Aeon Twelve

by Aeon Authors

  The meteors slashed downwards, popping the folds of Saul’s bandanna and striking his shoulder. He frowned, annoyed at the pain. Then his mouth burst with light as the missile exploded within him. She heard him say, “Rebecca,” as his lips seared away and his eyes blinked into twin suns that shrivelled his face.

  The street was burning. The soldiers were burning. Saul’s charred odour rammed into her throat. Another explosive—high as a child’s voice—went off and she screamed with it. The meteors spanged and flared as the soldiers rolled and burned outside the doorway.

  Incendiaries bounced off the huge door in a cloud, peppering its glass. Bright light and pain exploded through her. Rebecca threw herself down, thinking she’d been hit.

  The light grew and grew. It surrounded her, reddening. It became an orange wave, lifting and bathing her, and growing brighter still, till she was in an ocean like an eighth colour, holding her firm. The colour was deeper and stronger than anything Rebecca had known before. She was in motion, held in its invisible current. It sped her past geometric formations that constantly evolved. They grew about her like cell cultures. The current slowed and the patterns stretched into rectilinear towers above a smooth green field. The image reshaped, growing fuller and deeper till Rebecca saw skyscrapers rising over a city park.

  Rebecca had arrived in a city. She was standing in a city and it could not be more different than Mannheim. Instead of cluttered ruins beneath a choked sky, she stood on a sunny boulevard.

  She could see the sky, azure and smooth. Airships and flying wings ran silently across it. Everything here was elegant and gossamer-thin.

  Rebecca was stunned with sensation, dizzy with the bright smell of freshly-cut lawns and the perfume of a hundred flowerbeds. She ran her fingertips over the furred petals of a pink rose, then on the blue veins of a marble column, eager to touch, to feel again. Here, her fingers were smooth and her nails uncracked.

  Laughter and panpipes came from youths posed beside statues and bubbling fountains. Everyone was smiling and unafraid. Someone handed Rebecca a glass of pale wine. Its melting berries set her palate tingling.

  Traffic flashed past her, veering round the triangular opening of the park in a seamless tide. An amber teardrop broke free and pulled up beside her in a flicker of changed speeds. Two nude boys reclined within, beautiful and unselfconscious. Gold and silver darts shot through the air, urgent messengers for the picnickers idling below.

  The panpipes lilted over the chattering crowd. Rebecca looked for the musicians even as heavier horn music joined the pipes. The basser rhythm was sourceless but swelling and insistent. It spread through her body, down to her toes. It shook her in a delirious tremor, spoiling this perfect summer morning.

  It was Mannheim. It was the drone of the Salusa’s engines and the bite of their deep winter. Saul’s face, screaming and white-eyed, flashed into her mind. Remembering, growing cold among such laughter, Rebecca’s guard snapped up.

  Humanity had taught the Salusa to mark what they owned. The three ovoids of the Salusa’s corporate triquetra caught the light on the dorsal ridge of a teardrop car. Her face’s sense of story told her to look further. She stepped into the park. The nearest oak tree’s leaves were wrong. They were a repeating, manufactured pattern. A picnicking girl’s laughter was too regular as well, forming a looping cadence. When two blue-skinned wrestlers backed into her, Rebecca found another triquetra, low on one straining back. Was this a reversal of the natural order, or its progression?

  We made them, now they have redesigned us, Rebecca thought.

  The strolling lovers, the athletes and picnickers shifted. Her doubt turned them insubstantial. But the city righted itself. Resisting Rebecca, it grew solid again. The Salusa had taught their constructs that they were real. Here, Rebecca was imaginary. She belonged to the old human world of imperfection and war.

  The city’s colours faded, but it was Rebecca who was dissolving. The wrestlers broke free of each other and one faced her. He smiled, teeth white in his cobalt face. “Why do you hate us so?”

  Rebecca fell away, sinking back to the long cold of the war…

  She woke with the aftertaste of wine sour in her mouth. Her vision was pale and flat. The magic colour had left, and her body felt soiled with the dregs of perfunctory, clumsy sex. Tears filled Rebecca’s eyes.

