by Jaymee Goh
~*~
It was a warm night. The black-and-white blinds in Bradford’s living room had been raised to admit the weak breeze, along with the flying ants and tiny night moths that lived in the bungalow gardens. Stroud and Murchison, despite the heat, had not shed their coats.
“I do apologize, gentlemen,” Bradford was saying with obvious discomfort, “I’d offer you refreshments, but you see the servants have gone for the night… this is quite unexpected…”
“So were your recent escapades,” responded Stroud.
“But that’s all sorted,” Bradford hastened to add, “the subject’s been retrieved, you know…”
“An explosion in the Malay cemetery.” Murchison wore strapped over his coat a slim aether tank, the nozzle propped on the arm of Bradford’s chaise longue. Bradford’s eyes kept flicking anxiously to it. “A midnight house raid. Neighbors’ complaints. Police reports. And on top of that, the secret societies nipping at our heels. I would be worried, old boy, really I would.”
“We give you top-notch equipment,” went on Stroud. “Fresh supplies. Your own personal guard. And you’re still letting the side down.”
“I beg your pardon,” exclaimed Bradford, “the project’s really making unprecedented leaps—why, 24 is fully integrated and utterly functional—”
“Functional?” scoffed Murchison. “Derailed a fully-powered hearse, rampaged through Kampong Glam—your man had to put it down.”
“We wanted tame golems, not a time bomb,” remonstrated Stroud. “Look at Narayan there. Why go to all that trouble if your creations won’t be half as tractable as he and his lot are? We’ve barracks of them, after all—boys who, when we say ‘jump’, say ‘how high, sir?’”
“I need more time,” pleaded Bradford, “it’s just a defect in the cognition engine, I’ll overwrite it in a jiffy…”
“Face it, man, you’re through,” Stroud said. “All this uproar has got the attention of the… shall we say more liberal factions under the Governor. There’s already been talk of an investigation.”
“You’re to be repatriated immediately,” added Murchison. “The rest of it will have to go, of course, the lab and all. The higher-ups want a full clearance report tomorrow. Where do you think you’re going?”
Bradford had got up and was fumbling in the liquor cabinet. “Do excuse me, I’m quite—something to steady the nerves—”
“Sit down, Bradford,” barked Murchison.
Bradford swung round. He was holding an antique shotgun. “Narayan, please see the gentlemen out.”
“Bradford…”
“I’m almost there,” Bradford shouted, “if you pull the plug now, you—”
Stroud shot him in the chest. It was a small, gleaming pneumatic pistol that slid easily back into his sleeve. Bradford dropped to his knees.
“Frightfully sorry it had to go this way, old chap,” continued Stroud, “but you see how it is. No hard feelings.”
He and Murchison rose. Stroud beckoned to Narayan. “The servants are gone, you said?”
“Yes,” said Narayan. His eyes were fixed on his master choking on his own blood.
“Take us to the lab, there’s a good fellow,” called Murchison. “Do step lively, we haven’t got all night.”
In the lab, Khairunnisa was elbow-deep in blood and metal springs. Ah Hong lay with her back to her. “Come on,” whispered Khairunnisa through gritted teeth, “come on…”
“What’s this then?” said Stroud cheerfully. “Our Dr. Bradford had himself a taste for the local flavour?” Murchison powered up the aether tank and aimed the nozzle at the drawers of bodies. Flames licked the blackening glass. “Oh well,” said Stroud, “she’ll have to go too. Narayan, you know what to do.”
Narayan stared at him.
Stroud gestured impatiently. “Everything has to go. Dispatch her first, then we’ll do you. Hare and I weren’t for it, you must know, but—orders. They’re saying you’ve lost your touch, what with that fiasco in Bussorah Street. You understand, of course.”
Narayan stepped towards the table. Khairunnisa’s hands kept moving. Her lips too, in prayer.
The flames were spreading. Murchison moved on to torch the ice cabinet, which resisted stubbornly. “Get on with it,” Stroud said irritably to Narayan.
Khairunnisa was crying, getting blood in her eyes when she tried to wipe away the tears. Narayan turned away from her.
“You can do your own dirty work, sir,” he said calmly. “There comes a time when a man tires of asking how high.”
