What the Thunder Said

by Walter Blaire

  She knew how adaptable he was. She knew now how much brainpower he could apply to a problem. She had to move quickly.

  Caulie glanced around and saw more scattered rifles. She supposed she could dissemble each of them before the wizard’s eyes for the intimidation factor, or perhaps . . . Yes, why not. She lifted her next rifle by the barrel and hefted it like a club. It took real strength to raise it above her shoulder. On the other hand, if she could swing it at all, she would only need to swing it once.

  She forced herself closer to the throng of conjoined bodies and its mindless shuffling. Its functional arms waved like antennae, and it had a fecal stink that even the blasting wind could not carry away fast enough. Luckily, the wizard’s water pool was at the prow of the beast, and since the path tilted down toward Caulie, the wizard had slid right to the front edge.

  She moved closer and his eyes tracked her. His face didn’t change, but as she neared, she could see more of it. He was whiskery, and his nose was full of burst blood vessels. Small cuts covered his cheeks and neck, ravaged and dripping with infection.

  His mouth moved.

  She hesitated.

  “You.” The man’s word was heavy with recognition, nearly stolen by the wind. He spoke again, louder. “You monster. You beast. Your song was the purest torture.”

  Caulie stared up in rigid shock.

  “You make us human for an hour, and then make us slaves again—how dare you?”

  Before she had to conceive an answer, the wizard’s face changed.

  “Madness is what keeps this moving,” he said, in a different voice—an entirely new voice. This voice was sharper than the last, with a crisp accent that sounded more cultivated than the first. “You know how the thoughts spin when you fall into despair. So many minds, all of them spinning, and never enough borrowed moments like this.”

  “—Savor the madness,” the wizard added in yet another voice.

  “You speak Haphan.” Caulie murmured, transfixed by the changes.

  “A corporal-meh of Ed-homse, an’ shot through the heart,” said the voice. “Sank below the mud but didn’t die-meh—”

  “—It had to be northerners. Had to be. To know how the overlords work their trenchcraft.”

  “—I nor had a chance to die,” the cultivated voice resumed. “The ancestors know a thing or two: how death isn’t really death. I landed beside these others, and my thoughts fit perfectly into a whole. It’s a fabric and we’re woven into it. Or it is woven of us.”

  “—We never notice when we’re wandering alone, but we always feel there's more, don't we? How do fish have an inkling of the fish pod? La, or birds of the bird bear? Whence that knowledge we are never taught?”

  Caulie shook her head to clear it. The voices seemed to overlap but that couldn’t be the case. The frigid wind playing tricks with her hearing. The distractive fluttering of the composite creature. She struggled to think. The expressions unfolding across the ravaged face were nearly hypnotic.

  She said, “Which of these voices is the wizard, the one that controls you?”

  “The loudest voice?” The corporal was back. “Fighting in his sleep now—”

  “—Your sleep-song—”

  “—But steadily waking.”

  The cultivated voice said, “His mind is clawing out of its disbelief. He’s seen your metal animal, seen the pretty girl step out of its mouth. He knows there’s more under the sky than he ever guessed.”

  “—Hate him as he hates you!” the face snarled, making Caulie flinch.

  The voice switched again immediately. “Think nothing kind about us, we are all mad. Pretty Polly has made a project of seven minds together. You would not believe the secrets she somehow knows.”

  “—Thank you for the breath of freedom,” the corporal-voice added.

  “—But why just one breath? Why-returning the despair? Why not take away the Pollution forever?”

  The voices fell silent together. The demolished man scrutinized her with hard eyes, waiting, but Caulie had no idea where to start. It was the question she had asked herself, but when she tried to narrow with an answer it only scattered into more questions. What if she hadn’t returned the Pollution? What if she had allowed that single hour of peace in the Ed-homse mountains to yawn into days . . . where would she have gone after that? Further East, or to the West? Would she have walked or run there? Could she have ever moved fast enough to cover the whole front? A week from now, would any of the Tachba in earshot of her song still have been alive—or would they have been slaughtered by the next wave of replacements on both sides of the trenches, overrun like a bad idea?

