by Ian McDonald
I breathe nothing in.
I do not breathe.
When I wake, I am lying beneath the crystal chandelier in the entrance, the green-skinned housekeeper who speaks in clucking syllables and waves her many arms and legs in gestures of emphatic apology, hands me a ball of tangled thread. I believe she is confused; I am too embarrassed to tell her I am already dead.
Nineteen (after many more tellings)
Eventually it comes to pass that I learn to expand and contract my diaphragm. When I meet the housekeeper, I ask her for a mask, for cylinders, and boots made of thick rubber and hard soles. I clip lights and lines, learn to turn my regular on and off in the dark. I keep a journal with times and distance and SAC rates. If ever one of us is to escape, I feel it must be through me.
My husband and I spent every anniversary in Mexico. Once, as he carried my gear down the wooden steps, where the snorkelers were gathered, he asks the name of the place. Nahoch Nah Chich, I tell him.
Giant birdcage. He laughed. Why do we name such things, but out of fear, or longing.
I do not remember marrying him. I do not remember how we met, or where I was born, my mother’s face, the ten page checklist of mission objectives.
Tying the thread to the door, I feel a familiarity in my fingers. I bend my legs at the knees, floating above the alien world and it is not alien at all: white fingers of limestone drip down and all is quiet save the sound of my own breathing. It is a different cave each time. Different jumps and line arrows; the thread never pulls me back, but eventually I fade.
Thirty
A woman made entirely of bees introduces me to my husband. She sits us both down and explains, in as few words as possible, that I am here to be murdered by him. The story says it must be so. There would be time to come to it naturally, a progression of intimacies and arguments, tests of will as we circled each other like dogs, but everything is running slower than expected. He must do it now. Quickly.
My husband argues with her. He says he does not wish to kill anyone. He has never wished to kill anyone and could he please simply go home. He laments the destruction of free will, the confines of destiny. Why is his role never examined, the contextual analysis of his decisions given more than cursory glances.
The woman of bees grows large and small before him. “The things that I could show you would make you piss yourself in fear.”
My husband is undeterred. “You brought us here. This is all on you.”
“We did not make you,” she says.
There are glimpses within her form, planets and stars I do not remember, and I reach out without thinking. If the universe had formed in an infinitesimally different way, had a molecule collapsed or grown larger, had a butterfly been squished beneath a hunter’s boot, my life would not exist.
I hold stardust in my palm, I think, as a few crushed bees twitch and tickle against my skin.
I do not think this one small act has the power to affect great change. We are not at the beginning after all and the universe is expanding too quickly to catch up with it now. How insurmountable the arrogance that a crushed insect could change a presidential election (I do not believe I have ever seen an election, besides).
Four Hundred Thirty Seven
On our first date I tell the man who will one day be my husband how in 1994 Sheck Exley drowned at 925 feet in Zacatón cenote trying to see what the bottom was like. I linger on the ideal percentages in his gas mixture and tell him how the total pressure exerted by a mixture of gases is equal to the sum of the pressures that would be exerted by each of those gases if they alone were present and occupied the volume. I calculated the distance and ascent rate of an exhalation on a cocktail napkin to explain how when the last of his bubbles breached the surface, Sheck’s wife must have known he had died a full ten minutes before.
“But didn’t she jump in after him?” he asks.
“It would have been pointless,” I say.
Our relationship becomes a study of inverse calculations. Pressure and volume. My love for him is a steel cylinder, over-pressurized. Quantifiable, divisible into clean fractions, calculable for the prevention of oxygen toxicity and nitrogen narcosis. I do not enter a cave unless I am sure I have enough to get out. But he is decompression: a slow release of frustration and longing. Mathematically imprecise.
“What is the most scared you’ve ever been,” he says and I tell him of the Blue Holes in the Bahamas, how a woman there likes to follow the cave divers inside, flips their line arrows around to discourage them from returning.
“There are places one may reach,” I say, “where all exits point back to the self.”
“So that happened to you?” he asks and I shake my head.
“But all of us suffer the same fears. Even though I have never seen that place, I can still feel her eyes on me in the dark. Kindred spirits. Like the myth of twins who can feel when the other is in pain, or dies.”
“In this story, are you the lost diver? Or are you the one who traps them inside, so they will never return?”
“Can’t I be both?”
“Why are all the mad ones women,” he laughs. “Medusa, Lusca, evil queens and scorned ex-wives.” He smiles at me and I remember smiling. I remember agreeing. I remember being foolish in a great many ways.
Later, when I cannot clean the tell-tale blood from my hands he snaps my neck. The last thing I hear is the key hitting the floor. A small sound, less than leaves breaking, and I see there are two of him behind his eyes. One I will never understand, and the other who whispers It was a kindness.
The Husband’s Last Will and Testament Left on His Brother’s Answering Machine Before Lift-Off Which the First Wife Sometimes Whispers to Wife 1001 Like a Greeting, or a Prayer
Please take care of the dogs. Keep the house, or sell it—by the time we get back there won’t be a house left. If we get back. Tell your kids I’ll name whole galaxies after them.
