Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  Kaffa Brewcourt. I stepped up to the glass and peered inside, heart thudding. The kaffahouse was lit with low hanging lights; the high ceilings and peeling plaster walls fell away into shadow. Marble tables stood in a ragged line and a piano with keys like yellowed teeth squatted in one corner. A pale, ox-boned proprietor slouched behind the dimly lit bar, polishing chipped porcelain cups with a discoloured rag. No sign of Attia. I glanced at my timepiece. Still early.

  The door squealed as I pushed it open. Hot air and the smell of roasting beans and stale cigarettes. I stepped cautiously up to the bar. The proprietor did not look up as I sat, just thudded over to a brass machine that groaned and spat steaming kaffa into a small white cup. I spared a glance around the room. Empty but for a large man in the back corner, sweeping again and again the same bit of floor. The proprietor turned back to me, rattled a cup and saucer onto the bar.

  “Thanks,” I muttered. 22:01. No Attia. I fought off a shiver. I thought of the last time I was supposed to have met her in a kaffahouse. She hadn’t arrived then either.

  I took a shaking sip of kaffa and reached for a ring-stained newspaper that had been left on the counter. Bold black headlines proclaimed heightened tensions along the New Commonwealth’s continent-spanning border with the People’s Mandate, the state of arms purchases from the long broken away colonies across the ocean in Nova Roma, and the newest ever increasing production quotas. It didn’t take much subtlety to read the subtext: yet another war with the Mandate was looming.

  Someone stepped into my field of vision. “More kaffa?”

  A shadow fell over me: a thickset man with deepset eyes. The one from the back corner. I hadn’t heard him move. I flicked my gaze down to my cup of thick kaffa, which was still more than half full; along the bar, where the proprietor was now nowhere to be seen.

  It all slotted into place with brilliant and icy clarity: the typed letter, the too-empty public house, the proprietor’s strange attitude, the truck idling outside…That letter wasn’t from Attia. She wasn’t coming.

  After all these years hiding, the Commissariat had found me.

  “No,” I managed. I snaked a hand across the table towards the small porcelain cup—the closest thing I could see to a weapon.

  “I insist,” he said.

  My hand found the saucer. I didn’t plan my next move. I lurched back in my stool and flung the cup of steaming kaffa at his face. The thickset man swore and stumbled back, steaming black liquid running down his cheeks. The cup bounced off his head and then exploded on the tiled floor. Still holding the saucer I smashed it against the counter and grabbed hold of the largest piece: a jagged half-crescent which I swung at him like a blade.

  His meaty palm caught my wrist with a wet slap.

  And then from behind, unseen hands snatching me roughly by the shoulders.

  “Easy,” said a high quiet voice. “We just want to tal—”

  Gloved hands were holding my shoulders. I twisted my wrist half-free and then cranked my neck. I bit down.

  “Shit!” said a not-so-quiet voice behind me.

  “Put him out,” the thickset man growled.

  Barely a moment to cry out before being shoved to the ground. In the gap between that first push and the moment when my face hit the ground, my mind raced through the twenty-some years that I'd spent on the run—the failed relationships, the arms-length friendships (my landlord Viktor, with whom I shared a single nod once every day, as close a friend as anybody) and the days and days spent with my head down at the electrical station, trying hard to not to be noticed, shovelling coal into a high pressure boiler that roared hot and burned nearly as bright as dragonfire.

  A wet boot pinning my cheek to the sticky, sweet-smelling floor; a black burlap hood that reeked of stale sweat. And then a needle lancing my arm, pain more bludgeon than prick, and lightness spreading through my body, blooming behind my nose and eyes and mouth.

  “Time to go, Artur.”

  ***

  EXCERPT FROM, “ON DRACI AND REVOLUTION”

  (CENSOR’S COPY, REDACTED)

  Self-satisfied Imperial historians called the two millennia of uneasy peace that existed between Roma and Cháng’ān the Pax Draci. We accept now that these two words are a lie, do nothing to convey the suffering that the two imperial powers wrought upon their own people. And yet in the bloody lie there is some gleaming black bone of truth.

