I squeezed the trigger, sending her down in a cloud of blood.
~ ~ ~
I remember little of what followed. Everything collapsed into pandemonium. The balcony of blue flowers erupted in screams. I threw down the rifle and ran into the promenade, where yelling throngs poured in from every doorway. Soldiers ran about, shouting. Somehow, they recognized me despite my uniform. They must have beaten me, because my vision went black.
I awoke in some kind of medical ward: ugly and functional with clean tiles gleaming. In a mirror opposite my bed I saw my own face: bruised, gaunt, pale, and hairless. In place of my scalp there was gleaming steel; in place of my hair, needles ending in wires. I was wearing an urchin crown, just like the Motor King’s.
My hands were strapped to the sides of the bed, presumably to keep me from killing myself by pushing the needles in. The wires were bound into a cable that disappeared into a hole in the far wall. So they were monitoring me, which meant they knew I was conscious. And yes, as soon as I’d taken stock of myself the steel door squeaked open.
I heard quiet voices: one asking questions, another answering. I don’t think I was truly afraid until I heard the metal legs ticking on tiles. The door screeched wider and King Stefan entered.
As in his portraits, he wore a gauzy white shirt like a hospital garment. On his head—or rather, replacing the top of it—was the urchin crown. Otherwise he was naked, although his trunk disappeared so completely into the metal truss that it was hard to say how much of a lower body he had. His skin was chalk-pale and utterly hairless. When he spoke, only the right half of his face moved.
“Are you comfortable?”
“What?”
“I said, are you comfortable?”
He spoke in a whispering sort of croak, a deathbed voice. Palsied and stammering, half-paralyzed, he seemed more fit for a sickbed than I. With his good hand he reached forward, spider legs stretching, and pulled the sheet down over my body. Bruises lumped my flesh; my left leg was an unrecognizable pulp encased in blood-soaked bandages. From the crook of my elbow sprouted a thin, clear tube, pumping in food syrup or medicine.
“I never meant this to happen,” he said, as if excusing himself. “She asked me to spare you, as much as possible. I told my guards to try.”
“She?” I said. “Queen Nadia?”
The Motor King nodded. “The couple you killed were stand-ins. They trained years for this day and gave their lives willingly.”
I shook my head. “Nadia will be a good wife to you.”
He smiled—a one-sided sneer. “I could’ve taken the bullet myself. Do you think I’m afraid of that? But the whole kingdom would have collapsed. Anarchy, famines. My cerebromancers have heard it.”
I dismissed this with a wave of the hand.
“You doubt me?”
How couldn’t I, when he was clearly at death’s door already? The Motor King was a different man from the one I’d heard stories of: a weaker man. The king of legend would never have tolerated that dismissive gesture. Yet a kernel of arrogance remained: if he truly cared about his subjects, he would have stepped down in favor of a healthier king.
Which made perfect sense. I leaned forward. “Was your invasion a pretext to install Nadia as your successor?”
His face sparkled with amusement. “No.”
“Then what?”
He paused, as if dredging something complex from memory. Then, as if catching it, he leaned out the door and spoke. Minutes later, a pair of porters came in holding a small table and, on top of it, a recording device of some kind. A long scroll of paper stretched over its top, and many armatures tipped with graphite rested on the clean white surface.
One of the porters picked up the cable from my urchin crown and plugged it into the machine. At once the machine sprang to life. The paper rolled smoothly while the pencils jittered, tracing jagged lines.
“What do you think cerebromancy is?” the Motor King asked.
I looked at the machine. “To be frank with you, I don’t care anymore.”
He didn’t seem to be listening. He turned off drawing machine and examined the roll of paper.
“I used to think of it in terms of telling the future,” I said. “But look where that’s brought me. As far as I’m concerned, cerebromancy is useless.”
