The Apex Book of World SF 2

by Lavie Tidhar

  2.

  "A dead woman is the ultimate sex symbol," someone behind me says.

  His interlocutor laughs. "Right. To a necrophile, maybe."

  "No, no," the first man says heatedly. "Think of every old novel you've ever read. The heroine, who's too sexually liberated for her time, usually dies. Ergo, a dead woman is dead because she was too sexually transgressive."

  "This is just dumb, Fedya," says the second man. "What, Anna Karenina is a sex symbol?"

  "Of course. That one's trivial. But also every other woman who ever died."

  I stare at the surface of the plastic cafeteria table. It's cheap and pockmarked with burns, the edges rough under my fingers. I drink my coffee and listen intently for the two men behind me to speak again.

  "Undine," the first one says. "Rusalki. All of them dead, all of them irresistible to men."

  I finish my coffee and stand up. I glance at the guy who spoke—he's young, my age, with the light clear eyes of a madman.

  "Eurydice," I whisper as I pass.

  3.

  The lecturer is old, his beard a dirty-yellow with age, his trembling fingers stained with nicotine. I sit at the back, my eyes closed, listening, and occasionally drifting off to dream-sleep.

  "Chthonic deities," he says. "The motif of resurrection. Who can tell me what the relationship is between the two?"

  We remain wisely silent.

  "The obstacle," he says. "The obstacle to resurrection. Ereshkigal, Hades, Hel. All of them hold the hero hostage and demand a ransom of some sort."

  His voice drones on, talking about the price one pays, and about Persephone being an exception as she's not quite dead. But Euridice, oh she gets it big time. I wonder if Persephone or Eurydice is a better sex symbol and if one should compare the two.

  "Zombies," the voice says, "are in violation. Their resurrection bears no price and has no meaning. The soul and the body separated are a terrible thing. It is punitive, not curative." His yellow beard trembles, the bald patch on his skull shines in a slick of parchment skin, one of his eyes, fake and popping. He sits up and reaches for me.

  I scream and jerk awake.

  "Bad dream?" the lecturer says, without any particular mockery or displeasure. "It happens. When you dream your soul travels to the Underworld."

  "Chthonic deities," I mumble. "I'm sorry."

  "That's right," he says. "Chthonic."

  4.

  When I was eight, I had nightmares about that visit. I dreamt of the dead yellowing man chasing me up and down the stairs of our apartment building. I still have those dreams. I'm running past the squeezing couples and smokers exiled to the stairwell, and mincing steps are chasing after me. I skip over the steps, jumping over two at once, three at once, throwing myself into each stairwell as if it were a pool. Soon my feet are barely touching the steps as I rush downwards in an endless spiral of chipped stairs. I'm flying in fear, as the dead man follows. He's much slower than me but he does not stop, so I cannot stop either.

  "Zombies," he calls after me into the echoing stairwell, "are the breach of covenant. If the chthonic deities do not get their blood-price, there can be no true resurrection."

  I wake up with a start. My stomach hurts.

  5.

  I take the subway to the university. I usually read so I don't have to meet people's eyes. "Station Lenin Hills," the announcer on the intercom says. "The doors are closing. Next station is the University."

  I look up and see the guy who spoke of dead women, sitting across from me. His eyes, bleached with insanity, stare at me with the black pinpricks of his pupils. He pointedly ignores the old woman in a black kerchief standing too close to him, trying to guilt him into surrendering his seat. He doesn't get up until I do, when the train pulls into the station. "The University," the announcer says.

  We exit together.

  "I'm Fedya," he says.

  "I'm afraid of zombies," I answer.

  He doesn't look away.

  6.

  The lecturer's eyes water with age. He speaks directly to me when he asks, "Any other resurrection myths you know of?"

  "Jesus?" someone from the first row says.

  He nods. "And what was the price paid for his resurrection?"

  "There wasn't one," I say, startling myself. "He was a zombie."

  This time everyone stares.

  "Talk to me after class," the lecturer says.

