"The squirrels, ‘possum, and whistlepig held a lil powwow, and agreed that they didn't know what in the hell they'd stumbled into, or where it belonged. They figured it was some manner-ah tadpole ‘r salamander, and needed water, which it was quickly runnin’ shy on in its leaky fishbowl.” Dickie stood at the base of the steps, staring down the doors.
"The bold explorer smiled hopefully up at his saviors, even as the water level inched down his dainty, color-swirled mantle."
Dickie undid the buttons on his pants, and proceeded to loose a powerful stream on the church steps, his hands, and his trousers, sighing his satisfaction.
"These four crusaders had never seen the sea, nor had any notion of it, so they did best they could,” Dickie buttoned up crooked, then rubbed his face, like a night watchman warding off sleep. “They hauled him up, set him on their shoulders, and carried him, like a fallen hero, to the charred ruins of the plantation house. Round back, down to the old slave shacks, the ‘possum and whistlepig cradled the bold explorer. He's beamin’ at all he'd saw, and what he'd see yet, imaginin’ his hero's welcome back to the sea, his lecture circuit on the Place Beyond. The squirrels scrabbled up to the crumblin’ lip of the old well. The ‘possum and groundhog heaved the lil suit up—weighed almost nuthin', what with most of the water drained away—and the squirrels hauled it over, and dropped it down. The bold explorer tumbled into the dark with the moon's silver light frostin’ the copper and glass, shinin’ in his perfect, expectant eyes. It was a thin slice of moon, a droopin’ eye, like a lazy God almost sorta watchin’ over his passage. Then he was gone."
Dickie stood, swaying like he was on a foundering frigate.
"He didn't make no sound on the way down, but he splashed when he hit bottom."
Dickie fixed the big double doors with a baleful stare.
"The four a-them standin’ in the moonlight looked down inna that well. They knew they hadn't done right, ‘xactly, but they'd done best they could.” His breath hitched, like he might sick up, “Didn't feel much good ‘bout it, tho'."
Dickie took a breath, looked as to continue, but instead passed out. His right knee buckled while the left held, and he twirled like a ballerina before flopping on his back into the lane's filth.
We sat together, alone in the dark. Dickie snorted. Down the lane, lady laughter bubbled out of Sadie's. I shivered, even though the night was warm.
I wanted to help Dickie home, but his place is so far west of town that doing so would have meant getting caught out for sure. And the fact is, I wanted—I needed—to have my look at Sadie's gals, I needed to go get my fill, even though I knew: Needing to see is where the trouble starts; ain't no amount of looking that fills you.
Besides, sleeping out couldn't possibly bother Dickie Tucker; sleeping in his crumbling shack wasn't much better than sleeping out. At least on the church steps he had fresh air and the Lord watching.
But it didn't matter. I was still tangled in Sheriff's hedge when I heard clicking and clanking come from the darkness out west of the church. I looked up and seen that it was four clockies from the bunch that make their camp up on Windmill Mesa, refugees and veterans of that same Long War that had taken Dickie's good right eye. They looked down at Dickie, their eyes glowing like pairs of coals peeking out from a stove grate. One hunkered and nudged Dickie, who snored deep and didn't stir. The croucher clicked at his mates, and one tick-tocked off, returning with a wheelbarrow snitched from the side of Emet Kohen's Mercantile Emporium. They hauled Dickie up, then wheeled him down the lane, right past my nose. Dickie smelt terrible of manure and I can't even guess what, but the clockies were clean. They smelled like copper and gun oil, and water from the springs way back in the box canyons.
As he was wheeled past, Dickie's one good eye rolled open. It fixed on me blearily, and he mumbled, “Go have yer look, Seth Everett. Couldn't possibly do no harm."
At the next alley the party cut west, into the darkness, and if they dumped Dickie back into his own pitiful sod hut, or rolled him right past, all the way to their neat homestead on top of Windmill Mesa, I really can't say.