  ***

  2

  Attia. So much of my life had revolved about her. Since those days when we’d first met, young students at the University with not much in common but a hatred for the Commonwealth, and the Party; for every apparatus that had risen up to replace the Emperor, the Patricians, and their dragons. Not uncommon sentiments in Universities during those days, which was how we’d found ourselves at a protest that became a riot that now stood like a firewall between the two halves of my life.

  Even now, all these years later, I found myself trapped in her gravity. Even now I dreamed of her. Of course I did. We were at a party I was hosting with my roommate Sina, and she was perched atop a wing-backed chair. In this dream she seemed luminescent against the shadowed walls of my squalid walkup. She was scrawling left-handed notes in a ubiquitous copy of Wagner’s Green Book, the book that held the living word of the Party. But the notes she crammed into the margins of revolution were not words but tightly packed equations—numbers I recognized dancing with strange ideograms I didn't.

  Was this even sleep? Or did I lurch through some soporific induced hallucination? It was a dream and it was a memory. Or it was the liminal area between. The weeping walls of the garret seemed to fall away vertiginously, though the other students who crammed the party and chattered in some lost Vandalic dialect that I couldn’t quite decode didn’t seem to notice. This was still the early days of the revolution, some part of me realized, long before the chaos in Aelia Capitolina, those first years after the Emperor had been shot in the crypts beneath the Palatium Magnum and the last dragons had been sieved with hot bullets by squads of Revolutionary Guard. This was the first night I’d met her. Or some version of it.

  And then I was looking her in the eyes, mismatched eyes, one a murky sort of green, the other dark and completely dilated (she was nearly blind on that side, I would learn later). She appeared in my dream as I remembered first seeing her: small and fairly bony, her body disappearing into the over-large tunic suit that hung about her shoulders. I realized with a start that I looked as I do now, and laughed.

  Hot wind on my back. I turned. The wall behind me had fallen away completely, and thrusting a feathered, prehistoric head from the fog that grew beyond was a dragon. It opened its mouth, revealing triple-rows of jagged teeth. A smell like kerosene and spider-webs and old book glue. Its plumage glimmered red and gold and green. All the party guests continued their discussions, ignoring the massive, autocar sized head that heaved into the cramped garret. They had all, I noticed suddenly, been burnt black, charred meatsticks oozing blood and pus from their seared flesh. Their eyelids had been scorched away, so they looked at each other with expressions of constant surprise.

  “The dragons are dead, Gaius,” Attia said. “We killed them all.”

  The dragon pushed its head through the living room until it was so close I could feel heat radiating from emerald and sapphire down that covered its snout and glinted in the bronzed light. This was a Nile Dragon, and it looked nothing like the creatures of string and wire that jerked across the screen in those Committee sanctioned historicals that featured Otto Marx as the heroic Octavian, making his doomed stand against the black powers of Antonius and his mount Apophis. This felt real, as real as the dragons who had been shot to death in the air above the Bautai plateau, in pens beneath patrician mansions. Who died roaring at the chattering of machine guns, the buzzing of warplanes, the winking lights of tracer fire.

  The jaw of the beast yawned wide and hot fire spewed forth, so bright that everything became white light and heat

  Then Attia
was gone and I spoke words I couldn’t fathom into a black room. I couldn’t even hear what I was saying. My mouth was dry and my words sounded like drunken mumblings in my own ears. I stopped speaking abruptly, aware suddenly of how much my entire body hurt. My arm throbbed. I turned my head, and realized that it wasn’t the room that was black, but rather the hood draped over my head.

  It all flooded back. I cried out.

  I sat in a hard wood chair, hands bound tight behind my back. I could hear an electrical hum and the occasional soft thud of heeled boots. Light spots danced in the hooded darkness. But beyond the dull pain lancing through my head, all I felt was numb surprise.

  I thought back to Attia’s letter that for all I knew was still in my coat pocket. How could I have been so stupid, to think it was her? She had left me more than twenty years ago.

  "Gaius Plebius," said a nasal voice.

