by Various
Sirène! Maisie pleads again as her sister enters the square.
The baby passes to one of the women flanking Sirène so that accuser may step forward to face accused. That is the voice I heard, Sirène says, her voice clear. It wanted my baby as dearly as it now pleads for its life. As dearly as it clung to its house, denying comforts to the rest of its town fellows, the house it stole from my mother on her deathbed.
She gave it to me!
Maisie’s cry is ignored. Stolen, Sirène repeats, from a dying woman, when it was mine by birthright. Stolen, like the health of the mangoes I tend! Stolen, like our lives!
She finishes with a sweeping gesture to the ruined town. Her eyes meet Maisie’s, and the spiders crawl out, just a touch. Maisie knows all the things that are not being said, the small jealousies and grievances that accumulate in a family like cracks, the larger ones that crush love into hate.
I have stolen nothing! Maisie raises her voice, trying to be heard. I tried to help!
The murmur in the crowd is not enough. Sirène raises her voice to match her sister’s. You tried to help! Pah! You became a werewolf, a red-eye, and thought you could go on dancing on our blood, she says. With a malicious curve of her dark lips, she adds, Apre bal, tanbou lou.
The dance is over; now she must pay. The murmurs swell, nods of agreement. The men shuffle, stamping their feet like drums, heavy on the broken plaza ground. The thick air muffles the terrible rhythm, but Maisie feels it through the soles of her bare feet, through the blood that runs from her cuts, sticking to the pedestal. She feels it in her temples, and she feels it pressing in on her chest and her belly, overwhelming the frantic racing of her heart. In this moment of terror, she remembers her dream.
I carry a child! she screams, pressing one hand to her navel.
The foot beats soften but do not stop. Sirène screams as loudly, Lies! She lies to save herself! For if she had a child, why would she seek to steal mine, the only thing she envied of me?
Strength returns to the crowd. Heat and noise and dust rise from their feet, though they speak no words. The houngen, who has watched these proceedings with a solemn expression, now turns to Maisie. She does not meet his dark gaze. Sister, he says, shaking his head, you should not have turned to the darkness. The best you can hope for is to be forgiven in the next life. Do not worry—he anticipates her fear, he thinks—nobody will make a zombie from a jé-rouge.
Do not do this, she pleads, her eyes still downcast. Her hand remains pressed to her belly. Shallow breaths shake her body.
It is too late for that, the houngen says. Baron Samedi, take this creature from our midst!
Erzulie Dantor! Maisie cries, lifting her head to the moon as the priest sets his hand to her shoulder. Ede m’!
The crowd falls silent at the appeal. As one, they turn to the houngen, their eyes aglow with moonlight, waiting for his judgment. Even Sirène waits for her husband’s response to the name. Only Maisie, staring up at the moon, does not look at his hard, dark face.
There is no help for you, he says, with a voice as cold as stone. He pushes.
Her bloody feet come away from the pedestal with a tearing of flesh.
The crowd stamps harder. Maisie struggles, clawing at her neck; she is not so heavy that her neck breaks. Each breath rasps louder, harder, shallower. The onlookers keep gruesome time with her struggles.
Her hands fall to her sides. One gestures weakly to her belly, then twitches and falls limp.
In that moment, a cloud passes over the moon. The square goes dark with shadows and the men grow silent; later, many will swear they saw the black shape of a wolf run down Maisie’s side and flee into the nearest ruins. The houngen, watching Maisie, sees her face darken, her eyes glitter with starlight, and shadows slither like scars across her skin. For a moment, the terrifying visage of Erzulie Dantor blazes out at him, and his skin chills.
Then the moon returns, and it is only Maisie hanging still and dead from the arm of Faithful Pierre.
Sirène breaks the silence. Quickly! Before the foreigners come up.
She takes her baby back and steps to the side as the men lower Maisie’s body. They carry it with gentle tenderness; the wolf is gone, and only the corps cadavre remains. There is a place for the dead, on the edge of town, where one more body will go unnoticed among the others.
