Swallowtail & Sword: The Scholar's Book of Story & Song (Tails from the Upper Kingdom 4)

by H. Leighton Dickson

  Swallowtail

  &

  Sword:

  The Scholar’s Book of Story and Song

  H. Leighton Dickson

  Copyright © 2015 H. Leighton Dickson

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13:978-1508840657

  ISBN-10:1508840652

  To Richard, Sean, Micah and Marcus

  (lions all)

  The Art of Tea and Stories

  Before there was a Shogun, before there was a Journey, there was a Story.

  Not just one story, but many. Stories of myth and legend and Ancestors; of horses and lions and mountains and monkeys. Of life and death and those in between and how you can see them if only you try. If you sit quietly and listen deeply, you might hear something you’ve never heard before. You might know something you’ve never known and you might understand how we came to be the people we are. It is elusive, I grant you. Cats are, after all, an inscrutable people.

  And of course, there are songs. Many, many songs. All of life and truth and history can be found in a song. Just ask a tiger. Tigers write the very best songs but you know that. Our songs are brilliant and strong, lyrical and true, and our poetry is the finest in all the Kingdom. If you read them aloud and just right, butterflies will sit on your fingers and dragons will fall at your feet. I’ve seen it happen. The swallowtails are sweet but the dragons are impressive.

  There is steel. Much steel, for cats are warriors and our armies are the envy of the world. There are katanahs and kodai’chis, daggers and needles, picks and pins. There are battles in our stories and there is blood and death but there is also honour and courage and power and peace. The best blades are forged from such noble metal.

  There is also tea. Black tea, red tea, white tea and green. (There is Dragon Tea but I don’t recommend it unless you want to die.) The Art of Tea is a sacred thing - the making a ritual, the taking a blessing. It is one of the good things that set our people apart from the animals and I’ve started a special pot just for you. Hot and sweet, as you like it.

  While most stories begin at the beginning, ours begin before then, in a time not recorded and barely remembered. That is the power of stories. And so, you should pour the tea and find a seat that makes you feel wise. Breathe deeply the pages, savour the ancient words and begin.

  Death in the Mountains

  I have lived in the Mountains,

  these many long years.

  Yesterday I called on friends and family,

  All have gone to the grave.

  Slowly consumed

  like fire down a candle,

  Forever flowing

  like a passing river.

  Now, morning

  I face my lone shadow,

  And my eyes are blurred with tears.

  My body is like deadwood,

  my thoughts are like ashes

  there's snow on my skull,

  frost on my jaw,

  I don't distain the world but I leave it

  dust finds no place to land in my eyes

  Words of Life and Death and Those in Between

  Last Year of Man

  Under the mountain

  The dragon settles on gold

  Stolen from the king

  Yes.

  He stared at the word that flickered in the ionspace between his finger and thumb.

  Yes.

  Such big implications from such a little word. Life changing. World building. Heart stopping. Feet-tapping, hand-clapping, tune-whistling implications.

  Five years ago, his life had changed in exactly that way all because Pilar Belcamino had said yes.

  Jeffrey Solomon sat in the prep room, scrubbed, shaved, disinfected and wearing a hideous jumpsuit of GM cotton. It felt surprisingly good, this cotton, given the fact that gene-modification had been banned ever since Ouwehand’s rat hybrids had stormed the world. Still, he would be wearing it for a while so he was grateful that it was comfy. Five hundred years of itching just didn’t sit well with him.

  He sighed.

  She had said yes.

  He looked up as the door panels flashed green, alerting him to the approach of a tech. He could hear the hiss and click of the seals and the door slid open on Rajavel Patel in a containment suit. Through the smoky plex of the helmet, Raj smiled at him.

  “Almost ready, Doc?”

  His voice was muffled and tinny. Like far, far away. Soon to be a world away. A lifetime.

