by Exile
Attempting to stand, Tyler found his ankle unable to support his weight, so he was forced to crawl though the graveyard to his skidoo. Magnetic midnight – and actual midnight – passing now, the light from the aurora borealis was fading, and he was hard pressed to find his way by that now diffuse light and the splay of the stars. The snow reflected only dimly, a trembling shade of blue. Once onboard, he sped cautiously through the woods and out across the lake.
Chilled and thoroughly exhausted from sleep deprivation, Tyler felt blessed to hear only the wind blowing when he shut off his skidoo. No babies crying. No sonic static and pop of electrons colliding with the arctic atmosphere. He hopped inside on his one good foot, moving at an excruciatingly slow pace down the stairs, and collapsed onto his bed and into the darkness of sleep.
“Dibikiziwinan. ” He heard Naphtha whisper softly as the darkness embraced him, lips so close to his ear he could feel the passage of breath from her words. “Dibikiziwinan-gashkii-dibik-ayaa. Darkness-dark-as-night . That is my name. But you may call me Naphtha.”
And then there was nothing but sleep.
THE GARDEN OF OUR DECEIT
Rhonda Eikamp
But this is the end of the story, a peon ending perhaps, in which I have left the board. I have given you the golden pieces. You will do with them as you will. Life, mind, love. And I topple.
At first he thought the house was deserted. Ivy and trumpet creeper had blurred its form; the gardens – his only reason for returning – had lost their chessboard regularity, their hedges grown into one another, copulating. The hover set down inside the gates and J’taa clambered out first, her jointed pereopods making her seem a slender cricket about to spring away over the grass. Charles followed her only slowly, drowning in green scents. It was late dawn; the twins on the horizon moved toward their occultation, grey and gold, castling.
Not deserted, as he had secretly – fervently – hoped. The door creaked open. A young woman emerged, arms crossed, and leant against the leaf-choked doorpost so that she seemed gowned in ivy. Short and lithe-limbed, with an air of strength that made him nervous. She wore ragged men’s trousers. He knew her and didn’t. His family had had many servants.
He gestured to J’taa by way of introduction, speaking her name to the unknown woman at the door, and his corothul companion’s parasitical circuitry lit up beneath her silver skin in greeting, foggy capillaries racing red and blue. The woman did not react to the greeting. Surely there was no need to introduce himself.
“The corothai wished to see where the great – where I grew up,” Charles told the young woman. He was certain now he didn’t know her. She still had not moved or acknowledged J’taa’s presence. For heaven’s sake, it was his house. “They want me to play a chess game here. They want to watch.”
The woman’s eyes never left him. “Hello, Charles,” she said.
He recognized her.
In your eyes that I’ve watched sidle from fears or widen with wonder at the intricacies of the game, I’ve come to know you’re not me. I think you have often been intimidated. I do not want to tower over you. I want to tower under you. I want to watch you fly off perched on that siege-machine of yours and take over the world.
There is a terrible thing in the world. A silver maelstrom, drawing us all down. If we can fight it together, then you’ll never be apart from me.
From the open window of his old bedroom Charles Mestroe could see the corner of the tall hedge that enclosed the chess garden. The thought of playing made the figures in his mind begin to slide, blocking, strategizing. Like an itch in his fingers, a cerebral rash. Lines of obfuscation, of capture and geometry.
J’taa stood near, gazing with him. “This you are growing up in?” she asked. The corothul had seemed subdued while the woman (Kess, how could he have not recognized Kess?) led them on a tour of the house that was little more than glances into rooms abandoned to dust. Broken furniture, cold fireplaces. In some areas, cracked windows had allowed foliage to creep in. His mother’s beloved study was a forest. Kess and the few remaining servants – the cook with the wart, whose name he could not recall, the ancient butler Hedley – had carved a living space for themselves about the kitchen and the small vegetable garden, and ignored the rest.
“The Rook,” he replied. His mother had named the mansion. “It’s been only – what – eight years since I’ve been away? I can’t believe how old it’s become.”