The shot made Khairunnisa drop her instruments. Before her, the Gurkha collapsed quietly. He had made no move to dodge the bullet. Even in dying, his face did not change expression.
“Bollocks.” Stroud was angrily reloading the pistol. “Bloody natives. Can’t rely on them for anything.” He lifted the pistol again, meeting Khairunnisa’s frightened eyes.
On the table between them, Ah Hong sat up and tore the pistol from his hand.
Then she was on him, blow after blow to the face, pulping it against the tiles. The wound on her neck still gaping, the mechanisms within whirring furiously. Stroud’s hands scrabbled ineffectually against her broad back. Ah Hong crushed his lower jaw, then strained until it ripped free from his face.
Murchison turned in alarm, the nozzle flaring. A crossbow bolt thudded into his hand.
Ning limped into the room. She fired another bolt, which bounced off the tank. The nozzle, which Murchison had lost control of, was spilling flame wildly across the room. Khairunnisa scrambled out of its path.
Ning tossed the empty crossbow aside and went for her butterfly knives. Murchison pulled out a gun similar to Stroud’s, but could not fire properly for his wounded hand; Ning ducked his shot easily. Murchison tackled her. They went down together in a pool of blood and vomit, Murchison’s good hand landing blows where he could. Writhing to avoid him, Ning managed to force a knife up and stabbed Murchison through the eye. Ning clutched the hilt for dear life as he died above her face.
Across the room, Ah Hong was pounding what was left of Stroud into the floor. Ning got unsteadily to her feet. “Eh,” she said, “he’s giamcai already, you can stop.”
Ah Hong took a muzzy swing at her. Ning stayed well out of range. “Will you stop it? I’m not your enemy.”
“Still want to sell me?” snarled Ah Hong.
“I’m not sure you’ve noticed,” retorted Ning, “but trying to do anything with you is stupidly exhausting. And I’ve had it up to here with this night.”
“Everybody,” said Khairunnisa from the corner, “this room is on fire. I would really like to go.”
Outside the black-and-white bungalow, they took deep, welcome breaths of the night air. “Didn’t you stop working?” Ning demanded of Ah Hong.
“I fixed her,” said Khairunnisa. “Easier the second time round, actually. Didn’t you get left behind in my house?”
“Wasn’t hard to keep track of you,” panted Ning. “Speaking of which, please give me my eye back now, because I can hear trouble coming and I would like to be able to look it full in the face.”
A group of men was approaching. Ning recognized Chee in their lead. Chee was scowling. “Grandfather wants to see you.”
“Are you joking,” groaned Ning, “can a girl not get cleaned up first.”
“Grandfather said now,” repeated Chee grimly.
Ah Hong had her fists clenched, ready to attack. “Just go with them,” Ning told her in Malay. “Let me do the talking, it’ll be fine.”
“And if it’s not?” said Ah Hong through gritted teeth.
“Then you can punch them to death, whatever you like. Come on.”
~*~
Grandfather was eating a pre-dawn breakfast at a dimsum bar attached like a parasite to a garment factory. A great knot of pipes siphoned steam from the factory and vented it onto small columns of bamboo dimsum trays, which then went rolling out on little mechanical trolleys through the breakfast crowd. Everyone gl
anced at the stinking, bloodied women as they entered, but said nothing.
Grandfather picked up siewmai with his chopsticks. “Miss Ning,” he said without preamble. “You have not been discreet.”
“In my defense,” said Ning, “I was not the one who set fire to everything.”
“You have also worked too slow,” said Grandfather. “The tide has turned. The woman is now worthless.”
“Wait, wait.” Ning cocked her head at him. “You mean you don’t want her now? And I went to such trouble.”
“What for do I want her?” demanded Grandfather. “The only man who would pay ransom for her is dead. Now, if the British even realize she is still alive, we won’t see any money from them, just an extermination squad. This whole thing has been a waste of time.”
“I think it was more of a waste of my time,” snapped Ning. “I’m not getting paid?”
“You have the audacity, Miss Ning,” thundered Grandfather, ‘to ask for payment at this stage?”
“Grandfather,” said Ning with dangerous calm. “I have had a very bad day. I have been shot at. I have been punched in the head. I have been stabbed. And I smell like vomit. With all due respect, Grandfather, I think I should be paid.”
