by K. M. Szpara
The dragon told me this: that it would ferry me until I gained back my desire. That it would be difficult for it to leave until I was satiated. That it would not carry me forever but would carry me for a little while.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Take me to the wall.” I climbed aboard its back.
The sea we rode upon was not the same sea; purple light danced across the sky each evening, and soon after setting sail I glimpsed in the distance strange little ships off to our sides. The sea appeared as we sailed; to look too far into the distance was to look into nothing. The little ships, we came to know, were giant swallows, and they sailed to either side of us, a flock of them, leading our way forward. I watched them glide across the otherwise-still ocean and listened to them twitter to one another each morning, speaking their secret language. I remembered the birds in my other journeys, and I knew that Huan’s sisters were watching over us. I saw the sea unfold and knew that it was Huan who weaved it, that she still loved me.
The dragon demanded nothing more from me than that I cry upon its skin each night. I did my best, but soon I was too dry for tears. I became thin as paper, until I was paper pressed against my dragon ship’s sides. I had to unpeel myself from its edges to move across the bright blue skin.
The sky grew lighter as we grew closer, until it was only purple, untouched canvas, unwoven. The wall came into view. We reached it in three days. It was high and made of jade. As the dragon crawled to shore, my stomach tightened. How would I climb a wall so high? The sparrows circled me until I realized; they were meant to lead me over.
“Goodbye, dragon,” I said, letting it bury its face once more in the stink of my clothes.
“Your sorrow is lighter already,” said the dragon. “I am both happy and sad.”
I climbed a sparrow’s back and grabbed tight to its feathers. I looked down upon the sea glistening blue and white and black; my body called out to return to it. The air was too dry. But there was no going back, not without Huan.
On the other side of the wall massive trees stretched into an endless white sky, their leaves made of gold bells that rang in a soft wind. The trees did not stay in one spot, as trees did in our world, but moved with me, their roots sliding along the ground. They swatted at us with crooked branches. I clutched at the swallow’s feathers as she jerked to miss them. Finally we came to an area free of trees, where instead wooden pavilions as tall as the trees swayed in silver light. Inside the open-sided pavilions we passed up-close, weavers and other creatures slept standing up, leaning against the beams.
The sparrow slowed and descended onto a carpet of red moss that stretched below us. I climbed off its back and stood looking up and down the rows of buildings so tall I could not see the tops from the ground, wondering where to go. I did not have to wonder long, for from one of the pavilions stepped a giant man-god in bright red robes that I realized formed the moss at our feet. His eyes were wooden and creaked as they moved. He was this place, and so I knew that he must be the king.
“Climb,” he said, and he grabbed hold of the white beard that reached to his shins and shook.
“What?” I said, shrinking back from his booming voice.
“I expect you have come here to talk, and so I am telling you to climb, so that we might be face to face and can speak like two who are equal.” I grabbed hold of the beard and began to climb. He lifted the beard once I was halfway up, plucked me from his hairs, and sat me on his shoulder. “Though we are not equals at all,” he said. “We will never be equals, as I am sure you know. Why have you come to me?”
“Your daughter,” I said, holding a strip of his robe so that I would not fall. “I want to be with her.”
“You have come a long way,” he said. “And you do smell like a man, it is true. You have been at sea. You have much in common with men. But you did not want to be a man when my daughter made you so. You are a man no longer, and your marriage is revoked. Should you go back to being a man, your marriage would be restored.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, for I knew that I would not be happy. I would have his daughter’s love, but what of my own love? Was there a reason he could not give me everything I wanted? He was tall, and loud, and weaved the world. He weaved us into being. I could hardly speak I was so angry. Why wouldn’t he just give us all we wanted?
“Yes, you humans cling to what power you have. You want more than you deserve. Fine. I am impressed by how far you have come. I will not make you leave without reward. I give you two choices, then. Your first: you may have all that you ever wanted. You may keep your womanness, your womb. You may be with my daughter as you are. You may have another ship with which to sail the seas.”
