Mad Mary

The air smells of lunacy.  Smell it?  Delicious.  Lovely, wafting to the nostrils like Mom's apple pie.  Tasty, she was.  The madness has a distinct olfactory punch to it that cannot be mistaken.  It's not like fear.  Fear smells thick, like spilled blood.  Madness is light, almost frilly, delicate and thinly pungent.

Ah, yes.  There she is.  What'ssssss her name? Mary? Yes, that's it.  I lean in to the outskirts of her mind, and listen:

 The cows come home home home, all day all day...where mind the gallows go, inclines declines...algorithms of alcohol...


I withdraw, leave her to her nonsense chanting.  She's pressed far past the bounds of what can be understood as thought, much less coherence.  Perrrrrfect.

She mumbles and stumbles, swigs from a brown-paper bag in the shape of a bottle; I flare my nose and sniff...King Cobra, I think...yes, yes.  She's far gone, too.  Many bottles in, this day.

"Periwinkle, twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder who you are..." she weaves around a corner and into an alley, lurches to a stop, inspects her surroundings, sinks and sags to the ground in a pile of newspapers and cardboard arranged into a nest, still whispering to herself in a barely audible sing-song "it's contagious, here we are now, imitate us..."

Nirvana? Really, Mary?  Ah the mad, no taste whatsoever.

I wait, wait, wait, tasting the shadows, watching the stars come to life beyond the cloud cover.  Night falls, Mary sleeps.  The crowds fade, and no one sees me.  They never do.  I disguise myself as something living, something real.  Something vaguely human, or human-shaped.  I love their ignorance, these frail, mad humans.

Finally, the moment comes, and I strike like an adder, swift and silent.  She tastes of madness, so sweet like honey-wine, and anger, acrid, like aged scotch.  When I finish, she is a flaccid sack of nothing, but I sense her soul wafting upwards like a smoke trail and she is relieved, thankful.  She whispers to me, before she vanishes among the waiting multitudes of the In-Between, Thank you thank you, death is like loving--

I smile a toothy grin and slither back into the cool shades of nowhere. 

A Daphne Crown

She flits between the trees, and the only glimpses I am granted are shreds of white gauze vanishing between mammoth tree trunks like the legs of a colossus. She laughs, mocking, and it enrages me. Her laughter echoes...echoes...echoes, returns to me from behind, before, to the left and right. There is no sound but her bell-chime voice, no sight but her lithe, lovely form. She is all around me, she is everywhere, she is nowhere.

Daphne.

Her very name is like bewitching music coursing within me, burning fiery in my veins. My side stings where Eros fired his golden arrow; I hear Daphne's laughter pulling me ever onward. I see a single drop of blood glimmering bright and bold in a pool of sunlight, Daphne's blood; I dip my finger in the spot of crimson and taste her essence therein, like honey, like sunlight. I charge forward through the wood, and now I see her. She too presses a palm to the ivory skin of her side. She leans against a majestic elm, a leaden arrow lying at her feet. She sees me, framed by the sun, and she takes a step away from the tree. My heart leaps...I step towards her, hands outstretched; I can almost feel her skin beneath me, hear her panting in my ear...

...She lifts her face heavenward, calls the name of her father the river god, begs him to save her...Save her? Why needs she to be saved? I take another step forward, poetry of love on my lips...

She flees yet again, and my heart is crushed, my ire roused. All I want is to love her, and I will, I will have her. She runs like a wounded deer now, wild and frantic, weaving between trunks and ducking under low-hanging boughs and even as I pursue her I feel my lust rising at the tantalizing glimpses of her lovely body moving with such gazelle grace beneath the sheer white silken gown. My own unflagging speed carries me nearer, nearer, she is within grasp and now I have a handful of silk in my fist...

She cries out again, and I hear true anguish in her dulcet wail; she wrenches her head around to look at me, revulsion in her marble features, and her body is twisting as she pulls away from me. My hands are wrapped around her waist, I have her in my arms at last. But her pure white alabaster skin, so smooth and warm and flawless, is changing beneath my touch, turning rough and coarse, darkening, hardening. Her hair, black as raven wings, lustrous and shimmering in the noonday sun, her hair is turning green, spreading out and rising upwards as a million leaves fluttering in the breeze, stretching towards the sun as if hungry for his light, and her arms are reaching for the sky as well, twisting and knotting, bending, splitting and contorting, her legs are merging and thickening and driving grasping roots like serpentine tendrils into the ground, into the soft black loam. She has become a tree, an elegant laurel tree, leaves like spearheads wavering luminous in the brilliant sunlight.

Peneus has protected her. Damn him.

I wrap my arms around her broad, solid trunk, gaze up at the azure sky through her fluttering foliage, kiss her now-rough skin, caress her as if she were still flesh and blood. I turn away, unable to face the hungry hollow in my soul, the place where she belongs.

Wind stirs, soughs through the forest, lifts her delicate branches. I turn back to her, pluck leaves from her and weave a crown, whisper a prayer to her, promise to never forget her.

My Daphne, my love.

Lily's Hunger

A billowing draft rustles and lifts the curtains, granting me a fleeting glimpse of the world that lays beyond this darkened room that is my prison: a lush green sward stretching in rolling folds, an azure sky wide and unbroken in a vast curving expanse, and far in the distance, perched upon the horizon line is an oak tree spreading its branches like reaching, trembling-leafed fingers, each broad leaf burnished to luminescence by the great, glowing, blinding sun. 

All this in a fragment of a moment, then gone.  The curtains fall closed again and the room is bathed in darkness, affording me only dim outlines of the sparse furniture: a small cot, a table and chair, a candle for which I have no matches.  I feel eyes watching me; the door silently opening behind me had caused the draft that lifted the curtain.

She smiles slowly at me, a sinister curling of her cold red lips like a serpent coiling to strike, showing a pair of fangs that gleam in the gloom as sharp white omens of death.  I shrink against the wall, knowing what is coming.  I edge for the window.  "Go ahead," she says, gesturing at the window.  She laughs, a vicious, tinkling chuckle like breaking glass.  I lunge to throw open the sash, knowing it is in vain.  Her fangs pierce my throat, and darkness, hungry and breathing, washes over me.

