Mallow (2 page)

'But make no mistake!' she roared. 'I love this ship.
1
was born here, and I will die here, and in the long time between I will do whatever I can to protect its ancient halls and noble stone, from anything or anyone that shows it less than perfect respect. Do you understand me, you little fools?'

'Yes, Your Lord.'

'Your Goddess!'

'But is she finished yet? My tongues are numb from hunger!'

'I am nearly finished,' she told the aliens. Then even louder, she said,'
But I will be watching. From this moment, I am hovering over you like Phantom Night.'

That brought a respectfu
l silence.

Phantom Night was a Flounder god, the name translated into a rugged
little
squawk that brought a chill even to Washen's spine.

With a practiced haughtiness, she turned and strode away.

The quintessential captain. One of the lords of the galaxy.

And now, for this blunt moment, she was a mythical monster who would steal the souls of those who dared sleep.

long ago, Washen
reached that age where the past is too large to embrace, where even the sharpest, most efficient memory has to slough off
little
details and entire centuries, and where even the most cherished childhood has been stripped down, nothing left but a series of fragmentary recollections and a few diamond-hard moments that no amount of time, not even ten million years, can dilute to any degree.

Washen's first aliens were dubbed the Phoenixes.

That was when the ship was still outside the Milky Way. Washen was more a child than not, and her parents — engineers who had come on board the first starship — were part of the large unhappy team who fashioned a habitat for the Phoenixes.

Those aliens were unwelcome. They had tried to conquer the ship, after all. It was an ineffectual invasion, but people found it difficult to forgive them anyway. Washen's father, usually charitable to a fault, openly stated that his work was a waste, and worse, it was a crime. 'Give the shits a tiny catacomb, enough water and some minimal food, then forget they're there. That's my little opinion.'

Washen couldn't recall her mother's precise opinion; even Washen's own early biases were lost to time. And she couldn't recall why she first visited the prison. Was she looking for her parents? Or was it later, after their work was finished, and youngsters like herself were pulled there by simple curiosity?

Whatever the reason, what she remembered today was the funeral.

Washen had never seen Death. In her short happy life, not one human had died on board the ship. Age and disease had been tamed, and the modern body could absorb even horrific injuries. If a person was cautious, and sober, she didn't need to die. Ever.

But Phoenixes embraced a different set of beliefs. They evolved on a small hot world. Gills augmented a trio of large, black-blooded lungs; their metabolisms were quick and fierce. Where most winged aliens were gliders or soarers, passive and efficient, the Phoenixes were the ecological equivalent of human-sized peregrines. Skilled hunters and determined warriors, they possessed a broad heritage older than any human culture. Yet despite a wealth of advanced technologies, they didn't approve of the immortalities that most species simply took for granted.

Inside a human mouth, their name was an unsingable string of notes.

'Phoenix' was pulled from some ancient Earth myth. Or was it a Martian myth? Either way, the name was only partly appropriate. They weren't birds, after all, and they didn't live for five hundred years. Thirty standards was too long for most of them, physical infirmities and senility leaving their elderly incapable of flight, or song, or the smallest dignity.

Upon death, the body and a ceremonial nest were burned. But instead of a sweet resurrection, the cold white ashes were carried high by family and friends, then released, winds and wingbeats spreading the soft remains to the ends of their enormous and lovely prison cell.

Their home wasn't built out of simple charity. The Master, taking her usual long aim, decided that if the ship was to attract alien passengers, her crew needed to know how to tweak and twist the ship's environmental controls, turning raw cavities into abodes where any sort of biology would feel at home. That's why she ordered her top engineers to make the attempt. And aeons later, when she came to understand the Master, Washen easily imagined the woman's impatience with someone like her father -a talented employee who dared grumble about his job, unable to appreciate the long-term benefits of this apparently misplaced beneficence.

The Phoenix habitat was once someone's magnetic bottle.

It could have been an antimatter containment tank, though at its best this remark was an authoritative, utterly wild guess.

Five kilometers in diameter and better than twenty kilometers deep, the prison was a column of dense warm air punctuated by thick clouds and masses of floating vegetation. Biological stocks from the Phoenix starship had been cultured, then adapted. Since the original tank lacked lights, ship-style sky lamps were built from scratch, their light tuned to the proper frequencies. Since there wasn't room for jet streams or typhoons, the air was assaulted with an array of hidden vents and other engineering tricks. And to hide the tall cylindrical walls, an illusion of endless clouds covered every surface — an illusion good enough to seem real to humans, but not to the Phoenixes who flew too close.

The prison was meant to hold the defeated and the evil, but both sorts of prisoners quickly grew old and passed away.

It was one of the old warriors whose funeral Washen saw. It seemed unlikely today, but she could remember standing on a platform built against that great round wall, herself and a thousand other humans with their hands locked on the railing, watching winged shapes rising toward them, then higher, flying with a wondrous precision and singing loudly enough to be heard over the constant whis-de of wind.

When the ashes were dropped, the bereaved were too distant to be seen.

Intentionally, no doubt.

The young Washen contemplated the funeral. That next day, or perhaps next year, she proposed, 'We can let the rest of them go free, since the bad ones have died.'

Her father felt otherwise.

'If you haven't noticed, Phoenixes aren't human.' He warned his soft-hearted daughter, 'The creatures have a saying. "You inherit your direction before your wings." Which means, dearest, that the children and grandchildren are just as determined to slaughter us as their ancestors ever were.'

'If not more determined,' said Mother, with an unexpectedly dark tone.

