This is my offering, I said in the language of forest and mountain, which even city foxes spoke; and my mother, as a very proper fox, had raised me in the forest. Earth and stone and—
Jong’s curse broke my concentration, although the singing tension in the air told me that the small gods already pressed close to us, reaching, reaching.
“What is it?” I said.
“We’ll have to fight,” Jong said. “Buckle in.”
I had to let go of the panel to do so. I had just figured out the straps—the cataphract’s were more complicated than the safety restraints found in automobiles—and the panel clanked onto the cockpit’s floor as the cataphract rumbled awake. The small gods skittered and howled, demanding their tribute. I was fox enough to hear them, even if Jong showed no sign of noticing anything.
The lights in the cockpit blazed up in a glory of colors. The glow sheened in Jong’s tousled hair and reflected in her eyes, etched deep shadows around her mouth. The servos whirred; I could have sworn the entire cataphract creaked and moaned as it woke.
I scooped up the panel. Its edges bit into my palms. “How many?” I asked, then wondered if I should be distracting Jong when we were entering combat.
“Five,” she said. “Whatever you’re doing, finish it fast.”
The machine lurched out of the crevice where we’d been hiding, then broke into its version of a run. My stomach dropped. Worse than the jolting gait was the fact that I kept bracing for the impact of those heavy metal feet against the earth. I kept expecting the cataphract to sink hip-deep. Even though the gods of earth and stone cushioned each stride, acting as shock-absorbers, the discrepancy between what I expected and what happened upset my sense of the world’s equilibrium.
The control systems made noises that had only shrillness to recommend them. I left their interpretation to Jong and returned my attention to the small gods. From the way the air in the cockpit eddied and swirled, I could tell they were growing impatient. Earth and stone were allied to metal, after all, and metal, especially when summoned on behalf of a weapon, had its volatile side.
The magic had provided me not with a knife this time but with a hat pin. I retrieved it and jabbed my palm with the pointy end. Blood welled up. I smeared it onto the cataphract’s joystick. Get us out of here, I said to the small gods. Not eloquent, but I didn’t have time to come up with anything better.
The world tilted askew, pale and dark and fractured. Jong might have said something. I couldn’t understand any of it. Then everything righted itself again.
More, the small gods said in voices like shuddering bone.
I whispered stories to them, still speaking in the language of forest and mountain, which had no words except the evocation of the smell of fallen pine needles on an autumn morning, or loam worked over by the worms, or rain filling paw prints left in the mud. I was still fox enough for this to suffice.
“What in the name of the blistering gods?” Jong demanded. Now even she could hear the clanging of distant bells. Music was one of the human innovations that the small gods had grown fond of.
“They’re building mazes,” I said. “They’ll mask our path. Go!”
Her eyes met mine for a moment, hot and incredulous. Then she nodded and jerked a lever forward, activating the walk cycle. The cataphract juddered. The targeting screen flashed red as it locked on an erratically moving figure: another cataphract. She pressed a trigger.
I hunched down in my seat at the racket the autocannon made as it fired four shots in rapid succession, like a damned smith’s hammer upon the world’s last anvil. The small gods rumbled their approval. I forced myself to watch the targeting screen. For a moment I thought Jong had missed. Then the figure toppled sideways.
“Legged them,” Jong said with vicious satisfaction. “Don’t care about honor or kill counts, it’s good enough to cripple them so we can keep running.”
We endured several hits ourselves. While the small gods could confuse the enemies’ sensors, the fact remained that the cataphract relied on its metal armor to protect its inner mechanisms. The impacts rattled me from teeth to marrow. I was impressed that we hadn’t gone tumbling down.
And when had I started thinking of us as “we,” anyway?
“We’re doomed,” I said involuntarily when something hit the cataphract’s upper left torso—by then I’d figured out the basics of a few of the status readouts—and the whole cockpit trembled.
Jong’s grin flickered sideways at me. “Don’t be a pessimist, fox,” she said, breathless. “You ever hear of damage distribution?”
“Damage what?”
“I’ll explain it to you if we—” A shrill beep captured her attention. “Whoops, better deal with this first.”
“How many are left?”
“Three.”
There had been five to begin with. I hadn’t even noticed the second one going down.
“If only I weren’t out of coolant, I’d—” Jong muttered some other incomprehensible thing after that.
In the helter-skelter swirl of blinking lights and god-whispers, Jong herself was transfigured. Not beautiful in the way of a court blossom but in the way of a gun: honed toward a single purpose. I knew then that I was doomed in another manner entirely. No romance between a fox and a human ever ended well. What could I do, after all? Persuade her to abandon her cataphract and run away with me into the forest, where I would feed her rabbits and squirrels? No; I would help her escape, then go my separate way.
Every time an alert sounded, every time a vibration thundered through the cataphract’s frame, I shivered. My tongue was bitten almost to bleeding. I could not remember the last time I had been this frightened.
You were right, Mother, I wanted to say. Better a small life in the woods, diminished though they were from the days before the great cities with their ugly high-rises, than the gnawing hunger that had driven me toward the humans and their beautiful clothes, their delicious shrimp crackers, their games of dice and yut and baduk. For the first time I understood that, as tempting as these things were, they came with a price: I could not obtain them without also entangling myself with human hearts, human quarrels, human loyalties.
