New Suns

by Nisi Shawl

  During the day, she manages not to think of it. She takes the subway to work, she sits at her desk, she surveys the city from her office window and she forgets about old phrases, old stories, legends that nobody remembers, washed away by the tide of modernity.

  But at nights it’s still there, under her skin.

  There are warlocks and there are witches who are not what they seem. There are birds that are not birds and the flapping of wings and there is hunger. And it comes in the blood, it can skip a generation or two but it won’t be washed away. But it’s all in her dreams, all in half-forgotten tales of her childhood which she brushes away come morning, like brushing away cobwebs.

  Child eaters. Devourers.

  She boards the subway and puts on her headphones. The stations go by, there’s the blur of people, and she exits the subway car and walks up the stairs, avoiding vendors and beggars. There’s nothing to fear with the cellphone in her hand, the gentle music in her ears, the purse dangling from her shoulder.

  She phones her mother every Thursday and they talk for half an hour and on Fridays she likes to watch a movie. Saturdays she goes grocery shopping.

  There are no curses under fluorescent lights, nor can you find mysteries at the till while you swipe a credit card.

  The city comforts her like a mother who coddles a child. It says, ”You are an ordinary body among ordinary bodies, you are in fact no-body.”

  She likes that, just like she likes the neon of the signs downtown where nightclubs mushroom and the honking of cars fills the air while the pedestrian crossing urges pedestrians to walk.

  One day a man sits next to her on the subway. He wears a suit and his black shoes have just been shined, and he has a watch on his right wrist, but she knows immediately he is a not man. She knows there is something under his skin.

  She sits, rigid with fear, eyeing him from the corner of her eye while he remains immersed in his newspaper. She can smell his cologne, but beneath that there is another scent, the odor of raw meat. Meat left under the sun to spoil. It makes her think of the ranch where she spent her summers, of her grandmother chopping off a chicken’s head.

  It makes her think of blood. Makes her think of all those stories about the warlocks and the witches who turn into other things and how they fly through the air until they sneak into a child’s room and bite into their neck.

  Blood, thick and black, like the man’s suit. He makes a motion with his hand, as if checking the time, and raises his head, looking at her and smiling. She can see his teeth—ivory white, old ivory kept in cupboards away from dust—and the smile, which is dark, and the eyes, which are like gleaming obsidian.

  “I know you,” he says.

  Even if those that are not the exact words he says—because she is wearing the headphones, how can she hear him?—it is what he means. It’s all meaning, all there, like the bones that hide under muscle and flesh. True even if they are out of sight. Like the veins and arteries running down her legs, mapping her body. Rivers of life which extend far beyond the single body and reach through time.

  In the stories, there’s always a moment when the warlocks and the witches know themselves, and when they do there is no going back. It’s like lighting a match; such a chemical reaction will not allow the elements to return to their original shape.

  When they know themselves they are forever changed.

  “Sister,” he says, with a conviction that will not be denied. He knows her, knows the atoms in her body and the hidden wings beneath the cage of bones. He knows her like they must all know themselves, gazing at each other in the moonlight with their flesh peeled off and their faces removed.

  She is scared. She is paralyzed. She does not understand why none of the other passengers seem to notice her distress. Why do they keep looking at their cellphones, why do they keep chatting, why do they look down, bored, at their scuffed shoes? She feels she will die there, sitting in that cramped, stuffy subway car.

  There. There is the stop. The doors open and the man stands up, holding out his hand to her. He wants her to go with him.

  “Come,” he says.

  Something forbids her from considering such an action. It is the timber of his voice, which is deep and smooth, like tar. Or it is the smile, smooth too, and deepening, as if he already knows she’ll agree to walk with him.

  She clutches her purse and closes her eyes. The subway is in motion. When she looks again he is gone. The seat next to her is empty.

  She rushes out the subway concourse, up the stairs, startling a dozen pigeons which fly up into the darkening sky and for a moment she holds up her hands, as if protecting her face from them, as if they would claw her and puncture her skin with their beaks in an attempt to expose her other, inner skin.

  The pigeons fly off and she lowers her hands.

  At home she turns on all the lights in the apartment, turns on the TV and does not watch it. She paces until midnight, then slips into bed.

  She breaths slowly and tries not to think about the way her heart is beating, loudly, loudly, loudly, in her chest, and the way the blood drifts in her veins, and she bites the inside of her cheek and tells herself there is nothing under the skin.

  She dreams a different dream that night. It’s not a dream, but a memory, of long ago, long buried and forgotten like a child’s discarded toys.

  She is ten years old in the memory. Her grandmother is making chicken stew in the kitchen; there’s much plucking and feathers and boiling of water. She feels hungry and grandmother says the food will be ready soon. It is taking far too long.

  She should be helping the old woman, but instead she drifts into the nursery. Her baby brother is asleep. She looks at him, gentle and tiny, his breath soft, and then she reaches a hand into the crib.

  That is it. The end of the memory, the end of the dream. When she wakes up she is shaken and can hardly look at herself in the mirror. She is afraid of what she’ll see.

