It had been a long time since anyone had worked on the fence. It was not until the call of the beast was heard within the valley that they became aware that it had dug a small hole in the barrier. This time though, instead of being afraid, they struck back at the beast under the leadership of the captain, the flames of victory leaving them feverish. Using shovels, sticks, knives, even their fingernails and teeth, they managed to snatch a corpse from the mouth of the beast, which had been made weak from hunger.
When the captain managed to use a knife to chop a leg free from mouth of the beast he felt like he was finally in control of the situation again. In the past he had had times of hesitation, he had had times of confusion, even fear. His training had taught him to feel ashamed of such emotions—but everything was better now. Now that he knew the path forward, he was no longer worried about anything, because he knew that he would survive to be rescued. Happiness clouded his brain, and as he watched the beast scurry through the hole in the fence, he held the hairy leg of the chemistry professor in one hand, laughing.
He soon realized that the priest was standing nearby, watching him, with his skull-like face twisted up in pain. The captain immediately straightened up and stopped laughing. Anger toward the priest bubbled up, unbidden. Fuck, what right does he have to look at me like that? When survival is on the line, what’s the point of having convictions? Believer or non-believer, when disaster strikes it doesn’t make a difference either way. The captain began to hack away at the professor’s leg, methodically chopping and slicing, wastefully letting bits of meat fall to the ground. Without checking with the others, he could already tell that they all found the priest’s behavior infuriating.
Even after rinsing the remains of the professor in the fountain, the smell of herbal medicine lingered on his corpse and after a long time they gave up trying. The smell had permeated all the way down into the muscle and bone, making him taste especially delicious. The slender, half-mauled corpse of the professor barely lasted them a single night before every last bit was eaten up. They’d barely had a chance to taste him, but now they were hungry again, and needed more food.
The priest sat cross-legged in the cavity. His awareness spread outwards, encompassing the shining white crystals which surrounded him, countless as grains of sand in the mighty Ganges. Vibrating, resonating, the sound was as vast as it was miniscule, like the sound of silkworms chewing mulberry, or rain falling on the broad leaves of the plantain. A stream of information as expansive as the universe flowed through the room, passing through the arch of the hothouse-like structure and directly into his brain. Images from his childhood flashed in his mind, and then more images, of the distant past, of things he had never experienced. What is the origin of desire? Vibrations, vibrations, like wing-beat of a butterfly. The world is an illusion, a white haired man said to him. I dreamed of a butterfly, but only the butterfly is real.
Upon opening his eyes, the priest was greeted with the sight of a butterfly, its wings patterned in black and red. The butterfly was of a sort found only on Earth. As it passed through one of the narrow windows, the early morning light caught the gold in its wings, sending arcs of light off into void.
Could it be that I’m hallucinating? In a flash, the realization of what had just happened coursed throughout his body and he became extremely frightened. Most likely this was a dream within a dream, an illusion within an illusion. He simply imagined that he was hallucinating. The fear, however, was fleeting. What did it matter if the world was an illusion? An illusion of an illusion was nothing more than an illusion. Looking up at the paintings on the wall, he realized he could suddenly read them as if they were text:
The Buddha said to his disciple Subhūti: All that has form is an illusion.
If this was true, then things with form could also emerge from illusion. Dear god, is it really possible? The priest closed his eyes. Could the world really like be like the ancient story of the “golden millet dream?” Are we all just poor innkeepers dreaming of becoming of becoming men of wealth and power? He began to imagine a freshly baked bun, yellow and piping hot. A piercing pain racked his brain as his mind resonated with the crystals around him. Upon opening his eyes, the priest discovered that a bun really had appeared, complete with toasted sesame seeds on top, and a curlicue of steam spiraling above it.
Tears sprang forth from his withered eye sockets, falling one at a time. The imagined bun was edible and filling. I found food! This is the secret of the reclusive sect. In the past I thought that forsaking desire was the path to eliminating desire. I was wrong, though. Is there anything that better demonstrates the suffering caused by desire better than having all of one’s desire fulfilled?
He left the bun on the ground to let it cool. Feeling as if his head was full of buzzing stars, he wondered if this was a miracle or science, to have a planet filled with vibrations. As Plato once asked, what is thought and what is matter? I should have realized sooner that thought is a kind of vibration, the synaptic spark which passes between neurons. The unique structure and materials of this tower, even the planet itself, serve to amplify the power of thought. With only faith and imagination, we can create a whole new world for ourselves.
Ignoring an intense headache, the priest constructed a communicator in his mind. As the image became more clear, it emerged as if from the mist, and suddenly landed on the floor of the room with a sharp sound, a real, fresh sound, sending out a blue light which pierced his brain like a knife. With feverish hands he stroked the device before deciding to go down to find the others, who knew better than he how to use it. Even better, now they could use meditation and faith to get food. He stood up, staggering, and almost fell back down. His prolonged meditation had left him impossibly weak.
The communicator was too heavy. There was simply no way for him to carry the eighty-pound device down some six-hundred steps. He crawled to the steps and began to slowly make his way down the winding stairwell.