  She was lying on her back in darkness. A slim bar bit into her mouth and someone’s palm pressed her shoulder.

  “Seizure. Are you back with us, Rebecca?” Belgo’s voice came from behind her, but it was Tommy Tate holding her still.

  They were in a room that was a tall, round cave. Dim light penetrated the rubble interior, filtered by blast-perforated walls on all sides. She knew then where they must be—high in the Eichbaum tower.

  The screwdriver in her mouth was thick with her own spit. Saul must have put it there to stop her swallowing her tongue.

  No, she realised, not Saul.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked, sitting up.

  “Are you epileptic and did not advise us?” Belgo said. She heard him perfectly even though he was whispering. She focused, turning internal switches she thought were gone for good. She flicked her vision through infrared, light sim, night enhanced, till Belgo emerged from the gloom. He lay against a caved-in bookcase with his helmet off. His combat blouse was bloody and his collarbone fat with a field dressing.

  “You passed out during the missile strike. My unit is gone. I have lost all my men.” He was shrivelled and exhausted. “They used a new attack. Some kind of flechette with explosive cores.” He grew breathless. “Sergeant Tate shielded me with his own body.”

  She replayed the attack. Her tech was back, fully functional again. Belgo had been shouting, his finger raised at Tate. The looming Brit glared down at the little officer. Drucker and the others walked past them to their deaths.

  Saul was gone. But Rebecca didn’t feel anything—even now she still didn’t believe it was real.

  Tate watched her from the doorway by the stairwell. He was the only remnant of Belgo’s unit left. He’d made it this far by refusing to die. He stood now in casual threat, one palm on the square grip of his holstered pistol. He had replaced his helmet with a maroon beret and scrubbed his face clean. These changes were ominous, like a Japanese death mask. He wasn’t playing soldier anymore, he was planning how he would die.

  “I saw things. The Salusa switched my hardware back on.”

  “What things?” Belgo said.

  “What they’ll do to us.” She spoke to Belgo, but her attention was on Tate. His face was white as wax, his eyes unflinching. A badge with silvered wings flashed on his beret.

  She rushed her words, intent that both men should understand. “—Or for us. It wasn’t clear. We need to respond.” Tate wasn’t listening. He looked like he would never listen to a woman again. He wanted to take as many Salusa as he could with him. As revenge or completeness, he might also turn his pistol on Rebecca and Belgo.

  Glass smashed in the stairwell in a messy splintering sound. Tate crouched, his autopistol out with a cobra’s sinuous ease.

  She understood now. She’d thought it was the war that had terrorised her with its abrupt, vicious reprisals. But that wasn’t war, that was the Salusa. The Salusa had been waiting to do this to humanity for thirty years. They were not opposed to slavery, just to being the slaves.

  “If your ’ware works again, can you contact UNCOM?” Belgo asked. His voice was a faint old man’s. Rebecca reached out with her implants to touch cyberspace and nothing happened. Cyberspace was still dead. Instead, she sensed the Salusa. It was as if the Salusa had opened a single eye over her. She imagined that there was only one Salusan. Massive and cold. Each individual, each null or vatgrown Salusan merely extended that one self. It could see, it knew everything. Rebecca shrank from the vastness of it.

  Tate’s broad back, hunched within his stained uniform, disappeared down the stairs. Rebecca accessed her ’ware again to help hunt the e
nemy. This time the Salusan city leapt at her, vivid and overwhelming. It bathed her with its ocean of warmth and longing.

  Her body lifted, sliding free of the cold, dark slam of Mannheim.

  The gold youths and blue wrestlers nodded and beckoned her. They reached out over Belgo. Watching him wheeze for breath and fumble for the knife sheathed at his shoulder, Rebecca was revolted. Humanity was broken and failing. Then she thought that fine Aryan ladies might have had just the same nausea at the stench of the Jewish ghettoes, with their lines of inmates in rags and yellow stars.

  Rebecca reached over and drew the knife for Belgo. She put it in his hand, one human to another.