A flicker at the edge of one of the screens caught my eye. “Behind us, to the right!” I said.
Jong made a complicated hooking motion with the joystick and the cataphract bent low. My vision swam. “Thank you,” she said.
“Tell me you have some plan beyond ‘keep running until everyone runs out of fuel,’” I said.
She chuckled. “You don’t know thing one about how a cataphract works, do you? Nuclear core. Fuel isn’t the issue.”
I ignored that. Nuclear physics was not typically a fox specialty, although my mother had allowed that astrology was all right. “Why do they want you so badly?”
I had not expected Jong to answer me. But she said, “There’s no more point keeping it a secret. I deserted.”
“Why?” A boom just ahead of us made me clutch the armrests as we tilted dangerously.
“I had a falling out with my commander,” Jong said. Her voice was so tranquil that we might have been sitting side by side on a porch, sipping rice wine. Her hands moved; moved again. A roaring of fire, far off. “Just two left. In any case, my commander liked power. Our squad was sworn to protect the interim government, not—not to play games with the nation’s politics.” She drew a deep breath. “I don’t suppose any of this makes sense to you.”
“Why are you telling me now?” I said.
“Because you might die here with me, and it’s not as if you can give away our location any more. They know who I am. It only seems fair.”
Typically human reasoning, but I appreciated the sentiment. “What good does deserting do you?” I supposed she might know state secrets, at that. But who was she deserting to?
“I just need to get to—” She shook her head. “If I can get to refuge, especially with this machine more or less intact, I have information the loyalists
can make use of.” She was scrutinizing the infrared scan as she spoke.
“The Abalone Throne means that much to you?”
Another alert went off. Jong shut it down. “I’m going to bust a limb at this rate,” she said. “The Throne? No. It’s outlived its usefulness.”
“You’re a parliamentarian, then.”
“Yes.”
This matter of monarchies and parliaments and factions was properly none of my business. All I had to do was keep my end of the bargain, and I could leave behind this vexing, heartbreaking woman and her passion for something as abstract as government.
Jong was about to add something to that when it happened. Afterwards I was only able to piece together fragments that didn’t fit together, like shards of a mirror dropped into a lake. A concussive blast. Being flung backwards, then sideways. A sudden, sharp pain in my side. (I’d broken a couple ribs, in spite of the restraints. But without them, the injuries would have been worse.) Jong’s sharp cry, truncated. The stink of panic.
The cataphract had stopped moving. The small gods roared. I moved my head; pain stabbed all the way through the back of my skull. “Jong?” I croaked.
Jong was breathing shallowly. Blood poured thickly from the cut on her face. I saw what had happened: the panel had flown out of my hands and struck her edge-on. The small gods had taken their payment, all right; mine hadn’t been enough. If only I had foreseen this—
“Fox,” Jong said in a weak voice.
Lights blinked on-off, on-off, in a crazed quilt. The cockpit looked like someone had upended a bucket full of unlucky constellations into it. “Jong,” I said. “Jong, are you all right?”
“My mission,” she said. Her eyes were too wide, shocky, the red-and-amber of the status lights pooling in the enormous pupils. I could smell the death on her, hear the frantic pounding of her heart as her body destroyed itself. Internal bleeding, and a lot of it. “Fox, you have to finish my mission. Unless you’re also a physician?”
“Shh,” I said. “Shh.” I had avoided eating people in the medical professions not out of a sense of ethics but because, in the older days, physicians tended to have a solid grounding in the kinds of magics that threatened shape-changing foxes.
“I got one of them,” she said. Her voice sounded more and more thready. “That leaves one, and of course they’ll have called for reinforcements. If they have anyone else to spare. You have to—”
I could have howled my frustration. “I’ll carry you.”
Under other circumstances, that grimace would have been a laugh. “I’m dying, fox, do you think I can’t tell?”
“I don’t know the things you know,” I said desperately. “Even if this metal monstrosity of yours can still run, I can’t pilot it for you.” It was getting hard to breathe; a foul, stinging vapor was leaking into the cockpit. I hoped it wasn’t toxic.
“Then there’s no hope,” she whispered.
“Wait,” I said, remembering; hating myself. “There’s a way.”
The sudden flare of hope in Jong’s eyes cut me.
“I can eat you,” I said. “I can take the things you know with me, and seek your friends. But it might be better simply to die.”
“Do it,” she said. “And hurry. I assume it doesn’t do you any good to eat a corpse, or your kind would have a reputation as grave-thieves.”
I didn’t squander time on apologies. I had already unbuckled the harness, despite the pain of the broken ribs. I flowed back into fox-shape, and I tore out her throat so she wouldn’t suffer as I devoured her liver.
• • • •
The smoke in the cockpit thickened, thinned. When it was gone, a pale tiger watched me from the rear of the cockpit. It seemed impossible that she could fit; but the shadows stretched out into an infinite vast space to accommodate her, and she did. I recognized her. In a hundred stolen lifetimes I would never fail to recognize her.