Tomorrow, Sirène announces, we will take the house for all the town. As her nearest relative, it belongs to me now, and I will give it to all of you.
There are ragged cheers. The men take the women back to the tent, where the curtains and bed sheets do not seem so poor. The evil spirit is gone; their fortunes will change.
Only the priest is silent, remaining beside the pedestal, as still as a statue himself. Sirène approaches him, a smile on her face. Shall we go to our house?
He inclines his head. His eyes reflect the clouds grazing the moon.
What is it?
Erzulie Dantor.
Sirène scoffs, her voice low though nobody remains in the square. You choose a strange moment to begin believing, husband.
I saw… He does not finish, looking up again, past the crooked arm of Faithful Pierre, at the moon.
What? A shadow? A spirit? A jé-rouge? Do not forget that Erzulie Dantor protects me as well.
Sirène hefts the baby in her arms, and her husband looks down at his peaceful face. He reaches out to touch the babe’s forehead, and then nods. Still, he says, Maisie has been wronged. She called for help.
Sirène’s voice sharpens, shrill in the muggy night. Wronged? What of me? What of all that was taken from me? If Erzulie Dantor exists—(here she has the presence of mind to whisper)—she has looked with favor on this night.
Be quiet, the priest says.
But—
I will go with you. But you will be silent about Erzulie Dantor, and about the jé-rouge.
Sirène’s eyes flash. Have a care, she says.
The houngen’s eyes bore into hers. What has happened to one woman can happen to another, he says evenly.
Sirène’s lips tighten, web-thin. She turns and strides over broken bricks and splintered wood, up to the house. The priest looks up once more, and then follows.
Hours later, the moon hangs swollen over the lightening sky. No foreigners have come to investigate the midnight disturbance in the town square, despite Sirène’s worries. The town sleeps in its refuge, in the sheets and curtains that the people have taken from their homes to make one large home—all except for Sirène and the priest. They lie together on the couch, with Maisie’s blanket draped over them, pressed close together. The babe lies between them.
Twin red points show softly on the tar-paper at the window. Wind soft as a breath catches a torn piece, folds it backward, steals into the room. Sirène stirs, her sleep disturbed by the barest touch of air on her cheek, whispers from the night, dark and deep. Non, she whispers in return, though she is not yet sure what question she is answering.
But the whispers are insistent, persistent. Your husband threatened you, they say. You are not safe, they say. Your baby is in danger.
She turns, her arm around the mass of blankets. She squeezes. Not my baby.
Your husband has a son, he has a house; why does he need you? You, who know what he has done?
Non, she murmurs again. Weaker.
The whispers insinuate themselves into her blankets, slide around the fabric of the bed. They surround her, growing stronger. Come to the window. I am at the window. I will keep your baby safe.
The win—
Sirène’s eyes flutter open. She lies petrified while shadows flit around the room.
The window. Come. Hand your baby to my care.
Erzulie Dantor? Sirène sits. The world feels askew to her, as if there has been an earthquake in her mind, leaving its base uneven.
The room does not reply. Sirène clutches her babe to her chest and stands. The blanket slides to the floor; her husband sleeps on. She takes one tottering step toward the window, where a sof
t red light grows stronger.
She does not think of a jé-rouge and its bewitching voice. She thinks only of her sister calling on the goddess, moonlight shining on her face. She thinks of the name, the silence of the crowd, the troubled face of her husband. And now, now, too late, she can see the harsh woman outside the window, dark and forbidding, the tribal scars badges of honor on her face. She can see the woman as clearly as if there were no paper in the window, the woman who is sworn to protect mothers and daughters, the woman who fought for her people just as Sirène has.
Darkness hisses in her ears, silken words. Your husband is calling on the gods even now. He means to take your babe. He means to kill it.
She takes another step, glances back nervously at the dark form sleeping on the floor. His hand rests on the beads, the beads carved with faces. And the floor lurches below her, sends her stumbling, running to the window. The gods are angry, and her husband is calling them down on her. She loses her footing, drops to one knee, trembling more than the ground.