  “Almost.” Solomon looked down at the words flickering on the screen between his hands. It was a SmartALYK – a holocam generated by crystals embedded in rings on his thumb and forefinger. Patel hovered over him, glanced at the screen.

  “That was from Pilar, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “She was a fine woman.”

  “Too good for me,” said Solomon.

  “You know you can’t take the rings with you.”

  “I know,” he said. “I have three pips left so I’m just reading them, one last time.”

  Patel studied him, raised a brow.

  “You get a new start,” he said. “Maybe one of the subs?”

  “Nah. Not interested. A geek like me was lucky to have one wife. Not likely to find another and that’s okay.”

  He sighed again, eyes fixed on the shimmering word – the Yes that had changed everything.

  “Delete.”

  The letters scattered into the air like dust in the breeze.

  He dropped his hands to his knees and looked up at the tech. He smiled.

  “Ready.”

  “Excellent,” said Raj. “The others are already in the lab.”

  He pushed to his feet and followed Raj out a second door, down a long grey corridor that lit up under their feet, disinfecting with every step. It was maybe one hundred meters to the Coldroom, but it was the longest walk of his life.

  Finally, another door opened, the vaclocks clicking behind them like a stopwatch. The pair entered a small compression chamber that immediately filled with fine mist. AVR spray, he knew. With contagions rampant earthside, there could never be too many precautions. The mist prickled his face and head, ran down the screen of Patel’s helmet like rain. The air smelled sharp, slightly acidic. He wondered what the air would smell like after. After. Not, ‘In Five Hundred Years’, or ‘When He Awoke From a Lifetime of Cryosleep,’ just after. Funny how his brain protected itself.

  Soon, the hatch swung open on the Coldroom, the heart and soul of Project SANDMAN. A dozen shaved heads turned at his approach.

  “Jeffery,” said a woman. She was dressed in an equally-hideous GM jumpsuit. “We were getting worried.”

  “Just deleting my pips, Xuan. Can you imagine the bill if I kept the account open for five hundred years?”

  Xuan Pettypiece smiled. Her other name was Supervisor 2 and as he moved to stand next to her, his eyes flicked along the rest of the row. Claude Montgomery, Super 4. Carlos deVille, Super 3. Ben Pappadou, Super 6. Bella Whitehead, Super 5 and at the far end, Supervisor 1, Idris Ntombe. Jeffery Solomon made seven. Seven supers in the same room for the first time in six months. It would have been amazing had they not been so terrified.

  “Welcome Team,” said a voice from the speakers. “To SleepLab1.”

  ***

  I’m sick.

  Two words now, and they flickered in the ionspace between finger and thumb.

  I’m sick.

  Such terrible implications from two such tiny words. Life-changing. Heart-stopping, jaw-dropping,
pulse-quickening words that had thrown his life into disorder and chaos.

  She was sick.

  In a world of genetically-engineered plagues and mutated viruses, those two words meant death. He remembered the night when he’d received her pip. She’d been in Lucerne, overseeing the transportation of the subs to the underground facility that was SleepLab1, deep in the Swiss Alps. The city was locked down and supposedly safe but where there was air, there was always the possibility of contagion. The latest – G9EVi – was a clever and brutal piece of coding, a retrovirus engineered to turn the immunity of EUS vaccines into an aggressive autoimmune response of apoptosis and cell death. Factions in the EUS were calling it an ‘inside job’ and the ramifications were sweeping through the remaining layers of government, while supposedly immune people – many of them SANDMAN staff – were dying by the hundreds. Truth be told, there weren’t hundreds left.

  He wondered what Lucerne would look like after. Would there be ruins of buildings or would the Alps grind it to mountain rubble and dust?

  There was a tug at his ankles.

  “How’s that feel?” asked Raj through the helmet. “Same as last time?”

  “Yeah,” said Solomon.

  “You know the drill but they want us to go over it one last time.”

  “I know, I know. It’s all wires and tubes and good-natured banter until someone breaks out the jelly.”

