by Anthology
She clung to her love even as courtiers in the flying vehicle made of carved wood grabbed his forearms, lifting him half off the ground. She clung to him even as he turned first into a tiger that buried its claws in her shoulders, and then into a small, translucent dragon with wings that buffeted violently both the air-vehicle and his beloved.
She held on to him even as he turned into a forest porcupine that hurt her with its dangerously long prickles. She held on to him as he transformed into a heavy armadillo with armour so dense that it nearly knocked the vehicle out of the air when he bucked against the grappling hooks that lodged into his skin. He brought the girl flailing to the ground when he finally dislodged those hooks and landed on her belly as an angry forest fowl, waiting to tear her eyes out with its beak.
Her eyes filled with tears of virtuous consternation when he finally turned into a neatly muscled, bare-skinned man, bereft of his adornments and regalia. Any shyness she felt at his naked form was destroyed when the voice of the Empress seemed to boom from the sky, causing the forest to tremble in fear as the echoes filled every crevice, every pore, and every cavity.
“Celaka! If we had known you would defy us in this way, wayward admiral, we would have had the cenderawasih rend you limb from limb. If we had known you would defy us in this way, we would have turned you into a mouse-deer for Sang Rimau’s feast!”
The Empress then uttered the curse, a curse that now seemed to be etched on every loamy grain, every tree-bark, and every ghost of a leaf in the Belum-Temenggor rainforest. In the aftermath, all that Cempaka’s ancestor could have done was that which any maiden of their village left with a naked man was supposed to do. She wrapped him up in the kain pelekat she had brought along for the night’s adventure, her eyes modestly averted from the prize for which she had battled all night.
***
Cempaka would probably not have been so virtuous, but this was, after all, the story that her mother told her. Virtuous maidens always abound in such tales.
***
No mother wants to tell her daughter about a curse. No mother wants to dwell on the nature of a debt about to be collected. The first mother, that intrepid girl who laughed at a phantom courtier, and who defied the Empress, would never have told her children of the debt, had it not been for the were-tigers that pawed the trees surrounding their house at night, and roared the children to fretful sleep with their oddly soporific promises of retribution. She would have wanted them to have the autonomy of choice. But her progeny did have choice, and they did have the happy, normal lives the first mother wanted for her descendants. But it was also a choice tinged with knowledge of the debt.
No daughter has ever yearned to be the debt that would be collected. No daughter but Cempaka, who was named for the bloom that yearned for holy ascension. Perhaps that too was her choice, to be claimed. Or perhaps that was the wickedly subtle nature of phantom punishments—creating prey who would eternally long to be preyed upon. This is particularly true if they had partaken of the fruit of paradise.
– 4 –
Betel-nut stained her teeth red. She clenched her gnarled fingers and remembered when her body was still supple and taut beneath the thin covering of her sarong and cotton top. She would make this brew that her grandmother made before her the night she disappeared from sight. It had been conjectured that the women of their family possessed another gift from their bunian ancestor, that of shape-changing. It was a conjecture that Cempaka was willing to test.
She dug up another root, placing it inside a bundled-up sarong, along with the other acquisitions of the day. The brew required an invocation. That much she remembered. It may or may not have changed over the years but the effects remained. The ingredients were varied: bile of the earth, mother’s tongue, cat’s whiskers, leaves of longevity, gourd of the toad.
She remembered the first time she had come face to face with Sang Rimau. It had been shortly after her beloved had married a girl of his family’s choice. She had been gathering roots at midnight with a half-formed intention of making the brew. There had been little to betray the were-tiger’s presence. His eyes had gleamed, standing out in the uninterrupted darkness of a forest’s night.
The tiger made a yawning sound that trembled the ground.
The eyes blinked. They stared at each other, Cempaka breathless, the tiger still. It was twice as large as an ordinary tiger, its stripes slanting in the opposite direction. Then, those feral, almost floating lamps in the dark disappeared. Had it moved on, or was it moving closer? She waited for his teeth, still breathless. She waited but there was no sharp, savage pain. There was no end as soft fur sank into her at the same time as sharp teeth.
Cempaka soon realized that Sang Rimau had not come for her. It had other prey in its sight. A scream was soon followed by the wet, crunching sound of mauling. Rather perversely, Cempaka felt rejected by the were-tiger. It could have saved her the need to make a brew, if it would only scar her. Perhaps she would have been like the old shaman in the nearby village, one of the tiger-folk as well. Perhaps she would see the kinds of visions the shaman sees, and have more power then. Perhaps they would bring her milk and salt in saucers as offerings, watching her lap with her tongue as she became the most powerful being that roamed the forests.
She visualized Sang Rimau’s stripes and lean muscles beneath that glossy coat, yearning for it even more than she had ever yearned for her phantom ancestry.
Back home, she mixed the brew feverishly. She threw away more than one flawed batch. She ventured into the forest again and again to dig for roots and leaves. On other days, she foraged for dried twigs and bones to be ground in her pestle and mortar carved from rock. To bind the mixture together, she hunted the civet cat for its musk and bodily fluids. She then fashioned new incantations that wove together the energies of the four elements.
Naturally, she failed.
