Future Chronicles Special Edition

by Samuel Peralta

  Now in the tomb, the anger, at last given an outlet, came forth in a shape and a rush. The world would know, however many years hence, that she had been more than his woman. Her dance continued around the perimeter of the room. She left it in ruins and dust and shards of pottery, and his bed she left untouched. Let him see the juxtaposition of his own perfect preservation amongst the ruins of everything he sought to take from the world of the living. Let him walk in the loss of his life, alive and dead as she had been.

  She stooped to brush her fingers on the ground and the oil she had spilled came to life with a roar. Meilang stumbled back, too shocked to utter even a bare cry at it. What had the Emperor’s engineers devised? Flame that sprung on its own from lamp oil? It traced a circle in the room, lighting her destruction in eerie clarity, even the flames too bright for her eyes. She brought her hands to her eyes and gasped at their destruction.

  She had ruined herself.

  She had allowed herself to be walled in. When she might have fought to break free—well, what had been her options? To accept death, or to keep living the half-life that had been given to her? To have the chance at her own poems. She should have fled the city when the emperor fell ill, and yet how could she have known it would come to this? She had heard stories, and yet one never assumed…

  And the Emperor was young, he should never have had to come to death now, and her with him. She should never have had to die now, she thought mutinously. And yet was the point of protesting now? So many chances to run, and all of them had ended in quicker destruction. Would it have been better than living in dear and half-shame, shadow, wanting a full life she could not have?

  She could not give up the past years, she could not regret them. Survival had its own beauty. She paused, stumbling, swaying. Exhaustion was creeping in, and despite the flames, the cold had returned to her bones now. It was deep in, ice radiating outwards through her skin. It was killing her. She was going to die.

  She had always known that, and yet her mind failed over and over to understand. It came in stabs of awareness. Swaying, she fell to her knees on the flagstone floor. No marble and inlay here, either. What had the king sought in leaving his chamber like this?

  She had only wanted to have someone to understand her poems, and love them for what they were. She had loved the Emperor even, for loving them—before he misunderstood, before he wanted her body for what her mind wove. Before he obliterated everything she had wanted to be. She had transcended the court as a poet, above their petty squabbling, set apart as she did not see their titles and they came to trust her: and then she had been thrust into the world of the harem and he had given her over to the pain and the whispers. She knew she was not beautiful. She had used it like a cloak, painful in ways she could never understand, for did not every woman wish to be beautiful sometimes? And yet it had given her a life she could always love. She had made her peace with it, until it failed her.

  She had only wanted someone to understand. And he had been that person once.

  When they found her here, amongst the wreckage, they would know what she had done…but again, she would be defined by lack, by her relation to him. She would be the woman who had destroyed. Anger sang in her blood and this time she rejected its siren call. She did not want anger. She did not want destruction.

  She wanted the chance to be remembered for what she could have been.

  She made her way to the wall, stumbling and slipping. Anger flared and receded in her blood as she pushed it away. Pain was coming quickly and she wanted only to write, to grasp the last few minutes of her life—it was close, she accepted that now, at last—enough to give voice to the images she had felt tumbling over in her soul as she stood in her chambers, their glorious edict and joyous news falling in her ears. She had woken to birdsong and sunlight and she had wanted to write them…

  And this.

  One last poem. She had time for one last poem. She drew the sunlight and the flowers to her, their colored faces bobbing gently in the sunshine as their petals unfurled and bees hovered lazily. A dragonfly alit on one nearby. She dragged her fingers through the blood on her robes and swayed, lifting her fingers to the bare walls. She had made herself a canvas; in her mind, she was at her desk, dipping a brush in ink and holding it over the page.

  Her fingers dragged down the stone, elegance in the words. Dragonflies and the low arcs of birds. A trail of the submerged back of a fish. The sameness and beauty of rocks. The emperor had given her a pearl and she had shaken it out into her palm, mesmerized by the beauty and unable to bring herself to have it set. She kept it on her writing desk, tainted by its origin, captured by its beauty. Was this how women were won?

  She wrote a song of dying pain, or loss, of the world as it had once been in her eyes and her hopes that had struggled against dying faith, against fact. She wrote of what had once been, of the parallel ghost life that had never flourished. Of the beauty she had wished to hate. She wrote of dragonflies and hummingbirds, jeweled wings, a hair pin sliding out of the arrangement so her hair could tumble about her shoulders; a gesture that made no sense when it was never her beauty the Emperor had sought, and yet he wished to put her into the same box. He knew only one way to desire.

  She sang of what might have been, a song of fingertips on stone, and in her dreams the pen glided over the finest paper. Sunlight was warm on her face in her dreams even as the pain crept up, crippling her, dragging her down to the floor and the flames.

  The siren call of anger came again, and she rejected it. She did not want anger. She wanted to the last moments of what she had been, a monument to herself and no one else. The smashed finery, she could not regret. Someday, she knew, someone would see it, arrowheads in her body and her fingers smashed and ruined. They would know her fury, and it would be a testament to what had happened here. But that anger was done. And so: they would see the poem.

