by IGMS
She could have railed; could have asked why he was doing this - any of this - to her. But she'd learnt her lesson at the academy, all too well. She shook her head, and didn't answer - even though she felt as though she was tearing up inside.
"We've left you a little surprise," the girl said. She wore a golden lip-plug, a dangerous ostentation in a ship where any metal could act as an interface.
"Yeah, see if you like it," Mayauhqui said - with a smug, satisfied smile that stabs into her heart like a sacrificial knife.
The com shut off, but not before emitting a high-pitched sound that set Axatl's teeth on edge - echoing in the bones of her skull until it seemed to have become part of her shunt.
When it cut off, Axatl was so relieved at the silence that it took her a while to realise the truth.
The ship was gone.
Of course, it was still around her, still cocooning her in its reassuring metal hardness; still a tangible reality with its familiar smell. But, in her mind, there was nothing but a gaping maw where it should have been.
Gently, carefully, like a man probing at a mortal wound, Axatl extended herself along the shunt, trying to make contact through the interface.
She heard nothing. She felt nothing.
Like a cut-off limb, she thought. Her heartrate rose in the growing silence, filling the cabin like a desperate hymn.
Axatl-who-is-the-ship could go closer to the starsong. She could see the twin stars of Quetzalcoatl; and move further on, into reaches untouched by man, hear the song of the other, unspoiled stars. It would be the work of a thought to move - to leave everything behind, and never return.
Why, then, does she hesitate, as if something were still holding her back?
Outside, the ships were pulling away one by one, turning off their ion-thrust motors once they'd achieved the momentum to escape the station's gravitational pull. Their trail shone in Axatl's after-vision; and then they were all gone, all away from her into the battlefield where the other side awaited - and she remained alone in darkness, staring at dead controls.
Over her loomed the station: she was drifting back, and soon the safeties would kick in, and drag her back into the pod, snug and safe, empty-handed. Humiliated.
The word rose out of the morass, as sharp as a worship-thorn. Tochtlan had warned her, but she had left it too late - too eager to go out, too eager to earn her glory.
There had to be a way.
Again and again Axatl pushed into the interfaces, trying to bridge the gap between her and the ship; but it might as well have been on another plane for all the good it did.
Again and again, over and over. She couldn't go home, she couldn't return like this, with nothing.
She couldn't go back . . .
Again and again, and something broke and yielded, snapping with a sound like bent bamboo.
Axatl hurtled downwards, into the ship's system - vaguely aware of the shunts at first, and then they became nothing more than hindrances to her flight, and then she could not remember what they were or what their purpose was - her mind scattered and expanded, into a nebula of flowing numbers and lightspeed messages, staring into the darkness until everything started to make sense.
Couldn't go back - couldn't go back like this.
And the ship - who was her who was the ship - took her away from all of it.
Something - something grates against her peace, a persistent itch, a sense that something isn't as it should be. There is - noises, sounds, memories that aren't hers. Who - she asks, but voice doesn't travel, not in the space between the stars.
Let it not have happened. Please, Lord of the Near, Lord of the Nigh . . .
There was a whisper, behind, in the darkness; the kind of exhalation that only made Mayauhqui run faster. Thorns lashed his calves - he hoped it wasn't the wrong kind, or he was dead - and all the while the whisper was growing stronger. There was a fetid smell like rotten eggs, and the air grew thicker with every moment - thicker and hotter, with the distant rumble that might be a storm, that might be something else entirely.
It wasn't meant to be run like this - yes, it was supposed to be a hymn to the gods, a worship made in solitude, but there were always people around you, always fellow warriors, even if they were slightly ahead or slightly behind. Mayauhqui shouldn't feel as though he was all alone, in the dark, not the pale glow of the half-night.
No, not quite alone - there was whatever was behind him, but Mayauhqui would rather not think about it now.
