“Something,” Esithu said, “for forgetting. Call it ‘Annex’ if you call it anything.”
The rest of it was simply slotting algorithms into place. A matter of using sound to energize the effects of popular recreational drugs, and then unleashing it on an audience already well and dosed. Esithu made it small: a shift to alter perception of tempo.
They slipped into one of Yinshi’s performances. The crowd danced two beats slower than they should, not quite matching what was being played. The second time Esithu activated the script, Yinshi’s entire audience paused their network streams by mid-song and resumed them three-fourths of the way through.
When they met Lykesca again she had a head full of hair, and limbs bristling with thorns.
“I like what you’ve been doing.”
They talked over wilted vegetable and slivers of synthetic meat. In the old city few had a functioning palate and most subsisted on liquid nutrients or tablets. Easier to digest, less interruption to addictives or ongoing modification processes. Esithu had started eating real food again as soon as the physiotherapy permitted.
“I’m hoping,” Esithu said, “those are not prison marks.”
Lykesca lifted a barbed hand; Esithu switched to an augmens overlay. A playback of Yinshi’s music, spiked with Esithu’s memetic injection. “I’ve been freer than a pirate ship, but if I’m going to return to the scene of crime I might as well not be recognized on sight.”
They didn’t ask if she’d covered her tracks otherwise. It seemed an insult. “I’ve been thinking that your ideas are defeatist.”
“Coming from a cynic like you, that honestly upsets me.”
“You build them around the thought that not only can we not fight back now, we never will be able to. Not in two generations, not in twenty. Not ever.”
Lykesca shook a head of razorish brambles. “It’s true that plenty can happen over as short a time as decades. But I’ve made projections, Esithu, and my plans aren’t going to change.”
“Even if I said I could trigger mass hallucination? Mass suicide?”
It was gratifying to see Lykesca recoil. “A little extreme,” she said, “and it won’t solve anything. The Hegemony doesn’t run on people. It’s planets. It’s inertia. Revenge on individuals—this general, that lawmaker—is meaningless.”
Esithu chewed on tasteless faux-chicken. “If you’d said yes, I might have turned you in.”
“Very amusing. When will you have it ready? I’ll compile it against mass suicide models, by the way.”
“What good fortune it is our sense of humor is so compatible. It’s ready any time you want it.”
Lykesca stood. “You’ll know when the time comes.”
A public address on an override channel to all Hegemonic citizens: they were now at war with the Suoqua Sovereignty, and to harbor a Suoqua was treason. Save those who’d ripped out network receptors from their lobes, who’d blinded and deafened themselves—save those, none would fail to receive the broadcast.
Yinshi’s piece beat just out of hearing, infiltrating the interstices between a call to arms, a demand for sacrifices. Esithu would find out only belatedly how Lykesca broke through the security filters to embed the song and its memetic payload.
It went undetected for some time; Esithu’s injection left no trace, caused no immediate effect. They celebrated with turmeric-yellowed rice, tender poultry steeped in spices, and drinks that didn’t taste like lukewarm acid. Yinshi ate with them in bemusement. Neither disclosed to her, quite, what had happened.
“I’m going to prove you wrong,” Esithu said when the last yellow grain had been savored and swallowed.
A little inebriated and having flirted—disastrously—with Yinshi, Lykesca licked a dash of sauce off her thumb. “What about?”
“Costeya will give up Samutthewi.”
She vented a roar of laughter. Yinshi, dozing by the door, twitched awake. “I’d say I wish you luck, but you’ll need more than that. Immortality perhaps, and even then the universe will probably succumb to heat death first.”
“I intend to return Samutthewi to autonomy before the universe forgets it, forgets us. A couple centuries, at least. Not that it’ll moot your plan, but I just want to make a point.”
Lykesca spluttered liquor and amusement, then collected herself. “Then I can only say that I hope for the best, and may your ancestors watch over you.”