I’ve left you all our books save one. It’s her favorite and I’m thinking of sneaking it up there by hiding it in my jumpsuit. We’re not supposed to take any unauthorized items, and they tell us the sum of human history is in the computer if we get bored. But just the two us, willing to float out there alone for centuries, how can they say no?
The Penultimate Wife
I enter the story knowing my husband’s plans for me. He weeps as he does it; he begs forgiveness. We can be so much better than the sum of what has come before.
He mistakes my disinterest for his guilt as evidence that I do not know what I am, what we are, where we have been and where we were headed. It know it was a moment’s sentiment when the knife glanced against my throat and failed. A miscalculation of time and distance, a desire to wait until the last possible second.
He believes it is my story he is telling, dividing me into ten thousand forms, variation after variation and in this way he can keep us both alive. My consciousness hangs like silt stirred by the breath of unknown women. He hopes the sum of us will equal the whole, but looking into my eyes he must know the tiniest parts of me have been discontinued
I’m sorry, he says I’m sorry. I promise not to do it again.
About the Author
Helena Bell is an occasional poet, writer, and international traveler which means that over half of what she says is completely made up, the other half is probably made up, and the third half is about the condition of the roads. She has a BA, an MFA, a JD, and a Tax LLM which fulfills her life long dream of having more letters follow her name than are actually in it. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Shimmer Magazine, Brain Harvest, and Rattle.
Effigy Nights
Yoon Ha Lee
They are connoisseurs of writing in Imulai Mokarengen, the city whose name means inkblot of the gods.
The city lies at the galaxy’s dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird eve
r-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel.
Imulai Mokarengen has been unmolested for over a hundred years. People come to listen to the minstrels and drink tea-of-moments-unraveling, to admire the statues of shapeshifting tigers and their pliant lovers, to look for small maps to great fortunes at the intersections of curving roads. Even the duelists confront each other in fights knotted by ceremony and the exchange of poetry.
But now the starships that hunt each other in the night of nights have set their dragon eyes upon Imulai Mokarengen, desiring to possess its arts, and the city is unmolested no more.
The soldiers came from the sky in a glory of thunder, a cascade of fire. Blood like roses, bullets like thorns, everything to ashes. Imulai Mokarengen’s defenses were few, and easily overwhelmed. Most of them would have been museum pieces anywhere else.
The city’s wardens gathered to offer the invading general payment in any coin she might desire, so long as she left the city in peace. Accustomed to their decadent visitors, they offered these: Wine pressed from rare books of stratagems and aged in barrels set in orbit around a certain red star. Crystals extracted from the nervous systems of philosopher-beasts that live in colonies upon hollow asteroids. Perfume symphonies infused into exquisite fractal tapestries.
The general was Jaian of the Burning Orb, and she scorned all these things. She was a tall woman clad in armor the color of dead metal. For each world she had scoured, she wore a jewel of black-red facets upon her breastplate. She said to the wardens: What use did she have for wine except to drink to her enemies’ defeat? What use was metal except to build engines of war? And as for the perfume, she didn’t dignify that with a response.
But, she said, smiling, there was one thing they could offer her, and then she would leave with her soldiers and guns and ships. They could give her all the writings they treasured so much: all the binary crystals gleaming bright-dark, all the books with the bookmarks still in them, all the tilted street signs, all the graffiti chewed by drunken nanomachines into the shining walls, all the tattoos obscene and tender, all the ancestral tablets left at the shrines with their walls of gold and chitin.
The wardens knew then that she was mocking them, and that as long as any of the general’s soldiers breathed, they would know no peace. One warden, however, considered Jaian’s words of scorn, and thought that, unwitting, Jaian herself had given them the key to her defeat.
Seran did not remember a time when his othersight of the city did not show it burning, no matter what his ordinary senses told him, or what the dry pages of his history said. In his dreams the smoke made the sky a funeral shroud. In waking, the wind smelled of ash, the buildings of angry flames. Everything in the othersight was wreathed in orange and amber, flickering, shadows cinder-edged.
He carried that pall of phantom flame with him even now, into the warden’s secret library, and it made him nervous although the books had nothing to fear from the phantoms. The warden, a woman in dust-colored robes, was escorting him through the maze-of-mists and down the stairs to the library’s lowest level. The air was cool and dry, and to either side he could see the candle-sprites watching him hungrily.
“Here we are,” the warden said as they reached the bottom of the stairs.
Seran looked around at the parchment and papers and scrolls of silk, then stepped into the room. The tools he carried, bonesaws and forceps and fine curved needles, scalpels that sharpened themselves if fed the oil of certain olives, did not belong in this place. But the warden had insisted that she required a surgeon’s expertise.
He risked being tortured or killed by the general’s occupation force for cooperating with a warden. In fact, he could have earned himself a tidy sum for turning her in. But Imulai Mokarengen was his home, for all that he had not been born here. He owed it a certain loyalty.
