There are women by the river when Gris and Otthild arrive, knee-deep, but they are not washer-women—the profession is unheard of here. They splash playfully in the red-gold surf with long ladles the size of croquet mallets, scooping up the redolent water and serving it to each other. Otthild takes a ladle from the grassy park which leads into the current, one with a red and gold-flecked handle, and dips it deep, offering it to him.
“My name is Gris,” he says. She tilts her head.
“Grey? How odd. I found a man in the station once called Vermillion. He was shaking and hiding his eyes in the vestibule—he wouldn’t even come out of the train. He looked up at me from the steel floor like a calf, imploring, uncomprehending. He said he came from the north, from the City of Quaint Despairing, and he could not bear to look outside the doors of the carriage. His mother had been an agoraphobe in pearl earrings, his father a claustrophobe in iron cufflinks, and between them he could hardly move for terror. His brothers had dragged him to the train, but he could do no more than huddle and quiver and hide from the light. I kissed him so many times! I let my hair fall over him, so that he was neither exposed nor shut away, and against the rocking walls of that little vestibule I wrapped my legs around his waist. He paid me in his mother’s earrings.”
Gris started. “Are you a whore, then?”
She smiled. “What profession could remain in a city where the river makes one drunk and the trees bear cream and crust? Even still, I am not anyone’s for the taking, I am not a calf. I am not a lime or a grape. But here we are impatient with all that is not readily available, and so in the province of ease, all things are simplified. There are two occupations in the City of Blind Delight—the Station dancers and the prostitutes. I am both.”
Gris rubs his forehead and drinks from the proffered ladle. It tastes harsh and he coughs a cough of burnt grapes. “Why am I here?” His voice is so small. He cannot even now remember what sort of scotch he has at home, or how far it is from Union Station to his apartment.
“The Line must have wanted you. It has its own reasons. Like anything that lives in the earth it dreams and becomes restless, curious, even morbidly so. What would happen if this substance were added to that one, even though it says expressly not to on the label? There is a Conductor, I have heard that. Perhaps she has brass buttons on her uniform like my mother. Perhaps she has circuits on her eyelids. Perhaps she saw your blue coat and your briefcase and thought: ‘Otthild is lonely.’ Perhaps she was hungry for lime tarts and you stumbled onto her train because you could not be bothered to check the track number. You can go and wait for the evening train if you like. It makes no difference to me.”
He looks at her, and it is a look she knows. No one is hungry in the City of Blind Delight, except those who look at Otthild that way.
“I used to know a girl who looked like you.” He mumbles, looks at the girls splashing each other in the murky river. “She had your hair. She loved this old painter that no one has ever heard of, a painter obsessed with perspective who could never get it quite right, but he painted these cities, these cities like cut jewels, terrible and crisp and clear, with a woman in the corner, sometimes, full of the light of God like an afterthought.”
“Most men knew a woman who looked like me,” Otthild laughs.
“What would I have to pay, in a city without want?”
She frowns, looks at him seriously, her dark eyes fixing him to the riverbed. She opens the top three buttons of her emerald dress and takes his hand, gently, guiding it to her breast. She feels like the advertisement. “We are not without want.” She whispers. “No one is without want.”
Her house is made of brown cakes. It reminds him of the house in the fairy tale, but there are no red candies glinting in its cornices. Bricks of solid cake and barley sugar mortared in cream-icing the color of an old woman’s hair stack sedately into a small cottage, at the end of a prosperous street—but all streets are prosperous here. Her street is paved in bread. There are no doors or locks. Fat citizens lie about in the road, telling jokes about the size of their bellies. She leads him to a bed which is mercifully of the linen-and-wood variety, and lies down on her back, toes pointed downward. All around the bed are intricate boxes of gold and silver and ivory—he does not ask. She indicates the buttons on her dress, black jet with tiny engravings of peasants carrying water, and wood, and tilling fields decorating each one. Gris undoes each one carefully—her dress is a simple thing, with buttons from collar to hem. Beneath it she is as naked as the ceiling of the Station, and he thinks of the annunciation, the slender golden light penetrating the grey belly of Mary. But she is not grey, he thinks, he is, he is grey and blank, he is the Raphael of idiot features. The Line was not looking for him, how could it look for him? Perhaps it wanted the woman with the black glasses, and he only slipped by because she was burdened with her fruit and her ice.
