New Suns

by Nisi Shawl

  Having tasted each other’s honeyed mouths, we entered the ancient starship’s inner sanctum, and made love there to herald our true independence from Farhome, under the great arches of our dragon spirit’s metal ribs, under the impassive eyes of sculpted titans that once held the cosmic darkness at bay for our ancestors on their carbon-fiber shoulders. Long ago, our Ambassadors, sent to the stars from a village far to the east, where the world’s largest spaceport lies, had crossed the cosmic ocean to declare that this world was not a Protectorate like so many others in the sky. They told Farhome that our union here was of independent peoples on a world given to us by the bountiful universe, not by the leaders of first world. It had always been a tenuous agreement, with first world’s attempts to establish a protectorate stretching over generations. There is enough unique resource and knowledge here to keep the attention of Farhome, despite our colder climes and the threat of contagion. With the tunnel gone, the agreement was truly sealed. On the night I attended my first fertility rite, a tradition heralding our freedom and our potential doom, I fucked Saya of my clade, a village protector by profession, and a friend to my heart.

  If you will abide, I can tell you of Saya’s way with bow and spear, how her weapons sculpted her arms like wind against rock, revealing the rivers of her veins. I often brought her skaelg-broth during night watch, and watched the stars with her, watched how they were replicated in the eyes of demons emerging from the kal forest to stalk the sentinel grasses closer to the village. She never let a single arrow fly the many times I kept her company in the watchtowers. But I felt safe around her, even when I could hear the rattling whisper of demons echoing through the night. I admit this sometimes thrilled me, to watch their crowns of shadow breach the mists around the village wall, hunting for creatures to take back to their hagtowers. I never saw their faces, though I tried—they wear the faces of the dead, we are told, and I wanted to see if I could spot the faces of anyone I had lost to Death Walking. In breeding season, we saw demons roam far from the kal forests, approaching perilously close to the walls of the village and battling each other under the gene-crafted pines. Their horns clashing to release spores that travel on the wind, and bring the song of contagion to animals like us.

  We were told from the time we are children: if you are called to the kal forest while young, you will enter the doorway to darkness, and your body will be given to the shadow to become a demon everlasting, a kalform. All through the summers, the spores will call the young to the kal forest, and you must resist the song of the handmaidens in their towers with discipline and pain, unless you are deemed unfit for the society of your fellow humans. When you give yourself to the kal forest as an elder, you will enter the doorway to darkness to be digested by the hagtowers. You will be one with the ocean of space and time, and your bones will give the handmaidens of death form in this world. Protectors are told during training to never kill a demon unless they put a human in direct danger, because every demon is an immortal kalform. To end the existence of one is to destroy something that might have lived for generations, having swum in the same waters of time as our ancestors, carrying their death masks.

  Saya and I had played as children in our clade’s communal hall, running over the dirt ground shrieking with the other children—each of us had been demon or human in those games, chasing or chased. But as adults, in her watchtower, I knew Saya had come face to face with the real thing, that she had ushered humans to the kal forest to become demons.

  ONE OF SAYA’S earliest duties as protector was to be part of an escort party for a rapist among our clade. For taking a young woman by force, he had been sentenced to be given to the kal forest, to become either food for the hagtowers or a body for a new demon. I remember watching in terror among the gathered crowd, before the exile. Saya’s young face had hardened, the waters gone from her flesh, like I’d never seen her before. She lashed her fist into the rapist’s face. The sound was like a stone hitting a tree-bark, the blood bright with oxygen in the misty morning. Another protector, older, put a hand against her shoulder, firm. “No need for that,” he said. Unspoken: Exile is enough. Saya gave a jerky nod. Sick with worry, I watched the protectors put on their gas masks and take the condemned man through the village gate, into the peaty sentinel grounds, out towards the dark horizon of the kal forest. Saya did not hesitate, her bow slung across her shoulder, her spear held firm.

  They returned in the evening without the rapist. I tried hugging my friend, but she avoided it, instead briefly squeezing my hand and walking away. I said nothing, just relieved that she had no wounds from the mission. When I joined Saya that night in the watchtower, she didn’t want to talk about it. When I kept asking if she was alright, that drought of tenderness returned to her face, like in the morning, and I recoiled. She asked if I wanted to know what Death Walking looked like, up close. I don’t remember her exact words, but she said many things that frightened me. She said she’d expected the rapist to struggle, scream as they got closer to the kal forest. But he’d just gone quiet. Saya said that even with her mask on, she could feel the pull of the hagtowers, especially when she saw the peace in that man’s eyes. When they came close enough, he just ran all by himself, into the mists of the forest. She didn’t even see the demons.

  “I recognized,” she said. “That what we are doing is sacrifice. He was a gift.” Then she looked at me, this part I remember. “I saw your judgment, Surya. When we left. When I hit him,” she said.

  “You think I would judge you for taking a rapist to the kal forest?”

  “What if it had been a thief? A food hoarder? We’d still send them.” We haven’t sent minor criminals out there for a long time, but this was right before the gate’s collapse.

  “It’s not my place to judge,” I said. She smiled, with bitterness, though it was gone quick.