Esithu immersed themselves in cybernetics. They chased a greater consciousness, and a frame for it that could withstand time. They experimented on Yinshi, who wanted ears that could hear beyond the human range and fingers which could bifurcate to better manipulate strings. An extra arm.
A year of that and Esithu began to work on themselves, opening up veins and digestive tracts, excavating fat and epidermis.
In Hegemonic capitals it became difficult to live without a synchronized memory, and few rejected total integration into the grid. So long as the phenomenon was under control it served Costeya interests. On their part, Esithu retained their own memory in an indelible partition.
Lykesca was caught, eventually.
Like the raid, it happened in ignominious quiet. A data-terrorist and smuggler, Lykesca was called. There was a glimpse of her face, haggard and burned; she went to her execution tagged with a convict’s code, cremated without name or kin.
Twenty years after Lykesca’s execution, Samutthewi became a native and loyal constituent of the Hegemony. It always had been, just as Costeya had always been at war with Suoqua.
Twenty years after Lykesca’s execution, Esithu revised Yinshi’s music to tell a story. By then modifying data had become the exclusive province of Hegemonic agencies. But the backdoors stayed, and Esithu kept Lykesca’s access protocols.
Esithu gave Yinshi a change of name and origins out of courtesy, to sever her ties to a particular piece of music. “Annex” returned to circulation and a heroine slipped into the fabric of Costeya history.
A woman who shed and donned faces as easily as she changed names, who through tricks and transplants cheated death for a hundred lifetimes. A woman who traveled from world to world, promising unity under one name, an empire of peace whose borders knew no limits.
In the morning, flower-mouths in Vithansuthi sang a composition to honor Saint Lykesca, mother of Costeya.
Across Hegemonic planets the song was repeated, reverbing in uncounted millions of temples and churches. It preceded dawn prayers: Saint Lykesca ruled over worship of any thought or idol.
As she always would; as she always had.
About the Author
Benjanun Sriduangkaew spends her free time on words, amateur photography, and the pursuit of colorful, unusual makeup. She has a love for cities, airports, and bees. Her fiction can be found in GigaNotoSaurus, Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Clockwork Phoenix 4.
No Portraits on the Sky
Kali Wallace
The stranger fell from the sky just after dawn.
Rela heard the snap of branches and looked up. The sun was rising in a gray haze beyond the forest’s eastern edge, and the mist was retreating from the aerie. In the canopy above, a dark figure tumbled through the fog, bouncing from branches and whipping past leaves. Rela watched with her breath caught in her chest, her heart stuttering. But as the person fell closer she could see he was no skywarden. He wore no tools, no ropes, no soft sticky gloves the color of spider silk.
The stranger missed the bridge as he fell, but a line of cocoons caught him. He tangled in the ropes and set the pods swaying before twisting free again. Rela heard a thump as he landed. She couldn’t see the platform through the shivering leaves and broken cobwebs, and when she held her breath to listen, she heard no shouts of alarm, no curious cries. There was only the drip of dew and the rustle of settling branches.
Holding tight to the bridge, Rela leaned over the ropes for a better view of the sky. The canopy was thick, but she was high enough and there were breaks enough for her to see patches of bland gray throu
gh the trees, and the dark imperfections marring its smooth expanse.
Everybody in the forest knew the sky was falling. They muttered and fussed when scraps ripped free and fluttered down, draped over gardens and saplings and pods, left brown patches of crisp leaves and dead moss behind. Some days it was worse than others, a soft white rain, and spiders scurried to devour what they could before it did too much damage. Children, unconcerned, collected the tatters to poke them with sticks, burn them with embers, and laughed as the translucent threads pulled and curled and shriveled. The fallen sky made a high hissing noise as it burned, not unlike the call of the fat brown beetles that lived in knots and hollows.
Everybody knew the sky was falling, but Rela didn’t know if there were more wounds now than there had been yesterday. She rarely looked at the sky anymore.
Her spiders chattered and nipped at her bare arms. The ropes the stranger had struck were old, easily frayed, and the cocoons dangled precariously.