He leans in to kiss her, but Otthild stops him, and indicates her sternum. He sees there as he had not seen before, when she was a rafter swaying high above his head, four knobs of bone. She smiles encouragingly, and he slips each one loose like buttons. Her skin opens, soft as cloth, and her bones, and her lungs, peeling back like gift-box tissue. Beneath all this is her heart, and it is golden, gleaming, bright at the bottom of her body. A good part of her blood is gold, too, flowing out from the metallic ventricles. She is terrible, and crisp, and clear, a Jacobean diagram of womanhood, her heart burning, burning, burning golden as God. Gris begins to weep, and his tears splash on its hard, glittering surface.
“I told you,” she chuckles. She does not move to fasten her chest. “There was a man a long time ago, when the City was new, and the Line had only just come through—the tracks just unfurled here, like a wet fern, and where there are tracks there eventually is a city. The edges of the railroad curl out into the valley, and drag up a town from the earth, whatever town the Conductor dreams of that day, whatever city the tracks long to see. And so there is a river of brandy, and the lime-tart trees, and roads of bread. The Line brought folk, and they stayed. There was a man with a hand of gold, being the son of a jeweler and having lost the flesh one in a factory which pounded out ice by the thousand-cube load. When he left the Station and saw the river winding thick along the vale, and the roads with their brown crust, he wept, for nothing here freezes, and resolving never to leave pounded his hand into a railroad tie to honor the Line. Now the train comes to rest precisely on the golden tie, and that man, long dead, holds the City to the Line.
“My mother grew up working in the Station beside her mother and her grandmother, and she saw the tie glitter at the bottom of the tracks every day. She thought it the most beautiful of all the things in the City of Blind Delight, chiefly because it was so often hidden, down in the dark of the tunnel. She thought often of the ice-pounder whose fingers lay thus across the track, and came to love this thing in her mind which was less than a memory, and more than a dream. One night, after the train had sped down the tunnel, she crept across the platform and scrambled down to the gleaming tie. She lay down upon it, and felt it warm against her cheek. She wept for the dead man, and for a thing called ice which she had never seen. When I was born, she said I was so heavy, because of the gold, because of my father, and she polished my heart every night for me before bed.”
Otthild touched Gris’s face, his smooth, blank cheeks. “You see? We are not without want. But we are peculiar and refined in our ways of wanting, since vulgar food necessity is satisfied.”
Gris could not bear to look at her heart with its slow, clanking beating. He closed up her chest with shaking hands and sat on the edge of her bed.
“Would it help,” Otthild said, “if I had a knife in my side?”
She drew his face down to hers, and he felt the hard bone buttons beneath him. He looked at her red hair coiled on the pillow as he pressed into her, and thought of the girl with the braid who he had only loved once, who had, afterwards, stared at her stucco ceiling and told him that Crivelli som
etimes used chalk rendered in glue made from rabbit-fat to make the tears of his Pieta. It dried hard and clear, so that if you could touch one of his paintings, you would feel the tears falling beneath your hands, falling like tiny stones of grief, like little buttons of bone.
It is properly always dark after sex. Gris wants to feel guilty, but he feels nothing. After all, a businessman and a prostitute are as near a thing to an archetype as he can think of these days. A salaryman and whore walk into a bar—stop me if you’ve heard this one. He stops. He looks over his naked shoulder at her, at her four small buttons. Her hair falls over one heavy breast. She pulls a strip of drywall-pastry and chews it thoughtfully.