  Raj grinned. “Everything stops with the jelly.”

  Patel got to work and Solomon leaned back, casting his eyes across the quiet activity of the Coldroom. Each of the supervisors was being strapped into their units by an assistant, one who had been with them for years. Rajavel Patel had been closer than his shadow as he prepared for this – guiding him through the steps of deep meditation, the technique to briefly and consciously stop and start his heart, schooling his mind to embrace the stages of dormancy and training his body to effectively purge the nitrogen and recycle the O2/CO2. Patel had been there as Solomon had gone under first for an hour, then a week, then three months, then six, each time deeper, longer and colder than the last. It was a form of martial art – this deep transcendent state – and Raj had been his sensei. He didn’t know how he would awaken this time without Rajavel Patel’s sardonic, smiling face.

  “Hyperbaric pressurization in T minus 20,” said a voice over the speakers. “All systems check. Techs, prep your supers.”

  He wondered if there would be techno-jargon after.

  “Remember,” said Raj, slipping a thin cable over the wire at the base of Solomon’s skull. “Your wire is your hiber-hotline. You’ll be in hibernation first for three months before the plunge into cryo and I’ll be here everyday to monitor brain activity and metabolic function.”

  “Unless you get sick,” said Solomon.

  “I’m down here,” said Patel. “I can’t get sick.”

  “I’d never know but still, I’d find a way to feel bad. I’m good that way.”

  “I promise I won’t get sick.” The tech grinned, leaned in to tape monitors to Solomon’s shaved head. “So, provided there are no complications, the system will transition you from the hibernation into a true cryostate. Then, you’ll have no brainwave function, no breathing, nothing.”

  “Like a frozen turkey,” Solomon grinned.

  “Hopefully, without the freezer burn.”

  “But no dreaming, right?”

  “You can’t dream in cryo.”

  “Well you sure as hell dream in hibernation,” he grumbled.

  “Don’t even joke about that, Jeffery,” called Carlos deVille from his unit. “I’m looking forward to a long sleep without dreams.”

  The dreaming had been an issue. In the first stage of the cryo process – hibernation – brainwaves were still active. Limited and random, yes but the body continued to function and the brain was needed to accomplish them. The dreaming went hand-in-hand – dark, vivid and usually terrifying. In fact, in the early days of the SANDMAN Project, many sleepers went mad due to the lingering, reality-twisting effects of the dreams.

  “You’re not technically sleeping,” said Whitehead from her unit.

  “Really?” deVille grumbled. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You don’t need to be sarcastic, Carlos,” said Whitehead. “We have to leave all that behind.”

  “Human nature,” said Ben Pappadou. “We’ll never leave that behind.”

  “We’d better,” said Xuan. “Or we’re doomed.”

  “Ah, I love the deep existential conversations at T minus 15,” came the deep, calming voice of Idris Ntombe, the Team Leader. “But we cannot give in to the feelings of doom. We are the last, best hope of our species. Rise above your fears, people. We can do this.”

  “We can do this,” echoed Whitehead.

  “We will do this,” said Xuan.

  “We are doing this,” said Ben.

  “We are doing this,” said Carlos. “See, Bella? I left out the sarcasm. It was much more evolved.”

  “Can we leave him?” asked Whitehead. “Please?”

  Raj held up a syringe of clear jelly.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” said Raj with a grin. “I have to jellify you now.”

  “Jellification,” groaned Solomon. “That’s why we’re doing this.”

  “Jellification,” said Ben. “Gotta luv it.”

  “Jellify me, Bella,” said Carlos.

  “Shut up, Carlos,” said Whitehead.

  “Jellify me,” grinned Solomon.

  Jellify. Insert gelatinous protein into every orifice except his mouth, to protect the tissues and the integrity of the whole. Certain ‘delicate’ areas had already been filled. That, he had realized after the first session, was the worst part of the entire procedure.