“That is gravely wrong,” he murmured, scanning the paper, “though I can see why you’d think it.” He unclipped the scroll and showed it to me. About thirty rows of gray lines zigzagged across the paper. “Every fluctuation in a line,” he said, “records a transaction between two citizens of your brain. Which two—” he ran a hand over the needles piercing his own crown— “depends on where the needle strikes. Now look here.” He showed me a part of the scroll where several of the lines narrowed into sharp, precisely aligned peaks. After that, they dissolved into chaotic jaggedness.
“This surge in communication,” he said, indicating the jaggedness, “occurs when you speak. And this—” he pointed to the precisely aligned peaks— “occurs just before you decide to speak. In fact it is your decision to speak.”
“What does it matter, though?” I said. “Of real consequence is what is said, how it affects people. Can lines on a scroll feed anyone? What do they mean to the creatures occupying my skull, who died when the needles were put in?”
He replied with his sneering smile. “The men in your skull, like those in the world, are of little consequence. The system is what matters. But this is the point: the invasion wasn’t about wealth or territory. It wasn’t about Nadia. It was this.”
And he pointed again at the scroll, at the point in my brain activity where I’d decided to speak. “Really, it was about mirrors. In the human brain, mirrors are a metaphor: there are beings in your brain who allow us to understand other people’s intentions and feelings. In order to speak, those ‘mirrors’ must be yoked to the muscle control centers—the so-called motor system—for the mouth and voicebox. We call them that because in reality they aren’t metaphors: the Great Being is indeed about to speak, and for this to happen mirrors are needed. That, Daniel, and no other reason, is why the Motor lands had to conquer the Mirror.”
I shook my head. It was insane. War for defense, war for glory and conquest—these things I could understand. But going to war for the Great Being, who neither knew nor cared of our existence? It was too much for my fatigued mind to grasp. “I don’t understand,” I said, yawning. My limbs felt heavy. Numbness spread from the tube in my arm. I heard the Motor King speak to a doctor on his way out.
When I awoke, my ruined leg had been cut away. A steel limb was bolted into my hip.
~ ~ ~
The doctor who taught me to walk again was a quiet man with the tea-colored skin of a surface-dweller. He exuded the tang of alcohol. It was nothing like gin or melonwine, but like the solvents used to clean glass. He wore a paper mask over his mouth and a cloth cap over his silver hair. He never told me his name.
I found the false leg strangely easy to accept. I knew I was marking time until my execution, which would surely come when the Motor King offered me a place in his service and I refused. For the same reason, I no longer worried about my role in the Great Being’s cognition. I had myself, my own experiences, and that was enough.
When the doctor came in I sat up and greeted him warmly. Here was another being, as complex as a whole world. With little time left, what gave me comfort was to savor each speck of experience: the gray mortar between the wall tiles, the sheets crisp against my skin. I confess too that it gave me a grim satisfaction to be alone in my understanding. Nadia bent all her efforts to greater acquisition; the Motor King saw people as signals, pencil traces of information. Only I perceived the core truth of existence.
So, as much as possible, I tried to enjoy my final days. I submitted humbly to the doctor’s care. He plugged the cable from my urchin crown into a socket on the back of the new leg’s thigh. Then he asked me to try moving.
“But there’s nothing to mov
e,” I said. My left leg was gone. The nerves were cut.
The doctor answered patiently. “I didn’t say to move it. I said to try moving it.”
I tried.
“Try flexing the knee.”
I tried again, and this time the metal leg twitched, kicked slightly.
“Again.”
He drove me through hours of exhausting practice. By the end, I was using that metal leg almost as though it were my own: bending the knee, turning the lower part—even clenching the clawed foot, which had more in common with a hand.
I had no concept of day or night anymore, but I guessed it was about a week before I could walk with confidence. The rhythm of walking with one metal leg and one flesh unnerved me at first, but I soon grew used to it.
When I heard the boot soles thumping the floor outside, I rose to open the door. King Stefan, fist poised to knock, looked me up and down with approval. “Walk with me,” he said. I tugged on a linen hospital shirt and stepped out into the echoing, white-walled corridor. A pair of guards followed close behind.
