Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 87

by E. Lily Yu

  He remembers Mechanic telling him that they are alike and he knows this is a gift he cannot deny.

  “Will I still be myself?” He asks.

  “You will always be yourself,” Alternate Girl replies.

  He hands her the chip and bends toward her.

  “Then,” he says. “let this body also house his memory.”

  The world around him changes. He changes too. Mechanic is a memory. Mechanic is a dream. Mechanic lives on inside him.

  He has no regrets.

  About the Author

  Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is an essayist, fictionist and a poet. A Filipino writer, now living in the Netherlands, she attended Clarion West in 2009 and was a recipient of the Octavia Butler scholarship. At present, she is the secretary of the board for a Filipino women’s organization in the Netherlands (Stichting Bayanihan).

  In 2013, her short fiction was shortlisted for the BSFA short fiction award. Most recently, her fiction has appeared in We See a Different Frontier, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, What Fates Impose, The End of the Road anthology, and as part of Redmond Radio’s Afrofuturism Event for the Amsterdam Museumnacht at FOAM museum.

  Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade

  Benjanun Sriduangkaew

  The knife of her consciousness peeling off death in layers: this is how she wakes.

  She is General Lunha of Silent Bridge, who fought one war to a draw as a man, and won five more a woman against adversaries who commanded miniature suns.

  The knowledge reconstitutes piecemeal in the flexing muscles of her memory, in the gunfire-sear of her thoughts as she opens her eyes to a world of spider lilies skirmishing in flowerbeds, a sky of fractal glass. She is armed: an orchid-blade along one hip, a burst-pistol along the other. She is armored: a helm of black scarabs on her head, a sheath of amber chitin on her limbs and torso. There is no bed for her, no casket enclosing her. She comes to awareness on her feet, at ease but sharp. The way she has always been.

  Grass crackles and hisses. She draws the blade, its petals unfurling razor mouths, and recognizes that this weapon is personal to her. All generals have them: a bestiary of blades and a gathering of guns, used to an edge and oiled to a sheen. She maintained a smaller collection than most; this was one she always kept at her side.

  The grass is stilled, coils of circuits and muscles and fangs, petroleum stains on Lunha’s sword. She fires a shot into its vitals to be certain. A detonation of soundless light.

  Her datasphere snaps online. Augmens bring one of the walls into sharp focus, an output panel. At the moment, audio alone.

  “We had to make sure you were physically competent.” A voice keyed to a register of neutrality, inflection and otherwise; she cannot tell accent, preferred presentation, or much else. “It is our pleasure to welcome you back, General Lunha.”

  “My connection is restricted. Why is this?”

  “There have been some changes to data handling at your tier of command. We’ll send you the new protocols shortly. It is routine. You’ll want a briefing.”

  “Yes.” Lunha attempts to brute-force access, finds herself without grid privileges that ought to have been hers by right.

  “Your loyalty to the Hegemony has never been questioned.”

  “Thus I’ve proven,” said Lunha, who in life served it for sixty years from cadet to general.

  “We will not question it now.” The panel shimmers into a tactical map. “This world would offer its riches and might to our enemies. Neutralize it and the woman who lures it away from Hegemonic peace. Peruse her dossier at your leisure.”

  The traitor planet is Tiansong, the Lake of Bridges, which in life was Lunha’s homeworld.

  Their leader is Xinjia of Pale Cascade, who in life was Lunha’s bride.

  Naturally she questions whether she is Lunha, rebuilt from scraps of skin and smears, or a clone injected with Lunha’s data. The difference is theoretical beyond clan altars; in practice the two are much the same. There is a family-ghost copy of her floating about in Tiansong’s local grid, but that too is a reconstruction from secondary and tertiary sources, no more her soul or self than her career logs.

  The grid enters her in a flood, though like all Hegemonic personnel above a certain rank Lunha is partitioned to retain autonomous consciousness. For good measure she runs self-diagnostics, which inform her that she is not embedded with regulators or remote surveillance. Perhaps it is a sign of trust; perhaps the reconstruction is experimental, and the biotechs did not want to risk interfering with her implants. She entertains the thought that she never died—severe injury, a long reconstruction, an edit of her memory to remove the event. The report is sealed, either way.

