Asimov's SF, February 2010 (14 page)

"But the cats,” Dickie said, “They didn't get their supper. They was all legs and cartwheels, time a-their life, when somethin’ big and angry, somethin’ that wanted what they had, pounded up the brush and loosed a single screechin’ roar. Stopped them three toms dead in their tracks, and sent ‘em yowlin’ to the four points of the compass, leaving the bold explorer to rock and froth and shudder to rest among the roots and bracken."

Dickie squatted shakily and dabbled his fingers in the puddle of booze that was mingling with everything else in the street—hog slop and horse piss and cowflops and God even don't imagine what. “The cats’ yowls and ruckus drifted off into the night, with the tinkle of that age-black silver bell followin’ after,” he brought his fingers to his mouth and my guts clenched up tight and greasy. He scowled, then nodded.

"Soon, out from the brush, crept the ‘possum, gopher, and two squirrels who'd made that racket.” Dickie got shakily to all fours, “They circled up ‘round the bold explorer. His little undiving engine was worse for wear: Three of the legs was gone altogether, with toothy gears and useless snarls of spring-steel protruding from their empty sockets. The other five were twisted beyond all hope of repair, bent back and around the dome of his lil’ anti-bathysphere like the green sepals pulled up around a dandelion's fluff.” He carefully lowered his face to the puddle. “The glass was still whole—maybe for the luck of being shielded by them bust up legs—but there was a trickle of water running out from between the tarred plates on his undercarriage.” Dickie was bringing his lips to the dirt-flecked surface of that grotesquely filthy whiskey puddle when the better angels of his nature reared their heads. My guts hitched into my throat and stuck there, even when Dickie flopped onto his backside instead of slurping up that mess. He sighed like an abandoned dog.

I was scared of getting skinned by my pa, and scared of Dickie Tucker, and sick sad that I was missing on seeing those dancing girls that Pa calls “prairie nymphs,” like the words are a mouthful of spoilt milk. Maybe they're cheap trash, but to see them twirling in the light of a hundred candles, their curls shining, to see them lounge against the bar like cats, to see their legs and arms and necks, to see their coyness that ain't coy when they set hand to a man's arm or chest—it's warm and dizzy and worth any kind of scared. It settled my gut, thinking about them.

"The bold explorer himself was bruised all to hell,” Dickie said, “with one eye swelled shut like a county fair pugilist, but he's just as optimistic as ever. He smiled tentative, then blushed and wigwagged his color-talk, ‘splaining how he'd got there—which they knew plain enough, from seein'—and askin’ their help in diagnosing the ailments of his suit—which was beyond their capacities.” Dickie stood and turned back toward the church doors, serendipitously catching sight of his dropped bottle. A bare inch of liquor lay in the curve of the bottle's belly, and Dickie perked up seeing it. “All's to say that it was probably just fine that they couldn't understand a damn thing he said.” Dickie scooped up the bottle and drained her.

Though it seems unlikely, Dickie was even less steady on his feet than before, pacing careful, his eyes glued to the dirt. He brought each step to bear with ferocious concentration, as though he expected the ground to squirt out from under foot.

"The squirrels, ‘possum, and whistlepig held a lil powwow, and agreed that they didn't know what in the hell they'd stumbled into, or where it belonged. They figured it was some manner-ah tadpole ‘r salamander, and needed water, which it was quickly runnin’ shy on in its leaky fishbowl.” Dickie stood at the base of the steps, staring down the doors.

"The bold explorer smiled hopefully up at his saviors, even as the water level inched down his dainty, color-swirled mantle."

Dickie undid the buttons on his pants, and proceeded to loose a powerful stream on the church steps, his hands, and his trousers, sighing his satisfaction.

