Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  He’d thought it was only his own uneasiness at the way things were. Men fought men to take prisoners; they didn’t kill defenseless women. But it was more than that, a deeper revulsion in his gut, the same one that had sent him running away from himself. Perhaps, in the end, he was no more than a woman—betrayed here, then, as he had been in the regiments, by what the gender-change couldn’t erase. By tenderness, and by sisterhood.

  No, Black One take him, no. He wasn’t that weak. He’d been betrayed once. It wasn’t going to happen a second time.

  Acoimi knocked at Xoco’s door early the next morning, and found her sitting, bleary-eyed, before a bowl of synthesized maize porridge. “You’re right,” he said without preamble, blunt and aggressive, like a true warrior. “She’s gone. Nothing we do is going to bring her back.”

  She cocked her head, thoughtfully. “The night changed your mind, then?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” The old him would have offered explanations and excuses, or at least felt embarrassed. No such thing here.

  Xoco shrugged. “Fine. I’ll pack my belongings, then. You know what you have to do.”

  “Yes.” He’d thought he would feel fear, or unease, or remorse, but there was nothing in his chest but a growing hollow. He glanced around the room, saw what he had missed on entering: the neat boxes, the folded clothes on the sleeping mat. “You knew.”

  “I told you. I’ve seen many births.” Xoco spread her hands. “Her soul died, out there on the floor, trying to reach the ship’s core. You can’t get it back, no matter what you do.”

  Alone once more, he walked back to his room. Huexotl was still waiting where he’d left her: sitting on the floor, her hands trailing on the mat, drawing random patterns that might have been glyphs, or merely the ramblings of a madwoman. Her vacant eyes moved to him, and held his gaze for a brief moment.

  She could have been his sister.

  But, if he had been her brother, he would never have let her get that way.

  Acoimi knelt, and withdrew the injector from his satchel. He entered, by blind instinct more than anything else, the correct dosages for someone of her mass and build: enough to send her gently into the night of the underworld, but not so much that the components would react together and induce conscious paralysis. Then he sat by her side and bared her arm, watching the veins bunched under her skin.

  The hiss of the injector echoed in the room as loudly as a gunshot. He clenched his hand, half-expecting her to choke and keel over, but of course it wasn’t instant. She still had a handful of minutes, perhaps as much as a quarter hour, depending on how the toxin spread in her system.

  “Say something. Please.”

  She watched him, imperturbable. At length, Acoimi was the one who couldn’t bear the silence anymore. “Spread your wings upward, O Mother,” he whispered, his voice breaking on the last word—picking up strength, climbing higher than it should have. “O Giver of Life . . .”

  Huexotl’s hands clenched, slightly. “Spread your wings upward,” she repeated, and, gently, carefully, she unfolded her body, shivering as she moved. “O Mother . . .”

  Acoimi jerked back in surprise. But she was utterly unaware of him: merely moving upward, making her slow way to the door and the corridors that lay beyond.

  He knew where she was going: back to the heart-room, whatever its significance was in her diminished mind. He could have shoved her down, forced her to sit still. But to what end? He’d already done enough by killing her; why would he prevent her from choosing the place of her death?

  Huexotl walked, swaying, going more and more slowly as the corridors twisted and bent around them—shining metal, beating carbon fibers—and the echo of her song, coming stronger and stronger as she faltered, until it seemed the ship was filled with the hymn.

  At length, she reached the heart-room, stopped in the frame of the door, breathing hard, her hands clenched. And then she toppled like a felled tree, her hands still extended toward the ship’s core—as if she were the Mind herself, still struggling to find the ship.

  “Please . . . help . . .” she whispered. Her voice shocked him out of his immobility; it was the first coherent sound he’d heard from her, the first speech that wasn’t madness or half-remembered scraps. Before he could reflect on the consequences of what he’d done to her, he was bending—lifting her up, her full weight resting on his arms—and, stumbling, carrying her to the core.