J’taa touched his wrist, while with another pair of arms she tied back her head fronds with a bit of ribbon, a feminine gesture. The fronds were vestigial antennae, he knew, made redundant long ago when her species melded with the parasitical worms that formed their circuitry. “This we are to know wanting about you. Everything.”
“Old and ruinous.”
“Who was supposed to take care of it?” It was Kess who spoke from the door. “After the servants ran away.”
Charles turned. He still could not reconcile that pursed face with the voice of his childhood friend.
“Not blaming you, Kess. I’m going to show J’taa the gardens now.”
“Are you even going to ask after him?” Pursed and bitter, with a sheen of sweat that made her beautiful.
J’taa’s question circuitry glowed.
Him. Surely not still alive; he couldn’t bear that, and yet Kess was already walking down the hall to the master bedroom. “I’m only here for the game,” he called after her, but he followed, had to follow, his moves preordained.
His father lay on the canopied bed like a yellow husk that had floated in on the breeze. The stroke eight years ago had ravaged his left side, weighing down his face. The cheek still hung twisted, one eye at half-mast. Lord George Mestroe had been caught in a skewer move, as Charles imagined it, his gentle gelatinous nature for so long protected by his queen who had stood in front of him blocking all assaults, until the indomitable Lady Mestroe was removed, leaving the devastated, feckless lord vulnerable to the harsh world and his grief. The stroke had taken him from the game two days after his wife was killed. Checkmate.
When Lord Mestroe saw his son, he began to scream.
Kess rushed to the sick man’s side. The screams formed into a meaning, a word that might have been Murderer, over and over, slurred beyond recognition. Drool became an issue.
Charles’s skin felt on fire. Not this, not the guilt. He backed out of the room gasping. Turning, he found J’taa had followed him and without thinking he plunged his hands into the alien’s warm midsection. Her thorax parted to accept him, the needles of her placoid denticles pumping her transpathic drug into him.
High pink clouds bore him up, globular mists on which he soared above the vast cacti-dotted plain that some melders conjectured was the corothai home world, where the seas that were the aliens’ isopodan origin had long dried up. The vision rocked his cells to sleep. This was the beauty, so antithetical to human experience, that mindscape which the corothai-shy despised. Human minds joining with their alien superiors, experiencing the corothai dust world of utter apathy.
When he opened his eyes he saw Kess staring at them in disgust.
“You partake may,” J’taa told her. Another hole opened in her side.
In the blue eyes of his forgotten friend Charles saw some fragile thing that had survived ruination slowly seep away. Rage made her tremble. The voice – directed at him – was raspy, reminiscent of his dead mother. “You’ve no shame at all, have you?”
“Make stop the sound,” J’taa requested. Behind them Lord Mestroe’s screams had turned to moans, the one word still punctuating the air.
“I will not,” Kess told her. “Let him hear it.” In her anger she seemed to glow as the corothai did. Charles wanted to hug her or slap her. “It’s only true.”
She left the door open and walked away.
I would throw my body upon yours to protect you from that maelstrom. I would leap into it after you, hold you so you would know you’re not alone.
Out, out beneath the scud
ding clouds, air hot and breezy in turn. The famous Mestroe gardens were no more, only weedy parcels divided by high hedges, indistinguishable from one another in their tangles of exploding sweet fern and bellwort. J’taa had dropped to her running arms, loping beside him, and when he glanced at her he caught a frown of doubt as she looked around. All so shabby. What she must think of the chess genius, the man celebrated back in Loude by every corothul who worshipped the immortal game, which was most of them. He stopped at the last hedge-gate, hopeful, smiling back at her, and in response J’taa’s mandibles curled upward in the corothul imitation of a smile.
Let it be whole. He ducked beneath the wisteria arch, beckoning her to follow.
