Jiaotan walked through the corridors, seeing everything merge and blur into an endless dream of metal.
There was a wind, blowing through the ship—not the cold one between the stars, but a hot and rancid one, with a smell like spoiled butter, like curdled cheese left too long in the sun. The metal quivered and danced, became the red of flames which swept up, and Second Cousin Yu’s skin crinkled and blackened like charred paper, and her eyes popped like chestnuts in the Fire’s wake…
Something swam out of the darkness in which she walked: a picture against a red background—a fierce, dark face with a beard and eyes like black beads. Batons, crossed in front of silk robes.
A guardian deity, and his twin by his side, pale-skinned, his two straight swords drawn against threats. The doors they protected were tight metal panes, cold and reassuring.
Jiaotan laid a hand against the doors, feeling the coolness travel up her arm—into her heart. If she closed her eyes, she knew, she’d see Father again, or perhaps Aunt Qin or one of the other concubines: all the dead she couldn’t forget, an endless chain of ghosts stretching back to the wreck of Earth. Blood, stronger than mountains, more enduring than jade or cinnabar.
Why had they woken her up? It should have been Sukuang at the door, not her.
“I’m here,” Jiaotan said aloud. “Now would you tell me what you want?” She moved her hand to the control panel, long enough for the ship’s Mind to recognise her. The doors parted like the leaves of a book, and she entered the navigation room.
Inside, it was cool and dark and silent. The air smelled of ginseng and pine essence—not quite enough to mask the staleness of the recycling.
This was ridiculous. She couldn’t possibly fix whatever was wrong. Couldn’t the ship’s Mind tell the difference between Jiaotan and her sister?
Something shifted in the shadows—the sound of breathing coming in small, ragged gasps. Someone? Impossible. All the colonists slept in their hibernation couches; all the pilots were in their berths, augmenting the ship’s computing capacity with their own minds. There should have been no one—
“Jiaotan?” a voice asked.
Sukuang. But she didn’t have her usual confidence; her voice sounded empty, and a little startled, as if she’d been doing something that Jiaotan had interrupted—something reprehensible.
Cautiously, Jiaotan approached. The hollow feeling in her stomach, if anything, grew larger.
Sukuang sat on her knees at the foot of the pilots’ wall. Above her, bulges in the metal marked the crew members’ berths. The metal was translucent, letting her see the crew, resting as snug in there as in a hibernation couch. Their faces were pale against the grey fluid, their eyes bruised; their mouths were set in troubled grimaces. One of the control panels—that of the second-in-command—blinked dark blue, the sign of a problem.
“I should have known they’d wake you up,” Sukuang said, as Jiaotan approached.
“I—” Jiaotan stopped, seeing what Sukuang had spread on the ground.
A letter on white paper, stamped with the seal of the Courts of Hell, filled with scrawled, disorderly characters—and a welding knife, carefully set aside from the writing brush.
That wasn’t good. You only wrote to the dead Ancestors for one reason, and that was to apologise for the shame you would be bringing on the family.
Such as the shame of not living on.
“Aren’t you supposed to be fixing the ship?” she asked slowly. All that Sukuang had to do was pick up the welding knife and open her own throat; and there’d be nothing Jiaotan could do—and nothing the ship could do either. It had been programmed to take care of itself and the passengers in the hibernation couches, but it couldn’t act outside of that.
No wonder the ship had awakened Jiaotan.
Sukuang raised bruised eyes towards her. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean?” Jiaotan asked. “You’re the best engineer we have. That’s why the ship picked you.”
Sukuang shook her head. “I’m capable of repairing the damage. But what’s the point?”
“The point?” Jiaotan knelt by Sukuang’s side, carefully, and laid a hand on her arm. “We’re the only ones left. The hope of rebirth for the whole world. When we reach the colony—”
“We destroyed Earth, Jiaotan.”
Jiaotan tried to ignore the images of the Fire, sweeping through the steppes and the grasslands, racing up towards the launch rail in the instant before the ship took off in a blaze of light. “The alchemists did,” she said. “Whoever made the White Fire did.”