Carnivale Mechaniste

Chapter 10: Shipwrecked

High Consul Pede Claudo stood at the railing outside of his cabin, leaning heavily on his intricately-carved thornwood cane, idly fingering the silver eagle that formed the knob. His leg was throbbing, making him irritable and impatient, which the very last thing the situation at hand called for. His Dreadnaught ran like a clock without much intervention from him; his crew knew their jobs, they were all seasoned, experienced men, trusted and steady. He'd taken them to the farthest realms and back, faced incredible odds and had always come back to dock with minimal casualties and full profit. This time, it looked as if this might be an exception. This realm...it was mysterious, difficult, and dangerous; the inhabitants were even more so, treacherous, vicious, unpredictable, and cunning.

The ship was tethered in a precarious position, hiding in the lee of one of the massive, city-sized islands that floated in the air by some devil-magic. There didn't seem to be anything like ground here, just an endless maze of floating islands that ranged in size from large boulders to hulks bigger than all of Carth, to continent-sized mammoths that defied belief, all hovering in the middle of space, scattered helter-skelter, some miles apart, others with outcroppings knocking against each other like boats at dock. The winds worked awful mischief too, currents blowing in wild directions, shifting and changing without warning, raging and whipping, slowing and vanishing and kicking up again moments later; even the mighty Dreadnaught was turned on end by sudden gusts of unbelievable force, the rigging was in constant disarray, sails were split and spars creaked and bent and snapped with a noise like a cannon, piercing everyone in the vicinity with splinters. One man had even been knocked clear off the yard and overboard to tumble into space that seemed to have no end. And the damned mages couldn't cast the realm-shift spell again for another thirty ship-days, so they were stuck here.

 

The natives were the worst nuisance of all. Perhaps nuisance wasn't the right word, however, Pede Claudo thought to himself. They were gallingly, devilishly crafty, masters of guerrilla warfare. They seemed to understand instinctively that they couldn't face the Corsairs on any kind of level playing field—should such a thing exist in this awful abode—so they would swoop down out of the sun in ever-shifting arrowhead formations, launching those red balls of fire from silver, pronged sticks the size of a gladius. They flew in perfect unison, never colliding, even during the most outrageous maneuvers, throwing the balls of fire back and forth like they were playing a game he'd seen back Earth-side, long ago, in another lifetime, played by the natives of a then-unknown continent...Claudo shook himself out the reverie. Memories of Earth would do no good. He slammed the butt of his cane on the deck, gruffed and cursed under his breath. The natives would be attacking soon, his gut told him. Best move positions.

 

“Garris!” Claudo's second in command swarmed up the ladder and waited for orders. “Un-tether us and set the screws at quarter strength. Bear straight ahead and bring us above this rock. I expect we'll have company soon, so have the troops at the ready.”

 

“Sir.” Garris slid down the ladder without touching a rung, calling orders as he went. A good lad, that, Claudo thought. Reminded him of a praefecti he'd known in the Seventh Legion. Of course, that praefecti had been captured, tortured, and exsanguinated by Pict raiders, but that was the hazard of being sent to Britannica. Claudo had to shake himself again. He was getting maudlin, it seemed. That wouldn't do, not at all.

 

Claudo's Dreadnaught, the Realmfall, shuddered and rumbled as the engines kicked into gear and set the four screws to spinning. The sun was setting—or descending, or whatever—lowering in the west, darkening the sky to shades of pink and red and orange. The natives seemed to have no problem in the dark, so the coming of night was no shelter or solace. The crew of the Realmfall was on edge, jumping at every sound, every gust of wind, and Claudo wasn't in much better shape. The Realmfall eased away from the rock to which she had been tethered and swung out into open space, nosing up and away from the archipelago she had been hidden in. Not for the first time, Claudo wished to Jupiter that the winds weren't so be-damned unpredictable so he could move in silence; the engine and screws were dead-giveaways to their position, but every time he upped sails, the wind wreaked havoc on the sheets and the rigging, tangling lines, snapping yards and spars, and making life a living hell for everyone. No, engine power was the best choice, but every time Claudo had the Realmfall shift position, they found themselves under attack by harrying raids of the natives.

 

Sure enough, they hadn't so much as cleared the archipelago when he heard the distinctive battle-song of the winged warriors that made their homes in these floating mountains. Claudo peered over the edge and watched the arc of islands receding from view, but saw no shapes flying towards them; there was nothing above them but empty sky; then he saw them emerging from a cloudbank between three islands, each of which was big enough to hold all of the city of Carth twice over. Claudo put his telescope to his eye and brought it to bear on the approaching raiders. There were at least fifty of them, flying in a tight three-dimensional diamond formation, wide wings beating in perfect unison, each mouth singing in eery synchronicity the battle-song that always foreboded dead deckhands and Corsairs, more funerals, more families to visit once the year out and year back were finished.

 

Claudo cupped his hands around his mouth, bellowing, “All hands! Raiders to aft! Ready the deck guns!” Claudo turned to the helmsman and ordered him to bring the Realmfall about so her cannons could be used to some effect. The likelihood of actually hitting such small, maneuverable targets with anything so cumbersome as a cannon was laughable, but...he had to use everything he had. The deck guns, used primarily against targets that could conjure magical shields or force-fields, would be of more use, he hoped. He didn't know what effect the phage-globes had on living targets, but they would soon find out.

 

The Realmfall had swung about and brought her screws to a halt, all available hands manning any kind of projectile weapon available, long-bows, cross-bows, muskets, and rifles all carefully smuggled from various Earth eras, as well as other, stranger weapons magical in nature. Claudo knew he had an advantage over many other Dreadnaughts, in that Claudo knew Earth, knew when and where to go to procure weapons that would make all the difference in situations like this, where most other High Consuls didn't. Claudo's home realm was the one place the Carthians didn't like to raid, except for select times in history, when anomalies such as the Dreadnaught would go unremarked. One Consul had tried to raid Earth in a time-point too far advanced technologically, and the ship had never been seen again. Claudo knew all too well how that had happened, and he too stayed far away from his home realm as much as possible. He missed Earth, though. Quite a bit, sometimes...for so many reasons.

 

The lead warrior ended the battle-song with a long-drawn ululation that seemed to be the signal to open the attack, for when the sound of his voice faded, all the warriors unlimbered their weapons, each of them identical to the others: three-foot-long staffs, one in each hand, crafted of some kind of silvery metal that caught every shred of light and refracted it, intensified and prismatic. In his or her left hand—for women fought as well as men here, with equal viciousness and cunning—the warrior always held the pronged weapon, seven long and curving talon-like prongs cupped around a giant red, translucent, iridescent stone; from this hand, the left, the warrior conjured the red globes of fire that consumed with horrible swiftness anything and everything it touched, flesh, steel, wood, cloth, even the very air itself seemed to burn when the globes howled past. In the right hand, the warrior always held the hammer staff, a weapon the same length as the other, but with a a mace-head, round, bulbous, spiked, and heavy; with this hammer-headed staff the globes, once conjured, were hit to fly howling with an unnatural shriek for hundreds of feet. When Claudo first saw the warriors attack, he'd thought it to be another example of low-tech natives trying to attack a far superior force with sticks and fire, but then, when the devastating effectiveness of their sports-like technique was demonstrated, Claudo revised his opinion to grudging respect and even a little awe, in the manner that only a seasoned warrior can.