I quickly noticed that I wasn’t in a hospital at all. Nor was I in prison, precisely. The scent of alcohol was strong and every surface spotless, as one would expect in a medical ward. But the doors were heavy with external bolts. Armed guards were posted everywhere. Through the occasional window I saw shackled men wearing urchin crowns. In each room, a cerebromancer dressed as a doctor commanded the prisoner: some of them were writing with chalk; others were reading or speaking or solving some puzzle with their hands. One silver-capped face turned to me in anguish. We walked past.
“Have you thought about what I said?” the Motor King asked. “About the greater meaning of cerebromancy?”
I shook my head. “I’m finished with cerebromancy. I spent a decade reading visions for Nadia, and for what? To keep her on a throne she didn’t deserve? To advise her on getting the best return for the lives of her men? No, I’m done. Kill me if your laws demand it, but I’m done.”
I expected to die shortly—to arrive at an execution site where King Stefan would lecture me again about cerebromancy, a veiled offer to join his service. Instead, he said softly, “As a matter of fact you’re going to be exiled.” He saw my expression. “It surprises me, too, frankly.”
It had to be Nadia. Only a queen’s command could justify such expensive treatment for an exile. For King Stefan, it would have been less trouble to send me off one-legged, or to keep me prisoner in this hellish research clinic of his.
We reached the end of the hall, a door of thick steel flanked by a further pair of guards. We waited there while they recited a complicated series of salutes, credentials and pass-codes, convincing those at the exit that this was indeed the king and not one of his doubles.
King Stefan said, “I imagine you’ve often wondered about the citizens of your own brain. How do they live? What sensations, dreams, desires do they have?”
I nodded.
“My cerebromancers tell me that the Great Being wonders the same thing. They tell me that this. . . conversion of yours—this notion that individuals have some value—is the first embodiment of this fancy. The Great Being will speak of this idea, and—” he coughed— “after some coaxing from my queen, it seems that you are to be the message.”
At last, the two sentries were satisfied. One of them pushed a button. The heavy door slid away.
“Darling!” the king cried.
“My love!” squealed Queen Nadia, standing in the small room that was revealed. She wore a gemmed, brocaded cloak. A pair of guards flanked her. The Motor King scuttled forward, sweeping her into a one-armed embrace. She bent slightly to kiss his cheek, then cast a stage grimace and wink at me.
“Daniel,” she smiled warmly, inviting me into the little parlor as if it had been years, not days, since we’d seen each other. As if instead of leaving me to seek her own glory she’d simply fallen out of touch, as old friends occasionally do. As if she didn’t know I’d shot her double in the head.
I stepped inside. The door slid shut behind me. Some distant mechanism creaked into motion, cables groaned, and I felt my legs press into the floor as the room ascended. “I suppose I should thank you,” I said.
“I never forget my friends, Daniel.”
“Your friends.” I shook my head. “I thank you again, Nadia, but I’m not your friend.” I pointed to my leg. “You did this, and worse, to countless men. You abandoned me for your own ambition when it suited you! How can you look me in the eyes and smile?”
We must have been deep within the gyrus—as deep as the old Mirror Palace—for the room continued to rise. For the first time since the invasion, my body felt buoyant, even light. I whirled on King Stefan. “And you! You spend people like coins, and what does it gain you? You’re dying, you know, and your own wife—” A cold dagger touched my throat. The guard had moved with such furtive purpose that I hadn’t noticed him until he was on me.
Nadia waved him back. “Have you understood nothing, Daniel? If you want to condemn injustice, look into your own skull. Do you think, if you lost a finger or stopped using a foreign language, the patch of your brain devoted to it would go on living in peace? Of course not. Its neighbors would invade, enslave the inhabitants. Would you cut the evil out of your own cortex, then? You disappoint me.”
I said nothing. I was leaving this world, if I could believe the Motor King; and if I couldn’t believe him then I was about to die. Nothing I said to them would matter. My body felt lighter still as the room ascended, unnaturally so. My shirt floated around me; the cable along my back bobbed in the air like a rope in water.