“Fix the line,” Rela said. The words trembled on her tongue, but her spiders calmed at the sound of her voice. One of the largest, a green and gold ropemaker with bright sparking eyes, crept down her arm and onto the rope. Rela stroked a hand over its back and let it nip at her fingers. “Fix the line, lovely. Go.”
The spider scurried away, and others followed, trailing fresh threads of silk. Rela left them to their repairs and followed the bridge to the nearest trunk, climbed down a ladder and crossed to a junction between three trees. There she stopped, and again she listened. This corner of the aerie was remote, little used and little visited, home only to the faded cocoons of sleepers whose names and faces were long forgotten. That was why she had chosen it for her morning routine, apart from her fellow weavers who spoke to her in soft voices, with pitying glances; they did not know what to say to her anymore, and she preferred to work alone. The swaying cocoons and bright blue lights of her spiders’ eyes were the only sign anything had disturbed the canopy.
Nobody else had seen the stranger fall.
Her heart still pounding, her throat tight, Rela crossed a bridge to an old platform. Its wooden planks were softened with mold, split and warped by water and time. Half a dozen cocoons hung around its perimeter: sleepers who had been wrapped and silent for longer than Rela had been alive. Silk webs draped the cocoons in delicate curtains, and through the veils their painted features were soft, indistinct, their eyes no more than dark, blank blotches, their solemn mouths washed away.
The stranger lay face-down at a corner of the platform. His shoulders were twisted, both legs bent, one arm tucked crookedly beneath his chest. Rela hesitated, uncertain, but she could not help if she could not see his injuries. She dragged him away from the edge and rolled him onto his back. An odd gray cloth, soft and slick to the touch, covered his entire body. He wore no harness and carried no tools. His arms were too short, his legs too long, and a smooth, blank mask hid his face.
Rela drew her knife. Her spiders crowded up her arms and back. She saw no blood yet, but they could smell it, and they clicked and flashed eagerly as she sliced into the gray cloth to free the man’s shoulders and arms, his neck beneath the unsettling blank mask, his hips and groin and peculiar long legs. Beneath the pliable gray fabric there was another layer, soft, white, damp with sweat and splotched with blood. Rela cut that away as well. It had been a long time since she had used her spiders to heal broken bones and battered flesh, but she remembered what to do, and with each careful step she pushed her worry about where the man had come from to the back of her mind.
“Go on,” she said, but quietly, a whisper that would not carry.
The spiders raced down her arms and picked away the white fabric to reveal the stranger’s skin. Beneath the man looked like no person Rela had ever seen. The people of the forest were the same color as the leaves, softer green for those who dwelt in the shade, deeper green for those who climbed in the canopies and worked in the sunlight, and their hair curled and tangled like vines. The stranger was as brown as wood and hairless all over.
And he was alive. Each breath was shuddering and shallow, but he was alive.
Rela pressed the tip of her knife into the man’s side and opened a cut the length of a finger. She held the skin apart to let a few of her smallest spiders pick their way through his seeping blood. They balked and blinked at the first taste, but Rela did not let them flee.
“Go in,” she said firmly. “You remember, little ones. Go in. Heal.”
Reluctant, flashing their dismay, a dozen quick red spiders burrowed into the stranger’s body and pulled the incision closed after them. Rela sent others down the man’s legs to chew away the last of the gray clothing and weave a sturdy cocoon around his feet.
She turned her attention to the man’s head. Bruises mottled his neck and shoulders, and the mask he wore was as hard as the shell of a nut. In its flat, reflective surface Rela saw only her own face and the sparking eyes of the spiders perched on her shoulders. She probed around the stranger’s jaw and neck with her fingertips, worked the mask loose and pulled it free. The stranger’s face was as brown as the rest of his body, round and young and smooth. His dark hair was shaved close to his scalp. Rela pressed a finger to one eyelid to pull it open.