  The wizard nodded at her hesitation. “If the whole world is on fire, where do you place your single drop of water to put it out?”

  She whispered, "Unless it’s everywhere, it can be nowhere.”

  “Liar!” the face hissed.

  “—We decided the same,” the cultivated voice said. “We had to leave the Pollution in place.”

  “At least you Tachba are used to it,” Caulie said, and she couldn’t hide her bitterness.

  “There is the argument of a true overlord: that we are happiest as blameless contrivances of violence. Wind us up and release us to fight.”

  She stole a glance at Shanter, who was still lost in his troubled sleep. "I did not wish to see it."

  “—You see nothing, you monster!”

  “—You have seen nothing at all, sorceress.” The cultivated voice said coldly. “We are not machines until you use us so. We are human—until you make us not.”

  “Millions of innocent Haphans,” Caulie offered tonelessly, despising herself. “If the eternal front falls, millions of little boys and sisters and mothers. . .”

  “You Haphans are a blight.”

  “—The Pollution only wishes that its world be left alone.”

  “What did you say?” Caulie stared hard at the face, jolted, but it was already changing.

  “The loud one is-waking-geh.” The corporal-voice announced. “Which he-finding a clever thought to unlock himself.”

  The stolen voices and expressions sank beneath the surface of the face, and the wizard’s visage began to tighten into something new.

  Caulie finally tore her gaze from the wizard’s eyes. His two waxy arms crossed his bony, tented breast. His fingers were tapping a rhythm against his heart. He was fighting her sleep spell with a song of his own, clawing out of his dream state.

  When she glanced back up, the man seemed just conscious enough to understand her presence, though still too buried to respond. Caulie knew what this made her—she was the monster in a madman’s nightmare.

  She lifted the rifle off her shoulder and raised it over her head.

  What am I waiting for?

  She was waiting for her nerves to catch up. Somewhere inside her was a Caulie that would have felt sad or self-conscious; a Caulie who would have tried to communicate an apology to the voices.

  She’s not coming. That wasn’t her anymore.

  The wizard’s eyes focused on her, and she knew he was back. His hand stopped tapping and he uncrossed his arms.

  “Too late,” he said.

  Caulie swung the rifle at the wizard’s head.

  His arm flashed up to deflect the blow. She had let herself forget the speed of the Tachba, and whatever else this man was, his body was Polluted. —But then the rifle stock crashed through his hand with a gruesome crack of bones. The rifle stock missed his head but connected near his shoulder—not harmlessly. It thudded against the soft tissue behind his neck.

  An animal keen of pain tore from his throat.

  Caulie swung again. His arms flailed, one of them with bone sticking out, spraying blood. Now she knew he was weak, no matter what he once had been. He intercepted her second blow and it left his other arm dangling.

  She drew the rifle back again. Her disgust was overwhelming but it gave her endless, urgent strength.

  The wizard's howl resolved into a stre
am of syllables. Witch talk, but filled with hatred, punctuated with clicks and coughs.

  The composite creature below the wizard surged forward. Under direct control it was faster than Caulie expected. Revulsion forced her back until she had enough room to hoist the rifle again. It reached for her with a dozen arms, some blind, some knowing where she was. Terror glowed yellow at the fringe of her mind. If this thing caught her she would never break free.

  Caulie launched herself at the wizard with a final overhead strike. Hands latched mechanically onto her coat, pinioning her arms.

  The rifle flew from her grasp—but it had momentum from her swing. The rifle stock fell between the wizard’s broken arms and connected between his eyes.

  It caved his head in.