'These creatures hold a grudge,' Father continued. 'Believe me, they can make their hatreds fester and grow.'

'Unlike humans,' said their sharp-witted daughter.

Her irony went unmentioned, and perhaps unrecognized.

If there was more to that argument, it went unremembered. The modern brain is dense and extraordinarily durable — a composite of bioceramics and superconducting proteins and ancient fats and quantum microtubules. But like any reasonable brain, it has to simplify whatever it learns. It straightens. It streamlines. Instinct and habit are its allies, and even the wisest soul employs the art of extrapolation.

When she concentrated, Washen could recall dozens of fights with her parents. Childhood issues of freedom and responsibility never seemed to change, and she remembered enough of their politics and personalities to picture little spats and giant, ugly explosions — the sorts of emotional maelstroms that would make good engineers sit in the dark, quietly asking themselves how they had become such awful, ineffectual parents.

To Washen and her closest friends, the Phoenixes became a cause, a rallying point, and an extraordinarily useful thorn.

A ragged little political movement was born. Its bravest followers, including Washen, publically protested the prison. Their efforts culminated in a march to the Masters station. Hundreds chanted about freedom and decency. They held holosigns showing wingless Phoenixes bound up in black iron chains. It was a brave, remarkable event, and it ended in a small victory: little delegations were free to visit the prison, observe conditions firsthand, and speak to the pitiable aliens under the careful gaze of the captains.

That's where Washen met her first alien.

Phoenix males were always beautiful, but he was exceptionally so. What passed for feathers were a brilliant gold fringed with the darkest black, and an elegant, efficient face seemed to be all eyes and beak. The eyes were a lush copper^' green, bright as polished gemstones.The beak was a vivid jade color, hard and obviously sharp. It was open when he sang, and it remained open afterward, always gulping down the liters of air that he required just to perch in one place and live.

The apparatus on his chest translated his elaborate song.

'Hello,' he said to Washen. Then he called her 'human egg-bearer.'

Several young humans were in the delegation, but Washen was their leader. Following Phoenix protocol, she fielded every question and spoke for the others, following a shopping list of subjects agreed upon weeks ago.

'We want to help you,' Washen promised.

Her translator sang those words in a half-moment, if that.

'We want you free to move and live wherever you wish on board the ship,'she told them.'
And until that can happen, we want to make your life here as comfortable as possible.'

The Phoenix sang his reply.

'Fuck comfort,' said his box.

A deep unease passed through the human delegation. 'What is your name, human egg-bearer?' 'Washen.'

There was no translation, which meant that it was an impossible sound. So the young Phoenix gulped a breath and sang a note that came out as 'Snowfeather.'

She liked the name, and said so. Then she thought to inquire, 'What's your name?'

'Supreme-example-of-manhood,' he replied.

Washen laughed, but only for a moment. Then quietly, carefully, she said, 'Manly. May I call you Manly?'

'Yes, Snowfeather. You may.' Then the feathers around the jade beak lifted — a Phoenix smile, she recalled - and he reached out with one of his long arms, reaching past Washen's sho
ulder, a strong Littl
e hand
gently
, ever so gently, caressing the leading edge of her own great wing.

everyone in the
delegation wore strap-ons.

Their wings were powered by thumb-sized reactors and guided both by the w
earer's muscles, and more importantl
y, by elaborate sensors and embedded reflexes. For the next ten days, human
-
time, they were to live among the Phoenixes as observers and as delegates. Since no portion of the facility lay out of surveillance range, there wasn't any overt danger. Regardless how thick the intervening clouds or how loud the thunder, the children couldn't do anything that wasn't observed, and recorded, every one of their well-intended words spoken to a larger, infinitely suspicious audience.

Perhaps that's why Snowfeather took Manly as her lover.

It was a provocative and defiant and absolutely public act, and she could only hope that news of it slinked its way to her parents.

Or set aside the cynicism. Maybe it was something like love, or at least lust. Maybe it was stirred by the alien himself, and the gorgeous dreamy-strange scenery, and the sheer sensual joy that came with those powerful wings and the feel of wind slipping across your naked flesh.

Or deny love, leaving curiosity as the root cause.

Or put aside curiosity, and call it a deeply political act brought on by courage, or idealism, or the simplest, most wicked forms of naivety.

Whatever the reason, she seduced Manly.

On the summit of an airborne jungle, with her long back pressed against the warm and slick skin of a vegetable bladder, Snowfeather invited the alien's affections. Demanded them, even. He was quick to finish and quick to begin again, and he was tireless, his powerful, furnace
-
like body held over her with an impossible grace.
Yet their geometries didn't mesh. In the end, she was the one who begged, 'Enough. Stop. Let me rest, all right . . . ?'

Her body was damaged, and not just a little bit damaged.

Curious but plainly untroubled, her lover watched the blood flow from between her exhausted legs, crimson at first but turning black in the hyper-oxygenated air. Then her blood clotted, and the ripped flesh began to heal. Without scars and with minimal pain, what would have been a mortal wound in an earlier age had simply vanished. Had never been.

Manly grinned in the Phoenix way, saying nothing.

Snowfeather wanted words. 'How old are you?' she blurted. And when there wasn't an answer, she asked it again. Louder this time. 'How old?'

He answered, using the Phoenix calendar.

Manly was a
little
more than twenty standards old. Which was middle-aged. Late middle-aged, in fact.

She grimaced, then told her lover, 'I can help you.'

He sang a reply, and his translator asked, 'In what fashion, help?'