"These four crusaders had never seen the sea, nor had any notion of it, so they did best they could,” Dickie buttoned up crooked, then rubbed his face, like a night watchman warding off sleep. “They hauled him up, set him on their shoulders, and carried him, like a fallen hero, to the charred ruins of the plantation house. Round back, down to the old slave shacks, the ‘possum and whistlepig cradled the bold explorer. He's beamin’ at all he'd saw, and what he'd see yet, imaginin’ his hero's welcome back to the sea, his lecture circuit on the Place Beyond. The squirrels scrabbled up to the crumblin’ lip of the old well. The ‘possum and groundhog heaved the lil suit up—weighed almost nuthin', what with most of the water drained away—and the squirrels hauled it over, and dropped it down. The bold explorer tumbled into the dark with the moon's silver light frostin’ the copper and glass, shinin’ in his perfect, expectant eyes. It was a thin slice of moon, a droopin’ eye, like a lazy God almost sorta watchin’ over his passage. Then he was gone."

Dickie stood, swaying like he was on a foundering frigate.

"He didn't make no sound on the way down, but he splashed when he hit bottom."

Dickie fixed the big double doors with a baleful stare.

"The four a-them standin’ in the moonlight looked down inna that well. They knew they hadn't done right, ‘xactly, but they'd done best they could.” His breath hitched, like he might sick up, “Didn't feel much good ‘bout it, tho'."

Dickie took a breath, looked as to continue, but instead passed out. His right knee buckled while the left held, and he twirled like a ballerina before flopping on his back into the lane's filth.

We sat together, alone in the dark. Dickie snorted. Down the lane, lady laughter bubbled out of Sadie's. I shivered, even though the night was warm.

I wanted to help Dickie home, but his place is so far west of town that doing so would have meant getting caught out for sure. And the fact is, I wanted—I needed—to have my look at Sadie's gals, I needed to go get my fill, even though I knew: Needing to see is where the trouble starts; ain't no amount of looking that fills you.

Besides, sleeping out couldn't possibly bother Dickie Tucker; sleeping in his crumbling shack wasn't much better than sleeping out. At least on the church steps he had fresh air and the Lord watching.

But it didn't matter. I was still tangled in Sheriff's hedge when I heard clicking and clanking come from the darkness out west of the church. I looked up and seen that it was four clockies from the bunch that make their camp up on Windmill Mesa, refugees and veterans of that same Long War that had taken Dickie's good right eye. They looked down at Dickie, their eyes glowing like pairs of coals peeking out from a stove grate. One hunkered and nudged Dickie, who snored deep and didn't stir. The croucher clicked at his mates, and one tick-tocked off, returning with a wheelbarrow snitched from the side of Emet Kohen's Mercantile Emporium. They hauled Dickie up, then wheeled him down the lane, right past my nose. Dickie smelt terrible of manure and I can't even guess what, but the clockies were clean. They smelled like copper and gun oil, and water from the springs way back in the box canyons.

As he was wheeled past, Dickie's one good eye rolled open. It fixed on me blearily, and he mumbled, “Go have yer look, Seth Everett. Couldn't
possibly
do no harm."

At the next alley the party cut west, into the darkness, and if they dumped Dickie back into his own pitiful sod hut, or rolled him right past, all the way to their neat homestead on top of Windmill Mesa, I really can't say.

Copyright © 2010 David Erik Nelson

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Aliette de Bodard lives in Paris, where she works as a computer engineer. In between coding sessions, she writes speculative fiction: her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in
Fantasy Magazine, Interzone,
and
Realms of Fantasy.
Aliette was a Campbell Award finalist in 2009. Her first novel, the Aztec fantasy
Servant of the Underworld
, was recently released by Angry Robot. She tells us her first story for
Asimov's
began “as a thought experiment on what science and space travel would be like if the Chinese had become the dominant culture on Earth—and then sort of morphed along the way."

On a clear day, you could almost see all the way into Heaven.

That was what Shinxie loved about White Horse Monastery: not the high, lacquered buildings scattered across the mountain's face like the fingerprints of some huge Celestial; not the wide courtyards where students sat like statues, the metal of their second-skins gleaming in the sun; but the clear, crisp air of the heights, and the breathless quiet just before dawn, when she could see a flash of light overhead and imagine it to be the reflection of Penlai Station.

In those moments, she could almost imagine herself to be free.

That was, of course, before the first bell-peal echoed across the mountains, calling all the students to the meditation halls; when the stillness of dawn was shattered by the sound of dozens of bare feet, and the smell of incense and cinnabar wafted down to where she sat, a perpetual reminder of her exile.