  Gaius was dead, killed during the riots in Aelia Capitolina. I was Artur now. The hood came off in a rush and I blinked into a bank of high-powered lights.

  "My name is Artur.” My words sounded slurred. I might as well hold onto that, though I had no idea how much I’d said already, mumbling away in a drug-induced lunacy.

  Faint movement on the far side of the room. A mechanical lever clanked down and two of the lights popped off, leaving behind only the ghostly orange of cooling filament wire.

  Two figures resolved from the lessened glare, both staring at me from across a low table made of polished wood.

  I blinked and looked around. I had expected to find myself in a concrete interrogation room with discoloured walls and a rusted iron door. Instead I seemed to be in some kind of living room—an apartment or hotel I couldn’t quite be sure. Light walls and grey carpets; beachwood accented furniture and coarse grey upholstery; thick white curtains filtering bronze streetlight.

  What was I doing here? I turned to the two figures on the sofa across from me. A man who was seated and above him a tall woman with her arms clasped behind her back. The pair of them wore grey. A floodlight stood on a tripod behind them, its cable snaking to an outlet on the wall beneath a white radiator.

  “Awake now, I see.” The man was looking intently in my eyes. For signs of awareness, I realized belatedly.

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in the Grand Whitebottom Hotel,” he said. “I’m sorry that the room is not so grand as it once was. Such are the times, Gaius.”

  “That’s not my name.” This had to be some trick. Some kind of interrogation technique. The Commissariat’s Internal Security Directorate was shrouded in mystery and rumour, but everyone agreed they were subtle. And deadly. I wasn’t going to admit to anything. I was, after all, still tied to a chair.

  The man sighed, looked up at the woman standing beside him. She showed no reaction. The man was pale and had dressed in the drab uniform of a Commissariat major (brass buttons, red piping, bright green New Commonwealth flag on the collar) and the woman—Han, apparently, which made her a strange sight standing beside this particular man—wore a party tunic-suit with a pointed collar that was cinched tightly to her throat. They were a contrast in shapes: him short and formed something like a tortoise, with a tiny shrivelled head and a body that ballooned out at the waist, her tall with broad shoulders and a broad face, long black hair tied into a tight tail. She had large calloused hands, and kept her eyes turned down towards them, never looking at me directly.

  The man slid two fotos out of a hemp folder and placed them on the table before me. "Gaius Plebius,” the Major said for a third time. “A carded member of the Ravenna Student Continuance Council. Wanted for counter-revolutionary activities. A known instigator during the Aelia Capitolina riots."

  I had a brief image of Attia, there, on a street filled with blood and screaming, smoking rifling clenched in too-tiny hands.

  I found myself leaning forward. The foto was black and white, grainy, but still intelligible: a young man sitting alone in a kaffahouse. I felt my heart lurch. The figure in the image looked twenty years younger and much thinner than the reflection I saw every morning in the cracked mirror of my one-room flat. I recognized the kaffahouse too, the same one in Aelia Capitolina where I’d laid low for three days, hiding, waiting for Attia.

  I’d lost her there amid the blood and smoke and screaming. I’d run through those mad streets to a backwater kaffahouse where we’d agreed to meet in case we became separated. I’d waited in that kaffahouse three days, looking up each time the door opened, hoping vainly to see her walk back into my life, hoping vainly that she hadn’t been arrested or killed. But of course she never had. In the end I’d fled, taken a new name, and gone into hiding. In my heart I’d thought of her as dead.

  Shock still thrummed through my body, reverberated down every nerve. They had known I was there, in Aelia Capitolina, in that kaffahouse, waiting for her. Why hadn’t they arrested me? “Where did you get that?" I whispered.

  He started pulling more fotos from his folder. With each new print I saw that same man, the same reflection, but ageing as the prints and the years went by—the last twenty years of my life spread out there on the table

  I almost couldn’t breathe. I’d been hiding from the Commissariat for twenty years, certain that they would arrest me if they ever found me. That I would be sent to the northern labour camps and worked to death like so many friends I’d had. But they’d known. They’d always known. They’d followed me from afar for years. Why?