  Her hands wrapped around a jutting bit of metal, and a slow smile spread across her face: not the blissful one that should have been induced by the drugs, but something far more primal, a fierce, brash joy that made him feel sick to his stomach.

  “Spread your wings upward,” she whispered. Her breath was the only sound in the air, slow and labored, her lungs slowly filling up with fluid, her muscles seizing one after another. “O Giver of Life . . .”

  Huexotl’s hands fell back from the metal. Her gaze, roaming, found his, and there was something in her eyes—love, hunger, possessiveness, all of it merging into a feeling so alien and so strong it burnt him like acid thrown into his face, flensing all pretenses, all lies and evasions from him.

  “Please . . .” she whispered. She dragged herself up, curled her body against the ship’s core, her face resting against the metal, her breath fogging it. “Help . . . him . . .” She fell silent, the last of her muscles locking into paralysis. Her eyes closed. He couldn’t have told at what point she died, but at some point, her immobility became the familiar one of a corpse, and the last of the color drained from her face, leaving her small and pathetic—and yet curiously human. In death, she was no longer blank or mad, just diminished the same way as everyone.

  “I’m sorry,” Acoimi whispered, knowing it wouldn’t atone for anything. The fog of his breath moved across the bars and the tubes, sinking out of sight. He heard nothing but his own heartbeat, thudding painfully against his ribcage.

  And, gradually, he became aware he was no longer alone. It was a vast, numinous presence—something that distorted the space around them, gave an oily sheen to the metal, quivered in the air like a heat wave. The room buckled and shuddered, trying to fit itself to new forms, new rules; the presence brushed him, light and fractured colors, a plane that hadn’t been meant to open to him.

  Mother, it whispered, or wept, or screamed. Mother!

  A ghost. A memory, Xoco had said. But Acoimi was ticitl—physician, from beginning to end—even here, even now, in the face of . . . this; and he saw, not a ghost, not a memory, but a crippled being, dragging itself upward in agony and grief.

  It hadn’t been strong enough to quicken the ship, but something had leapt across, all the same. Something, slowly spreading in the corridors, slowly trying to gather itself together, until the final shock of Huexotl’s death forced it to coalesce into being . . .

  He tasted bile and blood in his mouth.

  A Mind. A crippled, incomplete Mind, trying to control the ship, to put everything together—like a wounded warrior trying to fight, rising again and again, falling again and again, the assault rifle quivering in his hands, readying for a shot that might kill an enemy, or bring the coup de grace to a friend. In its convulsions to imprint itself on the core, it would disrupt the ship’s equilibrium—take all or part of it into deep planes that couldn’t sustain human life, leave them stranded in the midst of the void to choke, or starve to death . . .

  He should run; that was what he should do. Get up and run, and find Xoco before that thing could do its damage. They could call on the Hungry Coyote, ask its Mind to blast this crippled, non-functional monstrosity out of existence, out of misery. He should—

  He didn’t move. The room shivered again: remodeling itself everywhere he watched, the walls receding further and further away, the metal changing to crystal to fibers and back to metal again. The air smelled of spilled oil and blood.

  Help him, she’d asked. Her last wish; her last conscious thought.

  What if in the end, it could gain control
of the ship, just like any other Mind? What if—

  In the end, he was a man—unable to bear the shame of killing an unarmed woman. In the end, he was a woman—made to give life, to yield life, but never to take it. In the end, everything betrayed him, or perhaps nothing did. Perhaps he was simply himself again: the girl who had wept over her sister’s corpse, eaten inside by fear and grief; the man who had walked away from the blood-wars, sickened by the slaughter. Perhaps . . .

  “Upward,” he whispered. And he didn’t know, not anymore, if it was a prayer against the inevitable, or—Black One help him—an encouragement.

  Copyright © 2010 Aliette de Bodard

  Previous Article Next Article

  Previous Article Next Article

  SHORT STORIES

  BROTHER SLEEP

  Tim McDaniel

  Tim McDaniel spent ten years in Thailand, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and then as a lecturer at Khon Kaen University. He found the disparity between “ ‘ Why can’t Thailand be the next Asian Tiger economic powerhouse?’ and the Thai take-it-easy worldview an interesting dichotomy.” That tension, plus the desire to present translated Thai nicknames as a Thai ear would hear them, led to the story of . . .

