Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

by Mike Allen

  Daria is the prettiest of all the nannies. I suspect my father molests her but I have never caught him at it. Her predecessor lasted a year before hitching a lift back to Sheredon on an export trader’s barge. Who could blame her? Pretty girls should be out there travelling among the worlds, not trapped in the perpetual pink-and-blossom twilight of a stinted baby’s nursery.

  The two fourteen-year-old Ann Elisabeths do not require nannies. They inhabit my father’s offices in the Summer and Winter wings. He keeps one girl handy to each suite where they perform embroidery and cross-stitch. Sometimes they swap places. He can never tell the difference between them.

  Father visits the nursery once a week. He never sees the baby in the same outfit twice. Daria is skilled at her work. She manages to teach the baby a new trick for each visit: picking up the kewpie rattle and shaking it for daddy; smiling at daddy when he walks into the room; crawling towards the sound of daddy’s voice; stumbling a few clumsy steps.

  But each old trick is forgotten by daddy’s next visit. Baby Ann Elisabeth has never even mastered walking. Father hoped for more, but the growth retardant process is not precise. When it comes to stinted babies, a few months can make such a difference.

  Stint nannies know they don’t have to try too hard; visiting day is all that matters. Nannying is a good appointment for a working girl, but being fondled by my ugly old father can’t be pleasant.

  But Daria is missing! Suddenly I realise my chance has finally come! Pretty Daria must be planning to run away. No ship has departed Amberjade in the past few weeks. The girl must still be here somewhere. There’s no need for me to learn to fly a ship. She knows all the offworld pilots by name. Daria and I will escape together and flee to Bellady’s moon.

  I must act immediately. Harmon must know of my plans. Keen to avoid the tedious ritual of the six-year-old stint’s singing, I slip from the table unobtrusively. No one bothers me as I leave. The men are drunk, the women screeching over small holographic amusements. My swallowtails are forgotten.

  As I make my way back through the autumn wing, my mind floods with possibilities. I will steal some of my father’s gold. He will not miss a little of it—it will be several days before he sobers up and notices I am missing.

  I climb the staircase and hurry through the house as fast as I am able, all the way through my Autumn rooms to my Link portal. It activates as I enter, pulsing warm and red, the colour of my heart. The air fills with the scent of rose and jasmine, an olfactory hallucination. Such plants cannot thrive in this planet’s bitter soils.

  A message awaits, as I knew it would. I am bursting with excitement. I nod for it to play, stand back and hold my breath. No, I will not wait another moment. Words will tumble from my lips in a delicious garble. He will not have to hear them to know what I intend because my manner will tell it all.

  When the Link connects my darling Harmon stands before me.

  He stands.

  I pause, sensing the wrongness, not understanding what I’m seeing even as I’m seeing it.

  He stands.

  There is no blanket shielding Harmon’s supposedly damaged lower body. He smiles, and an undercurrent of unfamiliarity taints his voice. My Autumn suite grows deathly cold, rose and jasmine draining from the air.

  This man is not my Harmon. This man has his face, but nothing else of him is the same.

  His hair is coiffed, his clothing finer and his mannerisms much more aggressive than those of the man I know.

  “Arna Maria, my dearest love,” he says. “I ache for you. If only we could be together. I would take you to see the grand touring exhibition of Rudiliere’s sculptures on Ellah, and then to the library on Gizienne. Why must we live so far apart? When will this torment end?”

  Arna Maria? Who is she? A friend from the university Linklounge, perhaps?

  “I love you, Arna Maria, as I have loved no other,” says Harmon. “Will your father not agree to our marriage? Soon I will have gold. Plenty of it. We can go anywhere we want.”

  My breath catches sharply in my throat. “I love you, Arna Maria, as I have loved no other.” I know this line by heart. The very same words he has used on me. The exact words, as if taken from a script. A script he no doubt reiterates as many times as amusement dictates.