  They’ve given her a tailored habitat: one section for rest, one for contemplation, one for physical practice. Being in this profession, she has few personal effects; most are accounted for. Not merely equipment but also the keepsakes of conquests. Here the gold-veined skeletons of Grenshal wolves, there the silver-blossom web of live Mahing spiders. A Silent Bridge shrine for the memories of elders, compressed snapshots of their accomplishments, proverbs and wisdom. Lunha did not consult them often, does not consult them now, and examines the altar only to ensure her family-ghost does not number among them.

  Her grid access continues to be tight. She may listen in on military broadcasts of all levels when she cares to, but she can’t communicate. Public memory is a matter of course and she checks that for civilian perception of Tiansong. To the best of their knowledge Tiansong embroiled itself in civil war, during which a new religion emerged, spearheaded by Xinjia. A dispatch would be sent to return Tiansong to peace.

  Reports on classified channels are somewhat different.

  Out of habit she evaluates troop strength, positions, resources: this is impersonal, simply the way her mind works. She estimates that with Tiansong’s defenses it’d require less than a month to subdue her homeworld with minimal damage. In a situation where that isn’t a concern, it would be under a week. Quick strike rather than campaign, and entirely beneath her.

  For three days she is left in isolation—no other being shares her space and she lacks social access. The void field around the compound forbids her to step far beyond the garden. On the fourth day, she stirs from meditation to the hum of moth engines, the music of shields flickering out to accommodate arrival. She does not go forth to greet nor move to arm herself; it seems beside the point.

  Her handler is purebred Costeya stock, a statuesque neutrois with eyes the color of lunar frost. They wear no uniform, introduce themselves simply as Operative Isren.

  “From which division?” Lunha tries to write to Isren, the right of any general to alter the thoughts and memory of lesser officers. She can’t.

  “Operative,” Isren says, and nothing else. They bow to her in the Tiansong manner, hand cupped over fist, before saluting her. “Your situation’s unique.”

  “Why am I required? It is no trouble to flatten Tiansong.”

  Isren has knelt so they are level; they have a trick of arranging their bearing and their limbs so that the difference in height doesn’t intimidate. “A bloodless solution is sought.”

  “There are other Tiansong personnel in active service.”

  When Isren smiles there’s something of the flirt in the bend of their mouth. “None so brilliant as you. Xinjia of Pale Cascade is a labyrinthine opponent. She has brought awareness of the public sync to her world and had the opportunity to spread the idea before we imposed embargo. She boasts . . . disconnect. In essence she’s become an infection.”

  “Has she achieved it? Disconnect?”

  A shard of silence pinched between Isren’s professional circumspection and the situation’s need for candor. When they do speak it is delicately, around the edge of this balance. “Not through the conventional methods. Her way entails ripping out network nodes and reverse-engineering them. Fifty-fifty chance for cerebral damage. Five to eight thousand have been incapacitated, at last count.”


  Lunha browses through available reports. Risk of brain death or not, Xinjia has gained traction, so much that she has been made First of Tiansong. It’s not unanimous; nearly half the clans posited against her. But nearly half was not half, and Silent Bridge tipped the scale. Her plans have been broadcast to twenty independent worlds. “Removing her won’t suffice.”

  “No. You are invested in keeping Tiansong well, Xinjia alive, and that’s why we brought you back.”

  “Let me travel there. I would assess the situation on the ground.”

  “That was anticipated,” Isren says. “We are on Tiansong.”

  When Lunha last visited her homeworld she was a man. Among family she’s celebrated only as daughter and niece, for all that she flows between the two as water over stone. Whatever her gender, General Lunha’s face—pride of several clans—is too well known, and so she puts on a mesh to hollow out her cheeks, broaden her nose, slope out her brow.

  She travels light, almost ascetically. One firearm, one blade. Tiansong currency, but not too much. Her one concession to luxury is a disruptor array to guard against targeting and deep scans. Isren does not accompany her in person; on the pristine sea of Tiansong phenotypes, Isren’s Costeya face would be an oil slick. The operative has no objection to blending in, but on so short a notice, adjusting musculature, complexion and facial tells is beyond even Isren.