But she does not drop her baby. She carries him to the window, away from her husband, away from the dust falling from the ceiling and the ominous cracking sound drowning out the whispers. She thrusts the baby at the window, crying, Take my baby, take him, protect him, keep him safe!
The paper tears with a grinding sound, but no, it is the floor and walls that are tearing. Sirène’s arms thrust through the paper, but she cannot see what is on the other side. She feels only the weight lifted from her arms.
Clarity returns to her. What has she done? She tears at the paper. Her hands slice into glass shards, and blood stains the paper as she falls to one knee again. The ground is bucking now, throwing her against the wall, but she cannot reach the window. She cries out, her breath too short for a scream, and through the paper, the red glow taunts her, the whispers turn to a woman’s laughter.
Her hand grasps the sill, heedless of the glass slicing through her skin. She pulls herself to her feet and thrusts her head outside, tearing the paper.
The house is surrounded by shadows, set in illusory motion by the clouds crossing the moon. Sirène sees movement in every flicker and she draws back, clutching the curtain. Stupid, she tells herself, and then she glances at one of the deeper shadows.
Two red eyes gleam in the pre-dawn light.
She cries out, and they are gone, and there is only her baby, sitting on the makeshift grave where her brother-in-law is buried. Her baby is not moving.
Dead? No; in the time it takes her to think it, she hears him cough, hears the beginning of a cry.
Just a dream. Her babe is safe, and there is no such thing as a jé-rouge. Sirène laughs, and lifts her foot to the windowsill to climb through.
Apre bal, tanbou lou.
She hears the mocking voice clearly within her mind, a female voice as deep as history and as rich as Haiti itself. She has heard it behind her mother’s voice in reproach for wickedness; she has heard it in the strength of wives whose husbands gave them bruises and scars rather than happiness. But here, stripped of any human guise, it shakes her bones and rattles her knees, and leaves icy fingers around Sirène’s heart, echoing and echoing in the cage of her chest. After the dance, the debt must be paid, the words say.
The ground lurches again, sending her tumbling to one side. The grinding, tearing sound comes again, stronger. She sees her husband sit up the moment before the heavy wood ceiling drops. It crushes him beneath timbers and plaster, beneath the second story of the house, the empty bed in the bedroom above.
Sirène’s scream lasts only as long as it takes the wall to collapse.
Whispers prowl through the dust outside the ruined house. They circle the baby, safe on the pile of earth. For a moment they sit by the earth, and the glow from their eyes burns bright red. They strain forward, but a shadow with a scarred face and eyes that shine silver holds them back. The silver glow, so faint against the pack of red-eyed four-footed shadows, will surely be overwhelmed. But a small piece of stone on the grave catches the silver glow and reflects it back; a broken piece of glass shines like the moon. The red-eyed shadows hiss and growl, and turn their backs, loping away into the darkness.
The shadow-woman leans over the baby. He cries once and then looks up in wonder, at the bright eyes and the dark scars. Her face shows no smile, but the baby knows that she loves him. The gods, sometimes, are merciful.
DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER
by Tim Susman
First published on timsusman.wordpress.com (Dec. 8, 2013)
• • • •
THE TRUCK rattled along the broken road. His left shoulder joint had already degraded and his right leg was missing below the knee. Loose wires from his auditory receptors made the sounds feel muffled, as though through a layer of insulation. His voice had been disconnected before he’d been put on the truck, as had the voices of all the others. But they could move their fingers, those that had fingers left, and they all knew finger binary and Morse Code, and it would not have taken long for them to develop a language to communicate with, if any of them had had anything to say.
In the course of the trip, a particularly bad jolt snapped the frayed connection in his head, rendering the world silent. His left shoulder lost its feedback circuit, but the ones in his legs remained, so he could tell when the truck stopped. The bed he and the others sat on tilted upward until they slid down, landing in a heap of metal. It would probably have sounded horrendous. Movement stirred below him, but weight pressed down on his weight which pressed down on their weight and the pile did not shift. He had an excellent view of the elegantly designed knee joint of the android above him.