“Why did you bring me here, madam warden?” Seran said.
The warden gestured around the room, then unrolled one of the great charts across the table at the center of the room. It was a stardrive schematic, all angles and curves and careful coils.
Then Seran saw the shape flickering across the schematic, darkening some of the precise lines while others flowed or dimmed. The warden said nothing, leaving him to observe as though she felt he was making a difficult diagnosis. After a while he identified the elusive shape as that of a girl, slight of figure or perhaps merely young, if such a creature counted years in human terms. The shape twisted this way and that, but there were no adjacent maps or diagrams for her to jump to. She left a disordered trail of numbers like bullets in her wake.
“I see her,” Seran said dryly. “What do you need me to do about her?”
“Free her,” the warden said. “I’m pretty sure this is all of her, although she left a trail while we were perfecting the procedure—”
She unrolled another chart, careful to keep it from touching the first. It appeared to be a treatise on musicology, except parts of it had been replaced by a detritus of clefs and twisted staves and demiquavers coalescing into a diagram of a pistol.
“Is this your plan for resistance against the invaders?” Seran said. “Awakening soldiers from scraps of text, then cutting them out? You should have a lot more surgeons. Or perhaps children with scissors.”
The warden shrugged. “Imulai Mokarengen is a city of stories. It’s not hard to persuade one to come to life in her defense, even though I wouldn’t call her tame. She is the Saint of Guns summoned from a book of legends. Now you see why I need a surgeon. I am given to believe that your skills are not entirely natural.”
This was true enough. He had once been a surgeon-priest of the Order of the Chalice. “If you know that much about me,” he said, “then you know that I was cast out of the order. Why haven’t you scared up the real thing?”
“Your order is a small one,” she said. “I looked, but with the blockade, there’s no way to get someone else. It has to be you.” When he didn’t speak, she went on, “We are outnumbered. The general can send for more soldiers from the worlds of her realm, and they are armed with the latest weaponry. We are a single city known for artistic endeavors, not martial ones. Something has to be done.”
Seran said, “You’re going to lose your schematic.”
“I’m not concerned about its fate.”
“All right,” he said. “But if you know anything about me, you know that your paper soldiers won’t last. I stick to ordinary surgery because the prayers of healing don’t work for me anymore; they’re cursed by fire.” And, because he knew she was thinking it: “The curse touches anyone I teach.”
“I’m aware of the limitations,” the warden said. “Now, do you require additional tools?”
He considered it. Ordinary scissors might be better suited to paper than the curved ones he carried, but he trusted his own instruments. A scalpel would have to do. But the difficult part would be getting the girl-shape to hold still. “I need water,” he said. He had brought a sedative, but he was going to have to sponge the entire schematic, since an injection was unlikely to do the trick.
The warden didn’t blink. “Wait here.”
As though he had somewhere else to wait. He spent the time attempting to map the girl’s oddly flattened anatomy. Fortunately, he wouldn’t have to intrude on her internal structures. Her joints showed the normal range of articulation. If he hadn’t known better, he would have said she was dancing in the disarrayed ink, or perhaps looking for a fight.
Footsteps sounded in the stairwell. The woman set a large pitcher of water down on the table. “Will this be enough?” she asked.
Seran nodded and took out a vial from his satchel. The dose was pure guesswork, unfortunately. He dumped half the vial’s contents into the pitcher, then stirred the water with a glass rod. After putting on glo
ves, he soaked one of his sponges, then wrung it out.
Working with steady strokes, he soaked the schematic. The paper absorbed the water readily. The warden winced in spite of herself. The girl didn’t seem capable of facial expressions, but she dashed to one side of the schematic, then the other, seeking escape. Finally she slumped, her long hair trailing off in disordered tangles of artillery tables.
The warden’s silence pricked at Seran’s awareness. She’s studying how I do this, he thought. He selected his most delicate scalpel and began cutting the girl-shape out of the paper. The medium felt alien, without the resistances characteristic of flesh, although water oozed away from the cuts.
He hesitated over the final incision, then completed it, hand absolutely steady.
Amid all the maps and books and scrolls, they heard a girl’s slow, drowsy breathing. In place of the paper cutout, the girl curled on the table, clad in black velvet and gunmetal lace. She had paper-pale skin and inkstain hair, and a gun made of shadows rested in her hand.
It was impossible to escape the problem: smoke curled from the girl’s other hand, and her nails were blackened.
“I warned you of this,” Seran said. Cursed by fire. “She’ll burn up, slowly at first, and then all at once. I suspect she’ll last a week at most.”
“You listen to the news, surely,” the warden said. “Do you know how many of our people the invaders shot the first week of the occupation?”
He knew the number. It was not small. “Anything else?” he said.
“I may have need of you later,” the warden said. “If I summon you, will you come? I will pay you the same fee.”
“Yes, of course,” Seran said. He had noticed her deft hands, however; he imagined she would make use of them soon.