  Lunha avoids air transports and their neural checks, keeping to the trains and their serpent-tracks. She takes her time. It is a leave of absence—the idea amuses and she catches herself smiling into the scaled window, her reflection momentarily interrupting art ads. One of them urges her to see a production of The Pearl Goddess and the Turtle, done by live actors and performed in a grid-dead auditorium. No recording, no interruptions.

  At one clan-hold she says she is a daughter of Razor Garden; at another, in different clothes and with a voice deepened by mods, Lunha introduces himself as a groom newly marrying into Peony Aqueduct. At each Lunha is received with courtesy and invited to evening teas, wedding dinners, autumn feasts. Despite the tension of embargo they are hospitable, but none will so much as breathe Xinjia’s name.

  Her breakthrough comes while she sits in a kitchen sipping plum tea, legs stretched out and listening to an elderly cook who fancies she resembles his middle son, long lost to a gambling addiction. “You want to destroy a nemesis, you teach their child to gamble,” the cook is saying as he spoons chives and onions into dumpling skin.

  “So the ancestors say.” Lunha’s enemies tend toward a more direct approach. She takes pride in having survived some two hundred assassination attempts, though it doesn’t escape her that she might’ve failed to foil the final one. “These days there are quicker ways.”

  The cook chuckles like dry clay cracking. “These days you point the young, impressionable son to Pale Cascade.”

  “Ah, it is but half a chance of ruin. I thought they hosted guests no more, having become grudging on hospitality of late? Since we can’t get off-world it was my hope to at least visit every hold before matrimony binds me . . . ”

  He shrugs, pinches the last dumpling shut, and begins arranging them in the steamer. On Tiansong no one trusts replicants to get cuisine right. “If you know someone who knows someone in Silent Bridge.”

  “Is that so. Many thanks, uncle.”

  She catches the next finned, plumaged train bound for her ancestral home.

  The public sync, the great shared memory, is an instrument to maintain peace. Even after learning of it and what it does, Lunha continued to believe this, as she does now. It doesn’t do much for freedom of thought; it comes with all the downsides of information regulated under the state’s clenched fist and the grid usurps perception of the real. But it functions, stabilizes. The Costeya Hegemony has existed in equilibrium for centuries.

  It is useful now as she edits herself into the distant branches of Silent Bridge rather than its primary boughs, as her true birth order dictates. The specifics make her hesitate. She settles on female, for convenience more than anything, and picks childless Ninth Aunt as her mother. No sibling, less dissonance to having a sudden sister where once there was none. Those reactions cannot be overridden. Emotions cannot be molded.

  When she arrives at the entrance bridge suspended between the maws of pearl-clasping dragons, Ninth Aunt comes to greet her. “My girl,” her aunt says uncertainly, “what kept you so long in Razor Garden?”

  “Grand nuptials, Mother, and I earned my board helping.” A bow, proper. An embrace, stiff. Having a daughter is merely a fact, the gestures Ninth Aunt makes merely obligation.

  Her edits have it that she’s been away three months; in truth she hasn’t been home for as long as—her mind stumbles over the rut of her death. But not counting that it’s been five years. Silent Bridge hasn’t changed. A central pagoda for common worship. Sapphire arches and garnet gates twining in conversation to mark the city’s boundaries. Tiansong cities have always been less crowded than most, and there’s never that density of lives in the habitat towers here as on Costeya birthworlds. A wealth of space, a freedom of aesthetics. Barely a whisper of the Hegemony.

  Far better off than many Costeya subjects, Lunha knows for a fact; there are border planets that remain in ruins even to this day after their annexation. She cannot understand Xinjia.

  When they first met Xinjia wore masks and prosthetic arms; she danced between folded shadows of dragons and herons, only parts of her visible in infrared. Like all thespians of her caliber, Xinjia never appeared in off-world broadcasts. Tiansong makes a fortune out of its insularity—foreigners wishing to enjoy its arts must come to the source and pay dearly, though there are always rogues and imitators.

