Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  “When?”

  “She came to Starveling a few years ago. What was her name now? It escapes me. But she’d been on a ship that had floated—”

  “Sailed,” said Kursten firmly. “Ships don’t just float when they’re going somewhere, they sail.”

  “She was on a ship that sailed far to the south, taking metals scavenged from the ancient places here to trade for musical instruments carved and shaped from the tusks of vast creatures that roam the baking plains—”

  ”You’re making this up, aren’t you?”

  “Some of it,” I admitted. “What good’s a story if it doesn’t want to turn itself into a song? But it was true this person had floa…sailed aboard a ship which took her to the world’s bulge, and it’s true she told me some of the things she saw there.”

  Kursten shrugged. “I was beginning to like the big tusked beasties,” she said. “Do say they were for real.”

  “If they were, my friend never saw one.”

  “Oh.” Kursten’s voice was wistful. After a moment she said, “So tell me something true.”

  “What she—”

  I began telling Kursten as much as I could remember. It was difficult not to embellish the account with inventions of my own, but she’d caught me out once in a fabrication and I didn’t want to risk the same happening again. Besides, there’d been plenty of marvels in the stories Anya—that had been her name, Anya—in the stories Anya had told the evening a pack of us had spent in the tavern down by Giorran’s small harbor. There were spiders bigger than a person’s head, dwelling in forest places where the undergrowth was so thick no one dared venture in for fear of never finding a way out. There were creatures resembling tiny Ghosts that swung high overhead in the branches or scampered like squirrels from one tuft of dry scrub to the next. There were rivers so wide no one could see across them, and giant lizards that dwelled in those rivers and could eat a person up in a single gulp. And in other parts there were no trees and no rivers and no lizards and nothing at all except endlessly drifting sands, an ocean of them with its own waves and even, so Anya had told us, tides. I’d found that last part hard to credit.

  “And there are no shadows,” I said.

  “No shadows?” Kursten glanced downward. The flame I was carrying was making her own shadow dance on the stunted silvery grass.

  “Not all the time.” I hurried to correct myself. “Most of the daytime there are shadows, just like here. But at high noon the sun isn’t just high in the sky, it’s directly overhead. Its light is shining straight down on top of you. If you stick out a leg you can see a shadow beneath it, but that’s all. There isn’t a shadow loping alongside you as you walk. For a while, Anya said, you don’t notice your shadow has…escaped. As soon as you do, though, it becomes nearly impossible to notice anything else.”

  “A place without any shadows,” said Kursten softly, more to herself than to me. “I wonder if—”

  But then we suddenly found ourselves venturing into an area where the going was treacherous underfoot. The long rains of the autumn must have turned this corner of the field into a lake of mud, and cattle or sheep had churned it with their feet into a miniature landscape of sharp peaks and narrow chasms. Frozen as hard as rock by the winter, the ground presented a million opportunities for twisting a foot or even breaking a leg. Kursten and I slowed down to a cautious walk, picking each new step carefully in the brand’s unsteady illumination. After a few moments of this, I put the shaft between my teeth and went down onto all fours, as Kursten had already done. The heat scorched the side of my face, and the stars in the night sky vanished from my sight.

  At the far end of the patch of frozen mud was a low hedge that we leapt over, its leafless twigs grasping for our bellies like ancient claws. What we landed in was another tract much like the one we’d just left, and every bit as perilous. By the time we’d safely negotiated it, several minutes must have passed since last we spoke, and Kursten’s mind seemed to have wandered to other concerns.

  “It’s strange the Ghosts should have organized the days so well and the nights so very poorly,” she sighed as she rose again to her hind legs.

  I shook my head, grinning, and looked at her. Her eyes were red from my brand’s glow as she gazed back. She was grinning, too.

  “What I mean,” she said as we began to jog across more level ground, “is that the Ghosts created daylight so we could move around safely during the day. Why didn’t they create nightlight so we could do the same at night?”