  I fall to the floor, clutching at my chest. He has sent the wrong message to the wrong woman—how many of us has he accumulated in his Link harem? Is his error accidental, or an intentional act of cruelty? Harmon, my lovely Harmon, is a fraud.

  “Say it to my face,” I whisper, all my dreams in ruins. Say it to my true face, not this cold, projected likeness. I will steal a ship from the Vazquenadas. I will fly to Bellady’s moon and discover the truth for myself.

  I feel my heart burn and shrivel. I am no longer in control. I find myself limping through my father’s mansion, eyes blurred with tears, my mind consumed with the hideous image of my darling Harmon smiling at another woman with love that was supposed to be all mine.

  Daria. Where is Daria? She will know which of the pilots can be trusted. I will make her take me with her. We shall escape from my father as he drinks himself to senselessness downstairs.

  My uneven footsteps echo loudly on the polished marble floors. Room after useless room, yet I feel invigorated through my tears. Driven forward by my pain and confusion. Surely my Harmon does not mean those words? I have misheard him. Misinterpreted what he said, that is all.

  Above the sound of my own anguished cries I hear another little voice. Instinctively, I head towards it, pushing through double gilded doors. A sickly stench assails my nostrils. Something putrid. Horrible. The wailing is much louder now, and I recognise it suddenly; the crying of a baby.

  I find the infant through another doorway in the spring suite nursery. Baby Ann Elisabeth lies screaming in her crib in a mess of her own excrement, a drip feeder taped crudely to her arm. She looks to have been in this condition for some time. Where is nanny Daria? And then it strikes me that this is Fourthday—three whole days away from my father’s scheduled visit. Daria could be anywhere on AmberJade. My father would never know. So long as the baby is healthy for daddy’s visit, no one cares what happens on the other days.

  I lift the squalling bundle from the crib, detach her from the apparatus, wipe her as clean as I can manage with the corner of the sheet. I pull a fresh towel from the linen closet and wrap her tightly.

  The stench is indescribable. Covering my nose, I run from that awful place. My father will have to be informed. Daria shall be found and banished in disgrace.

  I must find my father and present him with the filthy, squalling stint. I will demand he pay proper attention to his house and change his self-indulgent ways. I shall demand a ship of my own, and a pilot to fly me far away from this horror and decadence.

  Baby Ann Elizabeth continues to howl as I carry her through my father’s house, through room after empty, pointless room till we reach the grand dining chamber. I will display the dirty stint before his precious dinner guests. Let them all smell its neglect. Interrupt the recital or the pretty song, or whatever he has the six-year-old performing for that troop of drunken Vazquenadas baboons.

  I push open the double lacquered doors with my shoulder. The dining room is empty, the table still laid but the dishes abandoned. A butler whose name I do not know steps up to greet me, a crisp white linen draped over one arm.

  “Would Miss Luisa Alice care to partake of refreshment?” he asks.

  I lift baby Ann Elisabeth from my shoulder and present her to the butler.

  “Take this to my father,” I say as calmly as I can, but I know my voice is wavering. If the butler thinks my request bizarre, he makes no obvious show of it. He lifts the squalling stint-child from my arms.

  I wipe my hand across my face and find it damp with tears. My clothing reeks, and I realise that I am so terribly tired. I sit in the nearest chair, pick a crumpled napkin from the table and use it to mop my brow. Beside the napkin, a full glass of red wine that I
drain in one gulp. I do not normally care for wine but I must have fortification if I am to face my father and demand a ship.

  The wine spreads warmth through my veins. My thoughts begin to focus. I must have a ship. I will fly to Harmon and demand an explanation of his actions. It is only when I reach for a second glass that I remember his other words. Soon I will have gold. Plenty of it. Surely he could not be referring to my gold; the gold I plan to steal from my father? Where is my father and his revolting guests? Where has everybody gone?

  I stand and walk the length of the dining chamber, through the double lacquered doors and through a further identical set. Servants bustle around me cleaning up the detritus of the evening’s festivities. Nobody speaks a word.