The stranger gasped. Rela jerked back, but she caught herself before she lost her balance. The spiders chirped and flashed and fled before gathering again. A strangled half-word escaped the man’s throat. It drew into a long, pained groan when he tried to lift his head. Rela placed a hand on the man’s brow; his skin was hot and damp with sweat.
“Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t move. You’re hurt.”
She rubbed her thumb soothingly over his forehead and leaned close to look him in the eyes. His pupils were wide, his gaze unfocused. She did not know if he saw her at all.
“Who are you?” she asked. “Where did you come from?”
His lips moved again and for one sharp moment Rela thought he might answer, but the only sound he made was a hiss of pain. His eyes closed. He sank into himself, his breath slowing, his head lolling to the side, and he was silent.
At a gesture from Rela, the spiders closed the cocoon over his chest and shoulders and neck, and finally stitched the silk across his face and the crown of his head. Those spiders trapped within moved beneath the silk in roving lumps.
Rela cleaned her knife and tucked it into its sheath. With the stranger’s brown face hidden, his strange clothes piled to the side, the gasp of his voice and what he could not say caught now within a soft cocoon, she could almost pretend her hands weren’t shaking.
There was nothing she could do for the man but let the spiders heal him, if they could, if his body was not so broken it couldn’t be stitched together again. She waited until she was certain the spiders were settled in the cocoon, then left the platform. She paused again at the junction of three bridges and looked up. The day was growing brighter, colors shifting and deepening as the sun climbed.
The sky was falling, shedding pieces of itself like old skin, but even children knew not to ask why the wardens did nothing. Not a year had passed since six skywardens had fallen to their deaths. Most of the people of the forest had never known anybody to die; the elderly and ill wrapped themselves in cocoons to sleep and heal and one day, in a distant future, emerge as young and fit again, however long it might take. The weavers had hoped to heal the skywardens too, but the rootwardens had emerged from their hollows and taken the broken bodies from the aerie before the spiders could weave a single cocoon. They claimed, later, the unlucky skywardens had been shattered beyond what any long sleep could heal. It had been decades since the forest had held even a single funeral, and now it was holding six, all at once, for strong young men and women who had climbed too recklessly and too high. From every corner of the forest people had gathered to watch the six flat boats float the river, lined with torches and draped with flowers, from the boundary roots in the east to the western caves. Funeral spiders on delicate threads had dropped to the b
oats in a fine pale rain, burrowed into the shrouds and emerged, scattered again into the forest. Some onlookers had flinched away, closed their eyes and held their breath; others opened their mouths and welcomed the quick stinging bites on their tongues.
Rela had watched the funeral with Kef and their daughter Marun. She hadn’t known it then, but it was the last night they would spend together as a family, the last time she would sit beside her daughter and hold her hand, listen to her breath and know she was well. They had looped thick vines into swings above the river, and they hung, embraced by a low mist that never dissipated, their eyes hot with smoke, and they let the funeral spiders crawl over their lips and across their tongues. Rela had felt a rush of dizziness with the first bite, a spike of aching fear and the rush of sickening vertigo, the terrifying last moments of one young warden’s life, but it passed.
Marun had asked, “Does it always feel like that?”
Rela had been to only one funeral before, long before Marun was born, and that had been an eccentric old woman who had refused the comforting promise of sleep. Her memories had been as green and familiar as the forest itself, sunlight and shadows, a teasing mist of dew on skin before it was gone.
“I don’t know,” Rela had said. She did not lie to her daughter. The skywardens who had fallen had been Marun’s friends and partners, and the only thought in Rela’s mind had been cold relief that it had not been another day, another part of the sky, and Marun who had fallen.
The next morning, Marun and two other young skywardens had climbed the barren apex branches of the Dusk Man, one of the forest’s oldest and tallest trees, and disappeared through a tear in the sky. They never returned. The skywardens who remained refused to climb anymore. There was occasional talk, throughout the forest, of training new wardens, sending them up with ropes and hooks and tools to heal the sky, but more often now the gossip turned to wondering if perhaps the skywardens refused because they knew there was nothing to be done.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 79 Page 2