by Anthology
So a few days later, I decided to try a new batch of hybrids. I liquidated the old crop and left the Golems to clean up. When I took the fire-hounds out for a run, I passed an open pit where the Golems were disposing of the non-viable human/hyena hybrids, and instead of a pile of refuse, everything was laid out carefully, covered with a light layer of dirt. And here's the crazy part: there were flowers scattered over them. At first I thought that the villagers had snuck onto the grounds of Maderagon Mansion, but security reported no breeches of the perimeter fence. So it must have been done by someone inside the compound.
Do I have your attention yet, Joachim?
The other twelve Golems in the brood appear normal. But this one—this Alpha-7—seems to almost show emotion. Oh, I know its face is hardened clay, but it manages to convey something with its, I don't know, its body language, I guess.
When I talked to your tech support people they said that when Golem broods are created, the feeder soul is divided into such small portions that emotions shouldn't register in the least with any single Golem. But then I got out the manual—or rather opened the file, since you guys are too cheap to provide a paper manual any more. And I found this gem:
"…In rare instances, instead of simply welling up and then dissipating, the energy of the emotion somehow becomes 'trapped' within the physical body of the Golem…Trapped emotions can become problematic, and should be addressed before contagion occurs."
Now what the hell does that mean? Because I'm wondering if a brood of 13 Golems is one soul divided up, and if one of them starts to feel emotions, is there a ripple effect with the others? If that's the case, Joachim, I'm going to want to have this entire brood replaced, and no, I will NOT be paying the shipping to return them.
What the? There's a breech in the hybrid containment area.
…all my work…Joachim, if your malfunctioning product—
What the hell is going on?
That…That should be security. Call me asap, Joachim, and let's get this thing resolved.
Coming! I'm coming you don't need to break down the—
End of voicemail.
Naru Dames Sundar
http://www.shardofstar.info
A Revolution In Four Courses(Short story)
by Naru Dames Sundar
Originally published by Daily Science Fiction, June 2015
First Course
Rathwan's in Kur district is a study in white on white, the floor tile and tables arranged in a tessellation of rectangles whose sides matched the holy ratio of seven to three. Rathwan's is empty today, save for one table, one lone guest—the Gedt general whose soldiers now pillage and loot the silk strewn arbors of the district.
Rathwan himself serves the dish to the general. The first course, serving to awaken memory, served on a square of carved bone. The conflict of square and rectangle is played out in the arrangement of paper thin shavings of smoked river fen. The delicate pink flesh of the fish is accompanied by thin curls of plum rind, their astringency balancing the inherent sweetness of the fillet.
The general's arm is swift as a sword thrust, scattering the plate and the subtle shavings of fen into the air. One of them lands on Rathwan's lips, hanging open in surprise. The general gets up and leaves, a smirk on his lips. At the door, he turns his head slightly toward Rathwan.
"So much effort for a plate of food, and so little when our swords clashed. That is why you have lost your city."
Rathwan watches the general melt into the sea of soldiers outside, and shudders.
Second Course
While the first course awakened a wash of memory, the second course was always of the now, living in the extremity of experience. Few Mahaali attend tonight's meal. Once the soldiers slipped away, the rats came, the rabble of Gedt nobility, hungry for property. They purchased the stacked quarters and marble tiled avenues of the district, famed for its brightly colored pennants and exquisite cuisine.
Rathwan serves Rakh es Fatai to a quizzical Gedt. Small orbs of seared rabbit skin filled with garlic smoke, tied by an aromatic twist of herbs. The textural transition when the orb bursts inside one's mouth is intended to signify moments in one's life when shifts and changes happen on the instant, like Kur district the day after the general left. So soon were the old banners and pendants hidden away. So quickly were the ceremonial candles of the great temple snuffed.
The Gedt customer complains to his friend as Rathwan walks away.
"I was told this was the finest establishment in the city, but it's so tired, so traditional. A little Gedt touch couldn't hurt, perhaps even more than a little."