  Her brother has been long dead. Crib death. He passed away before reaching his first birthday. She seldom thinks of him; he’s not brought up. Once a year there is a gloomy mass for the child which her mother organizes, like clockwork. She does not normally attend the mass. The last time she went to the church, she recalls her mother’s cold stare.

  Just a look, a few seconds long. A look of loathing.

  I know what you are, said the look. I know what you did.

  That look of pure hatred.

  But there’s also love in the look. How could there not have been love, too?

  A love that had kept certain secrets or had ignored the truths under the skin.

  Slowly she gazes in the mirror and lets out her breath.

  The mirror shows nothing. Her eyes are dark, but not the color of obsidian and her face is a simple face, just a couple of acne scars left from her teenage years to mar its surface. She applies lipstick and mascara, brushes her hair, and steps out of her apartment.

  The city makes her forget her worries. The large ads on the bus shelters, the guy at the newspaper stand arranging his merchandise, the scent of cigarettes wafting towards her as she walks by a café: these details ground her and return her to this ordinary life, this ordinary moment.

  She sets the purse on her lap, enjoying the presence of the other commuters, their voices in her ears, the movement of the subway car. A woman with a baby sits next to her.

  The baby is wrapped in a fluffy yellow blanket and it gurgles.

  She looks at it.

  It’s such a pretty little child, like the Christ in a Nativity scene, soft like porcelain, this baby at her side.

  But her mouth salivates and she feels a terrible hunger and something stirs under her skin, and she presses her knuckles against her teeth to keep them from chattering. Outside, there’s the flapping of wings.

  The Shadow We Cast Through Time

  Indrapramit Das

  [Archive reconstruction; lore record, The First Demon, as re-told by Truthteller Surya]

  IT IS
TOLD that the first demon was born when a young human child from the first village on this world wandered out into the forest nearby to explore. This was so long ago that no human had yet died on this world, in the village within the great winged hulk of the first starship that came down from the first world. What the child wandered into was no forest, of course, because the forest is a thing of first world, and back then, no humans had planted any trees in the cold soil of here. But to the forest the child went with their lantern, because humans see what they want to see, and everyone called the shaggy dark on the horizon a forest, though no one was prepared to find out what it was until that day. As the child came closer, they saw that the trees of this forest were in fact a city of clay spires from which flowed rivers of hair that blew in the wind, hair without heads, without humans, growing out of towers that reeked like excrement and coiled with jagged black spikes. But this child knew no fear, having known only the deathly void of space outside their starship’s windows, and the distant tales of first world, so they ventured into this strange city, drunk on freedom, on finding their own world to name and gift with the blessing of human witness. They were clever, and knew that these towers had to be houses, which, for humans at least, were starships that did not move through space, and simply sat on a world to transport humans through time instead. The child wanted to find out who lived in these houses on this world. They went up to one of the towers, which they realized had a doorway into darkness. Raising the lantern to the impenetrable mouth of this doorway, the child asked the darkness, “Does someone live here?”

  The darkness answered, “Yes.”

  The child asked, “Who are you?”

  The darkness said, “I am the shadow that you have cast from across time, from the first world to this one.”

  The child asked, “What does that mean?”

  The darkness said, “It means that you belong under a star far away in the night sky, too far to cast a shadow here. It means that nature abhors a vacuum, but there is no nature here.”

  The child said to the darkness, “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand. Can you explain it better?”

  The darkness said to the child, “It means that you cannot be good in a world that has seen no evil. It means that I will be your shadow under the new stars. It means that I will be the gift of evil. It means that I am the kal, and I have waited long aeons for you.”

  And then the child realized that they had indeed come too far into this strange new wilderness, their lantern a tiny star in this city now grown dark as space with the new sun Umi below the horizon.

  “But we have left evil behind on first world,” said the child.

  And the darkness laughed, because outside of the endless void, a shadow needs something to cast it. The wind grew sharp as poison, as the locks of headless hair blew on the spires, and it grew cold as the skin of a starship drifted far from a sun, and the child had no choice but to enter that doorway where the darkness lurked. Lantern and child were swallowed, never to be seen again in the village of the starship.

  When at dawn what used to be the child emerged from the spire, they were not human, for their bones had turned black as distant time. The child was no child any longer, but first of demons on this world, Death Walking, because all worlds need death if humans must tread on them. From that day onwards, the humans of our world began to die, as humans must, as we did on first world, and as we have done on all the worlds.

  [Archive reconstruction; personal record, Death Letter of Truthteller Surya]

  IN THE CHILL air, the doorway to darkness breathes a humid heat. Umi, the great lighthouse, is at the horizon, about to be swallowed by night’s tide. The doorway is an orifice under a spined arch, at the base of a spire of bones and living clay that rises a hundred feet into the air, jagged with curling black spikes. One of this monument’s many names (none given by those who built it) is hagtower, for the long white snarls of hair and grey membranes of skin that grow around the skeletons that compose it, making them look like ancient humans pickled in time and spacelight. Hags from Farhome, the first world, handmaidens of Death Walking dancing down (or up?) in a pillar from the sky. Hair and skin; fibers of exomycelial lifeforms sewn into the bones by its builders. There is lore that says the hags are our dead, going back to the ancestral grounds of Farhome—they will climb the glowing bridge of deadmoon in the sky, and leap off it into the ocean of spacetime to swim the waves back to the beginning. There is lore says the reverse—the hags are the dead of first world climbing out of the ocean, dancing down here to cast our shadow and bring death here. Our village favors the former. It is our ancestors whose bones dance in these towers, who bodies make the demons that live in them, breathed to life by the black flame of the kal.