  “But if the sun was in the sky at night it wouldn’t be night, would it?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be the sun—nor anything as bright as that. Just enough of a light in the sky to let us see where we’re going…and to give us shadows, Rehan. I think that’d be very important if I were the one in charge of redesigning the world. It isn’t right for people to be without their shadows.”

  So her attention hadn’t drifted after all. She was still thinking about the stories Anya had told.

  “There used to be something like that,” I said.

  “There did?”

  “At least,” I qualified, “we think there was. It’s hard to be sure, but…”

  By day I assisted an old person called Lesor who was trying to construct an archive in Giorran of anything we could salvage from what the Ghosts left behind. So much had been lost, of course—used as fuel or destroyed by the elements or sunk unfathomably far into the ground, likely never to be seen by living eye again—but still there was more than enough that had survived to keep Lesor and myself busy for many lifetimes. While he catalogued and stored, it was my task to scavenge in the hamlet and the surrounding countryside for anything that might be worth adding to the hoard. There were devices galore, of course, but these were useless to our purpose; nobody could figure out how to get the things to work. Just by having once been there the Ghosts had made us like themselves—not in body but in mind. Even so, I believed no one ever would be able to bring those contraptions back to life. But pictures—these we could sensibly archive. Together, after a day’s gathering and cataloguing had been done, Lesor and I would often sit late into the night in his library struggling to understand the pictures the Ghosts stamped and painted on metal and stone and anything else they could find. There were also strange pictures they made which Lesor believed were pictures not of objects or creatures but of ideas. He dreamed of one day being able to interpret those ideas, to decipher the Ghosts.

  As for me, I confined my interest to the pictures of things I could recognize. Every now and then there was one that showed the night, and in a few of these there were two brighter lights in the sky than the stars—two suns that were paler than the day’s sun, and made of silver rather than gold.

  “No one knows where they went,” I said, “if ever they were really here at all. But when there were these paler suns in the sky at night, they would have given you the nighttime shadows you want, Kursten.”

  We’d come to another hedge. This time we ambled alongside it until we reached a gate, which I opened to let Kursten and myself through, and then closed behind us. It was good we were close to home, because my flame had almost burnt itself out. The frozen grass squeaked as we walked on it.

  “Where are they now?” she said.

  “The lights?” I put my head to one side. “Like I said, no one knows. Things change. There aren’t always good explanations.”

  “Or maybe you just made them up?”

  “No. I didn’t do that. Ask Lesor. We don’t know they existed but we’re sure, if that makes sense.”

  Kursten pursed her lips. “It does. It does for me.”

  We passed a few paces in silence and then she spoke again, once more in that dreamy way that made me feel I was eavesdropping.

  “So here we are at midnight in winter’s dead, and all the light we have aside from what we’ve brought is the starlight, and everyone knows the stars will never cast a shadow no matter how many of them you gather together. Somewhere on
the other side of the world, though, it’s the hottest part of summer, and right at this very moment the people who live in those parts are suffering the rigors of high noon…and they don’t have shadows either. Where are all…?”

  Her voice grew firmer, as if she’d just realized I was there as well and had decided to draw me into the conversation.

  “Where do all the shadows go, Rehan, at someone else’s high noon and our low midnight? They can’t simply stop existing, or be losing themselves. Like those paler suns of yours, they must have found somewhere to go. So where are they?”

  I started to explain once more about the sun being directly above, and the shadow being directly under, but I hadn’t gotten more than a few words out before she waved me to silence.

  “I understood the first time, Rehan. You don’t have to tell me again. The sun pushes the shadows straight down into the ground. But what happens to them once they’re there? And where at all are our shadows tonight?”

  “We haven’t any shadows at the moment,” I said pedantically. “There isn’t a light in the sky to give us them. Long ago—then it was different. Then there were silver nighttime suns to give our untamed, uncomprehending forebears shadows.”