***
That had been years ago, and before many, many hundred versions of this brew. Every time she felt like giving up, she would come face to face with the were-tiger, reminding her of what had started the night her beloved had wed. Always, they faced off. Always, the were-tiger left. She was convinced it was the same were-tiger, periodically keeping her company since the night her solitude was confirmed. Cempaka’s beloved came from a righteous family who were members of the New Faithful. There was a clash and faith won over love. She was part of the superstitions they followed but refused to acknowledge.
Her beloved was now buried in the same graveyard that had accepted the bodies of his children. She sometimes saw his grandchildren, now grown and with families of their own, at village kenduris, religious gatherings where the men would cook huge vats full of curried goat meat and banana hearts, while the women worked together to prepare other dishes. Cempaka hovered at the fringes of such communal gatherings, poised in a society torn between honouring the elderly, the customs of their ancestors and those of their renewed religious imperatives.
***
The medicine woman took a sip of the bitter brew and waited for some sign of a change to manifest. The brew was thick, bitter and almost painful in its astringency. She felt it slide into her body, the pain contorting her form, rending her insides from left to right. Claws began to jut out of her fingers. Stripes furred their way out of her skin and her spine. Her whiskers grew, pushing her face outward, creating jowls more pronounced than those bequeathed by advanced years.
Her muscles knit closer together, becoming compact and lean. The hunger for blood that moved through her was rivalled by a vital need to frolic through the trees, roll about on the loamy ground, and to tongue long, luxurious swathes through sylvan salt licks. The burning eyes etched on the insides of her lids moved into her pupils, becoming her own. She went outdoors into the waiting rainforest, bounding away on all fours from her ancestral home. There was no one left to wonder or to care. Muscles rippling underneath her coat, she danced deeper into the dream of the rainforest.
***
With
her disappearance came the stories. Rumours and speculations were the way of her people, after all. Rumours of her bunian origin, rumours that perhaps one of her old lovers had murdered her in some old vendetta. There were some who claimed her familiars had finally devoured her. These rumours disappeared after World War II became more than just hearsay. Troops began to mobilize, and boys were pressed from every village to help the colonizers prepare. There was no time to think of who would be the new medicine woman, or to look for a shaman or witch-doctor to utter incantations for them.
A bomb took half of the village population, destroying their crops. What the bomb did not destroy, the Japanese occupied. The Belum-Temenggor rainforest’s tranquility was marred by the war. Later, it was infiltrated by humans who fought for the greater glory of the socialist creed. The forest witnessed pain, blood and massacre. More pain than any forest should ever have to witness. But it was mostly indifferent.
Also indifferent was the medicine woman.
She was a were-tiger, running between the shadows of trees as she sought the kingdom of the bunian, seeking atonement for her ancestor’s escape, even though she never learned why he had been so desperate to do so. She was the last living descendent, and so she was sure they would find her if she failed to find them. Every fairy tale has its debt, and a debtor waiting to collect. She was prepared for them, for she was not alone.
Two were-tigers could easily defeat any fairy tale.
Your Right Arm(Short story)
by Nin Harris
Clarkesworld Magazine
His name was Jagdeep. He did not believe in ghosts.
***
“Did you kill the last human?” Teng asked, her eyes avid, curiosity making her quiver. Rasakhi knew the question was inevitable, but this did not stop the sigh. Four of Teng’s hind-legs wove indigo and tan-dyed mengkuang strips into the mats that were everywhere on the nursery ship. Teng shivered as she worked. Rasakhi did not bother to remind her that the cold was just an illusion, encased as Teng was in a silver praying-mantis chassis. Rasakhi had evaded cybernetic enhancement her whole life, fearful of that gap between her consciousness and the supplemented consciousness of augmented parts.
It was always cold on this ship.
Rasakhi welcomed the chill. It reminded her that she was still encased in flesh, failing though it was.
“I lived with him, as you well know,” she said to Teng. No one would remember her triumphs as a navigator. Everyone would remember her in relation to the last human.
“But do you remember how he died? Did you kill him?” Teng asked again, seemingly unaware that she was being repetitive.
Rasakhi looked away from the engineer. Just beyond them, fledgling apsaras moved marbles from groove to groove carved into long congkak boards, a game they had taken with them from the nusantara. On a sanded platform, other children played hopscotch, jumping from square to square as they sang counting songs Rasakhi had taught them. Above them, the lights glowed a muted green, soothing optically enhanced eyes that were trained to look for patterns in messages that floated before them all of the time, but for more material things, like chairs, and corners. The earliest engineers quickly learned the importance of adjusting the lighting on every ship.
“Jagdeep was running from the force that imploded the last human colony. We did not do that. It was not in our best interests to drive humans into extinction. It’s far better for you to ask if I remember the first time I met him. The first time I met him was the day that Jagdeep was put into a humanoid biotech replacement unit. I do not even know if he had any humanity left on the day our eyes first met.”
Teng’s look was inquisitive to the point of intrusion. The apsara-hybrid engineer had transferred to Rasakhi’s sector three months ago, and had not wasted time in befriending the retired navigator who ran the nursery ship. She seemed completely insensible to the fact that her presence was not wanted. Teng was not the first and would likely not be the last who would want to unearth the secret behind Rasakhi’s life with Jagdeep.