That is the view for the rest of his memory spool. He fast-forwards and starts it again at the beginning.
“These are the newly-awakened Cyberson 8 line, model GL-225.” The voice echoed over his head, clear as crystal. He stood alongside forty-nine others exactly like him, facing a window through which eager human faces peered. “You are seeing them experience the world for the first time.”
Feedback circuits hummed. He understood his nature, how he differed from the beings on the other side of the glass, that he was meant to serve them. He checked the status of his body: skeleton 100%, joints 100%, feedback circuits 100%, visual clarity 100%, auditory clarity 100%, chemical air analysis 100%, all external systems reporting fully functional. He ran a check of his logic and processing circuits.
“These models incorporate a synthetic diamond matrix central processor. Cyberson’s patented intelligence matrix uses diamond because it will never degrade under ordinary conditions. If you drop your android into the heart of the sun, your warranty is void, ha ha. But should your Cyberson’s body degrade, you can always slot the processor into a new body. In a very real sense, these androids are immortal.”
GOLDENEYE
by Tim Susman
First published on timsusman.wordpress.com (Dec. 3, 2013)
• • • •
JAKE GOT a gold nose piercing, and Molly got a gold tooth, and they talked big around me and Sherry, like we wasn’t worth what they were just because we didn’t have gold in our face. Like gold is expensive or something; it just looks cool, but I could basically go down to the Lunar Co-op and get a gold nugget for a couple packets of chewing gum if I wanted. If chewing gum wasn’t so damn ’spensive. So when we got in that fight with the 8-0-1s and Sherry got hit across the face and they said the left eye was a goner, I told her she should get a gold eye.
She was in the hospital, lying back on the bed with a big white patch over the eye, or I guess where the eye’d used to be, and the medibot was ticking down my minutes with big red numbers that even I could read. “Maybe I will, Shooz,” she said, talking slow like when we got drunk, only I was pretty sure nobody snuck sunbooze in the hospital.
“You full-on should,” I said.
“Hey Medibot,” Sherry said, still slurry-slow, but the bot understood and beeped at her. “How much fer a golden eye?”
My num
bers were ticking down to zero, and while I hold that rules are like fences—it’s better on the other side of them—I’d already tried to stay past my time a couple days ago and got jabbed by a needle and woke up in the parking lot. Hadn’t figured a way around the medibots yet, so I left Sherry in the middle of a numbers discussion.
“She’ll never do it,” Jake said.
Molly ran her tongue over her gold tooth. “It wouldn’t look right on her.”
But damned if Sherry didn’t come out of the hospital with one eye blue as the seas on Earth up in the sky and one eye golden metal with a black hole in its center. It moved around when she moved her head, and she told Jake and Molly it was just a mini-gyro, but when they were gone she told me she could really see out of it.
I couldn’t figure how; it was metal. To prove it, she closed the other eye, which made her look more normal and I don’t know how that worked, because nobody on the Moon had golden eyes. Mr. Devereux has a glass eye, but everyone else has two working ones. I figured she was just peeking when she reached out and touched me right on the nose, dead center, and after that she didn’t tell me she could see out of it again.
But Jake and Molly were pissed because now Sherry outranked them by their own system. Nose ring, tooth, they didn’t compare to an eye that moved around and gleamed and was worth all their gold put together and doubled. They made noises about how Sherry’d stolen to get it, but we all knew Jake had gotten his nose ring off a guy from the Northsiders, so the noises died out fast. The situation didn’t get better, though, and I was worried our gang might split up, Jake and Molly with their friends, and me and Sherry with ours. I watched Sherry’s back, but they didn’t try anything right away.
No, they waited until one night three months later when I was working on the scaffolding and I’d told Peanut to keep an eye on Sherry. I heard the story from him later: he’d been sitting with her when she fell asleep, and she always slept with the golden eye open. Jake and Molly came up behind him and gagged him, tied him up before he could make a sound. Jake stood over Sherry and reached down to grab that eye, and when his fingers were an inch away, she hauled off and planted her foot between his legs, so hard Peanut could hear it.