“You said you still had the support of the Integrators.”
“There’s been a revolt against the Integrators. Mansita Jano refused to accept their decision to keep me in charge of the Visitation.”
“We’re at war? We’re going through another Turbulence?”
“No one has died. Yet. Hundreds of people have been forced into dormancy on both sides. Some cities are completely controlled by Mansita Jano’s supporters. We have a serious rift in our society – so serious it could throw us into another Turbulence if we don’t do something before more visitors arrive from the human system. If we make the offer and the humans accept – I think most people will fall in behind the idea.”
“But you feel you need the support of the Adventurer community?”
“Yes.”
The men in the cityscape tapped their poles when they stopped to talk. The ribbons dangling from the ends of the poles complemented the color of their facial feathers.
“That’s a risk in itself, Overseer. Why would the serenes join forces with a mob of irresponsible risk takers? Why would anyone follow me? Everything they had ended when I sent my warning.”
“You’re underestimating yourself. You’re a potent figure. I’ll lose some serenes but the projections all indicate I’ll get most of the Adventurer community in exchange. You may look like an irresponsible innovator to most serenes but most of your own people see you as an innovator who was willing to set a third of the galaxy on a new course.”
“And what do you see, Varosa Uman?”
“I see an irresponsible interloper who may have opened up a new possibility. And placed our entire species in peril.”
“And if I don’t help you pursue your great enterprise I’ll be shoved into a box.”
“I want your willing cooperation. I want you to rally your community behind the biggest adventure our species has ever undertaken – the ultimate proof that we need people with your personality structure.”
“You want to turn an irritating escapader into a prophet?”
“Yes.”
“Speech writers? Advisors? Presentation specialists?”
“You’ll get the best we have. I’ve got a communications facility in the next room. I’d like you to sit through a catch-up review. Then we’ll send a simultaneous transmission to both visitors.”
“You’re moving very fast. Are you afraid someone will stop you?”
“I want to present our entire population—opponents and supporters – with an accomplished act. Just like you did.”
“They could turn on you just like they turned on me. The revolt against the Integrators could intensify. The humans may reject your offer.”
“We’ve examined the possibilities. We can sit here and let things happen or we can take the best choice in a bad list and try to make it work.”
“You’re still acting like a gambler. Are you sure they didn’t make a mistake when they classified you?”
“You take risks because you like it. I take risks because I have to.”
“But you’re willing to do it. You don’t automatically reach for the standard course.”
“Will you help me, Revutev Mavarka? Will you stand beside me in one of the boldest moments in the history of intelligence?”
“In the history of intelligence, Overseer?”
“That’s what it is, isn’t it? We’ll be disrupting a chain of self-isolating intelligent species – a chain that’s been creeping across our section of the galaxy for hundreds of millennia.”
He picked up another food disk. It was dull stuff – almost tasteless – but it supplemented the nutrients from the cart with material that would activate his digestive path. It was, when you thought about it, exactly the kind of food the more extreme serenes would want to encounter when they came out of dormancy.
“Since you put it that way. . . .”
THE COLD STEP BEYOND
Ian R. MacLeod
British writer Ian R. MacLeod was one of the hottest new writers of the nineties, publishing a slew of strong stories in Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Weird Tales, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere and his work continued to grow in power and deepen in maturity as we moved through the first decade of the new century. Much of his work has been gathered in four collections, Voyages by Starlight, Breathmoss and Other Exhalations, Past Magic, and Journeys. His first novel, The Great Wheel, was published in 1997. In 1999, he won the World Fantasy Award with his novella “The Summer Isles”, and followed it up in 2000 by winning another World Fantasy Award for his novelette “The Chop Girl”. In 2003, he published his first fantasy novel, and his most critically acclaimed book, The Light Ages, followed by a sequel, The House of Storms, in 2005, and then by Song of Time, which won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the John W. Campbell Award, in 2008. A novel version of The Summer Isles also appeared in 2005. His most recent book is a new novel, Wake Up and Dream. MacLeod lives with his family in the West Midlands of England.
Here he takes us to a far, far future where, in Arthur C. Clarke’s famous phrase, the technology is so advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic, for a melancholy study of a bioengineered warrior sent to fight a monster who ultimately turns out to be not at all what she expected it to be.
IN A CLEARING in an unnamed forest in a remote part of the great Island City of Ghezirah, there moved a figure. Sometimes, it moved silently as it swirled a sword in flashing arcs. Sometimes, it made terrible cries. It was high noon in midsummer, and the trees and the greensward shimmered. The figure shimmered as well; it was hard to get a proper sense of the method of its motion. Sometimes, it was here. Sometimes, there. It seemed to skip beyond the places that lay between. Then, when the figure finally stopped moving and let the sword thing fall to its side and hung its head, it became clear that it was scarcely human, and that it was tired and hot.