  Her last moments would be spent as she wished, even as her heart fluttered against her ribcage like a desperate bird, afraid of winter’s touch. She trailed her fingers over the wall where her last work lay, and then she stumbled away. She was crying as she lay down at last on the stone and waited for oblivion. She could not regret; did not regret.

  She simply did not want to die. And it hurt so very much. She squeezed her eyes shut as the pain wracked her again and felt a cry escape her lips. She would not regret, would not regret.

  She did not want to die.

  She did not…

  The anger stood at her side. What had carried her to this moment, it asked her?

  She did not want to die. She pressed her hands over her stomach, and both her fingers and her belly twisted in pain. She bit her lips. She was so cold, so cold… Her eyes traced over the lines of the poem. Sunlight and birds. She only had a few more minutes to endure.

  She was so scared.

  Did I not carry you up? the anger asked her. Did I not give you strength?

  I do not want to die, she told it. Acceptance warred with everything she had been: fire and outspokenness, fury still remaining in her soul. I do not want to die.

  You do not have to die.

  I do not want to die, she repeated. The pain was taking her and she was too weak to resist the fear now. Oblivion and silence would mean an end to the pain, and even so she fought for it. Had she not known pain even in her pavilion, the pain of being written away?

  Anger crept into her bones once more, chasing away the shadows of the cold.

  You do not have to be lost. The poem lies before you. It will remain as a testament to what you were. You made your peace. And now you do not have to die.

  Meilang looked up through the tears to the figure of fury and fire. Was it steel in the form? Was it glass?

  It was not her. She realized it only then. The anger that walked beside her in the hallway, that echoed her movements and drove her forward like a warrior. It was not her anger.

  You do not have to end here, it told her.

  Meilang gasped for air and
tasted blood on her lips.

  The end is close, it asked her. Her eyes slid to the painting and it looked after them. Close. A few seconds, nothing more. And what do you choose, little creature of sunlight? Oblivion… or immortality?

  In her dreams, Meilang reached up for the sky, a wraith with the echoes of a thousand women.

  Trembling, she reached out her hand.

  A Word from Moira Katson

  Moira Katson writes Fantasy and Science Fiction novels. Born and raised in the farmland of the eastern United States, she is now a transplant living in the oft-frigid wastes of the midwest, where she is learning to love hot dish, fried food on a stick, ice fishing, and the hilarious faces her friends make when she tells them about winter temperatures... just kidding, she has no intentions to learn how to ice fish.

  Despite the fact that she had been writing since childhood, Moira majored in nice, sensible subjects in college and went on to have a nice, sensible job, all the while continuing to write about dragons, courts, and spaceships. She has since bowed to the inevitable and begun releasing her work into the world! Her first book was released in 2012, and her current projects include The Novum Trilogy, The Sojourner Saga, and a series of bite-sized steampunk adventures!

  To find out more about Moira and her upcoming works, visit her website, http://moirakatson.com, or find her on Facebook or Twitter, www.twitter.com/moirakatson

  If you are a SciFi fan, she recommends that you try out Crucible, the first book in the Novum Trilogy, or The Alien Chronicles.

  The Grove

  by Jennifer Foehner Wells

  IN THE MOMENT when the last remaining filament between Hain and the Mother broke, the Mother’s parting thought raced through Hain’s mind, but Hain didn’t process it until later, when the sticky amber gum that oozed from her open wounds had begun to harden, and the euphoric newness of freedom had subsided.

  The Mother had said, “Come back to me soon, little one.”

  It had taken so long to break loose. Hain had been obsessed with wriggling, working, bending repeatedly in every possible direction, until the sapwood connecting the two of them had frayed to fine fibers and finally snapped, severing their nurturing connection. She had been so anxious to be free, so intent on experimenting with her unused, newly fully formed limbs, that she hadn’t even replied or said goodbye. She hadn’t meant to be so ungrateful to the one who had given her life.

  * * *

  The day the Salvors came, Hain was retrofitting an ancient vehicle with every-terrain wheels. She’d redesigned them to manage better than the wheels that some of the Mother had used so long ago. Hain used the narrow three-wheeled vehicle to haul raw materials and items scavenged from the ruins. There had once been roads to drive on, but those were long gone. Even open spaces were rare now that the Mother dominated the world.

  She was tightening lug nuts onto a rusted wheel stud when she heard rumbling overhead. She saw a white streak in the sky, and instantly knew it had to be a contrail, though her own eyes had never seen anything like it before. She quickly moved to track the trajectory, and after some computation, she determined an approximate landing site.

  She was lucky the alien vehicle was landing on the same continent. It had never occurred to her to launch satellites to detect incoming activity from off-world, and she berated herself for her shortsightedness. She had no way of knowing whether these were the first, or if others had come before and landed on another continent, or if there were many of them simultaneously investigating sites all over the globe. Only the Mother knew the answers to those questions, and Hain couldn’t hear the Mother’s voices.