  Lunha in the audience, breathless from applause. A friend who knew a friend brokered her an introduction. Offstage, Xinjia shed the mask but kept the dress, paper breastplate and bladed belts. In the custom of shadow-thespians she wore her face plain, bare, without mods. It made Lunha touch her own, self-conscious of the optic overlays, the duochrome cast to her jawline, replicant-chic.

  They talked quickly, amidst the noise of departing spectators; they talked again later, in the quiet of the staff’s lounge where the furniture, retrogressive, did not contour to their bodies.

  “You talk drama like a layperson,” Xinjia remarked once, between sips of liquid gold and jellyfish garnished in diced ivory.

  “I don’t have a background.”

  “Officer school doesn’t teach fine arts?” The actor drew a finger across Lunha’s knuckles. “A soldier with a passion for theater.”

  “Not before tonight.” Lunha caught herself, succeeded in not blushing.

  “Soldiers fascinate me,” Xinjia said, absently. “The juxtaposition of discipline and danger. Violence and control.”

  Tiansong marriage lasts five years, at the end of which spouses and family members evaluate one another: how well they fit, how well they belong. A collaborative project.

  They wedded on a barge, surrounded by family, blessed by avatars of thundering war-gods with their quadruple arms and spears and battle-wheels. Given that Silent Bridge and Pale Cascade were old rivals, neither Xinjia nor Lunha expected it to last—and it came a surprise to all involved that the marriage was extended past the first five years into the second, then the third.

  Divorce came after Lunha made lieutenant-colonel. By then they’d been spouses for nineteen years.

  The ivory tiles and the redwood walls of the great house hum with trackers. Lunha sets her array to nullify ones that would gene-match her.

  Silent Bridge has always been one of the more—paranoid, she supposes other clans would say—but it’s never been like this. A city-wide security lockdown. Anyone not family has been ejected; off-worlders are long gone, scared away by a non-existent epidemic just before the embargo fell.

  Xinjia anticipated that sanction. Lunha considers the possibility that she found a way to manipulate the sync. It unsettles.

  She kee
ps up desultory small talk with Ninth Aunt, with cousins who tentatively say they have missed her. It is the thing to say to a relative months unseen. They do it carefully, unsure of the words, of regarding her as family.

  To pretend to be a stranger pretending to be of Silent Bridge. Lunha buried away entirely, like the haunting she is, the ghost she should be.

  “Is that all you have?” Ninth Aunt says, trying to be a mother. “The clothes on your back and not much else?”

  “I’ve always traveled light.” Lunha nods. “You know that, Mother.”

  “You’ve never taken care of yourself, more like.”

  It always surprises Lunha what people imagine to fill up the gaps, patch up the cracks of recall brought by the blunt impact of edit. A defense mechanism, army psychologists liked to tell her, to ward off mental dissolution. There are Hegemonic facilities devoted to research into that, the sync’s effects. What it can do. What it can’t.

  Isren has gifted her with a spy-host; Lunha activates it with a visualization of tadpoles bursting through deep water. She avoids contact. There are disconnected people in Silent Bridge. They would know Ninth Aunt has never had children.

  After days of self-imposed house arrest, she steals to the streets.

  In the hours of thought and ancestors, the walkways are burnished gold. A low whisper of overhead vehicles like memory, a gleam of pearl from atmospheric stations like moons. Lunha inhales not air but the quiet.

  She wanders first aimless, then with a direction as she cross-references the host’s eavesdropped data. From the security measures she assumed it would be the great house, the halls in which Silent Bridge primaries make governance and cast laws. Two of them her mothers. They are proud of Lunha, but they always expected her rise through the ranks, her conquests of fifteen worlds in Costeya’s name, and if she’d been or done any less it would have been a blot on a lineage of prodigies.

  An old shrine, turtle tiles and turtle roof, stone monks enclosing a garden of fern and lavender. The scriptorium is guarded by wasp drones. She inputs a bypass code, stop-motion images of blue heron spearing silver fish. A murmur of acknowledgment and they give way; these are all Hegemonic make, and she has been reinstated as general. They’ve been reverse-engineered, but not deep enough to keep her out. She can’t quite fault the Tiansong techs; less than a thousand in the Hegemony command her level of access.