 

Claudo cursed yet again. He didn't know if his men could bear up under thirty days of this. He knew they couldn't. In thirty days, at this rate...they'd all be dead and the Realmfall would be a ghost ship, floating in the maze of sky-islands until it smashed against one and fell through the infinity of empty space in chunks of ruin.

 

Now the first warrior, the one at the very tip of the diamond, held the heads of his weapons against each other, chanted a single syllable, and ignited a ball of red fire. In unison, all the others followed suit, and at that moment, in the lowering, darkening haze of impending nightfall, there was a sudden blaze of red fire tracing through the sky; the warriors swung their hammers and the globes of fire exploded towards the Realmfall with a roar of rushing wind and a burst of howling energy. When the barrage was less than ten feet away, the formation broke, scattered up and down, left and right, prong-staffs igniting and tossing globes back and forth in a dizzying tracery that afterimages on retinas. Then red fire was splattering and spreading, creeping up masts and eating at the edges of reefed sails, devouring hair and boots and fingers, eliciting screams of agony and panic. Water didn't douse this fire, and water was always at a premium aboard ship; slapping only transferred it from cloth to palm; the only mercy was that it was short-lived, the fire burnt itself out after a few minutes, but each second that it burned caused awful devastation. By the time the first barrage had died down, there were at least three men dead and a dozen writhing with awful burns, flesh turned black with peeling oozing pink underneath. Now the warriors were darting overhead and past on either side and beneath, passing globes to and fro, swooping down beneath the mast to crush a head or open a chest with the hammer-staff; when the hammer impacted, it sent out a shock-wave that propelled the victim for several yards and battered against the ear drums and skin of anyone nearby.

 

There was a fraught, still silence left in the space after the attack. That was their way, the natives: swoop in, hit like lightning, and vanish. Damned effective. Claudo opened his mouth to order the cleanup, but his words were burned away by the raging fires of a second attack, hard on the heels of the first, a new contingent of aerial warriors singing and blasting howling balls of fire, smashing holes in men and in the sides of the ship, firing groups of red projectiles at the screws so that the ship shuddered and the engines groaned and the ship stuttered and yawed and drifted to a stop. The deck guns opened fire without orders, and found some effectiveness. The long, wide-mouthed guns belched, guttered, and emitted amorphous blobs of purple and yellow gelatinous liquid that formed itself into a teardrop shape as it gained momentum; the deck-guns were weapons magical in nature that Claudo didn't really understand fully, except to that they fired a modified version of the same energy that propelled the ship, the magical force that was drained from slaves, prisoners, and in cases of emergency, the crew itself on rotational conscription basis. The material was called chash, and its main property was an acid-like tendency to eat away at whatever it touched. It wasn't, as a rule, used against other living creatures, but Claudo wasn't too sure why this was. Probably because it was an awful and cruel way to kill another being, but that was just a guess.

 

The chash moved with a strange slowness, as if in slow-motion, but it reached, eventually, a clump of warriors stooping like hawks down at the ship; the yellow-purple teardrop swallowed the warriors, absorbed them, and their screams came down to the ship muffled and stifled, their forms disappeared and the screams were silenced, and the chash moved on, leaving nothing at all but a horrified memory, still glooping through the air to hit an island, through which the chash burrowed, hissing through rock and soil like a sword-blade through soft flesh to leave a gaping hole. The deck-guns were indeed an awful weapon to use against living things, but at this point, Claudo was willing to use whatever he had at his disposal to fend off the attacks of the flying warriors.

 

The second wave was scattered, warriors flying away in a dozen directions, disoriented by the disappearance of their comrades. There was a third wave on the way, however...Claudo heard shouts from three different quarters of the ship, and realized that this was not merely a few isolated guerrilla attacks, but rather was a concentrated effort to down the ship and kill all aboard. And they were winning, too, Claudo realized. His engine was stopped, his screws damaged, the sails were eaten to the point of uselessness by the fireballs, and his nearly half his crew was dead or wounded.

 

The hull of the ship echoed and crunched and grumbled under a constant barrage of fireballs, and Claudo heard the hiss of escaped air and energy as the reservoirs of magic holding the ship aloft escaped. That was another magical property of the Dreadnaughts that Claudo didn't fully understand, but rather knew about and trusted to in the way that one sat in a chair without consciously thinking about how the chair operated: in the very bottom-most holds of the ship there were a dozen sealed-off chambers that held some kind of magical spell-effect that had to be renewed at the beginning of every year-out-and-year-back journey by a quartet of hooded, glowing-eyed mages whispering sibilant spells. These chambers were punctured now, and the ship was juddering and sinking. There was a fairly large sky-island directly ahead and below the ship and with any luck they'd land there and be able to make a stand. They would be lost to posterity, of course, but they would sell their lives as dearly as they could.

 

The natives were buzzing the deck again, and one of them grabbed a deckhand with hands and feet—clawed appendages that seemed a cross between eagle talons and a monkey's opposable-thumbed feet, except they had two thumbs, one on each side, and their hands were the same—picked up the sailor as if he weighed no more than a rag doll, and flew out over the open air, threw him up and let him fall, darted down and caught him, the poor man screaming in terror all the while; he was tossed vertically again, and this time another warrior caught him with one hand and foot, slammed him with a hammer-staff. The man simply fell apart when struck, and the native warriors seemed to find this hysterical, cawing and whooping to each other, and that became a game to them.

 

Claudo climbed down the ladder to the deck, mingled among his terrified crew, shouting words of encouragement and orders to form groups and bands for common defense. He drew his gladius, reversed his grip on his staff so the eagle that formed the head became a weapon. A warrior swooped down at him and Claudo ducked to the side at the last second, bludgeoning the yellow-skinned warrior in the side and hacking with the sword, missing. This close, Claudo got a better look at his foe: they were enormous, measuring easily eight feet from head to foot, and they had long tails which added to their length. These tails were fascinating, being almost as long as the rest of the body, but thin, flattened, and prehensile. Claudo watched as one warrior landed on the mizzen-mast yard and clung there with feet and tail, like a monkey in the jungles Claudo had seen back on Earth, in his days as a new recruit in the Seventh Legion assigned to Africa. Then, as another warrior flew past him, Claudo realized that tails weren't just flattened, they could be changed for use as either a rudder or a vertical plane, which explained the incredible feats of maneuverability he'd seen.

