by Paula Guran
You accept the gift, tucking it into folds of shadow. The snakebite words pass into you; you ignore the scour of stories freeze-dried. “It’s your turn now,” you say, and raise your gun.
The queen’s people know your gun as Candor. The queen’s idea of a joke, a gift to someone who rarely has the opportunity to speak freely.
You and the queen know the gun’s true name. It is called Combustion.
As a point of fact, the gun’s incomparable lethality is only tangentially related to the vulnerabilities of paper or cloth.
The Stormrose bears you and the soldiers and the prisoners back to the queen’s starport. You are the first to disembark. The queen awaits you with her customary tiger. “What have you brought for me?” she asks. “The smoke-skeleton of a bird? A scintillant circuit? A mirror of undesired insights?”
“A book,” you say as you salute her, attempting to not express your doubts about the whole endeavor. You produce it for her inspection.
The queen laughs and returns your salute with a mocking wave. “Of course. He always did believe that everyone could be educated. It isn’t the worst fallacy I’ve ever encountered.” She takes the book from you and sets it before the tiger. The tiger bats at it experimentally. Probably just as dubious as you are.
“The disposition of the prisoners?” you ask. What was the point of ferrying them all back here, anyway? The queen has occasionally taken interest in gladiatorial amusements, but she is unlikely to be frivolous at a time like this.
“In your absence I have prepared a dungeon,” the queen says. She gestures, and you see it in the distance: an obtrusion you had mistaken for some recent fantasia of topiary. “The prisoners can reside there for the moment.”
You give the necessary orders, and the soldiers and their freight of unspeaking captives begin to march toward the dungeon. “I don’t understand what use you have for these people,” you say.
She doesn’t smile. “Book, jewel, bird, it’s immaterial,” she says. “The people were the point of this exercise in numbers.”
You should have figured it out earlier. She was never interested in refueling the lanterns through some treasure contrived of riddles, although in a land where starships coexist with chimeras, it wasn’t impossible that such a treasure would perform as specified. No: she means to use the captives as fuel.
“You have never approved of me,” the queen says dryly, “but then, I have never required your approval. It has only been enough that what I do is for the preservation of the realm; any ruler’s duty.”
“You’re going to run out of prisoners,” you say. “The supply of foreigners is finite. And after that, what then—your own people? Incompetent chefs? Birds that sing too early in the morning? Overly demanding consorts?”
“I almost wish you’d lose your temper more often,” she muses. “You’re not incapable of wit.” Her regard narrows. “But the world is dimming, and I have need of you yet.”
The world beyond has lanterns, which are called stars. Nuclei strike each other, overcome the forces that would repel them from each other, and form new nuclei. Just as shadows can be crushed together, so can particles, and in the process they dance a fury of light. Yet no star burns forever, and no universe warms its inhabitants forever, either.
This process, while it lasts, is known as fusion. A form of combustion, if you like.
You don’t like the queen, yet she has this virtue: she has always looked out for the best interests of her realm. If the rest of the world has to burn for her people’s welfare, so be it. It is this knifing purity of purpose that has kept you by her side all this time.
“A lesson for you, if you will,” the queen says. She sounds quietly exhausted, and that faint vulnerability alarms you. You do not wish to see weakness in her. It implies weakness in yourself, to the extent that you are her instrument. “There is no convenient isomorphism between the physics of the world beyond and the laws by which we live here. People are shadows, and shadows are souls. Unlike nuclei, they will burn forever: the perfect fuel. Even so, I sought to spare people—not just our people, but our enemies as well—as long as possible.
“Look up—not toward the cut-out shapes of star and crescent, but up out of the plane of the world-tapestry, up along the perpendicular. All the stars out there have burned out. Everything is cooling. We have denuded a universe of lanterns for our own survival. The only ones left to us are those we nourish ourselves.”
You are learning to ask questions too late. You look up, then back at the queen. “There weren’t just lanterns in that universe,” you say.
