I held my fire, as much as I yearned to use what had once been a simple torchgun, and was now something much more destructive. I wanted them to talk to me. I sent a message requesting parley while I maneuvered, using every communications protocol I was capable of.
The interceptors did not respond over any channel I recognized, nor did the Seethe’s fortress. Instead, we wove trajectories around each other, like a braid. I did not like the numbers. I especially disliked them when I realized what was going on.
The interceptors were miming an engagement from many years back, except Rhiis-2 and I had been part of a flight of eight. It had been our second time together after pledging to each other. We’d lost three skimships before returning to the fleet proper. People I’d barely gotten to know. I felt guiltiest about that part. To be honest, I hadn’t thought of the fight, or the creeping alienation afterward, in years. There had, after all, been many battles. I wouldn’t have expected to recall this one so clearly. The interceptors’ dance was so specific and so persistent, however, that the memories came singing back.
All right. If they were doing everything but firing on me, I could still fly the patterns they were defining for me. Call-and-response, like music. All I had to do (and I laughed a little, ironically) was condense an entire flight’s maneuvers into those of the single ship that I was now.
I needled toward them and darted away, stitched patterns in and out of shadowspace, tactical geometries. It took all my concentration. And when I had finished the ballet, I was still not done. The interceptors slipped away and were replaced by another flight of larger vessels. Another battle. And another after that, and another after that.
As I flew, I thought of the people I had left behind. My mother and aunts, to whom I had made the ritual offering of candied fruits before departing forever. The last I saw of them, they were passing the treats out and chattering about investments. A comrade, killed, whose locket contained nothing but a blank slip of paper. When I handed it to their lover, her eyes shattered. A quartermaster who could be bribed for better shoes. It was like passing through the halls of the dead.
—If you make it through the gauntlet of ghosts, Rhiis-2 said to me through the medium of old suppositions, they will not offer you anything but masks and illusions. You cannot bring back the dead. Turn back. Turn back. Turn back.
You won’t die as long as I am here, I thought back to the whisper-presence.
I did not know how long I flew, aware only of the necessity of reenacting the battles presented to me, and the dangerous everywhere-pull of the Seethe.
At last the ships parted before me and slowed. I understood this to be an invitation and circled them, wary, exhausted. Three guardships greater than any I had yet faced emerged from shadowspace, opening up a passage in the space between them.
“You have come a long way to show us your artistry,” the guardships said to me in one voice, in a language that both of us knew, but which was not native to me and probably was not to them either. “If you wish to speak, then we will hear you.”
“Thank you,” I said in the same language, although some of the spiders wove dire webs in their corners, and entered the passage.
The shadowspace fortress was constructed of dust and laminate, nanites endlessly chewing and regurgitating machinery into new shapes. More weapons, I presumed; I did not ask. I was brought through winding passages to a monument of light, shot through with jewel-sparks and swirls of smoke. I wondered if this, too, represented some battle, one that I had not been party to. “Artistry,” the guardships had called it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected anything else from people who devoted themselves to creating engines of war.
And really, was I much different? I had killed my share of people during the vastwar. I had killed more afterward, as a mercenary scrabbling for the upgrades that would bring me here. Perhaps it was death, rather than any combination of sounds and syntax, that was our common language.
A voice spoke out of the monument. At that point I realized it wasn’t merely a monument, just as I wasn’t merely a ship. It said, “Did you bring your soldier-sister with you to make of her a weapon, or to wake her from her death?”
“She spent her life as a weapon,” I said. “She is not any less one for being dead.” It was true. After all, I had consulted her decision-trees, the remembered sum of her experiences, all these years. “Is it, in fact, within your power to bring back the dead?”
The light dimmed bit by bit, coalescing into a silhouette that I knew all too well. Its twin dwelled unmoving within its preserving casket. The wry mouth, the clever hands, the livid scar at her heel. Even the way it held its head.