 

The island was nearing, now, and Claudo began calling orders for the crew, or what was left of them, to ready for impact. The ship was falling quickly, the wind howling past, the natives following, launching more fireballs, knocking more holes in the hull. Then a fireball hit one of the chambers and reacted with the energy from the buoyancy spell; the explosion rocked the ship, sent it bucking and spinning and in flames, crumbling apart. The rock and trees of the sky-island were hurtling up at breakneck speed and the ship was in pieces, men clinging to hunks of hull and bits of rigging. Claudo was free-falling suddenly, seeing sky-ground-sky-ground; the foremast was falling past him and he grabbed at a bit of stray line, pulled himself to the mast, amused to see that his soldier's instincts had kept his grip on his weapons even as he fell. He shoved his sword back into the scabbard and clung tightly, watching men fall into the trees and vanish, and now the trees were whipping past him, long, twisted limbs like raw exposed muscle, wide leaves slapping at his face. The mast hit a branch and snapped it, but the moment of impact slowed him just enough to fling himself at the tree, ignoring the screaming agony from his game leg as he used it to to jump free; he fell, missed a branch, grabbed at another and clung to it desperately, feeling muscles and bones ache from the force of impact, watched the mast tumble down, down, down, realizing for the first time how Mars-be-damned massive these trees were. He'd fallen at least a hundred feet down before the mast hit a branch, and then he'd fallen another fifty feet or so, and down beneath him the ground was still out of view, just branches and leaves. Around him, other men had caught branches, like himself, and others had not been so lucky, or quick-witted. Some were hanging from the limbs, broken and bent in impossible positions; the hull was crashing through now, right above Claudo. Move, old man, he told himself. He ran along the branch, which was wider, in fact, than the yardarms of a Dreadnaught, saw another branch a few feet away, jumped with all his strength, caught at the tip with his fingers, got a grip on it and swung down until it reached its breaking point bent nearly double, held briefly, and then, unbelievably, snapped back up like rubber band, throwing Claudo airborne in an inward arc, away from the onrushing hulk of the crashing Dreadnaught by the sheer luck of physics. It passed by him, missing by less than a foot, carving a swath of felled trees with its passage. Claudo could see men still gripping to the railings, trailing behind it on ropes, falling away from it, saw one man even perched on the boss of a screw.

 

Then the Realmfall hit the ground and Claudo felt the sky-island quake and rock from the massive shock. Claudo had caught a branch at the apex of his upward flight and let it droop down under his weight, let go when it was about to snap back up, caught another on the way down, keeping his momentum under control to a certain degree. After what had to have been nearly five hundred feet, the ground finally came into view. There were men there beneath him, cursing, moaning, weeping, clutching wounds and holding injured comrades, gathering supplies...as Claudo dropped heavily to the soft black loam he felt pride in his men, especially the officers he could see that were milling among the men, issuing orders, keeping calm and establishing organization. The most crucial thing right now was to keep the men busy, keep them from panicking as they realized that they were stranded here.

 

Above, the sky was was almost black with impending nightfall. Claudo wondered what would come out to stalk among these mammoth trees at night. Perhaps he didn't want to know. No indeed.

 

What a mess.

INTERMEDIARY

“These intruders must be slain. They are an infection.”

 

“Peace, Ghil'nur'Athni. They cannot leave that murak. They are stranded in a foreign place, and we have lost enough souls to the Everhalls this day. We are Rhylathi, and we are not murderers. Let them make their way as they can. They will not harm us any more.”

 

“You underestimate them, I think. That they could craft a thing so large, and cause it to fly as only born-things may, that is a fact to remember. Where there is one such, there are more. What if they come again, or send more to look for their lost tree-skin-murak and the brethren who caused it to fly? They would tell them of us, and how we fight, and then we would lose the advantage of surprise.”

 

“You speak wise words, my bond-brother. But I cannot allow you ravage them when they are no longer a threat to us. They cannot fly without that...tree-skin-murak, as you called it; we have seen that during the fighting. They fell and could not fly. Thus, they cannot leave the murak. We have no heart-homes on that murak, and we need not go there. They will run out of food, and then they will die without us needing to risk more souls to the Everhalls.”

 

The first speaker, Ghil'nur'Athni, the Song-leader, a huge, hulking, long-winged warrior with dusky red skin, hissed his frustration, slapped his wings against his sides, and thumped the ground with his tail, but Avra'kel'Zhura was the Song-maker, and she could not be gainsaid.

 

Avra tapped a long claw on the arm of her chair, eyes unfocused as she considered the best course. At length, she said, “Because I hear the truth in your words, and because you are a wise and skillful Song-leader—if you are a bit rash and prone to strike without thinking—I will grant you this one small concession: you may select two bond-brothers and watch the wingless intruders. Watch, I say, Ghil, and watch only. You may have no contact with them, and you especially must not harm them, unless they attack you first. This will be a great test for you, I think, and by it you will grow, should you succeed in heeding my injunctions.”

 

“I hear your words, Song-maker. I will not fail you, though it will sore try me to watch and do nothing.”

 

Avra chuckled, a dry, aged rasp that let through a glimmer of the humor that her weighty responsibilities of office forced her to keep hidden. “I know it will be a trial for you, my son, but you are equal to the task. I would not send you thus if I thought you would fail.”

 

Ghil bowed low, spreading his wings and curling them around him in the formal bow of respect. “Thank you, mother.” He stepped close to her chair—an elaborate, high-backed throne crafted of living wood, a thing that grew and aged and changed even as she herself did—and touched the tips of his wings to her shoulders, an intimate gesture shared only by the closest of blood-bonds.