Knight, cleric, peons. All still there. House-high, the thirty-two metal figures faced off across the etched stone terrace, the gold against the silver, his mother’s take on the traditional black and white. Weather-beaten, eaten by rust. Clematis had reached across to form wigs on the figures nearest the hedges. Charles stood in the golden king’s shadow, a robed figure thrice his height, its crown wreathed in wayward ivy. He held his breath as he always had, to feel the rustle as they sensed him and started up. At first only a subtle movement of giant hands and necks, servos stretching, a metal susurrus growing stronger, until the shrieks of gears long unused might have been the cries of the tortured in hell. He should have brought oil.
“Come!” he called over the noise to J’taa.
The mouth of the winding staircase that led up into the queenside rook was clogged with dead leaves. He swept them aside and stooped to climb the child-sized stairs and was a child again. That simple. Below, thumps echoed against the metal, J’taa following him. At the top he stood on the rook’s platform and peered out over miniature merlons onto his empire, the entire yard of the oversized chess game, pieces still creaking to attention, on this side his golden horde lined up awaiting his thoughts, over there the silver foe.
J’taa joined him. “Is hating you your father.”
She had waited to say that in private, he realized. He wouldn’t talk about it. “My mother built this for me. Took time from all her tests and trials, her endless lab work. Taught me the rules. I was six.” As Charles spoke, the golden queen – its head on a level with the rook’s platform – twisted to let its metal stare fall on him as though listening. Though their insentient circuits made it impossible, he had a sudden image of the pieces as conscious, real even when he was away, as alive as Kess and the servants, locked in stasis by his absence, unable to scream their torment as they awaited his return. Murderer. Unable even to cry. “Simple circuitry, of course. Nothing compared to what Mother was developing in her research.”
“And the girl. The Kess. Is hating.”
He sighed. “Yes, J’taa.”
The alien was a good friend, one of his many hangers-on among the silver, generous with the transpathic, yet the fascination she had – that all corothai had – for human minds and emotions both drew and repelled him. It was necessary, he knew. The very privileges he enjoyed in the capital depended on that inability in the aliens, the aristocracy of the earth, to unravel human thought as it played out in the most basic concepts: grammar, social mores. The brambles of their vast intelligence grew differently. A game of perfect information such as chess was a mysterium to them, no corothul able to win a match against even a beginner human, and in their faceted eyes it elevated masters of the game such as Charles Mestroe to a kind of god. A small counterbalance to the control they wielded over humans. God against god: their superior, earth-ruling technology, in space, weapons, communications, driven by the parasitical circuitry that connected them all, the addictiveness of the transpathic visions they granted – matched against their dumbfounded awe in the face of a single human synapse.
Gold here, silver over there.
“Is sensing that you here be.”
“Made to come alive at my heartbeat, my voice. Ultra-sensitive. From up here on the rook, I need only whisper my moves to them.”
“No. Them her.” It was no grammatical mistake, he saw. J’taa had not meant the game pieces. She pointed with three arms to where Kess had slipped in through the opposite hedge-gate and was winding her way through the silver opponent ranks. She vanished behind a rook and appeared a moment later at its crown, ready to play. Two generals, facing off across their armies.
His heart reared up. He’d been forgiven.
He smiled and moved a peon. Kess countered.
How many sumptuous afternoons they’d spent, he and Kess, the gardener’s orphaned daughter, fierce as the kestrel she was named after, hurling moves at one another, his mother often joining in to critique their strategy, laughing, her strident red hair, already flecked with grey then, tangling in the breeze.
Kess brought a knight into play; it lifted into the air and over the line of peons, really only a horse-shaped hovercraft, and Charles felt J’taa stiffen at the sight of the censored technology. His mother had known many things she shouldn’t have. He countered with his cleric. Soon the world was only giant figures rolling on invisible casters as the two sides battled. Kess played fast, faster than he remembered, pieces whooshing by, slowed only by their rust. It was speed chess. His golden queen kept turning its head to look at him, a fault in the circuitry. J’taa laughed when he brought his rook into play and they were whizzed about the board atop it.
Passing near to Kess on her own high platform, he was astonished to see utter hate on her face.