“That’s too bad, Miss Ning, because you won’t be.”
Ning gave a bark of laughter. “How far the secret societies have fallen indeed. Can’t even pay those they contract. Thought you were old school in this kongsi, but you’re cheap as any upstart crook.”
A ripple of anger ran through Grandfather’s retinue, stationed around the restaurant. “Perhaps a compromise,” said Grandfather. “We’ll cover the medical bill for whatever wounds you sustained.”
“And I get to keep the advance,” said Ning.
“Yes.”
“And I get her.” She pointed at a startled Ah Hong.
Grandfather raised his eyebrows. “Why would you want her?”
Ning shrugged. “You don’t. I’ll take her elsewhere. Maybe somebody else will be willing to pay.”
“The British will come after you for this,” pointed out Grandfather. “Be it on your head.”
“I’m not scared of the British,” said Ning. “Unlike some.”
She turned on her heel and strode out, Ah Hong and Khairunnisa following uncertainly. Nobody made to stop her.
“What happened?” Ah Hong wanted to know.
“Nothing much. I bought you. You were damn expensive.” Ah Hong stared. “I want breakfast,” Ning continued, “and then I want to never wear these clothes again.”
They ended up at a roadside coffeeshop. Ning drank black coffee and mashed liquid eggs with soy sauce in the saucer. Khairunnisa opted for milky tea. The whole ritual confused Ah Hong, who drank whatever Khairunnisa ordered for her and consumed mountains of thick toast smeared with coconut jam.
“What do I do now?” asked Ah Hong.
“I’m in the market for an associate,” said Ning. “I’ve begun to think that if I had a partner, preferably one who can squeeze out a man’s eyeballs with her fist, then I would spend less time bleeding and more time watching other people bleed. Also people would think twice about not paying me. That happens depressingly often.”
Ah Hong considered this. “Would you teach me back my language?”
Ning gazed at her thoughtfully. “I’d try.”
“We could put you back in touch with other samsui women,” suggested Khairunnisa. “Find people who knew you… knew the people you were from before…”
“No,” said Ah Hong quietly. “Nobody will come near me. Not when they know what I am.”
Khairunnisa stared into her tea. “What I saw down there. At the house. Allah will not forgive it.”
“He’s dead,” said Ning curtly. “The man who made her. He’s probably having a great time explaining it to Allah or whoever right now.”
“They’ll come looking for me, you know,” remarked Ah Hong. “They’ll always be coming.”
“When I ran away from the people who took my eye,” said Ning, “they kept trying to get me back. Eventually I proved to them it was more trouble than it was worth.” She looked at Ah Hong approvingly. “You’re going to be a lot more trouble than I ever was.”
Ah Hong smiled.
In a companionable silence, they finished breakfast and watched the sun rise over the island.
Spider Here
Robert Liow
[I]
Dai Ji skittered into the Jurong Central Wet Market, pushing through the crowd. The walking-chair strapped to her waist splashed through a wet spot, and a middle-aged woman turned to scowl at her, unhappy that her pants had gotten wet. Dai Ji smiled and apologized in Malay.
“Sorry, auntie! My fault.”
“Aiyo, girl. Careful a bit lah. Go, go.”
There was a loud crunch. A fat rodentlike bearing a message listed to the right, its gears squealing as it attempted to right itself. It sparked and spurted a strange green fluid, but limped on, reasonably mobile, towards its destination. Dai Ji looked at it with a frown, but didn’t stop. She couldn’t help it, anyway; everyone could Shape, but this thing had been locked down tight, all its functions tuned to its owners’ Shape by whoever made it. She could barely feel its threads. Besides, it was almost one, and she had to be on the roof early to set up. Towgey and the rest of her crew were already there.
Dai Ji walked out of the wet market and into the Reconstruction Trust block behind it. The slablike postwar buildings, replacing the kampungs obliterated by years of fierce back-and-forth fighting over Singapore between Nanyang and British Malayan forces, each housed thousands of people in blocks thirty stories high and the length and width of football fields. A Thai woman in a Reconstruction Trust uniform supervised a walker as it sprayed the ground in a sweeping arc with a high-pressure hose. Dai Ji waved at her as she nimbly sidestepped the water-jet. She rushed to the lift lobby and jabbed the call button with her umbrella. Decades-old hydraulics and gears began to grind as the lift descended from the fifteenth storey, and then abruptly halted as it paused at the fourth. Dai Ji sighed and folded her arms.