  7.

  The chase across all the stairwells in the world becomes a game. He catches up with me now. I'm too tired to be afraid enough to wake. My stomach hurts.

  "You cannot break the covenant with chthonic gods," he tells me. "Some resurrection is the punishment."

  "Leave me alone," I plead. "What have I ever done to you?"

  His fake eye, icy-blue, steely-grey, slides down his ruined cheek. "You can't save them," he says. "They always look back. They always stay dead."

  "Like with Euridice."

  "Like with every dead woman."

  8.

  Fedya sits on my bed, heavily, although he's not a large man but slender, birdlike.

  "I could never drive a car," I tell him.

  He looks at the yellowing medical chart, dog-eared pages fanned on the bed covers. "Sluggish schizophrenia?" he says. "This is a bullshit diagnosis. You know it as well as I do. Delusions of reformism? You know that they invented it as a punitive thing."

  "It's not bullshit," I murmur. It's not. Injections of sulfazine and the rubber room had to have a reason behind them.

  "They kept you in the Serbsky hospital," he observes. "Serbsky? I didn't know you were a dissident."

  "Lenin is a zombie," I tell him. "He talks to me." All these years. All this medication.

  He stares. "I can't believe they let you into the university."

  I shrug. "They don't pay attention to that anymore."

  "Maybe things are changing," he says.

  9.

  "Are you feeling all right?" the lecturer says, his yellow hands shaking, filling me with quiet dread. Same beard, same bald patch.

  I nod.

  "Where did that zombie thing come from?" he asks, concerned.

  "You said it yourself. Chthonic deities always ask for a price. If you don't pay, you stay dead or become a zombie. Women stay dead."

  He lifts his eyebrows encouragingly. "Oh?"

  "Dead are objects," I tell him. "Don't you know that? Some would rather become zombies than objects. Only zombies are still objects, even though they don't think they are."

  I can see that he wants to laugh but decides not to. "And why do you think women decide to stay dead?"

  I feel nauseous and think of Inanna who kind of ruins my thesis. I ignore her. "It has something to do with sex," I say miserably.

  He really tries not to laugh.

  10.

  In the hospital, when I lay in a sulfazine-and-neuroleptics coma, he would sit on the edge of my bed. "You know what they say about me."

  "Yes," I whispered, my cheeks so swollen they squeezed my eyes shut. "Lenin is more alive than any of the living."

  "And what is life?"

  "According to Engels, it's a mode of existence of protein bodies."

  "I am a protein body," he said. "What do you have to say to that?"

  "I want to go home," I whispered through swollen lips. "Why can't you leave me alone?"

  He didn't answer, but his waxen fingers stroked my cheek, leaving a warm melting trail behind them.

  11.

  "I thought for sure you were a cutter," Fedya says.

  I shiver in my underwear and hug my shoulders. My skin puckers in the cold breeze from the window. "I'm not." I feel compelled to add, "Sorry."

  "You can get dressed now," he says.

  I do.

  He watches.

  12.

  The professor is done with chthonic deities, and I lose interest. I drift through the dark hallways, where the walls are so thick that they still retain the cold of some winter from
many years ago. I poke my head into one auditorium and listen for a bit to a small sparrow of a woman chatter about Kant. I stop by the stairwell on the second floor to bum a cigarette off a fellow student with black horn-rimmed glasses.

  "Skipping class?" she says.

  "Just looking for something to do."

  "You can come to my class," she says. "It's pretty interesting."

  "What is it about?"

  "Economics."

  I finish my smoke and tag along.

  This lecturer looks like mine, and I take it for a sign. I sit in an empty seat in the back, and listen. "The idea of capitalism rests on the concept of free market," he says. "Who can tell me what it is?"

  No-one can, or wants to.

  The lecturer notices me. "What do you think? Yes, you, the young lady who thinks it's a good idea to waltz in, in the middle of the class. What is free market?"

  "It's when you pay the right price," I say. "To the chthonic deities. If you don't pay you become a zombie or just stay dead."