Copyright © 2010 David Erik Nelson
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Novelette: THE WIND-BLOWN MAN by Aliette de Bodard
Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris, where she works as a computer engineer. In between coding sessions, she writes speculative fiction: her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Interzone, and Realms of Fantasy. Aliette was a Campbell Award finalist in 2009. Her first novel, the Aztec fantasy Servant of the Underworld, was recently released by Angry Robot. She tells us her first story for Asimov's began “as a thought experiment on what science and space travel would be like if the Chinese had become the dominant culture on Earth—and then sort of morphed along the way."
On a clear day, you could almost see all the way into Heaven.
That was what Shinxie loved about White Horse Monastery: not the high, lacquered buildings scattered across the mountain's face like the fingerprints of some huge Celestial; not the wide courtyards where students sat like statues, the metal of their second-skins gleaming in the sun; but the clear, crisp air of the heights, and the breathless quiet just before dawn, when she could see a flash of light overhead and imagine it to be the reflection of Penlai Station.
In those moments, she could almost imagine herself to be free.
That was, of course, before the first bell-peal echoed across the mountains, calling all the students to the meditation halls; when the stillness of dawn was shattered by the sound of dozens of bare feet, and the smell of incense and cinnabar wafted down to where she sat, a perpetual reminder of her exile.
That morning, as on all mornings, she pulled herself up, wincing at the ache in her calves, and began the climb upward. Soon, she'd have to begin her examinations. By the looks of it, there were at least one or two students who might have achieved the perfect balance: fire and wood, earth and water and metal in perfect harmony within—two more, ready to take their gliders and transcend into Penlai Station.
She was thinking of the second one—Fai Meilin, a short, skeletal woman whose bruised eyes looked almost incongruous in her serene face—when she saw the glint of sunlight.
Penlai Station, winking to her again? But no, the glint came again, and it was larger, spinning itself out of nothingness, layer after layer carefully superimposing itself on reality, until a glider flew out of the singularity in the sky, the slender silhouette underneath shifting to accommodate the strong headwinds with the liquid grace of a Transcendent.
She stood, stared at the glider—hoping it would go away. But it did not. It remained stubbornly there, floating toward the monastery, a patent impossibility. One transcended—became one with the universe, knowing, for a brief moment, how to be everywhere at once before dematerializing on Penlai Station, in the company of peers. One did not, could not descend. That was impossible.
The glider was coming closer to her, its rider maneuvering the metal wings with casual effortlessness. His face, shining under the second-skin, tilted toward her, and somehow the faceted eyes met her, and pierced her like a spear.
For a moment more, she hung indecisive; and then, with a shudder, she broke the contact and ran up the mountain, abandoning all protocol and decorum, calling out for the guards.
* * * *
Shinxie pressed her hand to the door, waited for the familiar tingle of recognition that traveled through her palm—and slid it open.
Inside the holding cell, the Transcendent was sitting cross-legged in a pit of sunlight, showing no inclination to move or escape. He'd abandoned his glider soon after landing, and now looked oddly bereft, as though something vital had been torn from him. But, of course, that was only illusion. The gliders were more for the protection of White Horse than for the Transcendents: no one wanted to take the risk of a failed singularity opening within the monastery.
Shinxie sat cross-legged in front of the Transcendent, unsure of wha
t to say. The faceted gaze rose to meet hers, incurious—following her movement as if by instinct. His aura saturated the air: the five elements in perfect balance, nothing standing out, no emotion to be read or perceived.
She couldn't help shivering. She'd grown too used to the implants in her palms, relying on her ability to read auras to understand people. But he ... he was a Transcendent, through and through: nothing remained, no desire, no interest, no care for anything. He'd let go of his self—the only way he'd be able to open a singularity and lose himself into it.
"I know who you are,” she said. Carefully, she laid the papers she'd been holding on the floor between them. “Gao Tieguai, from the Province of Anhui."
The eyes blinked, briefly; the head was inclined, as if in acknowledgement.