 

Ghil turned away from his mother and queen, stomped out onto the landing-balcony with long, jerking strides that showed his underlying anger, despite his vocal and gestural acquiescence to the Song-maker. When he was near the edge of the balcony he crouched, coiled his tail and leapt leaf-ward with a mighty bound that carried him nearly twenty feet into the air. He let himself fall a few feet before he unfurled his long, wide, ribbed wings and sailed away over the treetops. He rode the root-ward current, banking and turning and dipping around muraks until he came to the murak on which he made his home. It was a small sky-island, no more than three wingbeats in diameter, shallow, ovoid in shape. He'd claimed it as his, and no one had contested it; here he made his heart-home, here he trained with his closest bond-brothers, and he was fiercely protective of it, as all Rhylathi were protective of their heart-homes. Ghil settled to the ground lightly, barely stirring the dust or making a sound, and called for his two best warriors, Treyev'iyl'Zurath and Khoryth'nur'Vedyov. The two warriors sang the three-note call of obedience, their harmony twisting and echoing from the next nearest murak. Within seconds, they were dropping to the ground, touching wingtips to dirt, staffs planted by their knees.

 

“We are to observe the invaders,” Ghil said, without preamble. “As much it galls me, we are under strict orders to watch without interference. No contact. Do you hear my song?”

 

Treyev and Khoryth responded in practiced unison. “We sing with you, Song-leader.”

Three figures perched on branches hundreds of feet above the camp of the flightless intruders. They hadn't strayed away from their wrecked flying-tree, the warriors were amused to note. They had scavenged things from within it, and had made temporary heart-homes and hearth-fires surrounding it. There were at least a hundred of them, crowded around fires, swilling from mugs and jars, eating, laughing in low tones. Standing outside the light of each fire was a sentry, in full armor, watchful and alert. The three figures were silent shadows lurking in the depths of the darkness, invisible and barely breathing, not so much as rustling a leaf. Night deepened, men slept, all but the sentries, who were replaced eventually. When daylight came, the strange, small, wingless things showed industriousness that surprised the watchers. They dismantled the huge thing that had borne them piece by piece, cut down trees—which caused each of the warriors to cringe and shed tears for the awful, tragic waste of such violence—and used the dead wood to make shelters for themselves. It seemed, to Ghil, that they knew they would not be able to leave, so they were attempting to make the best of their situation.

 

For many days, without food or drink, Ghil, Treyev, and Khoryth watched, immobile and silent. 

Then, when Ghil felt they had a firm grasp of the natures of the intruders, they climbed to the tops of the trees and leapt leaf-ward to make their report to their queen.

 

The invaders were resourceful, and intelligent. But they were still stranded. Perhaps, as Song-maker Avra predicted, they would fade away with time and the ravaged tree-spirits of that murak would be reborn. If not, Ghil swore that he would sneak down there and kill them all in the night, throw their bodies off the murak to tumble root-ward for all of eternity.

The Singer

The skirling whirl of a traditional Irish band greeted me as I stood outside Dick O'Dow's Irish Pub. I handed the burly bouncer my ID and replaced it, entering through the propped-open green doors and into the darkened interior. The contrast between the mellow amber glow of sunset and the perpetual midnight of the pub was jarring; heavy chandeliers depended from the low ceilings, dim, orange-glowing bulbs made to look like candle flames were the only illumination besides half-a-dozen flat-screen TVs tuned to Sports Center. Thick, scratched, scarred wooden tables ran the length of the room opposite the bar; the tables resembled hunks of driftwood from a shipwreck that had been retrieved and polished. The floors looked ancient, scuffed, weathered gray wood that seemed to have centuries of stories to tell. I remembered one of the bartenders telling me that the floor planks were from an 18^th century Irish hospital, and this made me think of the ghosts that must reside silent in the whorls of the wood grain. 

The band was the pièce de résistance of the pub, permeating the atmosphere with the lilting, jigging music. The band is a four-piece: a tall, thin man with angular features, round, gold-rimmed spectacles, and graying hair receding in a U-shaped cul-de-sac played the penny whistle with thin, deft fingers; the fiddler was the diametric opposite, short, portly, red-bearded and long-haired, sheened with sweat as he sawed his battered, well-loved fiddle; next to the fiddler was the bodhran player, a man with fine silver hair neatly parted, an iron-gray beard closely-trimmed framing patrician features, thumping his hand-held drum and stomping his polished leather boots on the stage to the rhythm; last was the singer and guitar-player, an elegant woman, tall and willowy, thick black hair shimmering in the dim light like raven wings.

It was her I had come her to see. Her eyes were the color of moss furring a tree-trunk in the afternoon sun, and she sang flawless Gaelic in a dulcet, haunting voice. I stood at the bar and ordered a whiskey, sipped it as I watched her sway with the music. She scanned the crowd absently, strumming her guitar with red-painted fingernails. Her gaze swept across me, but didn't see me. This was reassuring. I wasn't ready to be seen, just yet.

The bartender, who had just moments ago handed me my drink with a smile, passed by me without a glance, without even a flicker of recognition. Moments slid past, slow like sunset, and my anticipation mounted. I was growing restless, my palms damp and warm, my feet tapping a too-fast rhythm. Slow down, I told myself. Not yet.

Another whiskey, another greeting from the same bartender, as if he'd never seen me before. The set must have just started when I arrived. Damn. Impatience scoured through me; I gouged patterns in the bar-top with my fingernail, deep runic shapes incised in the hard wood.

A third whiskey, and I was feeling fine now, if burning with restless, hungry vexation. The set had to be almost over. Ah yes, now they were thanking the crowd, setting down instruments and filing out to the alley for a breath of fresh air.

I followed them out, lit a smoke, approached her with a broad smile that I hoped seemed genuine and friendly. She smiled back, shook my hand. Her palm was cool and dry, sending bolts of electric excitement through me. I caught her up in conversation, droll, mundane chit-chat. Her band-mates went back in, and I could sense her desire to end this conversation, to go with them.

It's not that easy, the fun hasn't begun yet, my lovely. Your fair, pale skin is far too perfect. I stroked the hilt of the knife in my pocket; yes, now it was time. Now.

 She never saw it coming, the poor, beautiful, doomed thing.

Oh, what fun.

MAN/MACHINE

01.10.1004

Lyss,

Things on Perepeteia have become untenable. It's gone from a few rocks thrown, a few people dead, a few Dual-sings lynched in retaliation, into rioting in the streets and full-scale battles. The unit I'd become attached to was dispatched to try to keep the peace—at least, that was the orders. In reality, they just wanted to crack skulls, human or not. I had to slip away, I couldn't stomach it.