She wondered what her brother was doing now. Kian Boon was the Officer Commanding of a company of mechanized infantry, stationed near the Causeway. He’d been busy recently, with the Malayan Federation making war-noises across the border in the papers, and he hadn’t been home for the past two weekends. She strained to remember Kian Boon’s call, the night before. He usually made his daily calls from his office, but yesterday had been different. His voice was hushed, the sound of steam and hydraulics and the metal footsteps of walkers in the distance. He was out of breath, his personal radio kept falling to the floor and he had spoken as fast as one of his gasguns. He had used the words “Confrontation” and “riots”. He didn’t know what was going on either, or why. He couldn’t tell her where he was going. Something big was about to happen. She could hear the steel in his voice as he had said that, and the slight smile when he told her to take care. A harsh, drilling bell rang, and someone shouted “Captain Wong, sir!” He swore, rushed a farewell, and shut the line off. Silence.
Dai Ji was sure he’d be alright, though. Her Dai Kor was good. He’d studied biology in Chulalongkorn University on a Nanyang Forces scholarship, and spent two years on the border with Sarawak with the Sultanates’ Army, defending the Sultanates from the White Rajah’s incursions. He’d find a way.
The lift finally opened to a cloud of kretek smoke and several batik-clad Sultanate women, their tiny pet birdlikes buzzing happily behind them, stepped out. Dai Ji shifted back a little, letting the little metallic fliers hover around her and play with her hair as their owners wiggled into the lobby. She whistled at one that stopped in front of her face, calling up and tweaking an unsecured thread, and it flushed red for a brief second before reverting to its natural, iridescent green. It flicked its tongue out, catching beads of sweat dripping off her forehead and chirping in glee as it twirled in the air.
Dai Ji loved birdlikes; she�
��d seen her brother work with the larger mail-delivery versions before he’d joined the Nanyang Forces; watched him feed them concentrated sugar-water and smooth their feathers of metal and keratin back into shape after each flight with the Sultanates’ Postal Service. She preferred spider casings, though. Casings were easy and cheap to build. Unlike lifelikes, they didn’t have an integral live brain, instead using that of an animal “pilot”, and so required much less maintenance and life-support. More importantly, though, they were a decent source of income for any young, skilled Shaper. She’d made a few spider casings over the weekend, easily ten dollars’ worth; there would certainly be willing buyers after Chalerm’s demonstration. The Sultanate women whistled, and the birdlikes returned to their shoulders as they left. Dai Ji stepped into the lift and let the old gears take her up.
~*~
[II]
Dai Ji climbed the final steps to the top floor of the building, where the lift did not go. Approaching the ladder that led to the roof-access hatch, she reclined in her lifelike walking-chair and called up its threads. The goat-brain inside bleated as she forced the tarsal claws of its pneumatic legs to latch onto the rungs of the ladder. She undid the hacked padlock and chains, gave the hatch a rough push with a chair leg and pulled herself through the opening. She inclined her seat and dusted herself off, watching her crew climb in after her. There was Towgey, her twelve-year-old cousin and bet-collector; Ridzuan, the backup host and spider-seller with his Sultanates’ Army-surplus load-bearing vest packed to the brim with spiders in their containers; the Chong twins, there to break up the occasional fight, and Chalerm.
Chalerm was the newest member of her crew. He’d replaced her old casing tester after the latter had been bought out by a ring from Clementi a couple of weeks ago; Dai Ji had personally locked them out of their meeting place with a few dead rats and a bicycle wheel, but she’d had to find a new tester. Chalerm wore the uniform of the fancy Thai school that replaced the old Singapore Institute after the British were expelled. His head was shaven, and his shirt had been deliberately left untucked. He palmed the casing he’d asked for as part of his fee; “Kiet”, he’d named it. “Honour” in Thai. He reached out to shake hands with his new boss, but she merely nodded at him.