by Lee, Yoon Ha
Issue #143 • Mar. 20, 2014
Special Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2
“The Bonedrake’s Penance,” by Yoon Ha Lee
“Sekhmet Hunts the Dying Gnosis: A Computation,” by Seth Dickinson
“The Goddess Deception, Pt. 2,” by Dean Wells
For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit
http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/
THE BONEDRAKE’S PENANCE
by Yoon Ha Lee
Growing up, it never occurred to me that everyone didn’t have a bonedrake mother, or, in the early days, that there was anyone else in the world. I say “mother” and “she,” although she was female or male, both or neither, as the occasion suggested or the whim took her.
Certain peoples, she explained later, found these distinctions important. I don’t believe she ever quite made sense of it, but accommodating others’ religious beliefs mattered to her; at least, she classified gender performances and the associated linguistic gyrations as religious. This was, at any rate, less interesting than other things about her, and when I began calling her Mother, she seemed content.
My mother was the keeper of the fortress at the center of the universe, where we are headed now. It was composed of spun metal and sibilant nanoparticles. I was not allowed outside, even if we had had a proper suit that fit me rather than the all-purpose protective mesh I used. She said I was too young, too fragile, and apt to forget even the simple principles of inertia and momentum. I was, however, allowed to poke around the storerooms where she kept the suits in pristine condition should anyone ever need them. They came in all shapes and sizes, and numbers of limbs, and some of them accommodated a head (or heads) and some of them didn’t. A few might fit you when you reach your adult phase. The materials they were made of varied. Later I learned something of their construction, and ways to repair them, but when I was a child none of this interested me. Instead, I marveled at the gold piping on one, or the crystal-dark displays on another, which flickered tantalizingly with iridescence when I angled a tentacle-gripper toward the light, or the way visors dimmed and brightened in response to my presence.
The most interesting suits were the ones I could imagine myself fitting into. This narrowed the field considerably. Not many were designed for bipeds with heads at the top, although I sometimes contorted myself upside-down trying to make my head emerge from my stomach. (Nothing worked. But it was entertaining, and in the meantime I became very flexible.) The majority were too big for me, and my mother had locked them down in some fashion so that I could touch them but not open them up to try on, or even poke my head in.
Most of them would respond to my prodding enough to allow their limbs to be repositioned, however, or even folded, depending on the particular material they were made of. Then I would go off and cut up rags—at least, I think they were rags, since my mother kept them in a heap and never seemed to care what I did with them—and stitch them together with great, clumsy child-stitches to make my own suits.
Second most interesting, although it took a few more years before I could formulate the question, was the absence of suits that looked like my mother. Granted, there were plenty of quadrupeds, but none that had her sleek serpentine grace, none that accommodated that heavy head with its skull-mask features, or her claws, which she kept sharp and yet was so gentle with. She could trim my fingernails with them yet keep from cutting me even as I struggled and squirmed.
The question came to me when I was perhaps six years old, by the calendar she used, when she caught me dressing up like her. “Dressing up” was a charitable way to put it. I had been raiding the pantry. My mother was a surprisingly good cook for someone who subsisted on, as she put it, “radioactive leavings and the occasional smashed atom.” (I was never sure how literally she meant this, since she prudently refused to let me examine her inner workings.) She knew I liked sweets, the more fancifully decorated the better. The previous week she had attempted to show me the nuances of cake decoration, which was more of an exercise in getting frosting and holographic sprinkles all over the table, but the results were sweet, crunchy, tender, and occasionally vision-inducing.
The pantry contained all the accoutrements of pastry decoration, some old-fashioned and some less so: serrated metal nozzles for sacks of frosting, powdered sugar sweetly scented with rose water or vanilla or (so my mother claimed) flavors she could sense but which I could not. And there was the frosting itself, most of it kept in a suspended state, no mixing required. I wasn’t allowed near the dangerous kitchen equipment at that age—the knives clattered at me and worse, lectured in high shrill voices when I reached for the drawer they were stored in—but I knew where the chopsticks were kept, and for all their sullen clicks and mutters, they didn’t raise the alarm. I grabbed one of the metal ones, prettily enameled with a fractal gasket, and used it to puncture one of the frosting bags.
Some of the frosting, which was blue with mysterious lavender-glow swirls, squirted all over my hands and shirt. I didn’t see this as a disaster but an opportunity. I licked it off my hands, although the stuff smeared all over my skin and left great gobs on my chin. It tasted like sugar and jasmine and firefly sparks, and tickled going down, making me giggle.
Then I remembered my original purpose, and I got to work. I stripped off my clothes and cheerfully traced my ribs with great streaks of frosting so they would look like my mother’s exoskeletal barding except, inevitably, mushier. The frosting developed interesting crusts as it hardened, causing it to flake off every time I moved. Lavender glitter drifted off in nebular swirls and meteor streaks, and the kitchen filled with shadows as deep as the lanterned night outside the fortress.