  “It just made me think we don’t belong. Here, on our own world,” she said. “That the kal is doing us a favor, taking us away. Demons don’t rape, after all.”

  I don’t remember what I said to that. Maybe that demons kill. Maybe that they don’t have sex at all.

  What I remember is that even in those days of youth, Saya seemed aged beyond her years after that trip out there. I remember the creases of her scars, like mine, dotting the lines of her cheekbones and temples, sinuous along her arms, where we pierced ourselves with hot needles during the fruiting seasons, when the kal spores are strongest in the air, and we feel the pull of the kal forest, the handmaidens of death singing from beyond time in our blood. That is when all the pubescent young in the village are sealed in the starship, where we drank bitter tincture to dull the call and threaded our skin with metal and string so the pain kept us from walking away to the kal forest. If we weren’t careful, we could wade out of time’s river and straight into the ocean of shadow, before the current of life carried us there. I knew that protectors who skirt the edges of the kal forest sometimes abandon their masks and venture inside, never to return.

  I’ve known since childhood that I would visit the forest when my body’s time in the world waned. Since then I’ve known that our guardians, and friends, all the members of our clade, would walk there eventually, when their bodies made the decision to send them to exile. But at that moment, talking to Saya in the watchtower, I grew terrified that Saya would go on exile before time’s river brought her to the doorway. That she would heed the song early and leave me without my dearest friend. I told her not to go early into the dark woods. I asked her not to.

  Saya said nothing, leaving me out in the cold.

  And then, years along the current, the gate in the sky collapsed.

  We had never fucked before, though we had fought in the mud as children, but we did that night, when I first joined the fertility rite, because I felt that Saya’s warmth and strength would be good for the child-to-be in my belly. When that bend in the river came, all us mothers gave birth in the belly of the starship, because it is the safest place in the world. The air vibrated with
our spilled blood, our screams. I watched many of this new generation of womb-born emerge before mine came. It hurt like falling to the world. For the first time, I became a mother. I don’t remember the name of my first daughter, but I remember her tender face devouring the air, fresh from my body, no different than the infants plucked from the membranous embrace of gestation pods. Saya came to see me, with our other clade-members. Because we were dressed in the dark of space when we made love together, all of us villagers, Saya was no different than anyone there. But I knew that it was her seed that had grown into that first child. She winked at me, and carved a thin line in my bicep with an arrowhead to mark the first birth. “Today you are one of the Atlax above,” she said, looking up at the statues gripping the ribs of the starship. “Pushing the dark back,” she said, near drowned by the choral wails of a new generation. She didn’t hold the baby, because she was no more a guardian to it than any other there. She had every right to, as part of the clade, but I know Saya. She didn’t want to seem possessive.

  I HAVE FOURTEEN small scars on my arm now, carved by different members of my clade each time I gave birth in the starship’s inner sanctum. After the first, they were much less painful, because I asked for the tinctures. I have one half-scar, for one infant lost to miscarriage. And another, longer line of pale tissue across my lower abdomen, where four of fourteen were cut out of me. I have been lucky, fertile as the gardens under our climate tents. My body is striped like that ancient fire spirit of first world, the taigur, scarred not just by my clade-members’ work but by the babies that have stretched my belly like a drum with their limbs and heads, pushing against my flesh and skin so that they too are the Atlax, holding back the tide of time so that they might meditate, timeless, within me, before facing the turbulent river.

  MANY OF THE children have left with trading parties to other villages, never to return, to keep the human flame lit, delicately dancing on the oily surface of our gene pool on the world. If the gene pool becomes too shallow, too stagnant and polluted, that flame will flicker, wane, and disappear. The gate in the sky, after all, still remains closed, though we have danced many times around Umi. I can only hope that the little ones who went away with the surly traders on their solar buggies and gliders loaded with goods, found peace and bountiful lives under the sign of a new starship beyond the wilds. We get supplies, or other children to be swapped for ours, in return. Sometimes news comes—of trade caravans lost in the wilds and gliders crashed because of storms—but I choose not to remember the details.

  SAYA AND I took many lovers in the years of rites to follow, on those summer nights with blazing bonfires under Eko’s throat. The two of us never had sex with each other again, that I can remember, though our love has never waned. She found great fellowship in her protector group, fucking many of them, and making companions of them as they went hunting and foraging. By the time she was middle-aged, her back and gut were drawn with scars from the spearheaded tails and horns of demons, for coming too close and being too bold along the edges of the kal forest. I was always in awe of her courage, that she had been so close to demons and survived. I asked her many times, have you seen them wearing the faces of our dead? Of Geyua and the elder guardians who have walked away? And she always said no, I’ve seen only the faces of strangers from distant bends in the river of time, our ancestors preserved by the kal.

  She was proud, though, never to have killed a demon in all her time as protector. Because she was one of my closest clade-members, I made friends of her fellow protectors too. One of them, Keliyeh, I loved for a while. He had killed a demon once, or so he said, to defend himself from an attack. I believed him, because he’d lost an arm because of it, replaced with a beautiful prosthesis of carbon-fiber painted black as the horns of the creature that took that part of his body. But no protector can ever have proof of such a killing, because demons killed must be left for their kin to collect and take back to the hagtowers to be digested as food. Demon and human; we all go to the hagtowers in the end, to the shadow of the kal. It is a sign of respect, of our bond.