“What can I pay you?” he sighs. “What do you want?”
She rolls onto her stomach and smiles softly, her lips without paint, pink and thin. “Most of us in the City are collectors,” she says. “Some are monomaniacal, like my mother. But when the sun is always warm and your house is made of food, desire curls in on itself and finds other objects. I know a woman by the butter-pits who collects calf’s tails. She has a whole coat of them. I collect tickets.”
Gris’s mouth opens slightly. He pulls his creased return ticket out of his discarded coat’s pocket.
“But if I give it to you, I can get another, for the morning train, can’t I?”
Otthild shrugs. “You buy a ticket to enter the station these days, not the train. But the glass booth is well within the arch. Maybe they would sell you a new one. Maybe they would let you inside. Maybe not. We are often perverse. Maybe the Station is full of Midwesterners trying to buy a ticket home with everything they own, even flesh, even bone. Perhaps that long-dead man did not lose his hand in an ice factory, but to buy a ticket here, or a ticket back. All of that is your business, curious histories, and I do not collect those.”
She kneels beside the bed and clicks open the jeweled boxes, one by one. Gold, silver, ivory. Opal, onyx, lacquer. Inside them all are countless tickets, old and new, with magnetic strips, without. Some have the City of Blind Delight as a destination, others are simpler: New York to St John’s, Odessa to Moscow, Edinburgh to Glasgow. But there are carefully inked and stamped tickets from the City of Envious Virgins to the City Without Roses, from the City of Variable Skylines to the City of Mendicant Crows. There is one, almost dust, from Venice to the City of False Perspective. She opens a box for him, of polished steel, tableware melted into a cubical shape.
Gris reaches out and strokes her sternum, his eyes sliding closed. He feels her fastened chest, the buttons like hardened tears. He lets his ticket fall into the box. Shadows drift over the neat printing: The City of Blind Delight to Chicago, Midnight Express.
There is a train which passes through every possible city. It folds the world like an accordioned map, and speeds through the folds like a long white cry. Of necessity, this train passes through Chicago, the City of Winds, a city which was once a lake-bed, and even now, if you were to dig far enough beneath the railroad tracks, you would find the thin, translucent skeletons of monstrous fish with fins like scythes.
A woman in black glasses stands with a bag full of strawberries and wheat-flour and frozen trout in her arms. She watches trains silver past while the cream and gold of Union Station arches behind her, as she has done every day since she moved here from California. A long, pale car screeches into the platform before her; she does not look at the track number, or the arcane code of the letters blazing on the side. With only a small hesitation, as she shifts the weight of her groceries from one hip to another, she steps through the doors that open and close like arms. Light shines through the glass ceiling and illuminates the spot where she stood just a moment before, like an afterthought.
FLOWER, MERCY, NEEDLE, CHAIN
YOON HA LEE
Yoon Ha Lee lives in Louisiana with her family, but has been menaced by more clouds of mosquitoes than alligators. Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Clarkesworld, among other venues. She owns no guns and plans to keep it that way, but has occasionally been known to stockpile books on military history and philosophy. This story owes a great deal to the curious argument in Daniel Dennett’s Freedom Evolves, which posits that free will and determinism are not, in fact, mutually exclusive.
The usual fallacy is that, in every universe, many futures splay outward from any given moment. But in some universes, determinism runs backwards: given a universe’s state s at some time t, there are multiple previous states that may have resulted in s. In some universes, all possible pasts funnel toward a single fixed ending, Ω.
If you are of millenarian bent, you might call Ω Armageddon. If you are of grammatical bent, you might call it punctuation on a cosmological scale.
If you are a philosopher in such a universe, you might call Ω inevitable.
The woman has haunted Blackwheel Station for as long as anyone remembers, although she was not born there. She is human, and her straight black hair and brown-black eyes suggest an ancestral inheritance tangled up with tigers and shapeshifting foxes. Her native language is not spoken by anyone here or elsewhere.