  His features crumpled into brief agony and went slack. His skull was as brittle as his arms, as if it had been eaten away by his madness until only a fragile shell remained, and he collapsed like a puppet. The wizard slid forward in the pool, sagging at the edge until he flipped entirely out of the water. He bounced once against the legs of the composite creature and came to rest at Caulie’s feet. There was no movement from the body, not even a twitch. In the frigid wind, Caulie had the terrible thought that this wet and corrupted corpse had just been birthed by the composite creature, with her as the midwife. She stared down at the mottled, naked stillborn, one who looked a hundred years old and already a week dead.

  The blind, groping arms of the composite creature released her. Nauseated, Caulie pushed herself out of the crowd.

  “Caulie,” the panther intoned.

  It had crept up behind her. When she turned, it was inches from her face. The cockpit still gaped open with Shanter still sleeping inside.

  “Caulie, the entity is dead. Does this mean your task is now complete?”

  “No, panther,” she said, catching her breath. “Not just yet.”

  For a moment, while the wind whistled up the mountain and the composite creature struggled for balance, she stared the panther down. It sank to its haunches and lowered the edge of the cockpit. She still had time.

  She turned back to the wizard and assessed the body. Now that he was dead—now that she had killed him—he became manageable, slotting into her normal lab workflow. She only needed to take a sample now. Nothing unusual about it, except for the exotic location and the fact that she had no tools.

  “Panther,” Caulie said hoarsely, “I need to get his head off, but with the attached brains. Do you have any—”

  The panther reached out and used its dangling claws to sever the head at the base of the neck. In the same motion, it pushed the rest of the body aside like a trimming, letting it fall off the cliff.

  Caulie hoisted the head and the pendulous cluster of six attached brains. It was ghastly, all the more so now because some of the minds had been innocent, though subsumed into the madness. She had spoken with them and then she had killed them. . . She gritted her teeth. Don’t get distracted.

  “Do you have something that will carry this, panther?”

  “The cockpit,” it said.

  She imagined tearing down the mountain, the cabin full of flying, tethered brains.

  “Something else?”

  A fold of metal on the panther’s shoulder slid aside. A block of green ice dropped out and burst on the path. It sizzled into a pile of froth.

  “Thanks, panther.” Caulie stuffed the brains into the compartment. “What is that stuff?”

  “Anti-explosive foam, stored in a sub-zero bay. You must enter the cockpit now. A new contingent of enemy troops is arriving and they are immune to your song.”

  She climbed in. This new version of Caulie didn’t hit her shin against anything. She sat on the unresponsive but luxuriantly warm Shanter and closed the netting over them.

  “How do you know they are immune?”

  “Behavior context. They appear to have been surgically deafened.”

  The cockpit closed with the usual grind of snapping bones.

  The last thing the panther did was bat the composite creature with its paw. It was almost playful. It guided the creature to the path’s edge, then calmly observed it dithering as row after row of legs lost purchase and slid over. The raft of bodies finally pitched off the cliff face, and the panther watched until it burst on the valley floor.

  The panther watched, and so did Caulie.

  Chapter 39

  The screens showed the panther’s manic race back to the Haphan lines, but Caulie only saw the darkness between the images. After a vicious direction change where Shanter’s bodyweight squeezed her against the netting, he jerked and came awake.

  “I let you sleep,” she said.

  “That man.”

  “He was an obtained man, like from the histories of the Southie kings.”

  “I know what he was called, but I didn’t know what he was. Pretty Polly knew. I couldn’t answer when you told me to wound him.” His voice turned thoughtful beside her ear. “He didn’t seem like something that could be harmed, which is strange. Normally everything can be harmed.”

  “Everything?” she asked softly.

  She couldn’t tell him directly; the panther would overhear. If she was indirect, the panther might divine her meaning with its conversation context algorithms. If she was vaguely terrified or even obscurely anxious, Shanter would grow suspicious and the panther would register his mood through the pilot’s seat. Yet she couldn’t delay any longer.

  “You are safe now, Caulie.” She felt his breath on her neck.