Wine addled laughter follows. Rathwan watches the disappearing flower of Mahaali tradition, its petals peeling off into the wind.
Third Course
The Mahaali citizen is dressed in the Gedt style, but the cut of his hair and the tattoos along his wrist signify his cultural heritage. He seems nervous. All of the old Mahaali are in these times. They disappear, slowly, with no cause. There is talk of a pogrom. But it is a quiet pogrom, a silent ghostly pogrom. The third course is always a pause, a place to breathe before the weight of the next.
Rathwan serves him a rendition of Mahaali rice, stewed with smoked nettles. Rathwan has altered it to serve the tastes of his clientele, now mostly Gedt. He replaced the artistry of structure and form with a striving for essence, attempting to adopt the Gedt philosophies of cuisine while retaining the origins that belied the dish.
The citizen looks at the dish, and then looks into Rathwan's eyes. There is judgement there, anger as well, but the hardest of all for Rathwan to stomach, is the pity. The citizen bends down again, his brief flaring of passion over. He whispers almost impercetibly,
"And yet more is lost."
Intermezzo
Rathwan sits in his empty kitchen. A plate of gelled tuber sits before him, lightly salted translucent cubes mirroring the color of spring moss. It is a Mahaali dish in color, in form and in its historical allegory, touching back to the time when Mahaal was occupied by neighboring Sahwat. The dish had been served in back rooms and passageways, created to remind the Mahaali of their own history with the most simplest of preparations. There are none but him to eat it in Kur district today. None but Rathwan to appreciate the weight of the dish's long past. Tomorrow the Gedt general would come again to Rathwan's.
Fourth Course
Puffer fish has always been a stalwart of the fourth course. The poison sacs of the fish are a deadly toxin, prized in dilute quantities in rougher districts as a mild hallucinogen. Cleaned of the poison, the fish is quite sublime, a subtle balance of texture and flavor.
Rathwan looks at the flayed fish on the wood board before him. There is no one to assist him anymore—it is he alone who prepares the fish. It is Rathwan alone who cuts the poisonous sac instead of lifting it, who lets the colorless and odorless death wash over the meat.
The fish is served raw, in the purest Gedt style, accompanied by little more than a mild puree of tubers. A true fourth course would have presented the fish in riotous constructions of color and form, but the new Gedt nobility have subsumed the old ways. The Gedt do not see the roots of the dish, the tension of life against death. They see merely fish, blind to history.
Rathwan walks out of the kitchen and hands the dish to a servant. He watches the little death wander its way between the patrons before finding purchase on the general's table. The general does not look at him, their first encounter long forgotten. The general has gone to fat, descended into complacency, no longer concerned of the thought of Mahaali around him. Rathwan returns to the kitchen and puts on his coat. He walks through the back alley, between the crates of imported fruits, across cobbled stone long worn down. The roots of his city
are fading, and like a ghost, Rathwan slips away.
Infinite Skeins(Short story)
by Naru Dames Sundar
Originally published by Crossed Genres
The room clatters into being, a sound like the slow flapping of wings. This room is empty, the wood covered in wind tumbled dust blown in from the gaping hole in the roof. The sky is burned and callused like the skin of dried grapes, a dull unblemished cinnamon. I don't hear anyone around, but there is a keening in the distance, perhaps a wolf, or something akin to that. The windows are aged into amber, the glass obscuring whatever lay beyond. There are many of these rooms, abandoned, unattended and empty. I breathe deeply, hearing the hiss of my breath through the gas mask. This isn't it. I press the button on the side of the box, holding on to my flashlight in case a windstorm or a gale punctures the skein and blows it away as it happened once before. I learned to bring a flashlight the first time I opened my eyes to a cold unyielding darkness. The ground was solid enough but the darkness gnawed at my bones until my scrabbling fingers found the button. I've seen burning rooms, icy wastes, airless plains under a sky the color of cherries—that last one taught me the value of an air mask—all these worlds wrapped in my two meter cage. None of them contained Xikele.