  My phone beeped, and I paused the game.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hi,” said Victory, calling from way down in Bangkok. Good thing the picture wasn’t on; I wasn’t wearing my university uniform or slumped wearily over a computer. “Just calling to check in,” he said. “How’s everything?”

  “Fine. Listen, Victory, I don’t have time to talk right now, okay?”

  “You’re not in class now, are you? From the schedule you sent us, I didn’t think—”

  “I’ll call you back in a few hours.”

  “A few hours? That’ll be after midnight.”

  “I know.” I hung up. I’d wake him up if I felt like it. Who did he think he was, anyway? My brother. What did that have to mean? That we’d be tied together for life? But he was a sleeper, and I hadn’t slept since before I was born. He was the past, and I was the future.

  Too bad I couldn’t afford to study overseas. I could have gone to the U.S. or Australia. Or Germany. There were a lot of Thais in Germany. It would have been harder for Victory to call me there. Too expensive.

  But I could forget about overseas. I couldn’t even afford Bangkok. I was stuck here upcountry, in a no-name provincial university, far from the center.

  If Sky ever found out about my family. That was on my mind.

  I turned off the game and went out to see if Bird or Fat could think of anything we could do. The trouble with never sleeping is you got to fill all those hours.

  One day a couple weeks later I invited Sky over to watch Increase sleep.

  I figured it would be a laugh, something different to do. I’d planned to go out with Fat, but then he canceled. And Sky had been asking me about Increase since he’d moved into my dorm room. Sleepers were maids or rice farmers seen walking along the road, not university students.

  I pulled my own bed down from the wall and we sat on it, watching Increase.

  “So, what happened when he went to sleep tonight?” Sky asked. She held her long hair back with one hand and leaned closer and closer to Increase, until her nose almost touched his, then drew back again. “Did he just, you know, collapse, and you had to catch him so he wouldn’t break his nose on the floor, or what?”

  “No, not like that. He just gets slower, and finally he just gradually goes to sleep. Come on, Sky. You sleep, too.” I got up and crossed the room to the little refrigerator. I pulled out a bag of sliced papaya and a couple of Green Spots.

  “Not like that, though.” She wrinkled her nose and plopped down on my bed. “I mean, every night, just sleeping for all those hours. Like an animal or something.” I passed her a Green Spot and she took a swallow. I jabbed some toothpicks into the papaya slices and laid the open bag between us, along with a smaller bag of salt and ground hot peppers for dipping.

  “There we go,” I said. “You wouldn’t find better service in the best restaurant in Bangkok.”

  “Yeah. Only Khon Kaen is a long way from Bangkok. Lord, I thought I would die when I got placed here. Third choice!”

  “I know. Me, too.” Not really. Northeasterners like me got a special rate, buffalo kids from Kalasin and Mukdaharn and Surin, and that was the only reason my family could afford the university at all. We’re all so poor and disadvantaged in the Northeast, you know. Or so Bangkokians thought. Like there weren’t gangs of sleepers in every alley of Bangkok, City of Angels.

  Increase had curled into a funny crouch, like a fetus in the womb. It was a warm night, because it hadn’t rained for a couple of days, and he had pulled the sheets from his chest, maybe without even waking up.

  I’d been at the university for less than two years, and already seeing someone sleep like that was like a visit to the zoo.

  “Turn the light up. I can hardly see him.”

  “No, I’m not supposed to. It might wake him up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I got a brochure when he moved in. It explained all about noise and lights and stuff.” Well, they could have sent a brochure. They should have.

  Sky was getting bored. She turned to brush a hand across my computer screen and paged through the list of my vids. “You don’t have anything new.”

  “No, I got to get some more.”

  “Hey, you got a message.” Before I could stop her, she’d tapped the icon.