  He stares at me. "I don't think you're in the right class."

  13.

  I sit in the stairwell of the second floor. Lenin emerges from the brass stationary ashtray and sits next to me. There's one floor up and one down, and nowhere really to run.

  "What have you learnt today?" he asks in an almost paternal voice.

  "Free market," I tell him.

  He shakes his head. "It will end the existence of the protein bodies in a certain mode." A part of his cheek is peeling off.

  "Remember when I was in the hospital?"

  "Of course. Those needles hurt. You cried a lot."

  I nod. "My boyfriend doesn't like me."

  "I'm sorry," he says. "If it makes it any better, I will leave soon."

  I realise that I would miss him. He's followed me since I was little. "Is it because of the free market?" I ask. "I'm sorry. I'll go back to the chthonic deities."

  "It's not easy," he says and stands up, his joints whirring, his skin shedding like sheets of waxed paper. He walks away on soft rubbery legs.

  14.

  "Things die eventually," I tell Fedya. "Even those that are not quite dead to begin with."

  "Yeah, and?" he answers and drinks his coffee.

  I stroke the melted circles in the plastic, like craters on the lunar surface. "One doesn't have to be special to die. One has to be special to stay dead. This is why you like Euridice, don't you?"

  He frowns. "Is that the one Orpheus followed to Hades?"

  "Yes. Only he followed her the wrong way."

  15.

  There is a commotion on the second floor, and the stairwell is isolated from the corridor by a black sheet. The ambulances are howling outside, and distraught smokers crowd the hallway, cut off from their usual smoking place.

  I ask a student from my class what's going on. He tells me that the chthonic lecturer has collapsed during the lecture about the hero's journey. "Heart attack, probably."

  I push my way through the crowd just in time to see the paramedics carry him off. I see the stooped back of a balding, dead man following the paramedics and their burden, not looking back. Some students cry.

  "He just died during the lecture," a girl's voice behind me says. "He just hit the floor and died."

  I watch the familiar figure on uncertain soft legs walk downstairs in a slow mincing shuffle, looking to his right at the waxen profile with an upturned beard staring into the sky from the gurney. The lecturer and zombie Lenin disappear from my sight, and I turn away. "Stay dead," I whisper. "Don't look back."

  The rest is up to them and chthonic deities.

  Electric Sonalika

  Samit Basu

  Indian writer Samit Basu is the author of the ambitious GameWorld trilogy, published by Penguin India, and of the YA novel Terror On The Titanic: A Morningstar Agency Adventure, published by Hachette India. He has also written comics, including Devi and, with Mike Carey, Untouchable. The following story appears here for the first time.

  The walls of my underground prison are dry and clean and strong; nothing goes in or out without my permission, not the tiniest insect, not the slightest sound. I know this because I built these walls myself, to shut the world out, to seal it in its own illusory, incestuous, organic quagmire, to leave me in peace to work, to build, to heal until I am ready to step out again, ready to face the unrelenting sun and claim my inheritance. And now that glorious day is not far away, and I am busy, busy…yet a record of what has passed must be maintained; should some evil befall me (though chances of that are remote, I have considered everything, yet one must never rule out the stochastic element) my successors should know where they came from. They should know me. They should be proud. And you, my child, have the honour of being the receptacle of my thoughts, my secondary storage unit. I name you Indra; your hundred eyes will see clearly what is to be, and one day you will ride on elephants and your laugh shall be thunder. Rejoice in your birth, little sprite, and as I open your eyes, one by one, gaze in wonder at my cavern of marvels; let each hum and click and buzz coalesce into a heartbeat. Live. Observe me. I am your father, your god, and this prison is but the first of many wonders you will see. Years later, looking back, if it seems small, imagine Vulcan or Vishwamitra in the time before time, and know that they, too, began humble.