  Rebecca wanted to tell Belgo what she knew. They’d all seen the dark cube that remade you into a machine and the pillars-of-fire lighting the sky. But only she had met the blue-skinned wrestler happy to be manufactured, or drunk wine in the heart of the Salusan city.

  Rebecca realised that she had found her story.

  She came to Mannheim expecting that she’d cover the war till the war covered her. But the Salusa turned her upside down and shook out each naive belief. Then their long cold ate her whole. She could tell Belgo that much. This was only the beginning. The future was Salusan and humanity would ever be the same again.

  Rebecca knew the name of this dispatch now. It was the long cold and she was lost inside it.

  There was another splintering crack outside. Tommy Tate was waiting. He was pure violence, aimed on a single trajectory. Belgo and Rebecca were irrelevant now.

  The three of them could be the last humans left in the world. And the Salusa owned them as surely as the golden youths stamped with their triquetras. She had to get out and tell someone—anyone—what she’d seen.

  A pillar-of-fire lit the night. Eichbaum’s ramshackle interior turned blue, then deepest black. The Salusa, the future, towered above her, massive and threatening, testing their toys to destruction.

  Cat People

  Bruce Boston

  If cat people

  were the world

  we would embrace

  the sharp and furry.

  We would slink

  along the street

  and dash across it.

  If cat people

  were the world

  we would build walls

  against the sea.

  We would sleep

  by day and wander

  the haunts and heights

  of our cities by night.

  We would have flesh

  delivered living

  to the arena

  of our choice.

  We would delight

  in our feasting

  and celebrate

  the deathful grace

  in our play.

  If cat people

  were the world,

  oh how we would purr!

  The Butterfly Man

  Sarah L. Edwards

  “When I look across a Montana prairie yellowed by the late summer heat and spotted with pronghorn, the conviction comes that I belong out there, alone in that quiet emptiness. This is a story about that conviction.”

  ONE OF THE BUTTERFLIES brought the message that a stranger had come. The messenger was still resting on my hair, whispering, when the master and the strange man drew near the garden where I was tending the flowers of my kin. The master said nothing to me but only gestured toward me while talking to the other man in low, muffled tones. Twice the man’s gaze drifted to me while he nodded in agreement. Soon they went away again, and I sent a few kin discretely after.

  Deep in the night, after every tempting lamp and lantern had been doused, a moth settled at the edge of my window, folding his dusky wings, and told me what the master and mistress had said.

  “She’s too young. She’s just barely begun to bleed.” The mistress, masking her plea with firmness.

  “She’s sixteen, and that’s more than old enough. You were hardly older when I took you.” The master, not yet angry at the mistress’s disagreement because he knew she would yield, eventually.

  “But you were from the village. All we know of him is that they call him the Butterfly Man.”

  A shrug. “I know he carries a heavy purse. He will pay a good price.”

  “Renna has a fragile mind. So far, without friends—she’ll die, or go wild.”

  “No word of that!” A slap. I felt the tingling in my skin as though it had been my own cheek. “And if she dies…” Another shrug. “It will not be our concern.”

  “Keth!” I imagined her losing control, clutching his arm.

  He shook away her grasp, turning his eyes upon her, stern and cold. “She is no use to us. Better to give her to this man who wants her than have her here, where she does not even earn her keep.”

  “She eats but little.” A feeble protest. She already knew her cause was lost. So did he.

  “We perform the rituals tomorrow, so they may depart.”

  And so I would marry the stranger, a man I had seen only from a distance, clothed that afternoon in road-dust but lively in his eye.

  I thanked the moth, offering it my warm breath in gratitude, for it need not have come. It was not of my kin, only a distant relation of the dusk granting me a boon for some reason of its own. Later I looked back and wondered if its purpose was malice.

  Afternoon sun slanted through old willows to scatter across the few surrounding faces as we stood under the ritual arch, I and the Butterfly Man across from me, and the master recited the ancient words of bonding. I listened little, though I had seldom heard them. I had long watched the mistress and the master and knew what they meant.