"Your family was outlawed after you wrote memorials against the Tianshu Emperor, may he reign ten thousand years.” She closed her eyes. “You came here in the fifteenth year of the Tianshu reign. I—helped you transcend."
She should have remembered him better, but even the faded likeness on the file hadn't brought back any memories. She'd have been newly appointed as Abbess of White Horse, still bitter at her expulsion from the Imperial Court: she'd done her work like a chore, laying hands on students every morning, reading the balance of their humors as if in a butterfly-dream—and forgetting them as soon as they'd left her office.
The head bowed to her again. “You did help me, Honored Abbess,” the Transcendent—Gao—said, the first words he'd pronounced since returning.
His voice was low, broken by disuse; and yet, in the pauses between the words, lay an abyss of untapped power.
"Why have you come back?” Shinxie said. And, when the eyes still did not move, “It's not possible, to do what you did. You cannot descend..."
Gao's hands moved, as if to a rhythm of their own. His second-skin stretched between the fingers, creating a softer transition like a webbed foot. “Do you presume to know everything?"
She was no Westerner or Mohammedan, to view the world with boundless arrogance, presuming that everything must cave in to reason. “No. But some things among the ten thousand have explanations."
"This isn't one of them.” Gao smiled, vaguely amused—she'd seen the same expression in her terminal students, except not quite so distant and cold. She hadn't thought she could feel chilled—by a former student, of all people—but then she'd never been made so aware of how different the Transcendents were.
Shinxie reached for the paper, steadied herself with its familiar touch. “You're going to have to explain it to me."
"I fail to see why."
Had he lost all awareness of Earth? But no, she knew the answer. To transcend was to detach oneself from the real world, measure by measure—until no other destination remained but Penlai, where all desires, all emotions had lost meaning.
"You're a child,” she said, feeling cold certainty coalesce within her. “With the powers of a Celestial. You could will yourself anywhere in the world—within the Censorate, the Forbidden City—even in the Imperial Chambers..."
"If I willed it so."
For a moment, she stared at him. His face under the iridescent second-skin was almost featureless: only the eyes, protected by their thick facets, retained a semblance of life. His mouth—a bare slit—was impassive, expressionless.
"You're never going to make them believe that you don't want to do this."
"To want, even the smallest thing, is to desire.” Gao inclined his head. “And desire is impure."
Shinxie shivered—thinking of the Sixth Prince's touch on hers, of the hands stroking the curve of her back—before they were found out, and the Imperial Edict shattered her life. “You're—” she started, and then realized that he was right. Desire, love, tenderness—it was all an expression of the self, and only those who had no self could open the singularities.
"You haven't changed, then,” Gao said.
He said it so matter of factly that it took his words a moment to sink in. “What do you mean?” she asked—though she knew, like ice in her guts, that he already knew.
"You have never transcended."
And she never would; and she'd known it even before the Tianshu Emperor sent her there. She'd known it as she'd watched the Sixth Prince just after the Edict's proclamation, his face frozen in what might have been grief, what might have been anger—a memory warm enough to last for a lifetime. “No,” she said. “I have made my peace with that."
Gao inclined his head again—could he even feel ironic, or amused? No, of course not; he couldn't—and that was what frightened her so much. Lust burnt and destroyed the world, and duty compelled, maintaining the structure of the universe; but he was beyond either of those, so far away from the living creatures he might as well have been a rock, or a waterfall.
"Why have you come back?” she asked. “Something had to draw you here. Something had to make you return.” He had to have found a way around the constrictions of the Transcendents; some trick to bend the rules to his will.
But Gao sat, and smiled, and said nothing.
"If I can find no explanation, someone else will come,” Shinxie said. “Someone with fewer scruples than I."
But, no matter how hard she pressed him, she obtained nothing but that enigmatic smile—the same one teasing up the corners of her students’ lips, the same one carved on the statues of all the Celestials in their temples.
