Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors
Page 93
When he could walk, we would walk. I brought him to the sprawling courtyard in my apartments. I astonished him with the grandeur of our plantations and of the ecosystems we had replicated and preserved. And he taught me of the ways of planting that they had improved upon.
And he would tell me things about his life.
He was trained as a fighter pilot, but he yearned to be a gardener. They had greenhouses in their fleet. Small, crude things built into abandoned storage halls. They grew yams, and water spinach, and tapioca. Some even tried to cultivate rice, but it was a very different kind of rice from the paddy fields of earth. We tried to improve on that, Jagdeep and I. We grew lentils and spices. He cooked for me dhal curries and parathas. Out of respect for my mate, I too became vegetarian.
We were happy.
We lived together, apsara and human, the first such union since our combined fleets had left earth’s solar system.
And the last.
***
We turned their kind into hybrids. They thanked us, one by one, as we switched them off as humans. We connected their consciousnesses to various biotech parts if they were still functional, or to our monolithic mainframes when nothing could be saved of their bodies. Their sakti bolstered our own embodied magics. We watched as consciousness dissipated, to be replaced by pattern recognition and simulacra of consciousness that became our communications systems between ships. They became bodies that could not decay. We harvested not just DNA from their bodies, but sakti, that force that had fueled our floating cities on earth, and kept them invisible to human eyes.
When age took first his kidneys, and then disease gradually weakened his heart, we knew the engineers would come for him. It was their last chance to get the last batch of pure human DNA, and of human sakti. They would attach his consciousness to one of the monoliths that fueled our ships and our communication systems. He would live on in the fleet.
On that last night, we sat together on my bed, his right hand in my left hand. I kissed him on the mouth gently, so as not to exert his heart. His eyes begged me again.
He asked me to smother him with a pillow, to do anything before they severed him completely from humanity, before his heart was replaced the way his kidneys had been replaced, before his brain was severed from his body.
***
“Did you do it? Did you snuff him out?” Teng’s silver praying mantis fore-legs were busy at work on a second mat, but her eyes were hungry. Rasakhi’s softening regard towards Teng was halted by those eyes.
She said, “Why do you suppose we do this? Why do we reproduce a past none of us actually know? Why do we memorialize the humans that we have turned into machines?”
Teng shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Why do you ask me questions about remembrance, and of love, when you do not even bother to ask why we play congkak, and weave mengkuang and rattan mats, long after they have lost their relevance? Why do you ask me if I killed the last human when we continue to profit from their systemic death? I did not kill the last human, Teng. We did that.”
***
I could not smother him. I wept in his arms, both organic and inorganic. He cried silently into my hair. We fell asleep. In the morning they came for him. I clung to him and screamed into their faces. His eyes begged at me.
I scrambled and fought them all: bunian, apsara, claw-footed Khinnaree. Yes, even the Khinnaree in full-berserk mode. I kicked, I bit at them.
Perhaps I have Khinnaree blood somewhere in my ancestry too.
His heart expired during the struggle.
***
They confined me in my quarters for a year.
***
I did not kill the last human, we killed him.
They taught us how to kill. They taught us how to enslave, how to colonize, how to exploit.
A long time ago, when the first bunian princess was stolen by the first man who dragged her away from her celestial robes, we learned the price of being valued for how we looked.
A long time ago we learned to transform into tigers, into owls, into trees to hide from them. We learned how to grow wings, to become swan-maidens and owl-vampires. Some of us turned into the chicken-feet Khinnaree of the Himmapan. Some of us became nenek kebayan, old women of the jungle who drugged wicked men with malicious potions and dispensed sage advice to virtuous warriors.
We learned to build machines, to live in the sky. We learned to harvest the sakti that made us beautiful and powerful. We used that celestial force to create weapons and ways in which to ensure we would never again be stolen.
We stole back the women they stole from us, the ones they bred with humans to create apsaras, my ancestors. We stole their kind to propagate our own. We became an empire of bunian, apsaras, and Khinnarees.
We did not learn love from the humans. We did learn nostalgia, that step-cousin of memory. But our relationship with humans has always been complex, for they are bred into us.
We used our technology to protect them as well. To protect the planet we shared.
***
Jagdeep gave me comfort. I held on to the memory of that comfort for a very long time in the year that they had me confined. I yearned to return to his arms, to touch his right arm, to cradle his right palm within the warmth of my own. I knew that what was left of him was now encased in a silver cylinder, with no surface of skin left for me to touch. With no consciousness, no qualia left to recognize what we shared.
All that was left of him were algorithms and the processing of external stimuli. Simulating sentience.
***
He learned from me the apsara ways of silence, and of meditation. We meditated a lot when we did not work in the gardens and plantations together.
Those human songs you asked me about?
He sang some of them for me as I strung together cempaka chains for our mutual amusement.