Civilizations come to terms with the heat death of the universe in various ways, if they do at all. A small selection of possibilities:
Some of them attempt to rewrite the laws of entropy, as though statistical mechanics were amenable to postmodern narrative techniques.
Some of them research ways to punch through into other universes, anthropic principle notwithstanding. It is rarely the case that other universes are more hospitable than the current one.
Some of them build monuments of the rarest materials that they can devise, even knowing that everything will be pulverized to the same singularity punctuation. Not all of the art thus created is particularly worthy of the effort put into it, but neither will there be anyone left to judge.
And some of them simply commit mass suicide, on the grounds that they would prefer to choose the manner of their passing. At this end of time, weapons of incandescent destruction are commonplace. We may assume that a sufficiently determined civilization can contrive to obtain some.
Each of these trajectories ends in darkness.
“You want the captives to burn forever,” you say. “Then, as a corollary, the people you put into those lanterns will never escape through death.”
“You’re learning about consequences,” the queen says. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
You know why the queen chose you for this task, and not some other, although it’s not inconceivable that there are backups. She cut you from the paper of a lantern, sacrificing its light forever. You remember being raked by fire, and the shearing scissors. You remember being constructed without a heart.
Knight of Pyres. Combustion. She needs you to light the lanterns for her.
A heart isn’t what you have. It’s what you do, the philosopher-king had said. You wonder what would have happened if someone had said it to you a lifetime ago. It’s unlikely that you would have listened. Only now, as you behold a universe comprehensively dissipated, do you realize what service you have rendered all this time.
“I can’t do this for you,” you say.
“So you are no longer content to be a knight,” the queen says, unnervingly composed. The queen’s hands. “I advise you to consider your decision carefully. Once you start making choices of your own, you move into the realm of consequence, and in most matters you cannot erase mistakes, or responsibility. Are you certain this is what you want? Our world slowly waning to a forever black?” Her mouth curves as you hesitate.
You raise your gun.
She raises the scepter.
You’re faster. And you don’t shoot her, anyway. You shoot the scepter. It goes up in a hellscream of fire and smoke and uncoiled volition.
The queen doesn’t let go, and the fire spreads to her hand. “In the darkness you will be outnumbered,” she says, raising her voice over the crackling. “People will attempt to relight the lanterns themselves. They will seek weapons deadlier than Combustion. They will come to you and beg in words like broken wings for any pittance of light. You will have to stand vigil alone in the forever night, listening, in case someone in the mass of shadow is clever enough to undo what you have done and start the furnace of souls.”
“Drop the scepter,” you cry. The gun is specific in its effect. This is an airless world and all fire is, in a sense, artificially sustained. She could survive a little while yet, one-armed.
“The realm of consequence,” sh
e says remindingly.
Time does not pass here as it does in the world beyond, but it passes quickly enough when it cares to. The queen burns up like a candle, like a torch, like a star of guttering ambitions.
The queen’s people haven’t yet figured out what has transpired, but they will know soon enough.
You settle back, gun smoking endlessly, and wait as the darkness settles over the world by smothering degrees. You have a long vigil ahead of you: time to begin.
There is nothing left of this story but a whispering condensate of shadow, and a single unknight standing apart.
Yoon Ha Lee’s fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other venues. His first short story collection, Conservation of Shadows, was published in 2013. He lives in Louisiana with his family and has not yet been eaten by gators.
There are no sides. Only love and hate . . .
Resurrection Points
Usman T. Malik
I was thirteen when I dissected my first corpse. It was a fetid, soggy teenager Baba dragged home from Clifton Beach and threw in the shed. The ceiling leaked in places, so he told me to drape the dead boy with tarpaulin so that the monsoon water wouldn’t get at him.