That morning, as on all mornings, she pulled herself up, wincing at the ache in her calves, and began the climb upward. Soon, she'd have to begin her examinations. By the looks of it, there were at least one or two students who might have achieved the perfect balance: fire and wood, earth and water and metal in perfect harmony within—two more, ready to take their gliders and transcend into Penlai Station.

She was thinking of the second one—Fai Meilin, a short, skeletal woman whose bruised eyes looked almost incongruous in her serene face—when she saw the glint of sunlight.

Penlai Station, winking to her again? But no, the glint came again, and it was larger, spinning itself out of nothingness, layer after layer carefully superimposing itself on reality, until a glider flew out of the singularity in the sky, the slender silhouette underneath shifting to accommodate the strong headwinds with the liquid grace of a Transcendent.

She stood, stared at the glider—hoping it would go away. But it did not. It remained stubbornly there, floating toward the monastery, a patent impossibility. One transcended—became one with the universe, knowing, for a brief moment, how to be everywhere at once before dematerializing on Penlai Station, in the company of peers. One did not, could not descend. That was impossible.

The glider was coming closer to her, its rider maneuvering the metal wings with casual effortlessness. His face, shining under the second-skin, tilted toward her, and somehow the faceted eyes met her, and pierced her like a spear.

For a moment more, she hung indecisive; and then, with a shudder, she broke the contact and ran up the mountain, abandoning all protocol and decorum, calling out for the guards.

Shinxie pressed her hand to the door, waited for the familiar tingle of recognition that traveled through her palm—and slid it open.

Inside the holding cell, the Transcendent was sitting cross-legged in a pit of sunlight, showing no inclination to move or escape. He'd abandoned his glider soon after landing, and now looked oddly bereft, as though something vital had been torn from him. But, of course, that was only illusion. The gliders were more for the protection of White Horse than for the Transcendents: no one wanted to take the risk of a failed singularity opening within the monastery.

Shinxie sat cross-legged in front of the Transcendent, unsure of what to say. The faceted gaze rose to meet hers, incurious—following her movement as if by instinct. His aura saturated the air: the five elements in perfect balance, nothing standing out, no emotion to be read or perceived.

She couldn't help shivering. She'd grown too used to the implants in her palms, relying on her ability to read auras to understand people. But he ... he was a Transcendent, through and through: nothing remained, no desire, no interest, no care for anything. He'd let go of his self—the only way he'd be able to open a singularity and lose himself into it.

"I know who you are,” she said. Carefully, she laid the papers she'd been holding on the floor between them. “Gao Tieguai, from the Province of Anhui."

The eyes blinked, briefly; the head was inclined, as if in acknowledgement.

"Your family was outlawed after you wrote memorials against the Tianshu Emperor, may he reign ten thousand years.” She closed her eyes. “You came here in the fifteenth year of the Tianshu reign. I—helped you transcend."

She should have remembered him better, but even the faded likeness on the file hadn't brought back any memories. She'd have been newly appointed as Abbess of White Horse, still bitter at her expulsion from the Imperial Court: she'd done her work like a chore, laying hands on students every morning, reading the balance of their humors as if in a butterfly-dream—and forgetting them as soon as they'd left her office.

The head bowed to her again. “You did help me, Honored Abbess,” the Transcendent—Gao—said, the first words he'd pronounced since returning.

His voice was low, broken by disuse; and yet, in the pauses between the words, lay an abyss of untapped power.

"Why have you come back?” Shinxie said. And, when the eyes still did not move, “It's not possible, to do what you did. You cannot descend..."

Gao's hands moved, as if to a rhythm of their own. His second-skin stretched between the fingers, creating a softer transition like a webbed foot. “Do you presume to know everything?"

She was no Westerner or Mohammedan, to view the world with boundless arrogance, presuming that everything must cave in to reason. “No. But some things among the ten thousand have explanations."

"This isn't one of them.” Gao smiled, vaguely amused—she'd seen the same expression in her terminal students, except not quite so distant and cold. She hadn't thought she could feel chilled—by a former student, of all people—but then she'd never been made so aware of how different the Transcendents were.

Shinxie reached for the paper, steadied herself with its familiar touch. “You're going to have to explain it to me."