  I find one of the Vazquenadas on the balcony fucking an underbutler. I turn my face away—I have no quarrel with them. The rest of the family staggers about in the garden below. I only want to speak to my father—what those degenerate foreigners get up to is their own business.

  I cannot locate him in any of his regular haunts. I find only the Summer and Winter stints huddled together, whimpering. They will not tell me what is wrong. Has news reached them already of baby Ann Elisabeth’s neglect?

  I wander through my father’s house opening door after door until I come at last upon his bed chamber—a room I have been forbidden to enter, a room I have never given any thought to at all, until this moment.

  The door is not locked. My father is accustomed to obedience. He never locks any of his rooms.

  Through the door, I see my father in his four-poster bed. Alongside him, sprawled across red silk sheets, a fifth Ann Elisabeth—a child somewhere in age between the six-year-old and the Summer and Winter stints. Nine perhaps, maybe ten. She is naked. Her lips and cheeks are rouged, her eyes lined with jet-black kohl. She wears gold bands around her wrists and ankles. She smiles wickedly as I enter my father’s room. Our eyes lock and I see that her heart and mind are devoid of all emotion: no happiness, no light, no love.

  * * *

  There were five Ann Elisabeths in my father’s house but now there are none. There is only me, Luisa Alice, the child he never wanted by the wife who abandoned him and ran into the jungle rather than endure another moment in his presence.

  I have cut the power to the palisade. Smashed the generators with an iron bar. The skies above the house, once filled with my precious swallowtails, will soon be humming with the dark wings of other flying creatures. Abominations with stingers, barbs and fangs. Jester beetles and other monsters with a taste for human flesh.

  Already the jungle has begun its steady creep towards my father’s house. Liana vines entwine themselves around my father’s butchered corpse. Within a week the marble steps will be cracked and broken, no longer visible from above. Within two, it will be impossible to tell what kind of structure once stood here. The grasses will thicken with tentacles and roots, the soils seethe and churn with carnivorous microbes.

  I have freed my father’s slaves. Some of them have ransacked the house and run into the jungle. A few of the hardy ones may survive this time. The others have joined the servants in commandeering the Vazquenadas’ silver ships. I watch their contrails blaze across the sky as soft flames of dawn kiss the horizon.

  The hangars are empty, the Ann Elisabeths all dead. I killed them, as I myself should have been killed all those years ago, spared the indignities of this pointless existence rather than mutilated with my father’s machete blade in an effort to spite my faithless mother.

  I stand here now before the Link, trying to compose a final message to Harmon. My embroidered dinner gown is soaked with blood. I want to tell him of the pain he has wrought, but in the end I will send no message. I will say nothing. The encroaching jungle will speak for me. It will tear this mansion stone from stone, wiping our human stain from its memory forever. The jungle will have the final word. It will cover my father’s wicked bones, claiming the gold he and my heartless Harmon loved above all else. It will leave no trace of poor Luisa Alice and her beloved swallowtails.

  THE WOMAN

  by Tanith Lee

  1. The Suitor

  Down the terraces of the Crimson City they carried her, in her chair of bone and gold.

  The citizens stood in ranks, ten or twenty men deep.

  They watched.

  Some wept.

  Some, suddenly oblivious of the guard, thrust forward shouting, calling, a few even reciting lines of ancient poetry. They were swept back again. As if a steel broom could push away the sea of love.

  But Leopard did none of these things.

  He simply stood there, looking at her. At Her. He thought, and even as he thought it he chided himself, telling himself he was quite mad to think it, that her eyes for one tiniest splinter of a fractured second—met his. Knew his—knew him. Knew Leopard.

  But then the chair, borne by its six strong porters, had gone by.

  All he could see were the scarlet, ivory and gold of its hood, and the wide shoulders of the last two bearers.

  Many of the citizens had fallen on the ground, lamenting and crying, cursing, begging for death. Like a tree which had withstood a lightning strike, Leopard remained on his feet. He was upright in all senses, bodily, mentally, in character and in his moral station. Also sexually.