“Did you love him, Rasakhi?”
“I am surprised by the question, Teng. Love is a human emotion. It is not an emotion we are conditioned to acknowledge. How do you go from asking if I killed him to asking if I loved him? I don’t understand these wild connections you’re making.”
“Apsaras were bred for love on the world we came from,” Teng said, her visored eyes insistent upon knowing the truth, “we were also bred to kill the things we love.”
“Yes, apsaras are also voluptuous dancers who are somehow lighter than air. We also shimmer when we dance.” Rasakhi said with some irony, throwing Teng a wintry look. “Say rather, that we were bred for the pleasure of humans. Love is a different thing altogether.”
“I have never shimmered in my life, not even when I had a complete apsara body,” Teng said, smiling, “but it is true. They bred us from the bunian that they stole to serve as court-dancers and companions. But that means that we have human DNA, don’t we?”
“We are not trained and conditioned to acknowledge human emotions,” Rasakhi said.
“Have you truly never loved, Rasakhi?” Teng sounded wistful. Rasakhi reminded herself of how young the engineer was. Be patient, be gentle, she told herself.
“If we feel an emotion, how do we label it? The way that humans label such things? I know amusement. I know that I am happy with companionship. I know what it feels to have a void when someone has left you. I do not know if that is the same as knowing love.”
Teng said, “We do not mate. We used to, when humans were necessary. But then they became redundant, and so did biological functions.”
“Well then. There’s your answer. Why do you ask me about an emotion that is redundant to our kind? The bunian ensured that none of us would ever need to mate again. Not the bunian, not the apsara, nor our sisters, the bird-clawed Khinnaree. All we require is companionship, and community. We have the consensus, we have the engineering wherewithal to ensure that we shall never go extinct. So why would we have a need to kill?”
Teng looked bashful, “The songs the humans sing about love. They are so sad and so beautiful. There are so many of those songs in the Sound Library. I listen, and it makes me feel strange. I always wondered how it actually felt. I tried talking to the converted humans but in their biotech systems they have forgotten all of those things.”
Rasakhi’s obsidian eyes softened as she looked at the younger apsara, “They are no longer what they used to be. Upon conversion, consciousness changes. They no longer have the depth perception required to parse emotions, or sense-data. Emotions, if they exist, exist as phantom limbs. As ghosts. The memory of an emotion, simulated upon cue. And yet, these memories are the backbone of our colony’s cultures.”
***
We had time before that last asteroid obliterated earth. Ample time to prepare.
The sun was younger when we first took to the skies in our first machines, made of wood and bronze, borne upwards by a fleet of armored garuda. We had no need of science then, we were fueled by sakti and by the benedictions of the holy bird, the Jentayu. This was not to last, as our magics faded, and we learned that we too, needed to master science and engineering.
The sun was older when the first super giant solar flare knocked out our strongest shield. For millennia, we had escaped the path of comets and asteroids. Narrow misses.
Sudden solar flares that could have knocked out our power supplies, and our magical reserves. The solar flares, and all manner of cosmic exigencies failed, because we worked overtime. All of us. The Khinnaree admirals, the bunian and apsara engineers.
We were safe until the sakti that held our shields up got weaker and weaker, while the asteroids came by more frequently.
***
I do not remember the first navigator who guided the first fleet of ships strong enough to transport all of us and all of the humans away from the solar system. I do not remember the day when humans were made aware of our existence. I do not remem
ber the first human fleet of ships, or the first space war between our kind and the humans, several solar systems away from earth. But I remember accounts of that exodus. I remember enough to tell you about it as though I was there. Even if I must supplement that account with details of my own imagined recollection.
***
Jagdeep was the last human colonist. He had taken the last fighter pod, and had crashed into our fleet. He sustained serious injuries. This was not a fleet of soldiers. We were navigators and scientists. We were cybernetic engineers. We were astro-botanists and DNA scientists. There was no need to harvest his DNA immediately—the bunian and apsaras had evolved long ago. They had augmented themselves, and could replicate well enough. There was no need to do anything to the last human, except to watch him die.
Or to allow him to live.
Mercy was not a thing exclusive to humans.
***
The bunian, the apsara, and the Khinnaree had long learned that their bodies had attributes that allowed them to flow easier into the cybernetic interfaces built by the human fleets. They had adapted easier to it, and their engineers had pillaged human technology in order to forge better bodies for members of their colony who had lost their limbs. They began to do the same for the humans that they had rescued or had vanquished.
***
The first night we met, I watched as the engineers fitted Jagdeep to the biotech units that replaced his left arm and the entire side of his torso that had been incinerated when his ship crashed into our fleet. It was a painful process. He cried, often. I held his right hand as he looked pleadingly up at me, for mercy, for death. They replaced his limbs, one by one. Except for his right arm.
His right hand, to hold my own.
We used a humanoid frame for his body. He did not choose, like you, to be in an insectoid carapace. He clung on to his humanity. Jagdeep did not take to the replacements as easily as the others. He was too weak, too fragile.