I've got no problem fighting, I'm no lily-white pacifist, that's for damned sure, but I'm no butcher either. And I've got no problem with anyone on either side of this scrum, although it seems to me as if the Dual-sings oughta get their due rights. They are people, right enough. Maybe, sure, they're not humans, technically, but they feel, they speak, they evolve, they...I don't know...they evince all the characteristics of humanity. It doesn't seem programming to me. When the Look-Alike Case happened, just after the war on Luna, people discussed this very issue. Cybrex had invented robots that looked, acted, and felt like real people, only they were inanimate machines. Of course, they didn't stay that way, the Androidicons. All the HoloNet fictions were coming true, Androidicons developing past what the inventors had intended, and causing all sorts of problems Earthside. I'm not sure how it all shook out, as I got shipped to Kleuer just as things were getting really heated. But this situation with the Dual-sings smacks of that same issue: what defines an individual? What is a person?

For me, a person is someone I can sit down with and have a good old fashioned talk with, someone I can shake hands with, or sock in the jaw, or kiss, and not predict the response based on programming. These Dual-sings, they're people. Odd, hard-to-look-at people, maybe, but they're people. And I cannot, will not be party to any effort to suppress their bid for equal rights. That doesn't mean I'm ready to join their side either.

I don't know what I want, or where I fit.

I'm wandering J-Temp, alone, dressed in torn uniform pants and a ground-length heavy coat pilfered off of a dead man in an alley. I kept my Patrol-issue boots, tablet, shock-sticks, and pulse-rifle, just because I feel more of a man if I'm armed. The fighting is intense, now, door-to-door, civvies against Patrol against Dual-sing. No one is cleaning up the dead, no one is using tactics or organization. It's a free-for-all hell, and no telling who'll win.

As I scratch this entry into the tablet, sitting in the shadows of dead-end alley, a knot of Patrol thugs are being systematically overrun by a much larger group of Dual-sings, not twenty feet from my hiding spot. The Sings seem organized. They've got a plan and leader to keep 'em following it. Patrol doesn't stand a chance, I think. They're cornered in a courtyard, surrounded, wounded, and desperate, but desperate men put up a savage fight. Just look at the Colonials on Mars. Those bastards were primal. We couldn't stop 'em until every last one of 'em had been shot to pieces. A Pyrrhic victory, the Old Man called it. Which amounts to no victory at all, if you boil it down.

01.11.1004

Midnight after the last entry. The Patrol lasted longer than I expected, but it was inevitable. The Dual-sings were crafty, they went for the head-shots, to preserve the gear of the dead men. The plan, as I could see it, was to get the uniforms and try to infiltrate with whoever could pass for human. Smart, that.

I'm feeling less and less connected. I don't know how else to put it. My brain and body, my mind and my soul are not fully in sync with my body. Memories waft up and wash over me, time slows down and speeds up, sounds get louder and louder, lights get too bright and the night seems less dark. Just now, I can hear a rat scrabbling in the darkness beneath me, hear its jaw chomping and its breath soughing slightly. There's fighting to the east and to the south.

I fell asleep writing that entry, and now it's dawn. Someone is screaming, a few streets over. A woman. I can't listen to it anymore, I've got to do something.

Damn it, I didn't want to get involved.

01.12.1004

Alyssa,

Now, this is just a record for myself. A means of keeping track of my thoughts, a place to work out my confusion. I don't think I can keep up the pretense that these entries are to you anymore. You're dead, my love, and to write letters I'll never send to a woman I'll never see again seems like running in circles. I have to let you go. I'm sorry I couldn't save you, my heart. You didn't deserve to die that way.

Goodbye.

01.13.1004

I died. Here's what happened: I heard screaming, and went to investigate. I should've kept my nose out of it, but it's just not my nature. She was a Dual-sing. A Patrol thug was raping her, beating her. She was nearly dead by the time I found her, and the bastard was still hammering away. I blasted his head into a splatter of red on the walls, threw his body into the street. The poor girl couldn't even move, could barely breathe. Half-dead, all beautiful. I picked her up, realized she was nearly as tall as me, knew she was Dual-sing by her hair. It's not hair, it's like...the filaments in the old-style lightbulbs they had in that museum of old-Earth tech. Thin, almost invisible strands of metal, twisting in braids. Her hair chimed when I lifted her, glowed dull red from within the strands of metal. It was as if her hair knew that she was hurt, maybe dying. That sounds silly, I guess, but it was my impression then, and it rings true, even now. I picked her up, carried her into the street. She was heavier than she should have been. Tall and lithe, willowy and delicately curved, she should have been a feather in my arms, instead she felt...like carrying a machine. But she wasn't a machine. She was warm against my skin, her blood dripped red from her bruised, battered face. Her skin was bruised and yellow by her ribcage and beneath her breasts, and I could tell she had broken ribs in a few places. She moaned, whimpered, cracked her eyes open, peered at me with violet eyes that glowed with preternatural luminosity through her slitted eyelids.

“I don't know where to take you,” I told her. I was whispering, for some reason. The city around me was dead silent, but for the distant concussive thumping of a battle somewhere miles away across the pyramidion.

“Down...beneath..” she croaked. She turned her head, flopped over to one side, looked around, lifted a limp, weak arm to point vaguely towards the eastern wall. “That way...to the Mosque of Ibn Haran... catacombs entrance...alley behind.” I had no idea where the Mosque of Ibn Haran was, but I knew what a mosque was, so I set off in the direction she had indicated. By the time I found the mosque, I was sweating and trembling. The girl, the Dual-sing, was dead weight, passed out but alive. The mosque was enormous, a cupola rising hundreds of feet into the air, spires and minarets spiking the sky, gold leaf on the roofs and trimming the arched windows of painted glass, white-washed walls, the whole surrounded by a wrought iron fence to keep out the infidels. The muezzin was ululating his call to prayer, and it brought me back to Mars with jolting suddenness. I slump the pavement, the girl in my arms a heavy weight across my legs. I laid my head against the bars of the fence and stared up at the city around me, eyes seeing, but mind re-living the past. Beyond the mosque, the city is a welter of building, all of them uniformly tall and thin, like reeds in a pond. I doubt anyone here would understand the simile, never having seen a pond, or reeds, but that's the image I see when I look around me. They've built vertically, here. There is no wind within the pyramidions, no weather at all, so buildings can rise up high and thin like needles stood on end, stacked one atop the other in impossible structures. They are round, made from what appears to be seamless glass windows that reflect like mirrors, making the city glint and glimmer and seem even bigger than it is; the towers are built cheek-by-jowl, less than fifty feet between sides in some places, and in others, they are touching, with walkways and bridges spanning the two, attaching them. There are a couple smaller buildings scattered here and there, like this mosque. The streets are laid out in a grid pattern dissected with diagonal cross-cutting side-streets, and the whole is lit, at night, by luminous globes a hundred feet in diameter strung like over-sized Christmas lights from the girders that prop up the ceiling. The lowest level is two thousand feet high, at least, probably more. I've never understood the physics of what makes the pyramidions so stable a structure, but it seems to work, and these people have taken the idea and expanded it into something unbelievable in scope.