When I went to the shed, DeadBoy had stunk the place up. I pinched my nostrils, gently removed the sea-blackened aluminum crucifix from around his neck, pulled the tarp across his chest. The tarp was a bit short—Ma had cut some for the chicken coop after heavy rainfall killed a hen—and I had to tuck it beneath DeadBoy’s chin so it seemed he were sleeping. Then I saw that the fish had eaten most of his lips and part of his nose and my stomach heaved and I began to retch.
After a while I felt better and went inside the house.
“How’s he look?” said Baba.
“Fine, I guess,” I said.
Baba looked at me curiously. “You all right?”
“Yes.” I looked at Ma rolling dough peras in the kitchen for dinner, her face red and sweaty from heat, and leaned into the smell of mint leaves and chopped onions. “Half his face is gone, Baba.”
He nodded. “Yes. Water and flesh don’t go well together and the fish get the rest. You see his teeth?”
“No.”
“Go look at his teeth and tell me what you see.”
I went back to the shed and peeled the pale raw lip-flesh back with my fingers. His front teeth were almost entirely gone, sockets blackened with blood, and the snaillike uvula at the back of the throat was half-missing. I peered into his gaping mouth, tried to feel the uvula’s edge with my finger. It was smooth and covered with clots, and I knew what had happened to this boy.
“So?” Baba said when I got back.
“Someone tortured him,” I said. Behind Baba, Mama sucked a breath in and fanned the manure oven urgently, billowing the smoke away from us toward the open door.
“How do you know?” Baba said.
“They slashed his uvula with a razor while he was alive, and when he tried to bite down they knocked out his teeth with a hammer.”
Baba nodded. “How can you tell?”
“Clean cut. It was sliced with a blade. And there are no teeth chips at the back of the throat or stuck to the palate to indicate bullet trauma.”
“Good.” Baba looked pleased. He tapped his chin with a spoon and glanced at Mama. “You think he’s ready?”
Mama tried to lift the steaming pot, hissed with pain, let it go and grabbed a rough cotton rag to hold the edges. “Now?”
“Sure. I was his age when I did my first.” He looked at me. “You’re old enough. Eat your dinner. Later tonight I’ll show you how to work them.”
We sat on the floor and Ma brought lentil soup, vegetable curry, raw onion rings, and corn flour roti. We ate in silence on the meal mat. When we were done we thanked Allah for his blessings. Ma began to clear the dinner remains, her bony elbows jutting out as she scraped crumbs and wiped the mat. She looked unhappy and didn’t look up when Baba and I went out to work on DeadBoy.
DeadBoy’s armpits reeked. I asked Baba if I could stuff my nostrils with scented cotton. He said no.
We put on plastic gloves made from shopping bags. Baba lay the boy on the tools table, situating his palms upward in the traditional anatomical position. I turned on the shed’s naked bulb and it swung from its chain above the cadaver, like a hanged animal.
“Now,” Baba said, handing me the scalpel, “locate the following structures.” He named superficial landmarks: jugular notch, sternal body, xiphoid process, others familiar to me from my study of his work and his textbooks. Once I had located them, he handed me the scalpel and said: “Cut.”
I made a midline horizontal and two parallel incisions in DeadBoy’s chest. Baba watched me, shaking his head and frowning, as I fumbled my way through the dissection. “No. More laterally” and “Yes, that’s the one. Now reflect the skin back, peel it slowly. Remove the superficial fascia,” and “Repeat on the other side.”
DeadBoy’s skin was wet and slippery from water damage and much of the fat was putrefied. His pectoral and abdominal musculature was dark and soft. I scraped the congealed blood away and removed the fascia, and as I worked muscles and tendons slowly emerged and glistened in the yellow light, displaying neurovascular bundles weaving between their edges. It took me three hours but finally I was done. I stood, surrounded by DeadBoy’s odor, trembling with excitement, peering at my handiwork.
Baba nodded. “Not bad. Now show me where the resurrection points are.” When I hesitated, he raised his eyebrows. “Don’t be scared. You know what to do.”