Not all my mother’s frostings were astronomically themed, but she had a weakness in that direction, and she herself had eyes that glowed in their depths like faraway stars. Sometimes I squinted as I looked at my reflection, hoping my eyes would do the same thing; no luck. At least I was old enough to realize that putting frosting in my eyes wouldn’t work.
I only realized my mother had entered the kitchen when I heard a sound that was part-wheeze, part-crackle. I started guiltily and scrabbled to hide the offending frosting paraphernalia behind my back, not that she was fooled.
My mother had a horrified tone that I later identified as meaning Am I doing this parenting thing wrong? but, at the time, I assumed she was upset with me. “Eggling,” she said, her voice rattling more than usual, “are you trying to persuade me to eat you?”
“I wanted to look like you,” I said, or something to that effect. That was the point of the exercise: drawing armor traceries over myself, and scribbly imitations of her electromagnetic banners, and putting the metal nozzles on my fingertips in imitation of her magnificent claws. (Even with the frosting, they kept falling off, but that was a game in itself.) Since I couldn’t play dress-up with a dragon-suit, I had to improvise.
I didn’t understand the way her eyes dimmed, as if in sorrow. She’d never minded my makeshift costumes before. Not that she was permissive about everything, but for a bonedrake she had sensible ideas about behaviors that did and didn’t harm human children. I especially remembered the way she had roared and clamored with laughter when I tried to glue myself, with leftover rice, into a caterpillar-priest outfit.
“Oh, eggling,” my mother said. She liked to call me that. “What’s wrong with the way you look?”
She had never asked that before. I gaped at her, confused.
My m
other huffed, and vapor whistled out of her sides, through apertures I had looked for but had never been able to find. “Come here,” she said.
I knew better than to argue, although I glanced back at the crumbling bits of starry frosting that I was leaving on the floor. She huffed again, and the vapor came once more, stronger. It felt warm and damp, and it carried the effervescent scent of limes, if limes grew on trees bright as suns. Then she retrieved a sponge and methodically began cleaning me off.
I wriggled, the way children do, and at the time I thought nothing more of it. But perhaps some lesson stuck with me anyway: I never again attempted to dress up as my mother.
* * *
Let me tell you more about my mother. She liked music, and she mixed musical traditions without having much ear for the harmonious. One of her favorite instruments was a great wind-harp concocted upon hollow bones of translucent metal. Wind in our fortress was necessarily artificial, but it came when she called it, and she did so to a schedule, as with most things. In the mornings (for there were mornings, the way there were mealtimes and evenings and year-festivals), I woke to the sound of the wind roaming through the pipes, moaning threnodies and the jangling accompaniment of wires stirred to unrhymed arpeggios. At times I took mallets or brushes to the pipes to bang out my own counterpoints, always scurrying away whenever her shadow crossed the threshold, as if the strings could hide me. She only smiled her inscrutable smile.
My mother had an obsession with neatness, as befitted a keeper of calendars and archaeological details. I asked over and over what she did here, and she never tired of answering me. The fortress was filled with clocks of all kinds and from all eras, some of which I was allowed to take apart, and some of which she walled up behind meshes of incandescent force. Clocks that dripped sand of silver and clocks that uttered relativistic syllables, clocks with gears that bit my clumsy fingers and clocks that tolled whenever a civilization devoured itself.
“What’s a civilization?” I would ask next, trying to get the pronunciation right. That was another thing. My mother spoke to me in a language of up-and-down tones and varied sibilants, but she was fluent in anything you cared to name, including a number of tongues that were no longer spoken anywhere else.
She gave me the word in many languages, and showed me paintings, holographs, maps, shards scavenged from ruins long swallowed by bloated red stars. She explained how most sentients developed some form of society, hierarchical or otherwise, and built edifices both material and metaphysical. Cities woven in and out of the rings of spinning worlds, or propagating across vast empty stretches soliton-fashion, or created out of nerve-flicker impulses webbed together across brightly beaded networks.
“Are we a civilization?” was the question after that, most days.
My mother retracted her claw and tapped me on the head, thoughtfully, as though I might make an interesting sound. (The one time I protested, “My head isn’t empty!”, her laugh thundered through the halls. She teased me about it for weeks.) “Can you have a civilization of two?” she asked.
“Two is more than one,” I said, holding my fingers out to prove it. I was eight then, old enough to count without my fingers, but I liked the visual aid. “We even have a city.” Then I frowned. “Is a fortress a city?”
“If you want it to be,” she said unhelpfully, and grinned at me.
My mother had not always been the fortress’s keeper. She alluded occasionally to her predecessors. I never asked, on the grounds that I couldn’t imagine a time before I existed, let alone a time before my mother’s stewardship of our home. She never referred to them by name, and she didn’t tell me what they had looked like. But she kept a shrine to them anyway.
* * *
Little-known facts about bonedrakes, before I tell you more:
They are, indeed, made of bone. Mostly. I never acquired the technical specifications. Whether the bones were laminates harvested from lesser creatures, or derived from drakes slaughtered for the purpose in the days of long-ago devas and paladins, the pallor of a bonedrake is unmistakable. The silken, chilly touch of death leaves its traces wherever a bonedrake goes, all the way down in the universe’s marrow, an absolute zero signature. Yet this is not all that terrible, when you think about it. After all, time’s arrow pierces everything that lives, and nothing is undying forever.