“We all did.” Sukuang sucked in a breath, went on, her voice shaking. “The alchemists, the engineers, the soldiers. Every one of us with our little experiments, every one of us reporting on what worked and what didn’t, building the sum of knowledge that they used to make the Fire. Do you really think we deserved to be carried away?”
“The Emperor ordered us to board the ship. Would you go against that?”
Sukuang’s hands clenched. “There are higher powers than the Emperor.”
“Not many.”
“Enough,” Sukuang said. “Please, Jiaotan. Just leave me be.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t. “Sukuang’s presence had made the Exodus bearable—the knowledge that the Shun lineage wasn’t reduced to Jiaotan alone, to a mediocre poet unable to pass the state examinations; that in the vastness of the ship, in the strangeness of their new home, they could still watch out for each other as they’d done when they were children.
“And you know I can’t ignore it anymore, either.” Sukuang was silent, her lips compressed—she couldn’t ignore Jiaotan without being rude, but neither did she agree.
Jiaotan tried something else. “We’re the only ones left. Father’s flesh, Mother’s blood. If we die, then the last trace of them will vanish.”
Sukuang’s eyes were as dark as scorched meat, her pupils dilated by grief. “I know what we’ve done, Jiaotan. I still see them—they’re in my dreams, in my waking days. Father and Mother and Aunt Qin, and the rest of them.”
All those we left behind, Jiaotan thought, shivering. But it didn’t matter; it shouldn’t matter. The dead were dead, and the future belonged to the living. It had to.
“Sukuang,” she said, “I share your grief. I understand.” Truly, she did. She saw them, too: all the ones they couldn’t save, all those the Emperor had been forced to abandon as they flew away, all those the Fire had taken. “But to commit suicide….” She paused, looking for a suitable quote to paraphrase, and finally settled on Grand Historian Sima Qian. “Some deaths are weightier than Mount Tai, some lighter than a swan’s down. Your death will achieve nothing.”
“You’re wrong,” Sukuang said, but her gaze strayed to the dark blue light, still blinking in the shadows, and wouldn’t come back to Jiaotan. “It would atone for what we’ve done.”
Jiaotan took a deep breath and called on the Classics, which Sukuang would know by heart, just like her. “A person’s virtue is seen through the whole of their lives, not the manner of their death. It is seen by the benefits of their acts. You know this.”
“I used to, once.”
“You can’t bring them back,” Jiaotan said. “You can’t change the past. And death is no atonement; it’s just a way to preserve your dignity.”
“That’s not what I’m doing. It’s different, Jiaotan. You know it is.” Her voice shook.
Jiaotan said nothing. There was no need to.
At length, Sukuang said, “You’re right. I’ve been selfish, Jiaotan. And arrogant.” Her smile was devoid of any joy. “And I have a ship to repair.”
She rose and laid her hand against the faulty berth. The wall softened, flowed up her wrist, her arm; the gleaming metal coated her skin and her clothes, burrowing into her body to connect her implants to the ship’s Mind.
“It’s going to be a while,” she said. “You might as well make yourself comfortable.”
Jiaotan propped herself up against the farth
est wall, watching her sister. Nothing happened that she could see. Sukuang did not move, though the metal of the ship shifted from time to time, changing colours like a living being.
Her mind drifted into the land of dreams. The metal flowed upwards, covering Sukuang as it had covered the trees and the flowers, choking them to death…
She and Sukuang ran on the dry earth behind the wall of the Fire, which grew more and more distant as it swept away from them. The trees were shining masses coated with the melted metal of skyscrapers, the mountains sterile rocks with the corpses of acid-eaten forests; underfoot were ashes—and bones, crackling like corn in the frying pan, their pale fragments billowing in the air, small and sharp.
The only light came from a figure dressed in white—a woman with an androgynous face who gathered bones in her hands with the plodding method of the desperate. She smiled bleakly when they came nearer, holding out her soot-stained hands. “See my children,” she cried, and her voice was the quivering wail of oboes at funerals. “They are one with the universe, and the universe is no more.”