“That’s not her,” I said. “If all I wanted was a puppet with her face, I could have gone to any of a thousand artisans.” Clones, sculpts, robots of polished mien. Or puppets from older traditions, made of paper or wood or felt.
It cocked its head, frowned at me slightly. “The puppet will serve you better,” it said in Rhiis-2’s husky voice.
The mind was not separate from the body. I did not know how the weapons-maker had achieved their miracle. But I was willing to bet that it involved the original body, or whatever records had been made of it. “That’s not what I asked,” I said.
“Ship who used to be human,” the silhouette said, “if bringing back the dead were wise, do you not think that we would have started with our own? Why else would we hide here, diminished from what we were?”
“If I cared about wisdom,” I said, “I wouldn’t be here.”
The silhouette laughed, and even that was Rhiis-2’s laugh, with its kind mockery, except I knew better. The scratching in my absent heart told me so. “It can be done if you are brave enough. Quantum mechanics will produce an exact duplicate so long as you don’t mind waiting out the heat death of the universe.”
“That is a very long time to wait,” I said. “I am not built to last that long. But perhaps with the Seethe—?”
Close orbit near the event horizon would induce the necessary time dilation. The universe would age unimaginably while I waited out a more bearable span. But the calculation would have to be extraordinarily precise.
“We can provide the orbit,” it said. “And in the course of eons she will come to you. But there is a condition.”
Of course there was. “Say it.”
“More a warning than a condition, perhaps. Don’t speak to her of the past, yours or hers.”
A terrible suspicion took hold of me. “Why?” I said. “Won’t she remember?”
“She will remember only what is given to her to remember,” the silhouette said. Its voice was sad. I was too impatient to press for details. I would regret that later.
Trusting in the orbit provided me, I launched from the fortress. I did not like being so close to the Seethe, vastest of its kind. No sane person would.
I wondered what she would say to me first. “When we pledged, this is not what I was thinking of,” she might say. Or: “Deserting? When did you decide that I would approve of deserting?” Except she hadn’t been around to say that, and I had dragged her with me anyway, past immense gas giants and ringed planets and the glitter-ice of frozen moons, through expanses of irradiated darkness, around the old remnants of defeated fleets. I had dragged her with me despite her devotion to the alliance. The pledge had meant something to her beyond camaraderie. The vastwar had been personal to her in a way it had never been for me. I wanted flight-rhythms and war-hymns; she cared about principle.
I had rehearsed defense after defense. The spiders, obsessive scribes, were weaving them into webs of guilty illogic. I did not know how any of my arguments would fare against her anger, or worse, her disappointment.
Outside, the universe swirled by. Due to the effects of gravitational lensing, everything I saw was distorted, doubled; and of course there was also the utter dark of the Seethe itself. I lost track of the red- and blue-shifting, and wondered just what was going on in the lifetimes passing me by. There came periods
of dark, and periods of renewed light, and in between more of the kaleidoscope oddities. Eventually I tired of them.
When I had all but given up hope, the fluid of suppositions sloughed away and pooled obligingly to the side, awaiting reuse. Flesh clothed bone. Rhiis-2 coughed. Everything down to the scar on her ankle was there. I started to speak through the spiders, then stopped. Rhiis-2’s eyes were the color of chambered bullets. The blankness in them frightened me.
The spiders assembled before Rhiis-2, and after an appallingly long moment, her eyes lit. Say something, I begged her silently. But I was determined not to push her, to let her speak first.
She rose from the casket and looked to the left, then to the right, and at last straight ahead, into a ghostworld I couldn’t share with her. “Why are there no stars?” she said. “I can’t navigate if there are no stars.”
I didn’t understand what she meant. There was a new universe outside. Of course there were stars.
The spiders retreated as she made her way to me. I was unnerved by the fixity of her stare. I could not breathe in or breathe out, but my spiders stilled when she laid her hand across the hatch. I wasn’t going to open it for her, naturally. “Yes,” she said to herself. “This looks right. It was like this in my dreams.”