I could taste it, the satisfaction of all my life’s dreams met, like salt water on my tongue.
“Or, your second choice, you can give it to all of your kind. You cannot have my daughter’s hand but can instead gift choice to others, to all of your humanity. I will make this man-woman power malleable. I will give you control of what you are. I will give you all blank slates to work with as you please.”
It was not a fair choice, to pit my desires against those of my fellow people, against those of the women I heard cry at night, who could never be with me forever always, the way some of them wanted. I would be lying if I said I did not want both things but wanted the first more. My belly ached with the weight of this decision. How dare he.
But one cannot change all the world in one day. One cannot take all the power at once. I would do what I could. I would give up Huan, beautiful Huan, who must be waiting for me, who had asked me to come for her, who I would never see again, to give my people their own power.
“You know what my choice is,” I said.
“I knew,” he said, “that you were a fool when I saw you riding your dragon to meet me.”
“Can I see Huan?” I said. “One more time? Can I see her?”
“It will upset her,” he said. “You have chosen your people over her. I cannot be sure that she will forgive you that. No, I think it best you leave the way you came.” He picked me up with his too-large fingers and dropped me upon the swallow’s back. “I hope you enjoy the complicated nature of the world you wrought. I made things simple for a reason, you know.” The swallow lifted into the air. I was grateful that I could no longer see him, though I could still hear his calls. “You will regret the ambiguity. You will regret the confusion. Things will not be as you think they will.”
When we reached the wall, his voice disappeared, and I sank my face into the bird’s back and screamed out Huan’s name.
My new Dragon’s Bane was waiting for me. The smell of my sadness, it said, was impossible to ignore. I did not go back to my homeland to check on the women there; those I met across the sea told me stories, of the confusion, of women making themselves men making themselves women again. Of in-between people. Of people of neither. I was no longer part of that world. Maybe I never had been.
The sea brought me to you all, though neither I nor my ship led the way. We sailed on waves unfolding before us and washed up on your shore. You who bestow legends. You who weave stories into the world. I ask you for my name. I ask you for a legend never-changing, where Huan and I may be together in story if not in life. This is what I believe she wants, why she wove the sea to take me here.
Give us this, please. A story that ends in happiness, a story of love. Give me a name that suits me.
In this package:
1. Three letters. (With our instructions on opening order, per Human dating system.)
2. One musical instrument, harmonica.
3. One plastic package containing three toothbrushes.
4. One tube of toothpaste.
5. One cloth Earth mammal, bear (unsure of further classification), filled with synthetic material. (We are sorry for the lack of symmetry, the cloth mammal was obviously damaged and repaired at some point. We were told not to modify it.)
First letter:
July 18, 2041
Dear Ryan,
They told me you’d get this after, so you won’t really be reading my words, will you? And you told me yourself you’d forget your own language, though I hope to God you don’t forget your planet, and your wife. And your daughter.
Ryan, how could you? I know this was supposed to be a nice letter to settle you into your new life, to bridge the transition, and God knows you tried to talk me into doing it, too—
I’m sorry.
No, I’m not fucking sorry. You left me for another species. Not another woman, Ryan, or even another man. Another fucking species.
If this is supposed to be the last letter, I guess I should say I love you.
Are you dead now? Can I mourn you?
Fuck.
—Sophie
Second letter:
July 19, 2041
Hey, Bro.
The Sedrayin consulate people said you’ll be travelling in a bubble-ship that breaks some sort of theory, and time will move faster for us than it does for you. That’s okay, I get that.
I just wanted to tell you that I support you in this. I don’t understand it, and I’ve asked the pastor what she thinks, if it’s even in the Bible. She quoted me some nonsense that had nothing to do with anything, and then just said the best thing I could do was accept you where you’re at.
I like that.