And tears ran down her cheeks, evaporating in the roiling heat, and the Fire ate at her skin and at her bones until her light had become that of the flames and her voice was overwhelmed by the screams of billions.
See my children…
Jiaotan woke up with a start, in the dark, the afterimages of the Fire imprinted on her retinas and the woman’s grinning skull superimposed on the navigation room. The woman—Guanyin, Bodhisattva of Mercy—she, too, taken by the Fire, eaten away to nothing.
Jiaotan’s heart beat in her chest with the frantic desperation of a caged hummingbird. They hadn’t done this—not any of this, it wasn’t their fault, they couldn’t have done anything…
But, deep where it mattered, she knew it for a lie; a flimsy, unacceptable excuse.
The light above the berth blinked red, the colour of good fortune and things gone right—slow and steady, the anchor for her flailing sanity. The ship’s metal flowed away from Sukuang, revealing once more the green of her clothes, the pale colour of her skin, the exhaustion in her eyes.
Jiaotan stood up, trying to calm the frantic beat of her heart.
“It’s done,” Sukuang said. “We’ll have a safe journey.”
Jiaotan forced a smile she didn’t feel and held out her hand to Sukuang. “Come. Let’s go back to sleep, then. With luck, they won’t wake us up before we reach the planet.”
“No,” Sukuang said. “I guess they won’t.” She sucked in a breath, her gaze shifting down to the welding knife.
The hollow feeling returned in the pit of Jiaotan’s stomach, sharp and cold. “Sukuang. Think of the others…”
Sukuang raised her gaze again—eyes filled with such a desperate need that Jiaotan knew, with absolute certainty, that she couldn’t stop her sister, that she didn’t have the right to.
Sukuang’s hand moved towards the knife; the outstretched fingers hovered over the handle for an agonisingly long while. At length, and with a visible effort, she withdrew. “You’re right,” she said tonelessly. “Let’s go back.”
She didn’t speak again until they’d walked back to her own hibernation couch—close to the navigation room, along with the ship’s engineers and the few remaining alchemists—until Jiaotan had wedged her into the couch and the cycle of hibernation had started.
“Sleep well, sister,” Sukuang whispered then, as the couch swung shut.
Jiaotan laid her hand against the outer panel of the couch and caught a distorted reflection of herself in the metal: dishevelled and pale, her eyes bruised and haunted, her skin the colour of things that no longer saw the sun, and ten thousand ghosts on her back, bowing her shoulders and spine.
“Sleep well,” she whispered in return, though she knew the truth, as did Sukuang: that in sleep there was no oblivion. The weight of their transgression would never be erased. The dead were with them, carried in their minds and in their hearts—and, as the Fire had eaten those left behind, they in turn would gnaw at the sleepers, every hour, every day, tearing away at the will to live, at the fabric and sanity of their beings, until nothing was left.
Red lights hummed on the control panel and from inside came a sound like rushing water: the hibernation fluid, filling the couch, flowing into Sukuang’s nostrils and lungs like water into a drowning man.
Drowning, Jiaotan thought. All of us, floundering in our couches, carrying our grief and guilt and madness between the stars, all the ghosts that we won’t ever exorcise dragging us down; a slow, lingering death instead of the Fire. Drowning.
She thought of the desperate hunger in Sukuang’s eyes, and she wondered how many among them would ever come up for air.
OVERCLOCKING
James L. Sutter
They’re waiting for him when he comes out of the tank. Whether plainclothes or just another pair of clockers, he can’t quite tell, but the way they avoid looking in his direction tips him off in a heartbeat. When Ari Marvel walks by, you look.
They start drifting idly in his direction, and that clinches things. Reaching down into the lining of his pocket, Ari palms the whole batch and trails his hand over the edge of the bridge railing. The brittle grey modsticks crumble with ease, and by the time the two have dropped their cover and made the sting he’s moved smoothly into position, hands against the brick and legs spread wide. The pigs don’t even thank him for being so efficient. The patdown’s rougher than necessary, but after a minute they throw their hoods back up and move off down the street.