There were rooms that were so close that I sobbed a hot sea of tears as I pressed the button to make it disappear. Once I saw that same curlicued tassel of black hair and my breath caught as I pulled the blanket down. It was a boy. He had my eyes, the same almond colored cheeks, that same kink in the nose that Kuan loved to kiss, but his chin came from somewhere else, askew and dimpled. He stirred lightly and I hurried away, the conversations would hurt me more than the disappointment. It had to be close, it had to be a hairs edge away. I'd tried before, with a maybe, a possibly, an almost found. She had slumbered softly in my arms, her head burrowed into the crook of my elbow. Her wall had that same scrawled stick figure drawing, two mothers and a child in crayon, a streak of blue paint across the top. She didn't know Kuan though, she had uncurled awake to Kuan's desperate eyes and stumbled back in fear. She didn't known Kuan, she hadn't felt Kuan's kisses or her gentle hands, her skein was too different. Ours collapsed her in a silent flicker flash, as swift as a hummingbird, and then the weight left my arms and I was standing there holding nothing, feeling Kuan's resentment and anger. I'd sobbed on the floor for an hour until I crawled weary into bed where Kuan finally let her rage cool and covered me in her warm arms.
The year had scrubbed us clean. Scrubbed us clean of words and hopes and dreams, washed away by a sea of endless waiting. Waiting for a vid, an email, a data fragment from some police ferret endlessly searching the datasphere of public surveillance. There was an eight in ten chance that walking out our front door, a spy-sat would capture an image fine enough to see the dried tears against my eyelids, and yet all we had was speculations and questions. One day she returned home from school, the next day, nothing. The first day was frantic and terrifying, our minds careening through as many possibilities as I have seen through the box. The next few traded the hot flush of terror with a cold seeping fear. As the days, and the interviews, and the depositions, and the investigations tumbled into each other, an unbearable agony of powerlessness—after all that, the fear remained, sunk into our bones, leeching away hope. At work it began with shock, then questions, then finally a wordless silence, the new leprosy of grief. Abandoned, we sunk into each other like water into sand.
Kuan and I spent the first nights as a tumbled sphere of arms and heads, locked in endless sobs until finally the grief ran so raw that we could only sleep in separate rooms, the mere touch sending arresting frissons of memory rushing through my head. Alone, I ran through those recollections, fragment by fragment, as if saturation might stop the torrents. I remember the ampule of synthesized sperm, an egg white shell of micro-machined delivery mechanisms clad around Kuan's genes. In that capsule lay the ancient song of my ancestors on some deep Kalahari night, thundering into the memories of Kuan's wind scarred Mongols riding across the plains.
We had both been ready to carry the child, but even on my research salary, we could only afford one. I remembered her fingers moving gently inside me while her lips described poems on my skin. I remembered the subtle flick and whirr of the ampule delivering its cargo, my body already suffering from the synthetic hormones. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. The memories run by too fast. The agony and ecstasy of birth. Xikele's screaming cry, borne from her Okwango ancestors, as they pulled her out of me. Seeing that perfect almond colored face against my chest for the first time. I wished I had fed her at least once, cupping her tiny head gently in my hands as I gave of my body. Instead I spent the first few months dazed on the bed, as the leftover chemical brew in my body slowly faded, stunting my mammaries as they exited my system.
Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. She's one. She's two. She's eight. She's ten. Where did her childhood go? She's out the door, I wave to her and kiss Kuan goodbye. I'm getting into my car as we both watch her turn the corner. Flicker. Flicker. Stop. That's it, there's nothing. Then she's gone, like a soundless whisper into the wind.
Kuan threw herself into her painting. Six feet swatches of incandescent blacks and browns, sometimes the red of the burning fire, the paint splattering the walls around the canvas like angry hands beating concrete. We swapped conversation for long hours apart; she in the studio; me in my lab—the lab where the box was.
It is a terrible thing I do. Monstrous.