***
When they released me from confinement, I was honourably discharged. Retired. They sent me here to be a nursemaid to fledgling apsaras.
***
Teng watched as the aging apsara stood up, walking towards the wall that showed them the stars surrounding the void that was a dead galaxy.
“He fuels this ship,” Rasakhi said.
“I know,” Teng said, “I tend to his unit. It is the strangest thing, his unit. It is always so cold. He sometimes speaks. But often he does not.”
Ah. Rasakhi gave the younger woman a speculative look. She said, “All of the humans that we captured or rescued did not believe in ghosts. So strange, considering that we exist, and now they don’t, except as hybrids, a blend between machine, apsara DNA, and human parts. They would have done the same to Jagdeep, except that his body had deteriorated beyond help. And in that last struggle, his heart expired. They punished me for that. Not for killing him. He would have made a far more superior model if he possessed a functioning heart.”
Teng shivered.
“It’s getting even colder. How is that possible? I keep double-checking the calibrations on the heating system. They’re always in order.”
“It’s always cold on this ship. It will always be this cold."
Rasakhi did not articulate the reasons behind the temperature. It was not needed. She met Teng's eyes. In the end, this at least was understood.
C.A. Hawksmoor
http://www.cahawksmoor.com
Y Brenin(Novelette)
by C.A. Hawksmoor
Originally published by Beneath Ceaseless Skies
An eagle turned in a low gyre over the battlefield. The red and cloying earth churned with rain and blood, turning everything to ochre in the light of a late summer. The sound of a hundred tiny battles between life and death caught in the arms of the valley.
The knight pressed through the crush of the fighting and the fallen. He fought as sunset swept unminded towards evening. Until the air itself seemed to thicken every sound and movement. And still the Red King did not yield.
Some long-forgotten blow had sheared the dulled gold armour of the Red King's cuisse, black blood boiling through torn metal embossed with golden flowers. He stumbled in the red mud like a dying calf. And still he did not yield.
The knight bulled forwards with his shield, stubbornness and momentum overawing the Red King's footing and throwing him over the body of a dying horse. The knight drew his sword back to make the killing blow. It took him some time to realise that his arm would not obey. He stood still as a golem shaped from blood-red clay. Only moving to draw deep gulps of air into his lungs.
The Red King's sword fell from his hand, and he fumbled with shaking fingers at the catches of his helm. His hair and beard were the colour of polished mahogany, but his eyes were pupiless, bottomless black.
"What are your orders?" he said. "What does my brother say is to be done with me, Ser…"
"Mercher."
The knight removed his own helm. His thoughts ached for the dirty scrap of paper secured behind his breastplate. He knew its words by heart, but the touch of the paper against his skin gave him comfort.
"The Edling of the North would have me kill you," the knight said.
And take everything from the towns, his lord's message ordered. Empty their stores. The North must eat.
The eithin aur on the Red King's armour caught the last of the day's light, gold petals of hammered metal glinting. The knight's hand reached involuntarily for its mirror-image, shaped into his own breastplate. The eagle felt its way through the blue emptiness above them, with a mind as clear as polished glass held up before the sun.
The knight was a creature forged of the same base elements: his flesh and his bones, the blade in his hand, all birthed out of the belly of the same earth. The same clarity of purpose hammered clean through him.
He seized the Red King's shoulder and wrenched him to his feet.
"Begin walking," he said, turning towards the ancient forest that rolled over the foothills, beyond the slow quiet seeping out into the battlefield.
***
They stopped quite close to morning, beside an ancient trackway that had led them to a clearing by the river. The path curved over a huge slab of grey stone that spanned the water, pitted and worn with a thousand years of feet and wheels and weather beneath the moss and lichen. On the other side, the track cut up over the bank and disappeared back into the woods.
The knight knelt beside the stream and washed the sweat and dirt out of his hair while his courser drank deeply beside him. He spread his hands and submerged them in the river until bloody trails of red earth streamed from the knuckles of his gauntlets. The sky glanced blue through sunburned leaves, and early light caught on the metal in the water.
"It is a dangerous thing for a knight to defy his lord," the Red King said from the shadow of a great old elm. He worked an arrowhead from his armour and lashed it onto a straight arm of fallen wood. "Aren't you afraid of what my brother will do when he finds out that I am still alive?"
Red water dripped from the knight's hands and dissolved into the current. "And why should I be afraid of Edling Gwyn when I have the Red King at my back?"
"The Red King? It has been a long time since any northerner has called me that, boy. Who are your family?"
"I wouldn't know," the knight said. "I never had any."
The Red King took a limping step towards him, blood oozing from the torn metal on his thigh. When he came out from under the elm, he flinched and raised a hand to the sky. Tears spilled over his lashes and quickened down his cheeks.
He cannot stand the light, the knight thought. Something is wrong with his eyes. His lips parted to form a question, but the question never came.