“Dreams?” I said, wondering if the dead dreamed.
She ignored that and made straight for where the pilot’s seat used to be. I’d taken it out a long time ago. For a moment she paused, frowning. She searched the deck with her hands. I did not have nerves with which to feel her touch.
It took her a long time to give up. Next she searched for the gunner’s seat. I did, at least, still have guns, although the current ones would be far outside her experience. And then she looked for our bunks. I could only present her with the casket. Her eyes darkened as she regarded it.
At last she returned to the primary gun, or the part of it that she could access without my revealing its mechanisms to her. “The gunner,” she said. “My soldier-sister. Where did she go?”
I was part of her past. I could not remind her of what we had been to each other, the missions we had flown, that fatal skirmish. I could not tell her what I had done to myself to bring her here.
Don’t speak to her of the past.
As I understood it, the past was dead anyway. I’d taken care of that.
Rhiis-2 made another circuit of the ship, then returned to the casket and banged on its side. “Answer me!”
—If I spoke to her, I knew what she’d demand.
I spoke.
I spoke through the spiders, and she listened. Some of it she knew. Most of it she didn’t. At first I was inclined to blame the shock of whatever process had returned her to me.
Then a different possibility occurred to me, and would not go away.
Don’t speak to her of the past.
I could stop now. She had come back to me. We could abide together.
“You’re not her,” I said at last.
Her mouth pulled down. “I’m who I am,” she said.
“You’re another silhouette,” I said. The same one I’d been carrying all along. I could only imagine that it had been easy for the weapon-makers to hack into my computer systems and internal sensors, to create the illusion of Rhiis-2 using the fluid of suppositions. The problem was, the illusion knew only as much as the weapon-makers and I did. Rhiis-2’s secrets—the snakeskin, her family, the scar at her heel—all of those were lost.
Her brow knit, and she said, “The dreams took me away from myself. Maybe it’ll come back with time. Maybe you can tell me about the dried squid again, and I’ll remember what I used to eat when I was a child. Maybe we can open that bottle—you remember the one—and drink to our reunion.”
I veered away from the Seethe, slowed, and left the orbit that had been given me. There was no more point to the charade. “You don’t have to pretend anymore,” I said.
Her expression grew ironic, then. “I was meant to make the wait bearable,” she said. “The recurrence theorem guarantees her to you; it did not guarantee that you would be sane to greet her.”
At last I understood the meaning of the dreams that I had borne with me since Rhiis-2’s death. The snakes that had killed her did not just consist of the tick-tock mortality of her body with its frayed parts. The deadliest snake was me.
To the silhouette, I said, “I thought I knew what I wanted, but the weapons-makers were right. End it here.”
The silhouette folded in on herself. It was as ungraceful as it was expected. I tried not to look at the expression of startlement on her face. My spiders waited for the fluid of suppositions to envelop the corpse again, then bore her back to the casket. It was time to relinquish my soldier-sister to death. Leaving the Seethe behind, I plunged toward the heart of a star.
About the Author
Yoon Ha Lee’s works have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. His collection Conservation of Shadows came out in 2013 from Prime Books. Currently he lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.
The Accord
Keith Brooke
1. Tish Goldenhawk
Tish Goldenhawk watched the gaudy Daguerran vessel slide into the harbor. If she had known then what she was soon to learn, she might even have settled for her humdrum existence, and even now she and Milton would be living a quiet life, seeing out their days before finally joining the Accord.
But no, unblessed with foresight, Tish stood atop the silver cliffs of Penhellion and watched—no, marveled—as the Lady Cecilia approached the crooked arm of the dock.
The ship was unlike any she had seen. Far taller than it was long, it rose out of the mirrored waters like some kind of improbable island. Its flanks were made of polished wood and massed ranks of high arched windows, these revealing bodies within, faces pressed against glass as the grand touristas took in yet more of the sights of the worlds.