I took a glove off and placed it on DeadBoy’s thigh. I tentatively touched the right pec major, groping around its edges. The sternal head was firm and spongy. When I felt a small cord in the medial corner with my fingers, I tapped it lightly. The pec didn’t twitch.
I looked at Baba. He smiled but his eyes were black and serious. I licked my lips, took the nerve cord between my fingers, closed my eyes, and discharged.
The jolt thrummed up my fingers into my shoulder. Instantly the pec contracted and DeadBoy’s right arm jerked. I shot the biocurrent again, feeling the recoil tear through my flesh, and this time DeadBoy’s arm jumped and flopped onto his chest.
“Something, isn’t it,” Baba said. “Well done.”
I didn’t reply. My heart raced, my skin was feverish and crawling. My nostrils were filled with the smell of electricity.
“First time’s hard, no denying it. But it’s gotta be done. Only way you’ll learn to control it.”
I was on fire. We had talked about it before, but this wasn’t anything like I had expected. When Baba did it, he could smile and make conversation as the deadboys spasmed and danced on his fingertips. Their flesh turned into calligraphy in his hands.
“That felt like something exploded inside me, Baba,” I said, hearing the tremble in my voice. “What happens if I can’t control it?”
He shrugged. “You will. It just takes time and practice, that’s all. Our elders have done it for generations.” He leaned forward, lifted DeadBoy’s hand, and returned it to supine position. “Want to try the smaller muscles? They need finer control and the nerves are thinner. Would be wise to use your fingertips.”
And thus we practiced my first danse macabre. Sought out the nerve bundles, made them pop and sizzle, watched the cadaver spider its way across the table. With each discharge, the pain lessened, but soon my fingers began to go numb and Baba made me halt. Carefully he draped DeadBoy.
“Baba, are there others?” I asked as we walked back to the house.
“Like us?” He nodded. “The Prophet Isa is said to have returned men to life. When Martha of Bethany asked him how he would bring her brother Lazarus back to life, Hazrat Isa said, ‘I am the Resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.’ ”
We were in the backyard; the light of our home shone out bright and comforting. Baba turned and smiled at me. “But he
was a healer first. Like our beloved Prophet Muhammad Peace-Be-Upon-Him. Do you understand?”
“I guess,” I said. DeadBoy’s face swam in front of my eyes. “Baba, who do you think killed him?”
His smile disappeared. “Animals.” He didn’t look at me when he said, “How’s your friend Sadiq these days? I haven’t seen him in a while.” His tone was casual, and he tilted his jaw and stared into the distance as if looking for something.
“Fine,” I said. “He’s just been busy, I think.”
Baba rubbed his cheek with a hairy knuckle and we began walking again. “Decent start,” he said. “Tomorrow will be harder, though.” I looked at him; he spread his arms and smiled, and I realized what he meant.
“So soon?” I said, horrified. “But I need more practice.”
“Sure, you do, but it’s not that different. You did well back there.”
“But—”
“You will do fine, Daoud,” he said gently, and would say no more.
Ma watched us approach the front door, her face silvered by moonlight. Baba didn’t meet her eyes as we entered, but his hand rose and rubbed against his khaddar shirt, as if wiping dirt away.
Ma said nothing, but later, huddled in the charpoy, staring through the skylight window at the expansive darkness, I heard them arguing. At one point, I thought she said, “Worry about the damn house,” and he tried to shush her, but she said something hot and angry and Baba got up and left. There was silence and then there was sobbing, and I lay there, filled with sorrow and excitement, listening to her grief, thinking if only there was a way to reconcile the two.
The dead foot leaped when I touched the resurrection point. Mr. Kurmully yelped.
“Sorry,” I said, jerking my fingers away. “Did that hurt?”
“No.” He massaged the foot with his hand. “I was . . . surprised. I haven’t had any feeling in this for years. Just a dry burning around the shin. But when you touched it there,” he gestured at the inner part of his left ankle, “I felt it. I felt you touching me.”