Not forgiven then. He knocked it from his mind like flicking over a king. The game condensed to a struggle. She was good, so much improved that he wondered where she had practised. She kept him on the defensive. Captured pieces rolled away to stand on the side strip. The sun poured out its pitchers of heat. Behind him he felt the house, its ruination like his father’s body, like the dead gardens and rusty chess pieces, filtering through his concentration, discolouring the game. Sweat ran into his eyes, turning his golden pieces into a molten stew.
Then he saw it.
Mate in two moves.
It was as though his brain had been stabbed. He was a master back in Loude, countless kings toppled; Kess could not have won against him, and yet she had. J’taa had not seen it, he knew, but when she did the corothul would transmit it through her circuits to others in Loude, who would twitch in the manner of corothai amusement, or shake their heads in human imitation. He heard Kess’s knight powering up to leap, the move that would pincer his king and checkmate him.
Instead, Kess slid her rook close to his, diagonally, illegally, until they faced each other. She was crying.
“Is this what it was for?” she screamed. “This game? This…toy! Do you love this so much, Charles?” She pressed the words out as though choking. “Is this what your mother had to die for?”
“I didn’t know what would happen—”
“Because you’re blind! Because you’re a genius who can see three chess moves deep but not past your own nose.”
“It was the lies of the ones in power. They blackmailed me. Who could have known the corothai were capable of duplicity?”
“Everyone, Charles.” Kess’s sobs had subsided. “Everyone except you. They outsmarted you.” She sneered hate at J’taa, who stood listening, seemingly unaffected, beside him. “Brilliant move. Convince your conquered world that being only half-organic makes you dumb to certain things. True perhaps, but only a half-truth. Lull your foe. Drug them.” Kess turned back to him, the disgust from earlier warping her face. “You think you’re privileged, don’t you, being given an addictive drug whenever you want?” He felt J’taa’s warm skin next to his. It called to him to float high above the hallucinogenic plain, forget everything Kess was saying. “Charles, everyone gets the transpathic.” Insert his hands into the folds until the bone needles pierced them, instantly numbing. “Those the corothai have no reason to pamper as they do you are given the drug all the time, in their food and water. Kept apathetic.”
“That’s a myth and you know it.”
“Made dumb. A tiny upper class where it pleases the corothai, yes – lords and chess grand masters – while the poor in the streets are made over into docile addicts, good only for scraping the yeast from their masters’ nests.”
“Not everyone can be educated. Scarce resources—”
“The transpathic erodes the brain, Charles.” Kess was shuddering in her rage. “We are literally devolving. The mass of us will soon be apes.” Yes, J’taa’s skin was warmer, some surge in the subcutaneous circuitry radiating heat. He wanted to put his hands over his ears like a child. “Soon we will have lost the inheritance of the earth. Just another animal species, while they expand and take it all.”
Kess swayed; her thin hands gripped the merlons of her platform and he suddenly remembered those hands on him, their lovemaking – lustmaking – at seventeen, anywhere and everywhere they could hide: in the ash woods out past the chess garden, in the unused drawing room, exploring each other, checking and mating. She had taken his fingers between her teeth, mouthing gently, longing, any time he won against her at the tabletop board kept in the house, worshipping the part of him that had touched the pieces. Nausea struck him. He had worshipped Kess’s body and she had worshipped his mind and he suddenly wanted that back. He wanted to touch her, another human, not silver chitin. He wanted a human looking up to him.
“Even the little you use is making you stupid, Charles.”
“Shut up.”
“Why do you think I could win against you?”
He would, he’d put his hands over his ears if she didn’t stop.
“Is this the level you play at, your best, there in Loude? All of you masters, only ever playing against each other, no input that isn’t corothai. If your precious tournaments had regressed to a child’s level – how would you ever know?” In the awful quiet a cuckoo landed on a cleric’s tip and whistled. “It is they who have played, always. With master tactics. You’re a curious toy for them. A peon they could use to get to the—”