Ahead, out of the orange light, loomed the temple to Tezcatlipoca, Master of War and Fate, Lord of the Near and Nigh: a large black pyramid surrounded by the stout wall of the temple complex in its shadow. Mayauhqui had left it, ages ago, with the others of the company by his side - before Chimalli, before the broken thorns. Now he was running back towards it, alone, his worship completed.
Please please Black One, watch over me. Let me not be crushed by the maws of jaguars, not drowned by the water-beasts, not poisoned by the thorns . . .
Running running in the darkness, towards the gates that didn't seem to be getting closer. Whatever was behind Mayauhqui as no longer making any noise, but he could still feel its presence, its shadow over his back.
The gates . . .
Abruptly, they became as tall as him - and then twice as tall. A last burst of speed, and Mayauhqui was inside. The doors slid closed behind him, with a hissing like air through a cut throat. He stopped, bent double to catch his breath, and listened. On the other side was a frustrated wail, and the sound of something large hitting the force-field - and then heavy footsteps squelching away through the mud of the marshes.
It was gone. Whatever it was, it was gone. He was safe.
Safe.
Mayauhqui found the others lounging in the hallway, paying calculated attention to a game of patolli, watching the counters on the screen as if it were life-and-death.
Chimalli raised her eyes, stared at him with no expression on her face. "Had a good run?"
He wasn't a fool. He knew the rules, from beginning to end - all that was needed to survive. "Very good," Mayauhqui said, even though his calves ached with the weals the marshes left on him, even though his lungs still burnt with fetid air.
Chimalli nodded, gravely, as if Mayauhqui had just passed some important exam. "Come on," she said. "Want to play?"
That was when he realised that he was no warrior; that he didn't have the courage to be alone once more, caught in Quetzalcoatl's deadly nights. That he would do everything - anything to ensure that this didn't happen again. "Of course I'll play," he said, forcing a smile he didn't feel; and pulled a chair and sat down.
After that, no one ever called him "Chink-lover" - because he never gave them cause to do so.
And the race became - no, not forgotten, because one did not forget such things - but papered over, rendered in exquisite colours like a codex painting: dead and faraway, harmless.
Until now.
"Please please please . . .
O Lord of the Near, O Lord of the Nigh,
I throw myself before you, I abase myself
With icy nettles I make my penance
With thorns and with blood
Please please please, let it not have happened . . ."
Mayauhqui hasn't prayed that hard - not since that night in the marshes.
There are - other thoughts, other dreams that don't belong in the deep planes. In her dream - which isn't hers, though she can't articulate how she knows - she's someone else - sitting in her ship, in her pod-launcher, staring at the glass of her canopy and seeing only the featureless dark of the pod's walls. Hours. It's been hours, and the ship hasn't come back.
It was a joke. A harmless joke, nothing like that night-run on Quetzalcoatl. Cut off the yellowface's - Axatl's - neural shunts, and she'd drift, and the station would catch her. They'd all have a good laugh at the poor hapless girl, and that would be it.
Except it's all gone wrong, and she can do nothing to fix it.
/> She prays - her hands and earlobes are slick with blood, and she stares at the darkness until it seems to stare back, to shimmer and bend like space around a black hole. With all her strength, she pushes, trying to bend the whole Sixth World to her will.
Who -?
Axatl. Come back, please. Wherever you are, please come back. In the name of He who is Wind, He who is Night, He who holds the Obsidian Mirror.
Who -?
Chopsticks, half-broken; a night, and a temple, and game counters neatly lined up, a pattern she cannot recognise, a message she cannot decipher.
Running running she was running away in the darkness, trying to catch the others before something bad happened, and there are whispers in the night, and the breath of something warm and large, and the noise of its approach . . .
Standing he was standing there watching chopsticks fall and break, and turning away to see Mayauqhi's gaze . . .
He is -
She is -
For a moment, a split moment as they both hang suspended, there is an anchor - and she sees herself as he sees her. And she remembers, all of it, everything from beginning to end.
There was a girl called Axatl once, riding the mag-lev home on Quetzalcoatl, in the diffuse, orange light from the half-night sun. There was a ship, once, made in the Dominion's finest yard, crafted to perfection - and she couldn't tell them apart.