  Not just to give them shadows, I thought, for I knew something in my bones even though the pictures Lesor and I pored through had never shown anything of this. Long ago the lights in the starry sky were there for people very like us to howl at.

  “You understand so little about shadows, Rehan,” Kursten was saying as we ran toward the yellow windows of Giorran, which at last were visible around a swell in the land. “Don’t you see the symmetries the Ghosts created? There’s the turning of the year in the icy cold of mid-winter, and in the middle of summer there’s the fiercest heat of all. There are cooler parts of the world, and warmer. If the noon is high on the other side of the globe right now, then it stands to reason it must be low midnight for us. All these opposites in perfect balance, Rehan. Don’t you see it? And the shadows—the shadows that are lost both there and here. You’ve told me where the sunlit people’s shadows go, but—”

  Her words pulled my mind like a kite being tugged into the wind.

  “I know where the shadows hide at low midnight,” I said, throwing my brand away from me so the fading fire went turning and tumbling through the darkness like a fugitive piece of sun.

  Kursten bared her fangs, and, tail high, broke into a full dash towards the homes the Ghosts had built for themselves and that our wild ancestors had, sometime back in the infinite past, come in from the forests and steppes to inherit. It took me a moment to realize she’d gone from my side, but when I did I began to race after her along the pathway that was leading to our lives together.

  And, all around us, the countless shadows we created as we ran rose silently from somewhere under the ground, fleeing into the sky to lose themselves amid unknowing stars.

  LINEAGE

  Kenneth Schneyer

  And yet I know so little. I feel the soil of a hundred lands under my feet, look into ten thousand frightened eyes, grasp uncounted brittle strands of hope between my fingers. But I cannot answer so simple a question as this:

  What am I, when I am not one of them?

  * * *

  Mathilde:

  I think your excitement is premature. If I understood your report (and it could have been clearer) there is a lot of work to do before you can approach the conclusions you’re suggesting.

  Let’s stick to the facts. I’ll accept your statement that you’ve found identical resonance patterns in seven different artifacts from disparate periods and points of origin, representing four continents and more than three millennia. Having said this, and understanding that I don’t doubt your word, please run the resonance tests again.

  I will also accept your assertion that each of these artifacts appears to display a similar visual marking or design—although, to my eye, the similarity could be coincidental, and the pattern is so rudimentary (even childish) that one could imagine it arising by chance.

  Even if both of these statements are true, it is an heroic leap to infer that somehow the artifacts are associated with the same individual. You admit the extreme improbability that this is true; why bring it up at all?

  However, I think that we can settle the matter easily. You did not mention running a DNA echo series on any of these artifacts. Do so now. If there are traces, and they’re similar for two or more of the artifacts, then you’ll have something meaningful to say. Otherwise we need to look for other (more plausible!) explanations.

  Don’t worry; everybody leaps to conclusions early in her career. If we didn’t get excited about this work, why would we do it at all?

  Leo

  * * *

  Raisl had nearly calmed the baby to sleep when Jan slammed open the door. The sudden noise and light frightened Bella, and she started whimpering all over again. After a weary evening—Bella was cutting a tooth and keeping the two older children awake—Raisl’s first urge was to snarl at Jan, if Moishe didn’t take his head off first.

  But Jan’s grey, sweaty face told her that he hadn’t intruded needlessly in to their cramped, musty alcove. The balding little man’s agitation was clear even in this bad light. His eyes bulged; he was out of breath. Raisl knew what he was going to say before he spoke.

  “They found out; they’re coming,” said Jan, looking at Moishe, not at Raisl. “I saw them coming down the street, a whole squad of S.S. I ran back, they didn’t see me, but they’re not far off. It won’t take them long to get here.”

  Moishe, dazed, rose slowly from his chair; Yakov and Dvora sat upright on their cot. “How?” asked Moishe. “How could they find out?”

  Jan bent over and took Raisl firmly by the elbows, impelling her and Bella up. “It doesn’t matter how,” he said. “Go. Go in the next ten minutes or you’ll all be in Oświęcim by morning. Get out of Krakow, however you can.”