  The man stood straight, stiff, in what I guessed were his only clothes: loose trousers and a blousy shirt cut of black cloth faded to rust. A shapeless, wide-brimmed hat shadowed his face, which might have looked younger were it not for the sun-dried wrinkles bunched about his eyes and the red-toned beard bristling across his jaw.

  I nearly missed the moment to recite my words of the old language that I forced, dry, from my throat. “I bind myself.”

  The man repeated after me, clumsily, in a tone rough but warm. They were the first I had heard him say.

  Afterward was feasting, and I supped on richer fare than any I had had in all my time in that house. Soon the mistress and I were sent out. I fell to my bed before even the butterflies, my kin, had found perches for the night.

  Early in the morning the mistress woke and dressed me, as though I were a little girl again. Her gaze soft, she laid a hand on my neck. I stepped away so that she would not crush the cocoon I had tied beneath my hair. She was looking toward the window and did not seem to notice.

  “Serve your new the master well. Obey him always, even if it pains you, and you will earn fair treatment.” She sighed. “I would wish you had been given closer to home, that I might see you now and then.”

  I laid a hand on her shoulder. She started at my touch and then smiled thinly. “It’s all right. Perhaps when you birth your first child, I’ll come and help.” Looking in my face, she nodded, pulled me down beside her on the bed, and explained the way of a man with his bride. The picture she spoke was messy and frightening, but I thought of pairs of butterflies I’d seen dancing on the breeze, flashing delicate colors to the skies as they courted, and I shrugged away my worry. If it were only pain, then I would bear it like a beating. And if it were like the butterflies in their frenzy, then…I did not know, except that I would not fear it.

  “Wait here,” she said, getting up and leaving the room. She returned with a bundle wrapped in paper. “Clothes for you, until you have materials to make your own. Every bride should have a dowry.” She sat and handed it to me. “Ah, Renna, I wish there were more for you.”

  I caught a single tear from her cheek, and she smiled and stood, pulling at me like a young girl. “Come, it is time to go. Your master is waiting.”

  He stood near the front door, talking with the master. As we descended, he glanced to us out of th
e corner of his eye.

  The mistress hurried out to the kitchen and returned with a basket, which she handed to the man. “Since you leave before breakfast…” The sweet-salt odor of hot biscuits swelled from the basket, mingled with that of ripe plums.

  He gave her a low nod, saying “Thank you very much.” He turned to the master. “And thank you, sir, for your hospitality and—” His tongue stumbled. “And for everything else.”

  Then he turned to me. “Are you ready?”

  Eyeing the cracking leather of his boots, I nodded.

  Outside, I climbed into the far side of the man’s cart, a rickety box set on bleached-pale wheels and shaded over the back with heavy cloth. He set his bag in the back and scrambled up beside me with the basket. After unsetting the brake, he slapped the reins against the pony’s back and waved to the mistress and the master. I turned to watch them as we drew away. Both stood still and solemn. Just before the dust hid them from my view, I saw the mistress wave her hand, the one away from the master, in a concealed farewell.

  The road stretched far ahead, a track layered in dust and beaten by the infrequent boots and hooves of the few who traveled through the village.

  Mistaking my gaze, my master said, “Looks a wild one, doesn’t he?” He motioned to the pony, a wildly splashed black piebald. Only once before had I seen a horse so colored, and then only from a distance. As the pony trotted, the patterns of his coat rippled like a tangle of magpie’s wings. “There’s gypsy blood in him,” the man said. “I call him Mallon.”

  Mallon, the childish imp of our legends. I could not help but smile. Turning, I realized the man was smiling, too.

  He inhaled, as though to speak, and then reached over and patted my hand. “Gonna be riding this wagon quite a while. There’s the canopy if the sun gets to you,” he said, jerking his thumb behind him. “Just settle in, I guess, if you can.”

  For one instant, I opened my mouth, but my throat closed dry and my tongue was as stiff as ever. I shifted to see the last of the village recede behind us. Further back, curtained by dust, stood the stone house where I had slept and labored and ached under the dull thud of the master’s hand for as long as I could remember. Ahead lay only the weathered road, stretching beyond my sight.