  She only heard one voice in her head now—her own. She’d grown used to that and now preferred it. After all, she knew everything the Mother knew, and everything the Mother before this Mother had known, and so on back through the eons, with each new offspring receiving all the knowledge of those that had gone before as she grew from bud to nymph.

  She had no desire to rejoin the Mother anytime soon, to put down roots and reconnect in partnership on that communal plane. So she’d have to investigate the contrail, and what it meant, on her own.

  Over the years, Hain had watched scores of other nymphs break free, roam for a bit, and then select a terminal point, whereupon they would bind themselves back to the earth. Some had come to her with messages from the Mother. In their eagerness to return, to rejoin the voices in that perpetual state of grace, rootlets were already unfurling from their lower extremities, allowing them to twine with Hain, making contact long enough to communicate to her that she was missed, and that staying away from the Mother too long could mean disaster.

  None of these nymphs had been like her. Hain now accepted that she was unique. There hadn’t been a message from the Mother in centuries.

  Hain gathered supplies and set off on her adventure. It took days to get there, over rough terrain, and she had to go out of her way to skirt the densest groves of the Mother. When she got close, she hid her vehicle in thick undergrowth and continued on foot.

  She rounded a thicket. Here, the Mother began to grow more sparsely, giving way to a broad glade. It was a low spot that would be marshy during the rainy season, not a good place to put down roots, but perfect for a vertical landing.

  When the ship came into view, its silver skin glaring in the bright sunlight, she stopped abruptly and stared in stunned disbelief.

  It was enormous.

  Hain had been gathering scraps of metal for centuries. She sorted it into piles and used it whenever she needed raw material for the object rendering machine. The ship before her represented a mass of metal she couldn’t conceive of gathering.

  She could see the aliens, too. She gradually moved closer until she could hear them speak and settled in to observe them for a while to see what they were about. It was easy to conceal herself from them. They were oblivious to her existence.

  They were as different from her as she was from the small mammals that scampered through the Mother, and she was surprised to note that they were far larger than the animals she was acquainted with. They were her size, roughly.

  There seemed to be several species, but nothing like any she knew. These were more highly evolved. They walked on two limbs instead of four, had nimble fingers, and used technology. Since the old times, no species on this world had used technology, until Hain had chosen to employ that aspect of the Mother’s memory. So it was fascinating to watch them use it with their furry paws that looked so much like hands.

  Each day the aliens scouted in a different direction from their ship. At first Hain thought they might be scientists, because they collected samples. These samples were mostly of plant life, but they trapped some insects and small animals too. They built up great stacks of sample boxes and crates, which they transported back to their ship at nightfall.

  Hain’s other hypothesis was that they were colonists. The old stories were full of visitors who had come to live among the mobile nymphs when the Mother was still small, sharing the planet’s resources, living symbiotically, peacefully. If they had come again, it could mean a new life, a synergy, discoveries derived from the sharing of different cultures, the elevation of everything she knew to another, higher level.

  That would have been a gift.

  But the old visitors had not come again. And these new aliens were not there to share or learn, but to take.

  * * *

  Both Hain’s larynx and the small bellows-like structures on the sides of her neck were vestigial, all but superseded by the evolutionary development of other structures in her progenitors’ throats. She could understand Mensententia as well as any civilized person in the universe, but she was unable to speak it at anything above a whisper.

  Among her many inventions was an implant that took in air through an opening she had incised into her neck and forced it through her rudimentary larynx. The device was crude but functional, and it was in place. She had thought it would undergo many more revisions, and that she would ha
ve many more practice sessions using it, before she would ever have the opportunity to use it among those with lungs. But it would have to do.

  As she watched the newcomers casually enter and exit their vehicle, she felt something unusual stirring in her. She had long been planning to construct a ship of her own. She’d already explored every continent of this world, and she ached to leave it, to explore new ones, to learn new technologies, and to interact with others in the old ways that were common in the time before the Mother embraced transcendence.

  She wasn’t supposed to want to leave. She was supposed to be content with her place on this world. But Hain wanted more.

  The aliens’ ship was so much larger than anything she could hope to create. It represented hundreds, possibly thousands of years of work. Inside, there was sure to be technology on a scale not seen since the Mother’s most distant and watery memories were reality. To have that kind of functional technology at her fingertips, instead of spending her time endlessly repairing or painstakingly building anew—the very idea made her fingers curl.

  At first she didn’t comprehend what she was feeling. She didn’t experience much in the way of emotion. And this was a strange mixture of longing and excitement, not unlike that which she felt in the days before she broke free from the Mother. Eventually she deduced what this uncomfortable feeling was. She coveted their vehicle.

  She should make contact and ask them for… what? Passage? Where would she go? She had little knowledge of anything outside this sphere. Ask for some form of employment—did such paradigms still exist? Did she possess any knowledge or skill they might want or need? It seemed unlikely.