  "Song, would you untie Gaius please?"

  The woman—her name was Song, apparently—frowned at the major and then with a blurred movement whipped out a sling blade from some hidden sheath. She paced around and sliced the ropes that bound my hands. When she leaned close I caught the scent of stale tobacco. Why were they untying me?

  "I’ll be honest," the Major said, "we aren't much interested in what you did or did not do twenty years ago. This all would have been much easier if you hadn’t tried to kill poor Charlez with a saucer." The Major’s smile revealed a glittering nest of amalgam fillings that wove through his teeth. "We can assure you that if we were from the Political Directorate you wouldn’t have even have had the chance to defend yourself."

  I struggled to follow what he was saying. The Commissariat Political Directorate protected the state from sedition and counter-revolutionary activities—the crimes I was guilty of. So if these two weren’t members of the Political Directorate…"Who are you?"

  "We're with the Primary Directorate.”

  The second true shock since I’d woken. Primary Directorate. Foreign Intelligence. Spies. What would spies want with me?

  "We brought you here," the Major said, as if in answer to my question, "because we need your help."

  The room, my life, my understanding of the word, all of it wobbled. What was happening here? A widening gulf between expectation and result. “Why—I mean…For what?”

  Song stared at her strong hands. Flexed them. She still hadn’t looked up at me. The Major kept on smiling.

  "When was the last time you saw Attia Vitellia?"

  I felt my gut twist. The telegram. They had sent it.

  "We know you were both at the riots,” the Major said. “We know that you were lovers."

  Lovers. Once. Old betrayals die hard. “The last time I saw her,” I said, “She was on the front page of The Truth.”

  That had been the final knife. Years after the riots, years after thinking her dead, I’d woken one morning to see her smiling face with its mismatched eyes splashed across the front page of the party newspaper. There she was, the woman I’d loved, who I’d thought hated the party as much as she loved me, shaking hands with some minor functionary. A desperate scan of the article revealed that she had become a magistra at one of the state universities and was being awarded a medal for some breakthrough she’d managed in physics. The fact that she was still alive was enough of a shock. But there she was: working for the Central Committee. She hadn’t died or been captured. She’d betrayed me, our fr
iends, everything we believed in, for the sake of her fucking work. If any vestige of Gaius had remained, that had killed him.

  The Major leaned back and smiled a little bit. "When did you last speak to her?”

  “The riot,” I knew that was an admission. At this point I didn’t care. I’d followed her from a distance, as she published her papers and became one of the most famous physicists of her age. But I couldn’t bring myself to do more than that. I couldn’t bring myself to confront her.

  Too afraid…

  “What does any of this have to do with her?” My anger thrummed through me, vibrating along every nerve.

  The Major flitted his gaze up to Song and she responded by finally meeting my eyes. "There’s no reason for you to know this,” she said, “but five years ago theoretical metallurgist Attia Vitellia defected to the Mandate government."

  A thought and a pang, one that I recognized as both familiar and irrational. And yet there it was: how could she have left without me? We’d often spoken of leaving the New Commonwealth altogether, to forge a new life in Nova Roma, or even maybe the Mandate. I gritted my teeth. But that was twenty years ago. She left because she doesn’t give a shit about you.

  The major adjusted the round spectacles on his nose. “At least that’s what everyone but Song, myself, and now you believes.” The Major straightened in the sofa. “Vitellia has, for each of those last five years, been working with us. Spying for us. She's been deep cover on the inside of a top-secret Mandate military project in the Taqlar Makan desert."

  Slowly I came back out of the past, out of the bitterness that waited there. I came back into the cold white hotel room. For the first time I noticed that the Major seemed worried. “What?” I said.

  The Major sighed. “She’s a double agent. Attia is our best scientist, and the Mandate were all too willing to believe that she wanted to defect. She’s been feeding us military secrets for years.”

  Song pursed her lips unhappily. "About a month ago Vitellia came to me.” I turned my gaze to her. She spoke perfect Gothic, which shouldn’t have surprised me but did.