Shivering, human, mouth full of blood-tang, I looked down. The magic had given me one last gift: I wore a cataphract pilot’s suit in fox colors, russet and black. Then I met the tiger’s gaze.
I had broken the oath I had sworn upon the tiger-sage’s blood. Of course she came to hunt me.
“I had to do it,” I said, and stumbled to my feet, prepared to fight. I did not expect to last long against a tiger-sage, but for Jong’s sake I had to try.
“There’s no ‘have to’ about anything,” the tiger said lazily. “Every death is a choice, little not-a-fox. At any step you could have turned aside. Now—” She fell silent.
I snatched up Jong’s knife. Now that I no longer had sharp teeth and claws, it would have to do.
“Don’t bother with that,” the tiger said. She had all her teeth, and wasn’t shy about displaying them in a ferocious grin. “No curse I could pronounce on you is more fitting than the one you have chosen for yourself.”
“It’s not a curse,” I said quietly.
“I’ll come back in nine years’ time,” the tiger said, “and we can discuss it then. Good luck with your one-person revolution.”
“I needn’t fight it alone,” I said. “This is your home, too.”
The tiger seemed to consider it. “Not a bad thought,” she said, “but maps and boundaries and nationalism are for humans, not for tigers.”
“If you change your mind,” I said, “I’m sure you can find me, in nine years’ time or otherwise.”
“Indeed,” the tiger said. “Farewell, little not-a-fox.”
“Thank you,” I said, but she was gone already.
I secured Jong’s ruined body in the copilot’s seat I had vacated, so it wouldn’t flop about during maneuvers, and strapped myself in. The cataphract was damaged, but not so badly damaged that I still couldn’t make a run for it. It was time to finish Jong’s mission.
* * *
Yoon Ha Lee’s first novel NINEFOX GAMBIT won the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke awards. Its sequel, RAVEN STRATAGEM, came out from Solaris Books in June 2017. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Lightspeed Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.
Forest of Memory
By Mary Robinette Kowal
My name is Katya Gould. As you’ve requested, to guarantee this is a unique document, I’m typing it on the 1918 Corona 3 typewriter that I had in my bicycle cart when I was abducted by the man known as Johnny. You will receive both these pages and the tyepwriter.
And all of the typos that accompany this account.
The ribbon, incidentally, is a reproduction fab-matter ribbon. My habit, when I take on a new client, is to learn what I can of them, so that I can tailor my offerings to their tastes. About you, I know nothing beyond the fact that your payment cleared.
You might be a single person, or a collective artificial consciousness, or a cryptid represented by an avatar. I do not know if you have requested this document to solidify the provenance of your typewriter, or if you are interested in the possible connection between my abduction and the deer die-off, or if there is some other rationale behind your request, and so I hope you will forgive me if I do not write exactly what you have paid for. I am used to providing unique experiences or items to my clients, not to being one of those items.
On the seventh of April, I biked out to a vineyard in the Willamette Valley. In one of my standard datacrawls through public LiveConnects, Lizzie—
That’s my intelligent system. I don’t know what you call your i-Sys, but mine is named after a character in a book. I gave her the crisp diction of the long-vanished mid-Atlantic.
I’m an Authenticities dealer. This will hardly be my only eccentricity, and I will try not to digress further. So . . .
Anyway. Lizzie had flagged a possible typewriter. It was part of a display, and it was hard to tell if it was a repro printed with fab-matter or a genuine artifact. That’s why you have to go see these things in pe
rson.
I wandered into the tasiting room, and the man behind the counter gave me a smile that almost looked genuine. “I’m pouring a couple of idfferent windes today.” He set a glass on the counter. “What can I start you with?”
“Actually, I’m interested in part of your display.” I pulled out a paper busineess card. That was Lizzie’s cue to sned him my contact information. In return I got a data packet that identified him as Autrey Wesselman.
Wesselman took the business card, rubbing his thumb across the letterpress impression as he gave a low whistle. “Haven’t seen one of these since my mom was running the place.”
“Well, when you deal in Authenticities, an actual business card just seems appropriate.”
He snorted. “If someone wants an authentic crappy fork lift, I’ve got one available. Guaranteed to stall at the least convenient moment.”
“If you’re serious, I might be able to find a home for that.” I rested my elbows on the clean pine counter. Dings and scars testified to its lifteime of service in this tasting room. Too bad it was built in. “But I’m actually hoping I can take a look at your typewriter.”
His brows went up. “Typewriter?”
My heart beat a little faster at that. The surprise in his voice sounded as if he didn’t even know he had one. “There’s a display in the member barrel room”
“Huh.” Wesselman folded his bar towel. “That’s my niece’s domain. I just handle the tasting room.”
“May I speak with her, then?”
He shrugged. “She’s out of town on a sales trip. I can take you back there.” He set the towel down and put an old bell in the center of the counter.
It looked to be from the mid-twentieth century, though without picking it up or using my loupe, I couldn’t confirm that. The fine dust caked into the grooves around the base seemed real enough, though. Most people who print fakes know enough to add dust to make it seem older, but they usually put it on too thickly and without regard for the use patterns of everyday objects.
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 35