  For he had seen her. At last. His predestined love.

  The Woman.

  * * *

  In the village where he had grown up, the birth of Leopard had been a great disappointment. He had been aware of a coldness among his family from an early age. By the time he was six, his mother was dead of bearing another son, and Leopard began to see neither he, nor his newcomer brother, were liked.

  One day, when he was a little older, and had been playing ‘catch’ with the boys on the flat earthen street, under the tall rows of scent trees, Leopard heard one of the village’s pair of ancient hags muttering to her sister: “Accursed, that boy. And, too, the infant boy that came after him.” “Why’s that?” quacked the second hag. “Ah. The mother was frightened by a leopard when she carried that older one. So he was turned into something useless.” “And the infant?” “Think of his name,” said the first hag. Then both old women nodded and creaked away into their hut. Leopard felt ashamed. He had vaguely thought he was called Leopard for the beast’s silken handsomeness and dangerous hunter’s skills. It would seem not. While his poor little brother, Copper Coin—had Mother been scared by a piece of money?

  Copper Coin, however, rather than cursed, actually proved very useful later on, when he became popular for his beauty, and their family grew both respected and well-off.

  Today, several years after, Leopard removed himself from the crowd and strode away along the wide white streets of the Crimson City, to the wine-house Copper Coin now owned. Leopard had a thing of wonder to tell Copper. Leopard’s heart buzzed and sang within him.

  * * *

  A single enormous scent tree reared outside the wine-house; it was somewhere in the region of three hundred feet tall. At this season it rained down orange blossoms that smelled of incense and honey.

  Patrons sat in the courtyard to catch the perfume on their hair, skin and clothes. And while they did this of course, ate and drank. Trade was bustling.

  Inside, Leopard had to wait. His beautiful brother was occupied for another quarter of an hour with a favoured client.

  Leopard drank hot green alcohol and ate two or three river shrimps roasted with pepper. Seeing who he was, the food and drink were on the house.

  Then the client, dreamy-eyed and flushed, rattled down from the upper apartment. He passed Leopard without seeing him though Leopard had met the man before. He was a prince of the High Family of the Nine, immensely rich, always courteous and good-natured. But also he was crazily in love with Copper, and usually came out of the bedroom in a trance, between shining joy and dark despair. This morning Leopard sympathized. For now he, Leopard, was also insane with love.

  The servant took Leopard upstairs
.

  Copper, just fresh from the bath and belted in a dressing-gown of embroidered white silk, lay on a couch. His hair, worn some inches longer than any merely male man would wear it, coiled over his shoulders, gleaming black as sharkskin.

  “Gorgeous as ever,” remarked Leopard, between praise and banter. “Prince Nine tottered down, almost dead of love.”

  “So I should think. We were together three hours. It wouldn’t look good for me, would it, if he pranced out bored and burping. But you,” added Copper, “you’re pale as a marble death-stone.”

  Leopard stared at Copper. Then Leopard went and kneeled at his brother’s feet and laid his head in Copper’s lap. Murmuring gently, Copper stroked Leopard’s own hair, shortly thick as a cat’s fur. There was nothing sexual between them. Copper had become like a mother-sister for Leopard at about the same time Copper also found his own inner femaleness.

  “Ssh, what is it, darling?”

  “Oh gods of the seventy hells—”

  “Don’t invoke that uncouth nasty mob.”

  “The eleven heavens then. Oh Copper, Copper—did you know?”

  “Know what, my baby?”

  “She was shown in the city today.”

  “The Woman? Gods, yes, I’d forgotten. No wonder half my best lads’ clientele was absent. Damn it, there was I cursing them. And they too stupid to remind me.”

  Leopard shook, but with laughter.

  He sat up and gazed into his brother’s exquisite and surprised face.

  “Listen, Copper. I applied.”

  “You—my own spirit! When? ”

  “Last Rose Moon.”

  “Three months ago? And all this while you never told me—”