  “But the plan won’t work on a Sunday night,” said Moishe, yanking clothes onto Dvora as Raisl wrapped the baby. “The children can’t—”

  “Forget the plan,” Jan said. “Go. I recommend north, then west, but go.”

  “They’ll be right behind us!” said Raisl, her own eyes as wide as Jan’s, her legs wobbly.

  “No, they won’t,” said Jan. “I can stall them, talk to them, maybe as long as ten more minutes. If you hurry, if you’re lucky, you’ll slip by.”

  “You can’t stay and stall them,” said Raisl. “They’ll kill you!”

  “Maybe. It’s been done before,” said Jan. All of a sudden he grinned—and he didn’t look like Jan anymore. The grin was feral, like a madman or a criminal; it transformed him from the timid clerk Raisl knew into something fey and reckless.

  Then she saw that he had scratched something onto his forearm, with a pin or a knife. It looked like three circles in a row, and it was very recent: blood welled from the shapes. She was afraid of him.

  “Done before? What are you talking about?” demanded Moishe, who hadn’t noticed Jan’s face or arm, jerking on his thin coat and checking Yakov’s buttons.

  “Never mind,” said Jan with a stranger’s cheeriness. “I wish we had some apples, though. I have a taste for yellow apples right now.”

  “Apples?” said Moishe, his voice now rising in panic. “Apples? Are you out of your mind?”

  Jan set his hand on Yakov’s small shoulder, his mad eyes on Moishe and his face still in that weird grin. “Moishe, this is my house,” he said. “Get the hell out of it and let me do what I want with the trespassers.” From his gay tone, he might have been asking to stay a little longer at the card table.

  That was the end of the discussion. In the next three minutes, Moishe, Raisl, and the children grabbed the few extra clothes, supplies, and precious things they could carry, embraced Jan in fear and confusion, and stumbled down the back stairs.

  So began the first of many dreadful nights, the twisted dream of flight, starvation, and exhaustion that l
asted for more than a year. Somewhere in those bitter forests and barren fields, Yakov died holding his father’s hand; somewhere else Raisl let in the chronic, painful illness that would never leave her. She was still wincing from it, an irritable old woman in a stupid pink suit, when she watched Bella’s youngest daughter stand under the wedding canopy in Ohio.

  Jan outdid himself in wit and misdirection, clowning and practically singing to the soldiers for not ten minutes, but twenty. He was still grinning his infuriating grin when Lieutenant Haupmann gave the disgusted order to shoot him.

  * * *

  Again and again, like a banquet, comes the heady inhalation of destruction. The choice, the leap, the delicious farewell, the sweetness of oblivion. Greater love hath no man than this. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Hear, O Israel: the Lord thy God, the Lord is One. Come on, nobody lives forever.

  But I am still here. If this is somewhere.

  * * *

  Leo:

  I’d already run the resonance tests three times before I made my report; I understood how unlikely the data seemed. Nevertheless I ran them a fourth time per your instructions. The results were consistent: each of the seven artifacts has the same resonance pattern, the identical sequence over all eight reference points, each point similar to four decimal places (data analysis attached).

  I understand what you’re saying about the design, and yes, I suppose it could be “in the eye of the beholder.” But that peculiar pattern of three circles in a row, each with its own perpendicular “arm” or “stem,” just seems too regular to be coincidental. It was the design, after all, that drew me to these artifacts to begin with; I saw two with the same device, then a third, and that persuaded me to run the resonance test and look for similar items. Also there’s the fact that each of the designs seems to have been added hurriedly, not using optimum materials or craftsmanship. If I were at home and these objects were contemporary, I’d say this was a gang sign.

  As you requested, I ran the DNA echo series. There are distinguishable echoes on all of the artifacts, but none of them match. The people who left genetic residue on these objects had no common ancestors for at least six generations (full report attached). I realize that this datum may seem dispositive.