  He wondered what the jelly would feel like after.

  “No exploding on decompression, right?” he asked.

  “That would be messy.”

  “Do my eyes last, okay?”

  “Will do,” he said. “I’ll need your rings soon.”

  “Yah.”

  And he glanced down at his hand, to the words floating in the ionspace there.

  I’m sick.

  “Delete,” he said and the words scattered like rice at a wedding.

  He leaned back and let Raj get to work.

  ***

  I love you.

  He would hang on to that.

  I love you.

  The three most powerful words in the history of the human race. Words that could crush armies, topple governments, bring dictators to their knees.

  She loved him.

  He supposed that was all he should need. He was lucky to have had five years with her. They had met at a SANDMAN conference, both candidates for the last supervisor spot. He still wasn’t sure how he’d beat her out. She was smarter, fitter, far more resourceful. But he was funny and apparently, needed to offset the somber intellect of the team. Laughter was a desirable human characteristic, something worth preserving.

  He wondered if he would be able to laugh after.

  Everyone else was being closed up in their units and he knew Raj wanted to tuck him in as well. But even as the chamber hissed with the cold and clicked with the microwaves, preparing to ice and de-ice the blood in his veins, he just couldn’t bring himself to delete that last pip.

  Not even a wince as Raj inserted tubules into the carotid artery in his throat, not even a grimace as the cold CP70 was piped into his circulatory system. Three years ago, it had made him sick. Now he was used to it, harnessed it, rode it like a wave to take him deeper into the organs and tissues and cells that made up Super 7. Hibernation was so much easier when you initiated it yourself.

  He breathed deeply, held it, let the sensation of filling his lungs carry him through the exhale, purging nitrogen with each cleansing breath. It was a disorienting experience, this hibernation-to-cryostate – the microwave burns before, the dreams during, the intermittent numbness and overwhelming fatigue afterwards. The process brought
its subjects to the brink of death, killing them only to abruptly bring them back. In the early days, it had killed and not brought back. EUS Prime had almost scuttled SANDMAN but the plagues had raged and the governments had relented. Unlike people, hope was a difficult thing to kill.

  He wondered if there would still be people after, if there would still be plagues, if there would still be hope.

  She had died during one of his sleeps. That fact had almost made him leave the program but they had convinced him otherwise. She had believed in him and in the project, in the three subterranean Arks on three different continents. After all the wars and all the disease, she still believed in humanity and its potential for good and so, he stayed. Broken, lost, a body without a soul. But still, he made them laugh so he stayed.

  A shape loomed across the plexi and Raj tapped at the rings. It was almost slow-motion as the jelly in his ears distorted all sound. The jelly filled his nose and soon, his eyes. The world was turning through a thin protein paste.

  Slowly, Solomon looked down at the words, flickering between his thumb and forefinger. She had loved him and if he died, that part of her would die with him.

  “Delete,” he said. His words slurred and rattled his skull and the letters scattered like snowflakes in winter.

  And just like that, she was gone.

  Patel slid the rings from his hand and slipped them into a pack in his containment suit. He brought the jelly up to his eyes and nodded.

  Solomon did not blink. He had learned how to control the impulse for hours. As the jelly was pasted across his corneas, blotting out most detail and reducing the Coldroom to a white blur, he left the world of men and science and war and disease, journeyed inside himself to the place where he lived. To the deep, dark quiet of thought, of breath, of heartbeat and pulse. He didn’t even feel it as the tech folded wax over his fingertips, inserted a mouthguard between his teeth or checked the many tiny tubules that ran into and out of his body. He didn’t hear Raj say goodbye, didn’t see the lights go down or the hatch slide closed, didn’t feel the temperature begin to plummet. He was merely a soul free of a body, slipping between the lipids and the proteins, between the water molecules and the DNA and between the very elements themselves. He existed but didn’t exist, floated high above the lab, above the Alps, above Kandersteg, Switzerland.