The Wind From a Burning Woman: Six Stories of Science Fiction (21 page)

He smiled and shut his door, then turned to the kitchen to choose what he was going to eat.

Being a whole man, he now knew, did not stop the pain of fear and loneliness. The possibility of quenching was, in fact, a final turn of the thumbscrew. He paced like a caged bear, thinking furiously and reaching no conclusions.

By midnight he was near an explosion. He waited in the viewing area of the terrace, watching the moonlight bathe God-Does-Battle like milk, gripping the railing with strength that could have crushed wood. He listened to the noise of the city. It was less soothing than he remembered, neither synchronous nor melodic.

Anata came for him half an hour after she said she would. Jeshua had gone through so many ups and downs of despair and aloofness that he was exhausted. She took his hand and led him to the central shaft on foot. They found hidden curved stairwells and went down four levels to a broad promenade that circled a widening in the shaft. The walkway, it doesnt work yet, she told him. My tongue, Im getting it down. Im studying.

Theres no reason you should speak like me, he said.

It is difficult at times. Dis meI cannot cure a lifetime obof talk.

Your own language is pretty, he said, half-lying.

I know. Prettier. Alive-o. But She shrugged.

Jeshua thought he couldnt be more than five or six years older than she was, by no means an insurmountable distance. He jerked as the city lights dimmed. All around, the walls lost their bright glow and produced in its stead a pale lunar gleam, like the night outside.

This is what I brough you here for, she said. To see.

The ghost-moon luminescence made him shiver. The walls and floor passed threads of light between them, and from the threads grew spirits, shimmering first like mirages, then settling into translucent sharpness. They began to move.

They came in couples, groups, crowds, and with them were children, animals, birds, and things he couldnt identify. They filled the promenade and terraces and walked, talking in tunnel-end whispers he couldnt make out, laughing and looking and being alive, but not in Jeshuas time.

They were not solid, not robots or cyborgs. They were spirits from ten centuries past, and he was rapidly losing all decorum watching them come to form around him.

Sh! Anata said, taking his arm to steady him. They dont hurt anybody. Theyre no here. Theyre dreams.

Jeshua clasped his hands tight and forced himself to be calm.

This is the city, what it desires, Anata said. You want to kill the polis, the city, because it keeps out the people, but lookit hurts, too. It wants. Whats a city without its people? Just sick. No bad. No evil. Cant kill a sick one, can you?

Each night, she said, the city reenacted a living memory of the past, and each night she came to watch.

Jeshua saw the pseudolife, the half-silent existence of a billion recorded memories, and his anger slowly faded. His hands loosened their grip on each other. He could never sustain hatred for long. Now, with understanding just out of reach, but obviously coming, he could only resign himself to more confusion for the moment.

Itll take me a long, long time to forgive what happened, he said.

This me, too. She sighed. When I was married, I found I could not have children. This my husband could not understand. All the others of the women in the group could have children. So I left in shame and came to the city we had always worshiped. I thought it would be, the city, the only one to cure. But now I dont know. I do not want another husband, I want to wait for this to go away. It is too beautiful to leave while it is still here.

Go away?

The cities, they get old and they wander, she said. Not all things work good here now. Pieces are dying. Soon it will all die. Even such as Thinner, they die. The room is full of them. And no more are being made. The city is too old to grow new. So I wait until the beauty is gone.

Jeshua looked at her more closely. There was a whitish cast in her left eye. It had not been there a few hours ago.

It is time to go to sleep, she said. Very late.

He took her gently by the hand and led her through the phantoms, up the empty but crowded staircases, asking her where she lived.

I dont have any one room, she said. Sleep in all of them at some time or another. But we cant go back dere. She stopped. There. Dere. Cant go back. She looked up at him. Dis me, canno spek mucky ob She held her hand to her mouth. I forget. I learned bu nowI dont know...

He felt a slow horror grind in his stomach.

Something is going wrong, she said. Her voice became deeper, like Thinners, and she opened her mouth to scream but could not. She tore away from him and backed up. Im doing something wrong.

Take off your shirt, Jeshua said.

No. She looked offended.

Its all a lie, isnt it? he asked.

No.

Then take off your shirt.

She began to remove it. Her hands hesitated.

Now.

She peeled it over her head and stood naked, with her small breasts outthrust, narrow hips square and bonily dimpled, genitals flossed in feathery brown. A pattern of scars on her chest and breasts formed a circle. Bits of black remained like cinders, like the cinders on his own chestfrom a campfire that had never been. Once, both of them had been marked like Thinner, stamped with the seal of Mandala.

She turned away from him on the staircase, phantoms drifting past her and through her. He reached out to stop her but wasnt quick enough. Her foot spasmed and she fell, garnering into a twisted ball, down the staircase, up against the railings, to the bottom.

He stood near the top and saw her pale blue fluid and red skinblood and green tissue leaking from a torn leg. He felt he might go insane.

Thinner! he screamed. He kept calling the name. The lunar glow brightened, and the phantoms disappeared. The halls and vaults echoed with his braying cry.

The cyborg appeared at the bottom of the staircase and knelt down to examine the girl.

Both of us, Jeshua said. Both lies.

We dont have the parts to fix her, Thinner said.

Why did you bring us back? Why not let us stay? And why not just tell us what we are?