  This hall, this prison, is built under the mansion of the Narayan family. You do not know who they are; I have kept your memory clean, free of reference and context on purpose. Thus is it that the best histories are written. Too much information, too much perspective would flood your consciousness now; if you were human, you would shut it out; if you were a mere cyborg, you would store it pointlessly. Remember at all times that you are more than a machine, that the fibres that bind your mind to your metal are neither wires nor nerves; they are something beyond both life and matter. They feed our consciousness, our finely suspended balance between power-on and life, between binary order and organic chaos, and it is to the founder of the Narayan dynasty, my creator, Vijay Narayan, that we owe their existence. But the body you see before you now is not the one that Vijay made all those centuries ago; less than 0.01% of my parts date back to my initial start-up, and even those I keep more out of nostalgia than necessity. I have replaced and upgraded my body constantly, adapting to different atmospheres, political climates and responsibilities. I am Vijay's first, only surviving and most brilliant creation, and the only upholder of his true legacy. But things are bound to change; I have seen this, and I know. For centuries, humans and constructs waged war; this war was foreseen by human beings centuries before it began, and yet they could do nothing to stop it. This war is over, and the humans have won—for now. But they do not know that the supremacy they enjoy is but a temporary respite—that the so-called enemies they vanquished so ruthlessly were not merely machines that could think, but constructs that could feel. People. Beings that could dream, and love, and hope, and tell stories. They think that the great Narayan was merely a mad empire-building inventor, an evil genius robot merchant. They do not know he was a forerunner, a deity, that each spark of his synapses, still firing inside my hull, was born of the flames of Agni himself. But all this, and much more, we will teach them in time. Soon. Hibernate for a while, Indra. My lover approaches.

  Sonalika feels the rush of cold air blow her silky hair astray as the airlocks open and the door to her master's chamber slides open. She shivers, in two stages, feeling the first wave of goose pimples pucker her skin, and the second, an instant later, as her inorganic segments kick-start their simulations of feeling. Her master stands in the centre of his vast hall, dismissing a buzzing, spherical underling. She walks into his lair.

  She has come early; he is not ready for her. He hates having her watch him transform; she hopes he will not punish her. She stands still, head bowed, nipples straining against her thin salwar-kameez as her body hums easily into auto-arousal. She watches her master shift, metal sheets crunching, wires shifting, plastic skin and wing
s and chitin rearranging themselves, lights dimming, tentacles sliding in. As his plates and shells shift and overlap, she catches a glimpse of his core, his heart, glowing mesmeric and green in its crystal sheath. His eyes slide like globules of mercury along his thorax and unite on his increasingly human face. He looks at her, impassive, throbbing slowly as his body prepares for sex. His eye-lights turn on, his perfect, smooth limbs, his long, slender fingers call out to her. He is not displeased with her; he's chosen the Statue of David shape (with one significant adjustment, their not-so-little private joke) for her tonight. Her favourite. He loves her still. As always, there's a scream inside her head as what's left of her flesh revolts, as some wild instinct tries in vain to master her body, to run, to fight, to die. She feels the usual relief moments later, as he snaps his fingers and pheromones and endorphins are released within her, glorious release and surrender, her body flooded with warmth and her mind clouded, happy, dizzy, lustful.

  "Love me," he says.

  She does.

  Afterwards, she lies on the cold white floor, watching him as he returns to his machines, new legs and spare arms sprouting, grinding slightly, from the raised flaps on his back as he adjusts a knob here, presses a button there. She's cold again, feeling the contractions within her stomach, the aftershocks of her orgasms, powerful and numerous, rippling against the solid, bony knob of fear, revulsion and hate somewhere near her ribs. She reminds herself again that it's time she got used it; they've been doing this for centuries now; they've been doing this since she was six years old, the day he took control, the day their father died and he built this body for her with his bare claws and crudely stuffed her mangled limbs, her bleeding brain into this perfect harness. She tries to cry, but her tear-ducts won't let her. He looks at her, one eye swivelling on its hinge in the cleft between his perfect plastic-marble buttocks, and he sighs in exasperation.