He might have been among them. Another face staring out, its perfect features only distinguished by a crooked incisor. But no, he wouldn’t have been part of that gawping crowd. She would have known that if she had been blessed with foresight, if she had somehow known that there was a “he” of whom she could speculate just so at this moment.
The ship, the Lady Cecilia . . . it towered unfeasibly. Only vastly advanced engineering could keep it from toppling this way or that. The thing defied gravity by its very existence. It sailed, a perfect vertical, its array of silken sails bulging picturesquely, its crew scrambling over the rigging like squirrels.
At a distant screech, Tish tipped her head back and stared until she had picked out the tiny scimitar shapes of gliding pterosaurs. It was a clear day, and the world’s rings slashed a ribbon across the southern sky. Why did beauty make her sad?
Tish breathed deep, and she knew she should be back at the Falling Droplet helping Milton and their fifteen-year-old son Druce behind the bar.
And then she looked again at the golden, jeweled, bannered sailing ship now secured in the harbor and she felt an almighty welling of despair that this should be her lot in a world of such beauty and wonder.
She walked back along a road cut into the face of the cliff. She was lucky. She lived in a beautiful place. She had a good husband, a fine son. She could want for nothing. Nobody starved or suffered in the worlds of the Diaspora, unless it was their choice to do so. People were born to different lots and hers was a good one.
She was lucky, she told herself again. Blessed by the Accord.
The Falling Droplet was set into the silver cliffs of Penhellion, its floor-to-ceiling windows giving breathtaking views out across the bay to where the coast hooked back on itself and the Grand Falls plunged more than a thousand meters into the sea.
Rainbows played and flickered across the bay, an ever-changing color masque put on by the interplay of the Falls and the sun. Pterosaurs and gulls and flying fish cut and swooped through the spray, while dolphin
s and merfolk arced and flipped in the waves.
Tish was staring at the view again, when the stranger approached the bar.
“I . . . erm . . . ” He placed coins on the age-polished flutewood surface.
Tish dragged her gaze away from the windows. She smiled at him, another anonymous grand tourista with perfect features, flawless skin, silky hair, a man who might as easily have been twenty as a century or more.
He smiled back.
The crooked tooth was a clever touch. A single tooth at the front, just a little angled so that there was a gap at the top, a slight overlap at the bottom. An imperfection in the perfect, a mote in the diamond.
In that instant Tish Goldenhawk was transfixed, just as she had been by the sight of the Lady Cecilia earlier.
She knew who he was, or rather, what he was, this stranger, this not quite perfect visitor. A made man should always have a flaw, if he were not to look, immediately, like a made man.
“I . . . erm . . . ” she said, inadvertently repeating his own words from a moment before. “What’ll it be?”
“I . . . ” He gestured at one of the pumps.
“Roly’s Scrumpy?” she said, reaching for a long glass. “You’d better be watching your head in the morning, if you’re not used to it. That stuff’s an ass—drink it full in the face and you’re fine, but as soon as you turn your back it’ll kick you.”
She put the drink before him and helped herself to some of the coins he had spread out.
“Been on Laverne for long?” she said, knowing the answer he would give. He had just landed, along with all these other touristas. Struggling with the dialect and the coins. These poor over-rich sods must be constantly disoriented, she realized, as they took their grand tours of the known. The poor lambs.
He shook his head, smiled again. A day ago—even a few hours ago—he had probably been in a jungle, or in a seething metropolis, or deep in an undersea resort, ten, a hundred, a thousand light years away, along with others on the grand tour.
Or that, at least, was probably what she was supposed to think. But Tish stuck with her hunch instead. She often constructed stories about the people she served in the Falling Droplet—the spies, the adulterers, the scag addicts, and the gender-confused. Sometimes she even turned out to be right, but usually she never confirmed her hunches one way or the other. This man was no grand tourista, although he might indeed be a new arrival.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106 Page 9