But now she can.
Come back, his voice whispers in Axatl's mind. It's here that you belong. The ship's controls? It was just a joke, and you'll swallow it, and move on.
Move on. Like he's always done, and look what he's become now.
Come, whisper the stars, singing in the mind of Axatl-who-is-the-ship, like the water-beasts luring humans into the First Lake. Wander our pathways, endlessly flensed, endlessly renewed.
Come.
And she could. Axatl knows what she is; she knows that she'll always have to fight to fit in; that, if there is no easy path for a Mexica like him, the path for her will be even harder. Far easier to be a ship, to follow the starsong from galaxy to galaxy, to listen to the secret beat of the universe - to hang cocooned in darkness as in the womb, away from mockeries and jokes. Far easier.
But she's never been one to take the easy path. And here - where they hang in deep planes, away from skin-colours and bloodlines - they are the same, and it's all that matters.
The part of Axatl-who-is-the-ship that remembers slowly unfolds, pushing into the electronics boards and tangles of cables, imprinting its consciousness onto everything.
She feels Mayauhqui's touch on her mind, like a line leading back; and she follows that line, pushing herself out of the deep planes - and withdrawing from the ship's consciousness, she disconnects her neural shunts from the interface.
Once more, Axatl hangs under the shadow of the station; and her mind is her own, with no sense of the ship beyond the shunts. But the void around her is filled with music, and she still remembers the touch of starsong on her hull.
There's another ship, by her side: his ship, with a pale face watching her through the canopy, and panicked thoughts she can still feel as if they were her own. There are people, gathering on the reaches of the station; chatters on the radio, sighs of relief.
They'll send her for exams; and the ship, too, they'll send to maintenance, scrutinise everything as if they could put a name to what has happened.
But Axatl - she'll walk out of the ship's cabin, tall and proud, showing nothing of what she feels. After the infirmary releases her, she'll find a mirror in her room, and stare at herself, surprised to see nothing but a human face, without the glitter of metal or silicium. Gently, slowly, she'll trace the contours of her face, every feature from almond eyes to large teeth familiar: the mirror image of both her parents - like the map of a treasured country slowly coming into focus.
InterGalactic Interview With Aliette de Bodard
by Lawrence M. Schoen
* * *
Aliette is an alumna of Scott Card's Literary Boot Camp, a winner of the Writers of the Future competition, a finalist for the Campbell, Hugo, and Sturgeon awards, and the proud owner of a Locus and a British Science Fiction award, as well as two Nebulas. Her most recent novel, House of Shattered Wings, came out from Roc (in the US) and Gollancz (in the UK). She lives in Paris, but the power of the internet folds space and bends time sufficiently to get her answers to a few questions.
SCHOEN: I always like to start by asking about an author's background, and in this time where diversity is such a hot topic it's worth noting that though born in the US, you're of French/Vietnamese descent and grew up in France. Moreover, English is not your mother tongue. Which - if any - of these do you feel is most typically at the forefront of your writing: gender, race, nationality, ethnicity? And, speaking as someone with lots of "diversity cred," what are your thoughts on the issue of authors writing "the Other?"
DE BODARD: Er, that's a tricky question - I seldom think of it that way. I'm aware that in many ways I'm what is considered "the Other" (while also aware that there are people with more uphill climbs than mine!), but I try to write what feels true to me - and that kind of includes everything, in ways that I'm not very well placed to pinpoint . . . the author is really the worst person to comment on this, I feel (grin). Similarly, I don't really feel like I have a lot of "diversity cred", as you put it - and I wouldn't want anything I say to be taken as the Only Truth or Last Word on the matter!