In the end, weary of his silence, she left him, and retreated to the safety of her room—where she began composing, with painstaking eagerness, a missive to the Imperial Court, explaining what had happened, and humbly pleading for guidance.
She had to pause for a moment at the transmitter, her hand frozen on the controls—it had been so long since the last communication between White Horse and the capital that she'd forgotten the proper protocol. But the lights shimmered on the panel; the humors swirled within the machine, until a single spike of wood-humor surged through the antenna; and the reassuring hum of an outgoing transmission soon filled the room.
The Court's answer was curt, and almost instantaneous: Wait. Someone will come to you.
* * * *
The Sixth Imperial Prince arrived with all the pomp due to one of his rank: a row of attendants, the metal of their engineered arms glinting in the morning sunlight; a few advisors, their gazes distant and contemptuous; and, finally, at the end of the procession, the Prince himself, a short, plump man of middle age, who looked curiously at every building in the monastery, as if working out a particular literary or alchemical problem.
The students, the alchemists and the teachers had all assembled in the Hall of Cultivating the Body and Mind, the teachers and alchemists looking almost colorless next to the students—their second-skins shimmering in the sunlight, so strongly Shinxie could almost imagine the whirlwind of humors beneath the alchemists’ modifications.
As abbess of the monastery, Shinxie was the one who welcomed the Prince—standing in the center of the Hall, under the ever-shifting pictures of successful Transcendents.
"Your Excellency.” Shinxie abased herself to the ground, in the prescribed position for welcoming a son of the Emperor—her chest pressed against the stones of the floor, her head lowered, her gaze down—she couldn't afford to look up at him, couldn't afford to meet his eyes.
She found, to her dismay, that she was shaking. Ten years past, and a whole world between them, and she couldn't even quiet her memories and her desires enough to respect protocol. What a waste.
"Yue Shinxie.” The Prince's voice was low, with the cultured accents of the Court. “You may rise. There's no need to stand on ceremony here."
From where Shinxie lay, she heard the sharp, shocked intake of breath course through the ranks of the assembled teachers and students—how could the Prince set aside protocol, unless he had some previous acquaintance with her? She could only guess at the questions she'd have to face later, the idle speculations at the noon rice and in the quiet hours after e
vening, the subtle accusations spreading like wildfire among the students.
But then, none of that mattered, because she was rising on stiff knees, to meet the Prince's gaze. He hadn't changed in ten years—aged a little, with new wrinkles on the moon-shaped face, a few lines pulling his eyes into sharper almonds. But the same presence emanated from him: the palpable charm and aura that underlined every one of his postures. She knew, of course she knew, that the imperial alchemists had worked on him while he was barely in his mother's womb—and she knew that, if she laid her hands on him, her implants would feel the engineered humors pulsing, combining into the melody of seduction—but it didn't matter, it had never mattered. Her throat was dry, her breasts aching as if with milk.
"You'll want to see him,” she said, struggling to bring her mind back to the present.
The Prince inclined his head, gracefully. “Of course. Walk with me, will you, Yue?"
Protocol would have put him in front of her—but protocol had to give way to practicalities; for, of course, he had no idea where the holding cells were. She walked slightly in front, head bowed, trying not to think of his presence behind her—of the hands that had once traced the contours of her body; of the lips, moist and warm, sending a quiver of desire arching through her body like a spear.
There were no other footsteps: neither the attendants nor the advisors had followed them, and the others in the monastery had gone back to the flow of their lives.
"You're happy here,” the Prince said. There was a hint of wood in his aura—a hint of enquiry, barely perceptible unless one knew him well.
Shinxie sucked in a slow, burning breath. “Of course,” she said.
"Shinxie.” He gave her name the edge of a blade.
She stopped, still not daring to look at him. “My work is here,” she said. “Helping them transcend."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"No,” she said. “You were the one who once said that happiness wasn't our fate, Your Excellency."
Asimov's SF, February 2010 Page 11