  ONCE SAYA RETIRED from the protectors she become a Truthteller like me, teaching the children by my side and thrilling them with tales of her adventures. Just as she had taught me so much about the kal and its many forms, about the demons, I taught her along with the children of Farhome’s lores. I showed her ghostlights from other worlds, paintings and video and statues and art, archives, pictures of demons long before they came to be on our world. She was amazed by these unimaginably old visions of horned creatures, demons imagined at the beginning of time by people who’d never seen one. “The lens of spacetime can be like a telescope. Even now, perhaps our ancestors watch us,” I said once (or something like that). She laughed, but she was agog with wonder. These times, the two of us aging together in safety, teaching archives, stretching and tanning hides, smoking meats, were precious to me.

  In this time of her life, she confided in me in ways that made me think she still wanted to go early to the kal forest. That fear of mine never quite went away. I knew she, like many protectors, suffered sleep walks and vivid dreams that drew her towards the hagtowers. She told me once, drinking mead in the banquet hall, that on her foraging patrols she had twice seen demons embracing in each other’s arms within the gloaming of a hagtower’s doorways. That they had been making love, like humans, like their bodies once had when they were used for human lives, for singing and dancing and talking and eating and fucking.

  “Death Walking, making love?” I asked her, my disbelief clear.

  “Fucking, if you prefer,” said Saya. “Would that make it more believable? I know what I saw. Demons, fucking like humans. Rutting behind the curtains of hag-hair.”

  “The kal reproduces by taking bodies, making kalforms, not sex. You probably saw two demons during fruiting season, clashing horns to release spores, that’s all.”

  “Oh, are you the one who has looked Death Walking in the face now? Why are you explaining what I’ve known since I was a child?”

  “You think I’m still a child, to be made a gullible fool.”

  Saya cackled then, shook her head, and hurled the last of her mead down her throat. There was sweat beading on her forehead. The hall was chilly, despite the fires inside. As she’d grown older, she drank more, not less, to numb the call of the forest. We probably fought some more that night about what she saw out there, but in good nature. She never brought it up again, though. She is a proud woman, and doesn’t take accusations of foolishness well.

  I should say now that Saya has already walked here to the kal forest to meet Death Walking, like so many I have loved, like all my guardians, and some of the children I birthed, who did not heed the warnings. The dirt roads of the village feel empty these days, haunted by mist or sunlight, the shadow cast by Eko long. Do not be sad for Saya—she lived a long life, with many to love in it. My fear, that she would leave me to come to the forest early, did not come true. Like a true friend, she waited, waited long, until there were cataracts in her eyes and she was braving spasms of longing for the forest. Too much exposure to kal spores during her time as a protector, despite the masks she had worn. She finally heeded the call in dark of night, alone, taking a solar skiff. I’ve long known we were approaching the end. I thought we would go together, but I should have known she wouldn’t have wanted to say farewell in person, or have to watch me die with her. For all her strength, she couldn’t take such things. The first time we watched one of our elder guardians go on the final exile, she cried for days, barely eating unless I spooned broth into her mouth.

  I cannot begrudge her the silent departure. She did leave me alone, but she waited as long as she could. It has been two days since she left the village. So now I come to the doorway as well.

  I TAKE OFF my backpack and open it. Inside are scrolls of printed meat from the village’s bioreactor cauldrons, wrapped in twine, their flesh marbled violet under deadmoon’s glow. It’s cold enough that they have kept through the day
’s journey on the solar skimmer, which I’ve left by forest’s edge for protector patrols to retrieve later. I unwrap one of the scrolls, tearing off pieces of it and carefully leaving the pages of meat pierced on the black spikes emerging from the bony walls of the hagtower. I leave these little offerings, prayer flags of succulent DNA from first world, as decoration around the doorway. I came through the forest with a necklace of dead rabbits taken from the village hutches, tossed behind me to keep demons at bay until I reached a hagtower. Three rabbits are left hanging over my heart, and I give them as gifts as well, hanging them by the doorway. The hagtower seems to stir, a rustling from far above. In the village, the scrolls would be smoked over spiced peat flame and eaten in strips with porridge, the rabbits skinned to make pelts and turned to stew or kababs. Here, the offerings are left raw.

  I speak into the darkness, as the child who became Death Walking did.

  “Who lives here?” I ask the dark.

  The darkness doesn’t answer, but the mother of contagion at the top of the spire does, their voice the death-rattle of the demon they are. Their cry is powerful, audible over the wind despite being so far above me. It is not the scream that precedes attack, but the ululation that signals a space, a warning, for me.

  So I kneel on my swollen knees, and bow my head low to the hag-webbed ground, sending pangs up and down my back. My old heart beats like it is young again. I haven’t been slaughtered swiftly by the mother at the top of the hagtower because of my age. I have proven my lack of speed, and brought gifts.