Bess of the Warrior Church sunk to a squat. The plates of her body armor – mottled greenish to blend with the landscape – were ribboned with sweat. Her limbs ached. Her head throbbed in its enclosing weight of chitin and metal. She swept her gaze around the encircling sweep of forest, willing something to come. She had been here many weeks now; long enough for grass to have grown back in the seared space beneath the caleche that had brought her here, and for its landing gear and rusty undersides to become hazed in bloodflowers.
She looked up across Ghezirah, arching away from her under Sabil’s mirrored glare. There, off to the east and rising into the distance, hung the placid browns of the farm islands of Windfell. The other way flashed the grey-blue sea-wall of the Floating Ocean. Somewhat closer, looming smudgy and indistinct over the forest, lay the fabled Isle of the Dead. But she knew she had no calling in any of those places.
The intelligences of her church had directed her to this clearing. Yet until her foe arrived in whatever shape or form it might take, until the killing moment came, all she could do was practice. And wait.
Yet something told her that, today, she was no longer alone. Her fingers retensed upon the hilt of her sword. She opened her mind and let her senses flow. Something was moving, small and quick, at the shadow edge of the forest. The movement was furtive, yet predatory. If Bess had still possessed hairs along the back of her spine, they would have crawled. She would also have shivered, had she not learned in her novitiate that tension is part of the energy of killing, and thus must be entirely reabsorbed.
Slowly, and seemingly more wearily than ever, Bess hauled her torso upright in a gleam of sweating plates. She even allowed herself to sway slightly. The weariness was genuine, and thus not difficult to fake. By then she was certain that she was being watched from the edge of the forest.
The blade of her sword seemed to flash in the hairsbreadth of an instant before movement itself. It flashed again. Bess seemed to slide across the placid meadow in cubes and sideways protrusions. She was there. Then she wasn’t. She was under the trees perhaps a full half-second after she had first lev
ered herself up from a squat.
Three severed leaves were floating down in the wake of her sword’s last arc, and the thing crouched before her was small and bipedal. It also looked to be young, and seemed most likely human, and probably female, although its sole piece of clothing was a dirty swatch wrapped around its hips. Not exactly the sort of foe Bess had been expecting to end her vigil; just some feral forest-rat. But it hadn’t scurried off into the green dark at her arrival even now that the three leaves had settled to the ground. It was holding out, in something that resembled a threatening gesture, a small but antique lightgun. The gun was live. Bess could hear the battery’s faint hum.
“If you try to shoot that thing . . .” She said, putting all the power of command into her voice. “. . . you will die.” The sound boomed out.
“And if I don’t?” The little creature had flinched, but it was still wafting that lightgun. “I’ll probably die anyway, won’t I? You’re a warrior – killing’s all you’re good for.”
Bess’s expression, or the little of it which was discernible within her face’s plated mask, flickered. Since first leaving the iron walls of her church and setting out across Ghezirah in her caleche three moulids ago, she had discovered that warriors were most often thought of by those who lived outside her calling as little more than heedless bringers of death. Scarcely better, in essence, than the monstrous things they were trained to kill. Not to mention the stories that had passed in her wake of soured milk, broken mirrors, and malformed births. Or the taunts, and the curses, and the things thrown . . .
“I’ll put this gun down if you put down your sword,” the little creature said. “You’re quick – I’ve seen that. But I don’t think you’re quicker than light itself . . .”
Technically, of course, the runt was right – but was it worth explaining that the killing movement of any weapon was the last part of a process that could be detected long before it began by those trained in the art of death? Bess decided that it was not. It was apparent from the thing’s stance that it was used to using this lightgun, but also that it had no intention of doing so within the next few moments.
Bess lowered her sword to her side.
The creature did the same with the lightgun.
“What’s your name?” Bess asked.
“Why should I tell you that? And who are you?”
“Because . . .” If there were any particular reasons, she couldn’t immediately think of them. “My name is Bess.”
The creature smirked. “Shouldn’t you be called something more terrible than that? But I’ll call you Bess if you want . . .”
“Do you have a name?”
“I’m Elli.” The smirk faded. “I think I am anyway.”
“You only think? Don’t you know who you are?”
“Well, I’m me, aren’t I?” The creature – although Bess now felt that she could safely assume that she was merely female and human, and not some monstrous anomaly or djinn – glanced down at her grubby, near-naked self. “Names are just things other people give you, aren’t they? Or just plain make up . . . ?”
The helm of Bess’s head, which had now absorbed the forest’s shades, gave a ponderous nod. She understood the Elli-thing’s remark, for she, too, had no proper idea of how she had got her name.
“Been watching you . . .” Elli nodded across the clearing. “Dead clever, the way you flicker in and out as if you’re there and then not there.”
“So why in the name of all the intelligences didn’t you back off when I approached?”
Elli shrugged. “I could tell you were just practicing. That you didn’t mean it . . .”
Not meaning it being about the worst insult that, in all Bess’s long years of training within the walls of her church, had ever been flung her way.
“But it was still very impressive,” Elli added. “If you could show me some more, I’d really like to watch.”