A soft breeze wafted through the air. The others stood around the pot in the square. The fire blazed and the water was already boiling hot, but they hadn’t even decided who was going to die yet. The priest rushed forward to tell the captain that he had completed his task. Food! I found food! All we need to have is faith, and we will have salvation. It was so simple, hallelujah!
They others formed a semi-circle around the priest, like a choir in church. They looked at him kindly. Far above them in the sky, He who had sacrificed himself observed the scene with compassion. The captain stood in middle of the group. From the corner of his eye, the priest saw the boiler tender drawing close, carrying an iron mace fashioned from a shovel. Standing stiffly erect, the priest became aware that he was on trial. Taking advantage of his last chance, he raised his hand and pointed upwards, beginning to say in a raw voice, “I’ve discovered . . . ”
The words were cut short by a heavy blow to the back of his head. His last conscious impressions were the sound of boiling water, the white teeth of the men, the fish swimming through the air, and the beast roaring in the distance, as if beckoning him with a bugle call.
Above it all, the high hunger tower pierced the sky.
Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, June 2003.
Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.
About the Author
Pan Haitian is a well-known figure among the third generation of Chinese science fiction authors. His previous work includes the collection Run Dajiao! Run! (New World Press, 2001) and four novels set in the Novoland universe: Ghost Sparrow, Spirit Turtle (New World Press, 2006), The Iron Stupa (New World Press, 2007), 24 Second Paradise (serialized in China Fantasy, 2009-10), and A Dark Moon Rises (Hunan Art and Literature Press October, 2012). He is also a founding editor of the influential Chinese magazine, Odyssey of China Fantasy.
Snakes
Yoon Ha Lee
I had brought the corpse of my soldier-sister Rhiis-2 a long way, suspended in a fluid of suppositions:
—If she examined the navigational display, she would advise that we route around this dwarf star in realspace, that strand of charged matter in shadowspace.
—If I neglected to clean out the ship’s torchgun regularly, she would gum up the apertures with that horrifying squishy self-heal gel that we were supposed to use on the ship’s lenses so I really had to work to clean it out.
—If the skimship’s power systems flashed that particular stress-alert, check the physical gauges before doing anything drastic, because the hookups sometimes lied to us.
Interlaced with these came other parts of her decision trees, which I lingered over even though I didn’t want to:
—If asked about her family and I was present, she’d smile that whiplash-blinding smile of hers, sling her arm around my shoulders, and say that all she had left, sadly, was this good-for-nothing sister. We weren’t related except in the way that a gun and its ammunition are related. I had often wondered, toward the end, if that had been enough for her.
—If someone propositioned her with the folded glove, she’d never say yes. It had nothing to do with being a soldier-sister. She never minded when I took one-night lovers. One night was all I wanted of them, anyway, and in the mornings I’d return to pledge the high pledge with her.
—If offered nectar-of-dreams for the second night in a row, she’d refuse. She’d take it away from me, too, while she was at it. Now that she couldn’t do it anymore, I missed the scolding. I poured myself a cup every night, then stared mournfully at it without drinking any, in her honor. Of course, I couldn’t drink in the human sense anymore.
For all the if’s I carried with me, however, I knew that Rhiis-2 would have told me that I was stupid for coming to the Seethe. For changing myself on her behalf. I had entangled my functions into those of the ship, over a hundred hundred small surgeries, over a thousand thousand large adjustments. I was home to a multitude of spiders, who maintained the ship and my soldier-sister’s sustaining fluid as I directed.
As we exited shadowspace, I saw the Seethe, and knew that I could not afford to fail so close to my objective.
We had lost the vastwar. That had been bad enough. I was determined not to lose Rhiis-2.
Sometimes, as we sped through shadowspace, I dreamt I could see into Rhiis-2 in her stillness. It had been rumored for a long time that shadowspace induced odd dreams and visions, although people had been having odd dreams and visions without the need of superstitious explanations everywhere they went. Sometimes, during the days of the war, we’d take nectar-of-dreams so that we’d slip into blurred, easeful fantasias. Mine usually involved food: thin-skinned dumplings with pork and shrimp and scallions, dried roasted cuttlefish, anchovies in sweet sauce. When I insisted on describing these to Rhiis-2, she’d pull a face and retort by making up recipes for sweet cakes laced with radioactive elements, or crisp biscuits of circuitry, or pies filled with flitter exhaust.
Now that I couldn’t drug myself with nectar, I had different dreams. A ship, or a human that has become a ship, was always awake, and always asleep. I had heard that the need to sleep (to dream) never fully went away, so that came as no surprise.
During the everywhere-cooling night, the painstaking needle-threading of shadowspace navigation, I dreamt that every star had unsunned itself. The lights that vined across my walls and ceilings had dimmed into ash. Darkness even greater than that of nightfall clothed everything. Yet, although Rhiis-2 lay separated from me by a heartbeat, a handspan, by the heat of vanished history, I could see her.
The seeing had nothing to do with the wry mouth, or the clever hands, or the livid scar at her heel, whose origin I did not know. Sometimes I could scarcely tell her boundaries from my own. We orbited each other, losing substance in the process like neutron stars holding each other captive, ghost inspiraling into ghost.