Because I’ve always looked up to you, you know? You were so different. I used to make fun of you for sneaking out at night to go and look through your telescope, especially when there were a lot more…ah, entertaining things you could be doing while sneaking out. And you just smiled, and said it made you feel calmer. And maybe I didn’t press too hard, because I didn’t like when you were so restless. I knew you weren’t happy.
But man, coming out as another species? Bro, I’m still trying to wrap my head around that. I look at the Sedrayin in their enviro suits, with their blue skin and weird—sorry Bro, I still have a hard time, I’ll get better—oddly shaped oval eyes, and the way they kind of walk with that forward slant, like they’re coming at you with all they’ve got.
Dude. You have always walked that way. Oh my God, I never noticed that until now.
Bro, I guess you look different now.
Anyhow, I hope you remember me. Meet a hot alien babe and fall in love. Have lots of alien babies. (Whoa, Jenna will have alien siblings???) I’m sorry they couldn’t come with you. Man, I know that’s hard.
I love you. I hope you’re happy, now. And, you know, have fun seeing the stars for real, and living on another planet! Dude, how cool is that!
—Gabe
P.S. Oh, I found your harmonica the other day and thought I’d send it along. Maybe that wasn’t the best idea, because do you even have lips now? Well, something’s gotta blow air.
Third letter:
July 20, 2041
My dear Ryan,
Oh, I’m sorry. I should call you Etsath-tachri now, right? Yes, I checked the spelling.
Etsath. I’m sorry I waited until the last minute to write this letter, I almost didn’t make it in time, but they held the courier shuttle at the consulate so I could write this.
I just wanted to say, I love you, son. This is all so new to me, the aliens being here at all—what are there, twenty-something species we’ve now had contact with? And I saw on the news that there’s another ship inbound from outside Jupiter. But honey, it’s hard. This isn’t the world I grew up in. The world I grew up in was having a hard enough time accepting people like myself and Leanne, but I—we—love you so much that we’re changing, too. We’re changing the way we look at the world. Or any world, if I think about it.
We always knew you were special. You spent hours with your science books and games, and you loved your art, though the galleries said it was too symmetrical. I guess that makes sense, now. I won’t ever let anyone paint over your mural of the stars in your bedroom.
I packed some toothbrushes and toothpaste, I know you always forget those.
I know we’ve already said our goodbyes. I will miss you like nothing I’ve ever missed before.
Thank you, son, for being my son. For being born to me. You were the greatest gift the universe could ever give me.
Be the best damn Sedrayin you can be. Be yourself.
Love,
Mom
P.S. Please forgive Sophie. I’ve talked with Jenna. She misses you, but she said she knows you’ll be watching over her in the stars. She wanted to send something, too. She said to hug her teddy bear whenever you’re feeling sad or lonely, and you’ll remember how much she loves her daddy and be happy again. The kids, they are so quick to understand.
In the womb-tank coded with thought and memory, Twoseret learned three things: that her life will be full of peace, that she will never die, and that she will know precisely one tragedy. These facts are absolute, untarnished by chance and impregnable to intervention.
After that, petals started blooming in her mouth.
They come at dawn at a regulated hour; she knows to be awake with her mouth empty so she does not choke. A tickle in her throat, a pressure against tonsil, and they emerge fluttering: the shape of hands with spindly digits, the color of unlit space that demarcates empires. She likes to speculate whose hands they might be modeled on, or whether they are the quintessence of hands, a mannequin standard.
They are pristine and velvet, untouched by teeth and untainted by saliva: like no part of the body at all, no effort to resemble tissue or keratin.
Here Twoseret finds her orders, in the capillaries that call to the light of accretion disks and press against her nerves in synesthetic licks. The petals are the flowers of prophecy, the blooms of destiny. As long as she follows their instructions, like any memorialist Twoseret stands deathless.