  The panther would attack . . . and Shanter would try to protect her. He would fight this hulking metal machine and there could only be one outcome.

  Shanter will die either way.

  He was turning the screens off one by one. The cabin fell to darkness.

  She had to live. What she knew now, no Haphan had ever known. No Haphan could do what she had learned to do. She was insurance for the war; she was safety for millions. So what if some political whisperers in the Gray House wanted her dead? They wanted her knowledge eradicated and the general naiveté restored—but that, in Caulie’s opinion, was more wrongheaded, ignorant fumbling. The knowledge had to survive in her. Should it be needed again, Caulie had to live.

  Shanter enfolded her in his arms and rested his chin on her shoulder. His arms and cheek were warm. She might have taken comfort if she hadn’t known what his affection really was: the rote behavior of a construct, false to its core; an accidental behavioral side effect from a youth spent in a simulacrum of family love; a caress by a machine that thought it was alive. She might have taken comfort despite that.

  “Shanter,” she murmured.

  “Gods, Caulie, just be quiet for once.”

  “When we get back to the mountain, I must go immediately to our little bunker.” She stroked his hand, as the old Caulie would have.

  “You’re telling me now?” He paused to think. “Because you can’t tell me later. Because you won’t have time?”

  “I will be in a hurry. I have to make a critical call on my tablet.” She blinked through the tears in her eyes. “You must make sure no one stops me, Shanter. You must destroy anything that tries to keep me from the bunker. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nothing can block my path.”

  He was silent for a long moment, breathing against her cheek. “Nothing will.”

  The panther turned vertical and pitched them back in the pilot’s seat. Shanter reactivated the screens and they saw they were climbing a steep rock wall. It could only mean they were near their destination.

  “It feels hot in here, doesn’t it?” he said suddenly. “Stiflingly hot.”

  Caulie didn’t feel hot, and neither did his hands on hers.

  He continued with a laugh. “La, I am out of luck! Me-knowing only the warming song. Never needed a cooling song before.”

  “Is that so?” Dim confusion touched Caulie’s thoughts. Why this mindless chatter? Why the servile helpie voice? />
  “But, la! I can imagine-meh how refreshing it would make this swelter,” Shanter added. “The chill skin, the icy hands!” His fingernails sank into her forearms, making her flinch. “The precise temperature of the air outside.”

  The sky appeared under the panther’s forelimbs. Its long, dangling claws caught the edge of the mountain terrace and pulled it over. The pilot’s seat swung upright, bringing the guns of the 188th into view along with the swarms of Tachba crewmen. They were nearly home.

  “Take us to my bunker, panther,” Caulie instructed.

  “Yes, effendi,” it answered. “And my cabin is not hot. Neither is your servitor. He is clearly confused.”

  All at once, she understood what Shanter wanted. “He’s just tired. We both are.”

  She grasped his hand and tapped a rhythm. The last time she would touch him, and it was to program his Pollution.

  The panther prowled past guns and staring artillerymen.

  Shanter’s hand turned clammy in hers. She reinforced the song. She knew there was no point to it, but she kept on regardless.

  There was the broken artillery piece. Waiting beside it was Grampharic and the rest of the squad.

  Shanter’s body felt like ice beneath her. She had taken his warmth away and made him something else—a true machine, a corpse.

  The cockpit of the panther yawned open and the seat restraints released. “We have arrived.”

  Caulie stood and stepped out of the panther’s mouth.

  Grampharic wore a relieved smile that disappeared when he saw her face. He shifted his weight and, behind him, the squad instantly formed up, eyes alert, weapons ready.

  Shanter didn’t follow her out of the panther.

  When she glanced back, he was still slouched in the seat, shivering. One of his hands was twitching. No—not twitching. Shanter was signaling something to Grampharic.

  “Caulie,” the panther said. “Is our task now complete?”

  She permitted herself two more steps from the machine. Nothing would be the same after this.