At work there's a glass jar with a feather patterned in silver and copper. It was the first thing we pulled through, a tiny beautiful feather. We've kept it in the jar for months, its tiny cupola of antipodal space merging into our own, the distortions swabbed clean as the skeins merge. It was magical and mysterious, beyond anything, an accident that fractured all the simple rules that moored us to this simple linear causality. Trake was terrified of the consequences, ethical and moral. It anchored him to indecision, into waiting, into more tests. He stayed in his office, awaiting our reports, unable to direct us for fear of the possibilities.
A twist of matter exotic, curled around a swath of quantum instabilities rendered and manipulated by silicon and diamond. A matte cube with a button and dials to constrain the direction of flight. A box. A button. Flicker. Flicker. What skein twists around this sphere, this quantum tunnel into another fork? An endless multitude of what-if spaces enveloping like water around this small cupola that the box extends. We watch our skein and the other fracture around the edges like feathers. Too long and one skein wins, the water rushing in, the air pulling out. Flicker. Flicker. We turn the dials randomly, not caring where it went, like children playing with toys. By accident we found strands that mirrored ours, the differences noticeable but slight. The dials turn slowly as we traverse the cusp of skeins barely distinguishable from our own. It bores us quickly. We swing the dials like casino wheels, the gamble of a window into a million worlds.
Once I saw a bird sitting on a pearl colored branch just outside the edge of the field, silver patterned feathers splaying out on bifurcating wings across twin tails. I reached out, not caring, across the field, the skein folding like a glove, clasping a single feather and pulling. The feather slithered across the horizon, a feeling like slick oil. Drew and Obi were elated at the possibility that the feather could be in our skein without collapsing under the weight of its quantum interference. The feather was slight, an inconsequence, it existed in a tiny bubble that hung perfectly in our own imperfect reality, with nothing to pop it. That was perhaps the root of it.
The idea cuts through grief. Hope, like a flaming sword rising through my chest. I sat with Kuan in the paint spattered basement where the grief is buried under turpentine and oil. I explained to her about the quantum sea and the twist of matter exotic, the filigree of skeins branching out through dimensions near and far. It burned, this hope, it burned with shame, and fear and the dirty mud-slick feel of its repercussions. Kuan clutched me to her breast, letting my tears muddle into the
ochre and the ultramarine streaked on her skin.
"Ayo, we can't. I don't believe you. I couldn't do it even if it was possible. She's gone Ayo. She's gone, and there's nothing we can do. We can't do this!"
Yes we can. We can if you want it enough, if that desire burns you like flame. I said words that shouldn't be said. Accusations without meaning. We dug up that grief, so quickly buried, and let it flourish and flower. We are mothers, both. One of us bore the seed, the other fed of her breast. We raised this child, and though Kuan yields to the simple causal truth of what is, I cannot—what-if space beckons me. Once I drew the feather across the cusp of skeins, it wasn't so simple anymore.
***
The box disappeared from the lab, rousing Trake from his stupor.
"What do you mean its gone? Gone how? Gone where? Who took it, Ayo? We can't tell them yet? Its not yet time!"
Trake is spluttering with rage and paranoia. He quietens when I tell him we've already built another one, retreating back into that small coffin of indecision. The children in the lab, Drew and Obi and I, go back to our meaningless explorations.
They knew I worked late. They knew why, but they had accounted me an exile from their questions and cares and asked nothing. It was easy to bring the box home, wrapped in nothing more than garbage bags and packing tape. I rigged it in Xikele's room, attached by a spider's web of wires to my slate, so I could map the skeins. Kuan stayed up with me the first night and the second. By the third night she went back to the basement and her paint, deathly afraid of what I might bring back.
It is a gradient descent through the sea of skeins, tracking the similar to find the closest strands. By day, the slate's imager searches randomly, to find avenues worth exploring in my endless nights, until I crawl exhausted into bed. A grain of sand sails on a desert wind, a trillion causal connections separating skein from skein. I pick one road at random, adjust the dials with nothing more than intuition. Flicker. Another empty room, so similar to this one, the bed made and kept just like the day Xikele left. I sigh, the tears welling as they always do.