The sky above us, outside the pyramidion, is yellow, like sulfurous gas, and the land is barren wasteland, empty brown and red gently rolling hills is some places, flat as the Kansas plains of my boyhood, a dusty expanse of dead earth. I can see the lure of a place like this, open, uninhabited: they can build pyramidions one next to other until the whole globe is covered with the gleaming transtanium structures, each one holding millions. The race can expand exponentially before running out of room. It is an unlovely place, but it serves a function.

Like Mars. The Red Planet. It was a place of death, at the end, and its crimson appearance was awfully apropos. I can't think of that. Can't, just can't. I shake my head, shake away the images that cling to my consciousness like cobwebs.

Are there spiders here? Probably not.

The girl moans, coughs, and I am stirred out of my delirium. I realize that I'm dehydrated and starving. I haven't eaten or drunk anything in a long time...days...

Drunk? Or should it be drank? I can't remember now. I haven't had anything to drink in days, is what I'm trying to say.

The entrance to the catacombs is hidden carefully, at the back end of a blind alley, behind a door that seemed perfectly natural, a back door to a shop or apartment. Behind it was a staircase, low, narrow and steep. I have to duck almost double, which makes carrying the girl almost impossible, but she is limp still, barely conscious.

As I glance back up at what I've written, I realize I'm vacillating between past tense and present tense. My memory is difficult to control, since the cryobed. Past and present bleed together, and it's difficult to tell, sometimes, whether I'm living an experience currently, or remembering something that's happened. To make it all the more confusing, I have a habit of composing the entries in my head before I write them down, so I tend to forget whether or not I'm composing or writing. It all bleeds together.

I think I'm telling the story of how I died. Yes, I do believe that's it; so this should be past tense, then, and I'll just stick to that. It's easier, I think. It puts distance between me and all that's happened, and that's a good thing.

We entered the catacombs, and now the girl directed me with a weak finger pointed this way or that. The catacombs were dark, dank, and low, echoing every footstep to sound as if a thousand nightmare monsters were creeping through the darkness behind me. My pulse-rifle has a lamp on it, shedding a dull yellow spear of light into the thick darkness of the subterranean passage. It took me several minutes to realize that these tunnels were truly catacombs, underground burial chambers. The walls on either side were carved with shallow niches six feet long and two feet high, stacked four high. Each niche held a body, wrapped in a kind of bag rather than a hard coffin. The tunnels were a maze, stretching for miles in every direction, winding and looping and dipping and rising, crossing and re-crossing. I cannot imagine how many miles of catacombs there must be beneath the ground, if this is how they dispose of their dead. It seems archaic and bizarrely low-tech, but there is much I simply cannot understand.

I was thoroughly lost within moments, but she seemed to know where she was going, and indeed, within maybe fifteen minutes, we had left the catacombs and emerged in what looked like an underground cavern, a natural space that had been turned into a city. I stood amazed for many long moments, staring, unbelieving. It was hyper-organized, gridded and uniform in layout, but each building looked handmade, like an expression of the builder, some tall and thin, others short and squat, some colorful and bright, others white and utilitarian. Light was provided by the same globes that lit the upper world, and the cavern was so enormous as to make it feel as if one weren't underground at all.

I was seen immediately, and surrounded by a host of curious, hostile Dual-sings, some normal looking, others looking as if nature and technology had fused in an accidental freak of evolution. No two were the same. They took- her from my arms, disappeared with her, and I followed as best I could, pushing through the crowds that whispered and muttered at the appearance of a human in their midst. They healed her, somehow. I was brought to her side, and when she awoke, she took my hand, thanked me in a voice like synthesized bells.

“I'm Cully,” she told me. Cully? That baffled me. It was a word I'd heard back up above, in reference to a specific kind of Dual-sing, ones that sold themselves. A cully was a prostitute.

“Yes,” she said, eyes firing and flashing, “that kind of Cully. It's what I was, though not by choice. I took the word as my name, because it was my identity, and now...it's a reminder.” I didn't pursue the subject. 

What I'd seen wasn't prostitution, it was rape, and I knew it.

She must've seen or sensed the thoughts running through my head. “He'd decided he didn't have to pay for it,” she said. She leveled an odd look at me, saying, “You know, now that you're here, among us, I'm not sure what we're going to do with you. No human has ever seen this place before.”

I had a sinking feeling in my gut that told me where this was going. “And then you're going to tell me that I can't leave, now that I've done my good deed of saving you.”

Cully smiled, laughed gently. Her laugh sounded like a spoon tinkling against glass, exactly so, like a recording. Eerie, but beautiful. “Pretty much.”

“Would it make a difference if I said that I couldn't get back here if I tried? After the first few turns, I was lost completely.”

“No, that won't matter. Humans don't even suspect that there is a secret community of Dual-sings. You even knowing that there is such a thing...it compromises you.” I sighed, leaned back, tried to collect my thoughts. I hadn't felt any more at home among the real humans...

Real humans...as opposed to what? These weren't humans, I couldn't deny that. At least, not fully. But they were people. What comprises an individual? Sentience? Emotion? Enough philosophizing, back to the story.

I just sat there, for a long time, staring at her, lost in thought. She was beautiful, human or not. Her eyes were magnetic, fiery, like purple supernovae, lush with emotion writ plainly. Her hair, too, was an expressive part of her beauty. Now, at rest, at home, and healing, her hair was a gentle, vibrant green, like oak leaves when seen backlit by the sun.

There are no trees here. I miss trees, grass, early morning dew on my feet.

Already her bruises were fading, and she seemed less tired with every passing second...as if she were being recharged...

I followed what I had taken to be an IV line in her arm, but the line was opaque, and it terminated, not at a IV tree with the clear bag of regrow meds, but at the wall, in socket. She was being recharged, literally, and was healing in the process. This struck me as so funny that I laughed out loud. I have sounded slightly unhinged, because Cully regarded me quizzically.

“What's funny?”

“Nothing...I just haven't ever seen anyone get...recharged before. That's all.”

“Recharged? What are you talking about?”

I pointed at the cord in her arm. She fingered the cord, and then looked back at me, confusion in her violet eyes. “You've never seen a med-line before?”

“Med line? I thought it was a Dual-sing thing, like...recharging a battery...”