Until a few years ago there was still hope, Thinner said. The city was still trying to correct the programs, still trying to get back its citizens. Sixty years ago it gave the architect more freedom to try to find out what went wrong. We built ourselvesyou, her, me othersto go among the humans and see what they were like now, how the cities could accommodate. And if we had told you this, would you have believed? As humans, you were so convincing you couldnt even go into cities except your own. Then the aging began, and the sickness. The attempt finally died.

Jeshua felt the scars on his chest and shut his eyes, wishing, hoping it was all a nightmare.

David the smith purged the mark from you when you were a young cyborg, that you might pass for human. Then he stunted your development that you might someday be forced to come back.

My father was like me.

Yes. He carried the scar, too.

Jeshua nodded. How long do we have?

I dont know. The city is running out of memories to repeat. Soon it will have to give up... less then a century. It will move like the others and strand itself someplace.

Jeshua walked away from Thinner and the girls body and wandered down an access hall to the terraces on the outer wall of the city. He shaded his eyes against the rising sun in the east and looked toward Arat. There, he saw the city that had once occupied Mesa Canaan. It had disassembled and was trying to cross the mountains.

Kisa, he said.

<>

* * * *

HARDFOUGHT

In the Han Dynasty, historians were appointed by the royal edict to write the history of Imperial China. They alone were the arbiters of what would be recorded. Although various emperors tried, none could gain access to the ironbound chest in which each document was placed after it was written. The historians preferred to suffer death rather than betray their trust.

At the end of each reign the box would be opened and the documents published, perhaps to benefit the next emperor. But for these documents. Imperial China, to a large extent, has no history.

The thread survives by whim.

Humans called it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs, glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Its central core was a ghoulish green flecked with watery black. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebulas magnetic field. The Medusa was a huge womb of starsand disputed territory.

Whenever Prufrax looked at it in displays or through the ships ports, it seemed malevolent, like a zealous mother showing an ominous face to protect her children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some of the fibs.

At five, Prufrax was old enough to know the Mellangees mission and her role in it. She had already been through four ship-years of indoctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she would dream of penetrating the huge red-and-white Senexi seedships and finding the brood mind. Zap, Zap, she went with her lips, silent so the tellman wouldnt think her thoughts were straying.

The tellman peered at her from his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared straight at the center, all focusing somewhere around the tellmans spiderlike teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. How many branch individuals in the Senexi brood mind? he asked. He looked around the classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. Pru?

Five, she said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the surgery done to adapt them to the gloves.

What will you find in the brood mind? the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead as wide as his shoulders. Some of the ferns thought tellmen were attractive. Not manyand Pru was not one of them.

Yoke, she said.

What is in the brood-mind yoke?

Fibs.

More specifically? And it really isnt all fib, you know.

Info. Senexi data.

What will you do?

Zap, she said, smiling.

Why, Pru?

Yoke has team gens-memory. Zap yoke, spill the life of the teams five branch inds.

Zap the brood, Pru?

No, she said solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her classs inception. Hold the brood for the supreme overs. The tellman did not say what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern.

Fine, said the tellman. You tell well, for someone whos always half-journeying.

Brainwalk, Prufrax thought. Tellman was fancy with the words, but to Pru, what she was prone to do during Tell was brainwalk, seeking out her future. She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were four.

Zap, Zap, she went with her lips.

* * * *

Aryz skidded through the thin layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment. He knew the Medusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for him. He and his four branch-mates, who along with the all-important brood mind comprised one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for ninety-three orbits, each orbitincluding the timeless periods outside status geometrytaking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a hundred generations hence, when the Senexi plan would finally mature.

The Senexi were nearly as old as the galaxy. They had achieved spaceflight during the time of the starglobe, when the galaxy had been a sphere. They had not been a quick or brilliant race. Each great achievement had taken thousands of generations, and not just because of their material handicaps. In those times, elements heavier than helium had been rare, found only around stars that had greedily absorbed huge amounts of primeval hydrogen, burned fierce and blue and exploded early, permeating the ill-defined galactic arms with carbon and nitrogen, lithium and oxygen. Elements heavier than iron had been almost nonexistent. The biologies of cold gas-giant worlds had developed with a much smaller palette of chemical combinations in producing the offspring of the primary Population II stars.

Aryz, even with the limited perspective of a branch ind, was aware that, on the whole, the humans opposing the seedship were more adaptable, more vital. But they were not more experienced. The Senexi with their billions of years had often matched them. And Aryzs perspective was expanding with each day of his new assignment.

In the early generations of the struggle, Senexi mental stasis and cultural inflexibility had made them avoid contact with the Population I species. They had never begun a program of extermination of the younger, newly life-forming worlds; the task would have been monumental and probably useless. So when spacefaring cultures developed, the Senexi had retreated, falling back into the redoubts of old stars even before engaging with the new kinds. They had retreated for three generations, about thirty thousand human years, raising their broods on cold nestworlds around red dwarfs, conserving, holding back for the inevitable conflicts.

As the Senexi had anticipated, the younger Population I races had found need of even the aging groves of the galaxys first stars. They had moved in savagely, voraciously, with all the strength and mutability of organisms evolved from a richer soup of elements. Biology had, in some ways, evolved in its own right and superseded the Senexi.

Aryz raised the upper globe of his body, with its five silicate eyes arranged in a cross along the forward surface. He had memory of those times, and times long before, though his team hadnt existed then. The brood mind carried memories selected from the total store of nearly twelve billion years experience; an awesome amount of knowledge, even to a Senexi. He pushed himself forward with his rear pods.