“I forgot to ask you,” Nadia said to her husband, “did he ever ask about his friend Terrence?”
“He never did,” the Motor King answered, with mock sadness. “We looked in on Terrence in the research clinic, and Daniel didn’t even recognize him.”
In a single moment, my pretense of enlightenment fell to pieces. I’d renounced all I had: my position, my loyalties, even my faith. If I’d still held onto anything in this world, it was my certainty that at least I had saved Terrence from a fate like mine. That had been my secret, the one thing Stefan could never take from me.
“What a shame,” Nadia said.
“That’s plain to see on his face,” Stefan remarked. As if imparting a valuable lesson, he said to me, “Hold onto that shame, Daniel. Treasure it. Think of the worth that Terrence has for you: quite apart from its place in the Great Being’s mind, his life means something in itself. I confess I don’t understand it. But if the Great Being finds it so interesting, I urge you to speak of it as you make your way in the new world.”
That was goodbye. The moving parlor ground to a halt, the door opened, and I saw that instead of moving up through the gyrus we’d been ascending the tall spire atop the Motor Palace.
The guards took me out onto the balcony at the spire’s tip. My body felt weightless and I was given a rope to clip myself to the handrails.
Far below, the wrinkled land was a patchwork of glimmers and shadows. Albatrosses and gulls spiraled. Clouds shrank back from the sun. A giant mirror in the shape of a bowl, ten times the span of my body, occupied a platform at the end of the balcony. I was left sitting under it with a bag of dried fruit and a skin of water.
At this weightless altitude, I felt the sunlight as a faint pressure against my face, like wind.
Hours passed before the sun caught my mirror.
Then the whole platform shuddered—startled birds took flight—and broke away into the sky. Up I sailed, away from my dwindling world, into exile.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
T.F. Davenport lives in southern California where he is working on a doctorate in cognitive science. In his spare time he would be writing science fiction, were it not for the minor impediment of having no spare time at all. By some miracle, he has stories appearing in GUD and the fiction column of Nature.
MEMORIES IN BRONZE, FEATHERS, AND BLOOD
Aliette de Bodard
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THIS IS WHAT WE REMEMBER: the stillness before the battle, the Jaguar Knights crouching in the mud of the marshes, their steel rifles glinting in the sunlight. And the gunshot—and Atl, falling with his eyes wide open, as if finally awakening from a dream. . . .
~ ~ ~
It’s early in the morning, and Nezahual is sweeping the courtyard of his workshop when the dapper man comes in.
From our perches in the pine tree, we watch Nezahual. His heart is weak and small, feebly beating in his chest, and sweat wells up in the pores of his skin. Today, we guess, is a bad day for him.
The dapper man, by contrast, moves with the arrogant stride of unbroken soldiers—his gestures sure, casual—and he has a pistol hidden under his clothes, steel that shines in our wide-spectrum sight.
We tense—wondering how much of a threat he is to Nezahual. His manner is brash; but he doesn’t seem aggressive.
“I’m looking for Nezahual of the Jaguar Knights.” The dapper man’s voice is contemptuous; he believes Nezahual to be a sweeper, someone of no importance in the household.
What he doesn’t know is that there’s no household, just Nezahual and us: his children, his flock of copper and bronze.
Nezahual straightens himself up, putting aside the broom with stiff hands. “I am Nezahual. What do you want?”
The dapper man shows barely any surprise; he shifts his tone almost immediately, to one of reluctant respect. “I’m Warrior Acamapixtli, from the House of Darts. We had hoped—you could give a speech on the War to our young recruits.”
Nezahual’s voice is curt, deadly. “You want me to teach them about war? I don’t do that.”
“Your experience. . . .” Acamapixtli is flustered now—we wonder how much is at stake, for this speech to be given.
“I went to war,” Nezahual says. He’s looking upwards—not at us but at Tonatiuh the Sun-God, who must be fed His toll in blood. “Is that such a worthwhile experience?” His heartbeat has quickened.
Ceaseless Steam: Steampunk Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine Page 26