She arranges the petals, four, radiant—fingers pointing out, fluttering in the low salted wind, the heels of their palms held down by mosaic stones. A murmur of sun slants across unlight velvet. She bends to read, sibyl to her own fate.
The city ground is a canvas, the avenues brushstrokes, history a palette. An avian view yields faces gone to carcass and archive, some self-portraits, others celebrating personal affection and past deeds—the war heroes, the founding scholars, the beloved siblings. Within these walls, nothing is forgotten. Outside them, everything is.
Twoseret walks through parabola gates of porphyry and persimmons heavy on the bough, down bridges whose curves follow theta-rhythms. The petals have given her a course, a target.
It will be a channel, she expects, through which she may monitor a life and from that material suture together a new person. Broad edits are crude: a wholesale revision of a planet’s chronology, a rearrangement of civil wars and epidemics and sundry. The work she does, however, requires more finesse. In identity reassignment the subject must feel at home in their new path, natural to a strange career and family and spouse as though they have always lived this life. The more moving pieces there are, the more skilled a memorialist has to be. Twoseret counts herself one of the best in the city, if not the very best.
The only one to whom she conceded supremacy was Umaiyal, but ey is long gone.
She stops at the basin of faces, where bone dunes in a hundred twenty-seven colors—most visible, a few not—rotate hourly, resolving into the faces of the first memorialists. There, at the border of grinding femurs and fibulae, she finds a casket.
The edges of it are sharp as invasion, its casing radiant as war-beads, its lid heavy as regret. Around this a homunculus of encryption hovers, epidermis full of paradoxes clenched shut. She coaxes them open, by intuition and determination. Her routines grant her a surplus of leisure, and she’s spent it on dead languages, ciphers, puzzle-solving.
She expects a soldier, a spy, a politician of high standing. Those are ever the first to develop a taste for sedition. But once the homunculus has been whispered and peeled off, she finds instead a foreign assassin.
Beneath a canopy of chameleon fish and isometry rosettes, she thaws the body. Thei
r face is blunt, singed at temple and jawline by ecclesiastic tattoos. Their neck looks as though branded by bird beaks, their biceps abraded by bird claws. The marks of the Cotillion and the divine Song under which they march.
The assassin is armed too, but Twoseret is unconcerned, for the petals did not forecast that she will die today. When the fluids have been drained and the cryogenic phase deactivated, the assassin wakes: all at once, without the transitional stage between occluded cognition and full alertness. The gaze that latches onto Twoseret’s is clear and iridescent with corneal implants.
They jackknife and heave. A splat of saliva and bile, so black, so blue. Waking up this way is never pleasant, no more than being decanted from a tank. Twoseret has vivid recall of her own birth, her first breath and emergence, of volition beyond the crèche-parents.
She reads their name and gender as they come online. “Sujatha Sindh.” The name susurrates like parched leaves, from a language spoken on several Hegemonic constituents. Not entirely foreign, but the two empires have regular exchanges; citizens of one flee and become refugees in another, diasporic. Their descendants repeat the cycle.
The assassin gains their composure in turns, gray and shuddering, on their back, then on their knees. Twoseret offers a hand; they take it. Long fingers, velvet where synthetic dermis has replaced fingerprints.
“You have been sent to abduct or kill one of us,” Twoseret murmurs, off the dossier. “Did you choose a specific target or would any of us have done?”
“My instructions were not discriminating.” Sujatha’s voice is a blasted echo, its wealth and timbre gouged out. Cotillion personnel wield their voices for sacred music, better than any weapon. Without that the assassin’s bite is much blunted.
Because they do not ask what their fate will be, Twoseret does not provide. Perhaps they already know, as surely as if they had read the same petals Twoseret did. She gives them her shoulder, her arm around the heft of a torso honed to swift retribution, limbs trained to kinetic poetry. Those too have been weakened, ligament augmens snipped off, bone enhancement ripped out. Where once there was puissance, now there is brittle mortality.