That said . . . for me, "writing the other," or at least writing outside your lived experience, is always possible - the thing that people often misjudge is that it's a lot of work - and by that I don't mean a couple of days at the library! Thing is . . . the further away your character is in terms of race, gender, ethnicity, time period . . . from you, the more work you're going to have to catch up with them. And when you're doing a minority culture, there's also a significant risk of misrepresentation: it is very very hard to not perpetuate problematic clichés (the Mystical Asian, the Native American magically in tune with nature, etc.), because, if you haven't had firsthand experience of the culture, the clichés are what feel natural to you. It's a problem both because you continue perpetuating clichés, and because you drown out voices from the culture - if you're majority culture, then your portrayal, which hews close to the familiar and reassuring depictions, is a lot less alien, a lot more comfortable than the portrayals made by insiders - so you're both writing things that aren't truth, and making less space for that truth at the same time?
(that said . . . "truth" is of course a complicated thing, and I personally want to see the term "authenticity" struck from the vocabulary, as it's more often than not used to police and exclude. But that's a whole other kettle of fish! ) All of which is to say . . . of course it's not impossible to write outside your experience, but please please don't underestimate how hard it is.
SCHOEN: I have many things I want to ask you about your latest book, but before we get to that I'd like to go back to your debut novels, the Obsidian and Blood trilogy you did with Angry Robot. You published that at a time when several other authors were also writing Aztec-based and Mayan-based fantasy. You took things a step further and made yours an Aztec murder mystery. Was there some Mesoamerican conspiracy going on among fantasists at the time, or do you think it was just some random chance that has made this a popular culture for storytellers in the past decade? And more specifically, what is it that attracted you to this time and place? Was it the blood ritual, the breadth and depth of deities that defined the worldbuilding, the incredible architecture, some combination of these things, or something else entirely?
DE BODARD: Ha, I don't know! I came up with it before seeing the other authors. I think that part of it was that the genre has been looking for inspiration further afield for a while, and that time probably coincided with a greater reaching out to non-Western cultures? (and if you're going to look into Mesoamerica, the Mexica/Aztecs kind of come up pretty fast, as they're one of the most instantly recogniza
ble civilizations in that area, at least as far as popular iconography is concerned).
Personally, I was attracted to this time period because I'm a bit of a contrarian - I've long thought that the Mexica were a much maligned civilization (when the people accusing them of being barbarians are the conquistadores, no saints themselves, you begin to suspect there might be a tiny little bias in the accounts that have been preserved). I really wanted to show that they were not evil barbarians, not bloodthirsty monsters - but simply people who thought they were doing the best they could to keep the universe going. And sure, they had some horrendous customs; but the Middle Ages had some horrendous torture methods too, and that doesn't make everyone who used them irredeemable monsters.
SCHOEN: Switching gears now, let's talk a bit about your Xuya universe. The range of these stories is breathtaking, alien while at the same time deeply human, and time and again you've captured a poignancy that the reading community has responded to with nominations and awards. What's the common thread for you with these? Is there an underlying metaphor, a particularly angled mirror you're holding up, or are you just challenging yourself to see how far you can push the speculative fiction envelope?
DE BODARD: Mostly I'm having a lot of fun with these? They sort of grew organically, from a simple alternate history in which China was dominant, to an intergalactic space empire based on Confucian culture (rather than the ubiquitous Roman empire which often serves as the template for such empires). Along the way I sort of ditched China for Vietnam, because I was more comfortable with that latter culture for obvious reasons. And I really like the way they allow me to explore different mores, and in particular different familial structures and different values - and also the way that the universe is wide enough for me to add bits and pieces in different corners of space to explore new themes and new angles!
SCHOEN: Moving on to House of Shattered Wings at last, I found this book to read like a stroll through an art museum, scene by scene and chapter by chapter, switching between brightly lit watercolors to dark and heavy oils. You manage to tease and torment readers with compelling ideas (the reality of Heaven implied by the presence of Fallen who cannot recall it, the evidence of resurrection without explanation, to mention just two) but without eliciting anger when you fail to answer the inevitable questions because you throw a brilliant combination of magic and addiction at us as a distraction. Was this a deliberate balancing act, or am I giving you credit for something you just stumbled upon?