There are sagas written about bonedrakes, and incantations, and dry academic treatises. (There is nothing in the world so dull that a dry academic treatise cannot be written about it, and bonedrakes are far from dull.) The taboo against depicting them in the visual arts is not universal but widespread nonetheless. After all, if carcass-armor could be animated by the will of distant warlords and descend roaring from skies whose constellations were tattooed over by explosions, who was to say that sculptures and paintings could not also turn against their makers?
Bonedrakes are good at computations. My mother’s favorite instrument was the abacus, even if she preferred using it as a percussion instrument. It wasn’t as if she needed something as primitive as an abacus for arithmetic she could do in her head. She always said I was missing the point and that creative tool-use was its own pleasure.
It’s not true that only four bonedrakes ever existed, four for the dimensions of space and time, or four for death, or four for the elements. The number of base elements varies so widely among belief systems anyway, and my mother once mentioned that her predecessors believed in atomic configurations rather than the poetry of stone, acid, vortex, plasma.
Most words or gestures of warding against bonedrakes are sheer superstition. I once sat on a cushion stuffed with firebird down—it was unusually cold in that chamber, to accommodate our guests’ preferred environment, and I liked the extra heat source—and watched, resisting the urge to pick at my fingernails, while my mother listened patiently to emissaries filling the fortress with the wave-like overlapping of barrier-chaconnes before they presented her with defanged artillery pieces. I played the chaconnes back later, because the rhythms were oddly soothing. My mother never showed any sign of discomfort.
On the other hand, because bonedrakes are essentially creatures of war, they are designed to follow orders. Because my mother’s original commanders were dead, and because she was the only one of her kind left, it took me a long time to grasp this essential point.
* * *
For the longest time, I didn’t realize that my mother’s duties involved emissaries. On occasion she disappeared, and I wandered around looking for her, or not, if I was too engrossed looking at pictures or picking berries. Among her several gardens was one she had designed to be “friendly to creatures who put everything in their mouths and have delicate stomachs.”
When I was very young I cried for her, and this triggered messages telling me to be patient until she could take care of my needs. In the meantime, since she was able to manipulate multiple bodies at once—another knack I never picked up, as you’ll find—she dispatched one of her marionettes to handle the immediate problem, whether that was feeding me rice porridge or reading me a book. As I grew older, I could tell I didn’t have her full attention, and at last, when I was twelve, I demanded to know where she went when she wasn’t really with me.
My mother was in the middle of organizing a shelf full of curios. The “shelf” wasn’t so much physical as a ladder-basket of lines of light suspending the contents, everything from grinning railcars carved from driftwood to upside-down bottles in which raged storms of oil particles and petals. “Where do I go?” she echoed, not paying attention as she tried to decide whether she wanted the ice sculpture facing left or right. “I don’t leave the fortress, eggling. I’m always right here.”
“But sometimes I can’t find you,” I said, more insistently. “Where do you go then?”
She fixed me with an interested stare. I was reminded that, as well as I knew the fortress, there were yet crevices and nooks and closets that I had never been permitted to explore, and would never be able to break my way
into. Then she sighed, and this time the vapor that whistled out of her side-vents had a metallic quality. “You are old enough now,” she said.
“Sometimes people send emissaries with items for the fortress. We are a repository of sorts, a museum. It is only courteous that I deal with them and their artifacts personally, if they so desire. Not all of them do.”
I studied the shelf with new interest. Come to think of it, I’d never seen the railcars before. I had assumed that they came from her usual inexhaustible trove of treasures. She liked to rotate her decorations, from tapestries of rustling leaves with couplets chewed into their edges, to strands of beads carved from the remains of exploratory probes and painted with representations of their solar systems of origin. But where, after all, had all those treasures come from? Although my mother had her hobbies—cupcakes as a case in point—I didn’t think her own capabilities were so varied. Nor were mine. And matter, let alone matter in the shape of grinning railcars, or even sad railcars, didn’t spontaneously come from nowhere.
“Do you require their artifacts?” I asked, trying to imagine my mother demanding tribute, a figure crowned with whorls of plasma perilously contained. It was absurd.
She snorted. The walls vibrated, although the fragile trinkets she was arranging showed no sign of being affected. “Yes and no,” she said. “It is good to study the march of history, but we lack little here.”
“I want to meet the emissaries too,” I said impulsively.
“There are none right now,” she said, tail flicking idly back and forth.
“But more will come, won’t they?”
“Very likely so,” she said. “Not to a schedule, mind. One thing you must understand about the outside world is that its modes of recording history, including calendars, change and shift as different nations rise and fall and conquer each other. Even matters like timekeeping are an expression of power. In any case, if you are old enough to want to meet visitors, you are old enough to learn the protocols for dealing with them.”