  If I try to hurt the hagtower—with fire, or weapons—it is said that it will wake and tear me apart with its many calcified claws and stony teeth. It will not. The skeletal walls are lifeless bones, even though the tower itself is a colony lifeform. If there were demons nesting in the tower, they would kill me. But even if the tower were empty of a demon mother of contagion, the hag-skin that sheathes the dancing skeletons, translucent and grey under the light of the stars and flaring sunset, is sensitive. Disturbing it can release potent toxins. I have my gas mask and fiber pelts and gloves. But why would I hurt the hagtower, and the kal inside it, even if I could? I don’t touch the curtains of hag-skin or locks of hag-hair, or disturb anything in this sacred place. Up in the sky, Archive passes in the darkening sky, a tiny moving star. I chose this.

  In the etched shadows of Umi’s fall, the hags of the tower do come alive to my eyes, their hair stirring in the cold breeze from the mountains far to the northeast. This doesn’t scare me, because I have come to see the hags—they are built of the bones of my people, my guardians, my friends, my lovers, my offspring. I have come to join them.

  All these things are known to my people. They are not known to many of you in the sky, beyond the fallen gate, so I speak them to you and to the demons that surround me, in case time’s river snuffs our flame from the world. In case the gate opens again, and you find this letter, and need guidance to understand what’s transpired here. My words will go to Archive, because I must bear witness. There is more happening here than just my insignificant death.

  FOR MANY YEARS of my life, I was a mother by profession. I was twenty years old (by our sun, and no others) when I grew the first of fourteen children inside me. By then it had been years since we realized the gate in the sky had collapsed. We’d seen the ripples of spacetime warp the constellations, sending stars dancing on an invisible tide through the sky. Archive told us too—the gate was closed, and all the worlds gone. No more starships, no more trade missions, no more precious cargo of star-borne human genes to feed our gestation pods. Our village’s dragon spirit Eko, the starship that brought my ancestors here, could perhaps be revived one day, but it has slept long, and deserves its rest. It is ancient, and it would take much to learn how to steer it again. Even if Eko did set sail again after the long centuries, without an open tunnel to head to we’d be lost, drifting forever on the black ocean of space. We have no way of knowing when the gate might be opened again from the other side—it could be decades, centuries, millennia, forever.

  Already my generation barely remembers the days when the gate was open, of visiting season, when arriving starships made new constellations in the sky. People from other worlds came down to crowd the world with new looks and tongues to bewilder and delight, their starships’ bellies full with precious cargo, foods we’ve long forgotten the tastes of, rice and wheat and tea and coffee, grown in climes milder than ours. Guardian Geyua, who was a teacher and Truthteller like I became once my mothering days expired, told us of these days, of the markets that sprung up in the village commons, bustling with life from other solar systems, of the Ambassadors who came from far off islands in the cosmic ocean. Some of them carried the words of Farhome, the promises of terrible machines, of mining bots and fueled vehic
les and guns long forbidden on our world, in return for mineral, flora, fauna, and knowledge unique to this corner of the universe. We traded, but only for food and materials. They gave us much less than those other promises would have gotten us, but it was still a life-giving supply. But once the tunnel collapsed and the gate fell, visiting season became memory, not expectation.

  We were alone, like first world once was at the dawn of exo-time.

  So I offered my body for the service of the village, of my people, so that we might keep our flame alit here a little longer. The gestation pods can only do so much when there will be no new humans coming here to trade new genes, perhaps ever—our wellspring, contained in the belly of our starship, grows dry under the inexorable drought of passing generations. Sex was not new to me. So I went to the fertility rite once I was of age, with my hair let down and my body bared, swathed only in space—charcoal for the void and rock salt for the stars, to honor the ocean of space and time that now threatened to drown us. One with the night sky against the bonfire, camouflaged, I could still recognize the silhouettes of the people I had grown with, and loved all my life, my fellow villagers, but if we saw each other, we said nothing. It was late summer, with the tunnel’s death still visible above us, a celestial wave streaking the stars. The bonfire was high and sparking, licking the throat of our village starship. Across the peaty sentinel grounds and mutant pines cloaked in summer’s mist, from the kal forest, we could hear the ululating cries of demons as they saw the blaze. We sang back, and danced our hearts to thunder. There were young and old there, all the village’s clades, the eldest, beyond birthing age, clothed not in space but in white ash, as handmaidens of Death Walking in their benevolent aspect, come to bless the rite and partake in its pleasure if they wished. Even some who declined to take part in the sex danced naked, to give the rest of us strength—others watched the children in the nurseries, who had been put to sleep. We drank bitter sap mead until the ground moved, and our swaying orbits brought us clashing into each other.