  It was Victory, his face tired. “Hey, Horse. Mom says you haven’t called for a while, so I’m just checking to make sure everything is okay, that you don’t need anything. Call us when you get a chance. During the daytime or evening, you know.”

  “That your brother?”

  “Yeah. Older brother.”

  “Where does he go to school?”

  “Oh, he’s finished.” Never started—but I couldn’t tell her that.

  She turned back to Increase, who had now twisted into a new position. His sheets were tangled, too. It looked like he’d had a fight with them. His head was tilted back on the pillow, and his mouth was wide open, but slack, like when a stupid person is trying to think. A thin trickle of liquid ran out of the side of his mouth, and down to the pillow.

  “Look at his mouth,” Sky said. “He’s probably dreaming about food. They do that, don’t they? Have all those dreams and stuff. And his blankets are all twisted around. Look. I wonder if he could strangle himself with them. He’d never even have a chance to wake up as his air was slowly cut off. He’d just drift away.”

  “I don’t think it works that way.”

  Sky rolled her eyes. Then she smiled. “Hey, would he wake up if we just took a peek?”

  “A peek?”

  “Yeah, you know. See what he’s got down there. I wonder if he’s like other guys in that way.”

  “He’s just like other guys, okay?”

  “Okay,” Sky pouted. “Anyway, if he’s just like other guys, how come he has to sleep so much? Is he here on a scholarship or something, some buffalo boy from the rice paddy?”

  “No, he told me he had the treatment, but it just didn’t take. I guess that happens sometimes, like once in a million or something.”

  Sky was already bored with the topic. “Hey, let’s go shopping,” she said. “I have to get some stuff for my room. We can go with Bird and Cucumber and her fat sister.”

  I called Victory that afternoon. I had to wait a bit while they got him from the work floor, and when he finally came to the phone his face was splotched with sweat. He pushed back a lock of hair, leaving a streak of some kind of industrial lubricant across his forehead. I squirmed in my white and black university uniform.

  “Hey, Horse. I’m glad you called. It’s been a while.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been busy, you know. Classes.”

  “Busy, twenty-two hours a day? Mom and Dad were getting worried. You got the last bank transfer
, right?”

  “Yeah, the money’s fine.” I had to be much more careful than my friends—but there was nothing more Victory or Mom and Dad could do about that. What little Dad hadn’t thrown away on keeping Grandpa drunk was all in the little farm. But a son can’t say no when his father asks him for money, and Grandpa was not shy about asking.

  “Also, Mom says she was surprised to hear about your test in Business Ecolaw last month. Is that class going any better now?”

  I scowled. “Oh, that was just one test. I don’t see why it’s any of their business. I’m doing all right.”

  “It’s their money, so they’re told. Remember, they gave up a lot to give you this chance. If you don’t—”

  “I know, I know.” Same old thing. Victory’s money, too, though he didn’t say it. “I said, I’m doing okay.”

  Victory looked at me a long time. His whole face and neck were wet. His factory didn’t have air-con. I thought of the busy, noisy work floor, with the metal roof that magnified the heat, the smell of sweat, the sounds of men being crude and comradely. Then it would be back home to his tiny room. “Okay, then. Just call us more often, right? It’s not just about the money, though they’ve got to think about that. It’s you. They want to know about your life.”

  So I talked a little bit about the dorm food and about the baby cobra that they’d found nestled in a men’s room in the Engineering Faculty. I didn’t tell him about Sky—Mom and Dad had made it clear that they didn’t want me dating until I finished at the university.

  And I didn’t tell him about my new sleeper roommate.

  Sky came over one morning about 5:30. Increase was still sleeping, and I was unfolding the bookshelf I’d picked up, as quietly as I could.

  “What’s up?” Sky burst through the door like she always did, no knock. I used to think it was cute.

  “Not so loud,” I whispered.

  “Oh. The sleeper. It’s funny. I’ve never even seen him awake!” She dropped a shopping bag onto the floor and took a chair. Her shirt was unbuttoned to a point that would give my mom a stroke. But it was so hot.