The Dead Queen’s Gambit. The Circle Unleashed. The Upwards Waterfall. The Welcoming Blade. The Twice-Backwards Turn. The Belly Becomes the Mouth. The Leap of Steel. Even The Cold Step Beyond, a maneuver of sword and space that Bess still found difficult to execute. She performed them all.
Before, she had felt tired and bored. But now that she had an audience, even one as lowly as this Elli-thing, she felt re-energized. Her blade sliced though the warm air and the fabric of local spacetime, drawing her sideways and backwards in intricate twists and turns. She remembered her dizzy exhilaration when she first managed this near-impossible trick in the practice yards. This was like that, but better.
“Bravo! Bravo!” Elli was clapping.
For want of anything else, and no longer feeling in the least goaded or stupid, Bess gave her sword a final flourish and made as much of a bow as her armored midriff would permit.
It was late afternoon. The shade beneath the trees was spreading. As Bess straightened, she saw that the Elli-thing had already vanished into the woodscented dark.
Bess felt different that night as she squatted inside the iron womb of her caleche.
Laid before her at the central altar of the cabin’s console, set around with the glow of the more ordinary controls, was the steel eye of the keyhole that admitted the will of her church’s intelligences. Briefly, it had flashed the message that had borne her here, and all the time since it had remained blank and blind. The other instructions since her changing into warrior form and setting out on her first quest had been plain – at least in their seeming purpose, if not in their execution and result . . .
That great seabeast that had supposedly been terrorizing a community of fisherwomen who lived in a desolate village on the far side of the Floating Ocean. A task that had seemed worthy of her first killing until she had faced the creature itself. A slobbering thing, true. Big and grey and, at least in appearance, monstrous. But it had been old and in pain and helpless. She had realized as it sobbed and moaned on that rocky shore and she drove her sword into its quivering flesh that she had been summoned to do this work not because the women of the village feared to kill the creature, but because they pitied it too much.
Then had come her duties in guarding a senior imam of the Church of the Arachnids, who was supposedly under threat from the incursion of an assassin djinn from other unspecified dimensions. But her arrival and attendance upon this plump and near-regal personage had coincided with a summit meeting of all the churches of the animalcules in Eburnea regarding various issues of precedence and money. It soon became clear to Bess that her presence at the canny witch’s brocaded shoulder through those interminable meetings in vast halls was intended not as protection, but as an implied threat of force.
And so it had gone, and then her third instruction had come, and now she was set down here amid this nowhere forest, waiting to do battle with an unexplained something.
Bess shuffled down into her night couch. There was little space inside this vessel for much else – after all, what else did a warrior need other than her will and her sword? – but she had been permitted to bring one small chest containing her personal belongings, although she would just as happily have gone without it. The lid gave a pleading scream as she lifted it. This, she thought, as she gazed inside in the caleche’s dull glow and breathed a stale waft of air, reminds me why I don’t bother to look.
Other new novitiates were brought to the great walls of the Warrior Church by a variety of means and accidents. Lesser daughters. Unwanted or unexpected products of the vats. Those cursed with malformations, either of the body or the mind, which other and more squeamish churches found themselves unable to accept. Girls who had performed some sacrilege or debasement that placed them beyond the pale, in the antique phrase. Downright criminals. They were all admitted in an unholy gaggle through the iron gates of the Warrior Church, although almost as many were soon found to be lacking and cast back out.
Bess remembered the rusty towers, and the courtyards of trial and test and battle. She remembered the light from classroom windows that washed
through drapes of platinum gauze as they were schooled in all the near-endless varieties of monstrosity: djinn, interjection, tulpa, dragon, quasi-dragon, behemoth, and demon that they would be expected to destroy. Most of all, though, she remembered the faces of her fellow novitiates, and night-silence in the dormitories, and the laughter that exploded as soon as the junior imams doused the lights.
Clubfoot Nika. Humble Talla of the auburn tresses. And Afya of the shadows. All now transformed into hulking warriors like her. Out fighting some terror in the great Island City of Ghezirah or across one or the other of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. Or already dead. Bess gazed down at the few dry leavings of her past. A shriveled starflower. A tress of auburn hair. A handwritten note about soon returning, casually left.
Just one other item lay in there. Bess’s taloned fingers struggled to pinch the fine loop of chain.
Who are you, Bess . . . ?
Where do you come from . . . ?
What are you doing here . . . ?
Bess no-name – Bess who had struggled to belong even in those dormitories of the dispossessed and deformed. From all the other novitiates, sitting along the dark lines of bunks, hands clasped around knees with eyes rapt and mouths agape, there was always some story to be heard. High schemes or low robberies. A birth mother knifed by a jealous bond mother. A hand let go in a market of slaves. Over the nights, the whispers echoed through the dormitory as the tales flowed on. And grew more elaborate, Bess began to notice, as well. So the suckling child came to remember the taste of her dying birth mother’s blood, and the slave-sold underling survived a jumpship’s spectacular crash. But the essential seed of truth of some lost life remained, and could thus be embroidered upon much as a basic sword thrust can once – but only once – it is entirely mastered.
But Bess was mute when the eyes turned to her . . .
What about you, Bess?
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