Ari runs his hands through his faded blue-green spikes, then takes the stairs down to the tube. A beginner might have lingered at the railing and thought about all the time and money now floating down the culvert, but Ari doesn’t look back. Necessary expenditures. Expected losses.
It’s just business, baby.
Back at the pad, Maggie’s waiting by the door. She looks like hell: hair in ratty dreads, shirt stained with god-knows-what. Crust in her eyes.
“Hey, Ari,” she says.
Ari slides his keycard into the lock, checking first to see if the hair he put over the swipestripe has been moved. Still there. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s been there, of course—just that if they have been, they’re good enough that there’s no point in worrying about it. You win some, you lose some.
Inside, it looks like he’s won. Maggie plops down on the couch, worrying a hangnail that’s started to bleed. Her foot taps on the coffee table.
“Hey,” she says again. He drops his coat onto the chair and moves into the kitchen to get a soda. She picks up the remote and begins flipping rapidly through the channels, then turns the set off again. Eventually he leaves the can on the counter and comes back into the living room, sitting down on the coffee table across from her and taking her hands.
“Maggie, look at me.” She does—or, at least, as well as she’s able to at this point.
“I’m only going to say this once. You’re welcome to crash here, but you’re not getting a fix. I won’t have that in my house. You understand?”
She nods—those wide doe eyes the color of egg yolk—then goes back to gnawing at her thumb. He stands and leaves her there, entering the bedroom and closing the door. Once it’s locked, he jimmies loose the bottom drawer of the dresser and flips a wad of sweaty bills into the crudely carved hollow. Then he drops fully clothed onto the mattress and covers his eyes with his forearm, blocking out the ruddy afternoon light that still filters in through heavy curtains. Out in the apartment, he can hear her moving about restlessly.
He’s doing it again. It doesn’t matter that he knows how it’ll end, that he knows how it has ended more than once. It’s simply a given: she’ll show up. He’ll let her in. Things will proceed accordingly. He bears down with his arm until the muted red of his eyelids turns to black, and then to stars.
The worst of it is that even through the filth, he can still see her. Inside the shell of those dreads, her hair is still gold verging on white, so fine as
to be almost intangible. Behind the bruises and bags, her eyes would still crinkle upward if she smiled. And if he opened his arms, she might still flow into them like water, sparkling and warm and full of life.
Ari is not a stupid man, but Maggie is an exception.
Eyes clenched tight, Ari curls up on his side and falls asleep.
Any idiot with a fifth-grade education can get into it. If X is the price you pay for the product and Y is the cash you get from the girl-boys and junkies down on Madison, how many hits do you have to sell to earn one for yourself? Simple algebra.
The problem is that so few people get beyond that phase. Buy the goods from a lifer like Mickey or C.T., sell enough to pay for the rest, then get blasted in an alley or flophouse and hope the pigs don’t raid until you come down. That’s the killer, right there—as soon as you stick that junk in your head, your profit margin drops immediately to zero. Do not pass Go.
Ari knew better. Where small-time boys like C.T. were just middlemen, Ari cut straight from the source code. Where Mickey would drop his stash and run at the sight of a pig, Ari tied his shoe and made the product disappear, only to have it back in his pocket by the time they rounded the corner. It was an art and a science, but always—always—a business.
It’s eight o’clock and she looks better, if one corpse can look better than another. Head back and mouth wide, snores threaten to shake apart her tiny frame. Setting his gear down, Ari gently takes the hand trailing onto the carpet and lays it across her chest, scrawny and thin as a prepubescent boy’s. She doesn’t even stir. He moves past her into the bedroom.
Slipping on a pair of thick glasses he’d never be caught dead in on the street, he unfolds the laptop and sets up shop. With the software loading, he spools up the burner and busts out a package of generic modsticks. Cheap, easy, and infinitely upgradable, whatever’s on sale at the pharmacy is usually fine. Tonight it’s anti-flu mods. He checks the make and model, then logs into the company’s network remotely and anonymously, sliding past the firewalls and into the secure servers.
The Book of Apex: Volume 2 of Apex Magazine Page 14