They say her true name means things like gray and ash and grave. You may buy her a drink, bring her candied petals or chaotic metals, but it’s all the same. She won’t speak her name.
That doesn’t stop people from seeking her out. Today, it’s a man with mirror-colored eyes. He is the first human she has seen in a long time.
“Arighan’s Flower,” he says.
It isn’t her name, but she looks up. Arighan’s Flower is the gun she carries. The stranger has taken on a human face to talk to her, and he is almost certainly interested in the gun.
The gun takes different shapes, but at this end of time, origami multiplicity of form surprises more by its absence than its presence. Sometimes the gun is long and sleek, sometimes heavy and blunt. In all cases, it bears its maker’s mark on the stock: a blossom with three petals falling away and a fourth about to follow. At the blossom’s heart is a character that itself resembles a flower with knotted roots.
The character’s meaning is the gun’s secret. The woman will not tell it to you, and the gunsmith Arighan is generations gone.
“Everyone knows what I guard,” the woman says to the mirror-eyed man.
“I know what it does,” he says. “And I know that you come from people who worship their ancestors.”
Her hand—on a glass of water two degrees from freezing—stops, slides to her side, where the holster is. “That’s dangerous knowledge,” she says. So he’s figured it out. Her people’s historians called Arighan’s Flower the ancestral gun. They weren’t referring to its age.
The man smiles politely, and doesn’t take a seat uninvited. Small courtesies matter to him because he is not human. His mind may be housed in a superficial fortress of flesh, but the busy computations that define him are inscribed in a vast otherspace.
The man says, “I can hardly be the first constructed sentience to come to you.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not that.” Do computers like him have souls? she wonders. She is certain he does, which is potentially inconvenient. “I’m not for hire.”
“It’s important,” he says.
It always is. They want chancellors dead or generals, discarded lovers or rival reincarnates, bodhisattvas or bosses—all the old, tawdry stories. People, in all the broad and narrow senses of the term. The reputation of Arighan’s Flower is quite specific, if mostly wrong.
“Is it,” she says. Ordinarily she doesn’t talk to her petitioners at all. Ordinarily she ignores them through one glass, two, three, four, like a child learning the hard way that you can’t outcount infinity.
There was a time when more of them tried to force the gun away from her. The woman was a duelist and a killer before she tangled her life up with the Flower, though, and the Flower comes with its own defenses, including the woman’s inability to die while she wields it. One of the things she likes about Blackwheel
is that the administrators promised that they would dispose of any corpses she produced. Blackwheel is notorious for keeping promises.
The man waits a little longer, then says, “Will you hear me out?”
“You should be more afraid of me,” she says, “if you really know what you claim to know.”
By now, the other people in the bar, none of them human, are paying attention: a musician whose instrument is made of fossilized wood and silk strings, a magister with a seawrack mane, engineers with their sketches hanging in the air and a single doodled starship at the boundary. The sole exception is the tattooed traveler dozing in the corner, dreaming of distant moons.
In no hurry, the woman draws the Flower and points it at the man. She is aiming it not at his absent heart, but at his left eye. If she pulled the trigger, she would pierce him through the false pupil.
The musician continues plucking plangent notes from the instrument. The others, seeing the gun, gawk for only a moment before hastening out of the bar. As if that would save them.
“Yes,” the man says, outwardly unshaken, “you could damage my lineage badly. I could name programmers all the way back to the first people who scratched a tally of birds or rocks.”
The gun’s muzzle moves precisely, horizontally: now the right eye. The woman says, “You’ve convinced me that you know. You haven’t convinced me not to kill you.” It’s half a bluff: she wouldn’t use the Flower, not for this. But she knows many ways to kill.
“There’s another one,” he says. “I don’t want to speak of it here, but will you hear me out?”
She nods once, curtly.
Covered by her palm, engraved silver-bright in a language nobody else reads or writes, is the word ancestor.
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