The Red King cursed the sun and turned away, snatching up the arrow-headed spear and sliding down the bank into the shallows under the shadow of the tree.
The knight set his gauntlets down. "Are you going to try to kill me with that, Goch?"
"I was going to try and eat." The Red King tugged at the knots holding the arrowhead in place. "Unless you would rather that I starve. Where are you taking me? Do you even know?"
The knight unfastened the catches of his breastplate and laid his armour in the sun. Beneath it, his arming jacket was sweat-yellow and blood-black. "To Dinas Pair yr Arfaeth."
"Through the mountains?" The Red King drove the point of his spear into the water. "Taking North Road with the rest of your army would be safer."
"The rest of my army want you dead." The knight took his courser's bridle and untied the barding from around her neck. "And every town and village we passed through would rather free you. That does not sound as though it fits my definition of 'safer'."
The Red King crouched down in the water and clamped the thrashing salmon between his hands as it died on the point of his spear. He pulled it free and threw it up onto the bank. Far enough out of the water to suffocate.
"And what will you do with me when we reach the city, Ser Mercher?"
"I will bring you to the Edling of the North."
The salmon spasmed once and gaped for air. The Red King pulled himself up onto the bank and shelled its eyes into his mouth with his thumb. He pressed them between his teeth until they burst and nodded to the curl of parchment stowed in the hollow curve of the knight's breastplate. "It seems to me as though my brother would much rather you killed me," he said. "And pillaged my towns to feed his army."
"You should not have read it," the knight snapped, tugging too sharply at his courser's girth. The horse stamped and flashed the whites of her eyes.
"And when would I have done that? I didn't have to read it. I know my brother, Ser Mercher. Better than you do."
"You don't know anything," the knight growled, hauling the saddle off.
"I know that he would very much like to murder me and leave the south to ruin. I know that he expected you to break open our grain stores and find them overflowing with all the crops and livestock that we've taken, and that when he finds that they are bare, his cities will starve for the sake of his army just the same as mine."
"What else could he do?" the knight demanded. "Your people have been attacking our villages for months now. Why haven't you sent word of the blight to Dinas Pair?"
The Red King laughed and laid his hand upon the eithin aur forged into his armour. "You think that when my brother hears about the blight, he'll open his granaries and forget about this precious war of his? No, he will notice that we are weak. If he is smart, he will seize his chance to strike."
"Gwyn doesn't understand," the knight said. "You've given him no choice. When I bring him to you, you will tell him. Then he can decide what he wants to do with you."
He frowned and stared into the current. Then he can decide what he wants to do with both of us.
The Red King cut the salmon with the point of his makeshift spear and emptied out its innards. "Gwyn, is it now?" he said. "Tell me, Ser Mercher, just how familiar are you with my brother?"
"You should still your tongue," the knight spat, his aching shoulders bowstring-tight. "You may need it when we reach the capital, but you do not need your fingers."
The Red King sat back against the elm and linked his hands behind his head. Metal intertwined with flesh.
"If you are so certain that all of this is a terrible misunderstanding," the Red King said at last, "then why have you brought me all the way out here without so much as sending him word?"
The knight glanced up at the tessellated sky, clear blue behind the shifting leaves, and did not answer.
***
Through much of the next two days the Red King sat astride the knight's warhorse, raising his hand to block the sky from his black eyes while the knight walked along beside him. The wound on his leg stopped bleeding when they made camp, but overnight the flesh around it turned an ugly red.
On the second afternoon, it rained, starting in a few large drops that resounded on the knight's armour and pinged off into the grass and soon pouring straight down in the windless air.
The knight pulled the Red King from the saddle and set about removing the mare's caparison—a stained length of white cloth emblazoned with a thousand golden flowers. "We'll use the stone circle for cover."
"That isn't a circle." The Red King retrieved the body of the young hare they had snared the night before from behind the saddle. "It's a cairn. A group of farmers from Dirneb dug it up when I was a boy. It was full of ash and bones. Human and animal, all mixed in together."
The knight shivered and stared into the centre of the circle: a round and gaping mouth ringed with broken teeth and half-smothered by low cloud. "Help me with this."
The Red King took the edge of the caparison, and between them they dragged it to the cairn and struggled to spread the cloth over two of the leaning spears of stone as the rain drummed down a steady cold. The knight drove his sword into the ground to make a third hitch for the canopy and crawled beneath.
The Red King stooped out of the rain to sit beside him. "Do you even know where we are?"
The knight tried to make out the shapes of the dark mountains drifting in and out of the cloud beyond the edge of the caparison. "Heading north."
"You realise that most of the Drysau are between us and Dinas Pair," the Red King said calmly. "Do you know these mountains well, Ser Mercher? Because Gwyn and I grew up in them. And, if he were here now…" He turned the limp, furry body of the hare over in his hands. "He would be telling you the same as me."
The knight looked at him sidelong. "And what is that?"