Instead, I could see alveoli like sprays of flowers. Long lean bones. The unmoving knot at her center that was her heart. Snakes everywhere: the crenellations of her brain, silent of electric flickers. Flaccid blood vessels. Winding ropes of intestine. Snakes.
In the language of light, the Seethe was a fist of utter black surrounded by a coruscating accretion disk and sustained from evaporation effects by the masteries of an ancient civilization. That was realspace. The Seethe also hid a shadowspace fortress, the retreat of that same civilization, and our old opponent in the vastwar. The story went that they had specialized in weapons. Weapons that sundered matter into a vapor of quarks, weapons that smothered planets, weapons that smeared stars into unradiant dust. For a while they were content to peddle their weapons. Then something changed: whimsy, yearning, some threat from outside. At that point, they developed the secret of resurrection and used it to touch off a general war.
Eventually the warring nations wearied of the conflict and united to destroy the weapon-makers. A great many people died in the vastwar. Rhiis-2 was one of them, in a skirmish at the outskirts, past stars so obscure that their names were pin-scratchings in the great catalogs.
Rhiis-2 was the pilot, back then. I was Rhiis-1, the gunner. “I’m just the percussion,” I said to her many times. “What you do is the music.” She only laughed and said I had it the wrong way around.
Rhiis was the name of the ship. We had flown a great many scouting missions together, and our commander sent us to investigate odd readings in shadowspace. When we chanced upon the mercenaries that the weapons-makers, disdaining to do the actual fighting, had hired as sentries, the only thing that saved us was that they had not expected anyone to be poking around that corner of space.
We fled, but not quickly enough. I ran for a long, long time, until even the shadows in my nightmares had blurred into insignificance. By the time I was able to haul Rhiis-2 to the ship’s medical unit, she was beyond saving. She would have been beyond saving anyway. It bothered me how whole she looked, as though she had merely slid into some underworld of sleep. I should have known that not all weapons left such obvious marks as cuts and holes and burns. Nevertheless, I kept expecting her to stir and speak.
After that I deserted. I was almost certain that my one attempt to warn allied forces resulted in the destruction of an allied fleet. I decided not to try again. Instead, I went mercenary myself, not in the vastwar but the smaller simmer of conflicts that came and went among the minor polities. None of them had the technology to breathe Rhiis-2 back into motion, but that had also been true in the alliance proper.
The fluid of suppositions had not been intended for revival. Rather, it was meant to memorialize the vastwar’s dead. I had no desire to take Rhiis-2 back to be ogled by masses to whom we were nothing but checklists of ceremonial mourning. My family and I regarded each other as cordial strangers; it wouldn’t matter much to them.
Nor did I have any great feeling for Rhiis-2’s family. I had never asked her about them. But one night she had mentioned, with a casualness that I knew better than to take at face value, that her parents and sisterkin had not approved of her enlisting. She’d recently received a package that included a snakeskin, oiled and supple and sewn with gems like pomegranate seeds. I remembered how her face had frozen when she opened it up. “Take it and sell it,” she had said. “Don’t tell me where. Get something to drink with the money, and we’ll save it for a special occasion, I don’t know what.”
The force of her bitterness convinced me to do as she said. I still had the bottle of wine. I had the spiders bring it out of storage even though I didn’t need to do so to contemplate it.
As we neared the Seethe, I had the spiders spell out its name in the languages I knew, and the names of long-ago generals and colonels, as they skittered up and down the walls. Then I amused myself further by firing at the spiders with lasers turned down low enough to do no harm to the ship’s structure. (I hadn’t always thought well of my officers.)
Perhaps it was folly to show up at the weapon-makers’ doorstep to demand redress. Alternately, I had little coin with which to offer them payment. Indeed, I couldn’t i
magine that I had anything that would interest them, except the pale threat that I knew of their survival and others did too.
I had no guarantee that they wouldn’t shoot me out of the sky and fling me into the Seethe, where my ever-dwindling image would serve as a warning to other travelers. But then, even a slim chance seemed better than accepting Rhiis-2’s continued silence. And, as small a comfort as it was, the space around the Seethe’s event horizon was not, in fact, crowded with the red-shifted ghosts of unfortunate would-be visitors.
I had expected to fight my way in. Call it habit. I’d laid in as much ammunition as I could. It might not be enough, but it would be worse to die without having fired.
The weapon-makers’ first interceptor flight took on a formation that I had seen battlefields ago, when I was human. It was difficult not to fly straight at them, suicide-fashion. I was saved from my own impulses by the ghosts I carried within me.
—If they don’t come out firing, they might just be getting a good look—
—If they flash their stardrives like that, they’re probably going to swerve away at the last moment—
—If they keep dancing like this, it’s not a trap, it’s a test—
Part of this was my memory of Rhiis-2’s steady judgment. Part of it was my own, long-disused, waking under the pressure of necessity. Before I’d deserted, I’d been among the best gunners. Now that the ship and I were no longer separate entities, I was even better.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106 Page 8