She shook her head, making her hair chime. “What's a battery? Where are you from? Who are you?”

I guessed I had misjudged a few things, and given myself away in the process. “My name is Vargos Vale. 

I'm new to J-Temp. New to Perepeteia in general.”

 “How can you be new to Perepeteia? Were you born on a far-scout?”

“Kind of. You probably wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

“Told me what? And what does 'kind of' mean?” I hesitated. Now, it seems stupid. I was talking to someone who was an outcast, who had to live in a secret, underground city because normal society didn't like her kind.

“I came in on a far-scout, that much is true. But I didn't go out on one, and I wasn't born on one, either.” Cully tilted her head to one side, puzzled. “I was born on Earth.”

“Earth...?” She said the word as if it tasted strange, like it was a word only heard rarely, an exotic word used by scholars and mystics. “How...how is that possible? Humans left Earth a millennium ago, and no one even knows where it is anymore. They teach human kids about it in grade school like it's a myth.”

“It's real. How...it's a long story. The short version is that I was part of the Exodus and something went wrong I was in cryosleep, kind of, and my ship got damaged. We...I...got knocked off course, without power, and I drifted in space, for what turned out to be a more than thousand years. I was found, by accident, by a far-scout. They sent me here.”

Cully was silent for a long time, processing what I'd told her. To her credit, and my relief, she didn't seem to disbelieve me. “So you really don't know much about anything, do you?” She seemed sympathetic, almost.

“No, not really.”

“Who is 'we?'”

She'd caught that slip. “Just...someone who was with me. Someone I cared about. She...her cryobed shut down, and she...didn't make it. Mine malfunctioned and went to back-up power, which kept me alive, kind of. I hadn't gone completely under, so I was awake.”

“I don't know much about cryosleep. It's ancient tech, these days. Some humans use it, sometimes, just as a fad. They'll go under for a while and come back up.”

“Well, it puts you to sleep, freezes you, starts at the feet and works upwards. I was frozen physically, but then the accident happened. Eyesight and consciousness get turned off together. They're connected, somehow. Well, when the ship got hit, I was left awake.”

“You mean, you drifted, awake, and seeing, for a thousand years? How is that possible? Didn't you go crazy?”

This was touching on things I wasn't comfortable with. “I...I don't know. At some point, I think I just fell asleep, or something. Things get blurry, if I try to think about it. I don't think the human mind is meant to experience that kind of thing, just empty, unmoving time. I couldn't move, couldn't smell or hear. I could only see, and think, and remember. I think my mind just...shut down.” I hadn't really thought about any of this too carefully, but something about Cully...the words just poured out. “I'm not sure I've really woken up, truly. I feel...disconnected. Time doesn't feel the same, anymore. I don't feel the same. I feel...like I'm not a person any more. Like my mind and body and soul are three different things now. Awake, asleep, thinking, remembering, feeling...it's all the same, it all runs together. Everything is confused and blurred.”

Cully reached out a hand, touched my arm. Her eyes drilled into me, struck deep into me, held me fast. I couldn't look away, and I felt a brush against my mind. It was delicate, careful, tentative, but real. Cully's eyes were locked on mine, and I could feel concentration coming from her in palpable waves. My instinct was to lock down, run away, push back; instead, I sat still and let her in. I don't know why. There was no sense to it. I didn't even believe in telepathy, for God's sake.

Then, like a concussion, I was duality. She was there inside, reading me, rifling with quick, sure mental fingers through the contents of my mind; I was seeing her, too, and something told me that this was a conscious decision on her part, somehow. She didn't have to let me see her, but she did, to reassure me.

I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, I could only feel her thoughts and mine twined like vines. She was sad, and angry. She hated who she had been, and longed to remake herself.

The universe shifted between us, and I was seeing her through my own eyes, and seeing myself through hers. She saw with mechanical precision. There was no focus or blur, no near and far: all things were inherently clear and sharp, from the fine hairs on arms and the flecks of gold in my eyes (oh Lyssa, you always loved those gold flecks in the brown of my eyes) to the far crags and stalactites on the ceiling of the cavern, thousands of feet away.

Her thoughts left me whirling, mentally. She thought in a logical procession, computer-fast computations and sequences; conversely, there was a strain of illogical emotion running through it, wound around the logic like ivy creeping up a tree trunk, urges and desires, fears and love and hate and curiosity that was entirely human. She was assessing my character at the same time that she was trying to decide how she felt about me, if she was attracted to me, if she wanted me to take her hands in mine or not, if she wanted to remember how it felt to be carried by me through the tunnels, my strong arms like silken steel around her...

It was fairly strange to think of myself in those terms, to see myself in that light. I shuddered, pulled back, took my arm from her touch. The connection between us was snapped like a cord stretched too tight.

I've been delaying the telling of the important part. Now I come to it. It's unavoidable, but hard to tell, mainly because it all happened so fast.

They took me topside with them. They'd ended up trusting me, and I them. I felt more in common with them. They let me be. They understood that I liked to sit at the farthest edge of the cavern and be alone. It was quiet there, and peaceful. I could feel Alyssa, there.

It's been easier and easier to let her go, now that I've got Cully around to distract me. It feels like betrayal, in a way, but I know she would want me to move on. Cully and I are friends, but there's a glimmer of something there, a respect, a tentative attraction that we haven't dared look at too closely.

After months below ground, emerging topside was like rebirth...again. Like coming out of a cocoon, blinking and stretching in the bright sunlight. Above, all was chaos.

The riots and street warfare hadn't subsided; the entire planet was in a state of warfare, a many-factioned free-for-all, with Dual-sings stuck in the middle. The group I was with—Cully, myself, three big, warrior types that also looked mostly human, and a person that was some kind of androgenous, deaf-mute healer—were sent to observe the state of things, to find any Dual-sings and try to bring them to the underground city, Sessura.

It turns out even the Dual-sings were divided: some wanted to stay and fight, get their rights, kill and destroy as much as possible in the process and then start over. Others wanted just to be left alone—this was the smallest faction, and quickly eradicated. The other group were the ones who wanted to leave, to board a colony ship and set out to find somewhere they can live on their own, start a new society. Cully and the Sessurians were of the last group, and they were willing to break a few human heads to get away, if that's what it took.

And it did.

We were ambushed.

We were moving in a tight group down a main thoroughfare, myself in point, Cully behind me, Apothika, the healer in the middle, and the three warriors—Herick, Dove, and Lure—in the rear. A dozen Patrolmen slipped silently out of an alley behind us, opened fire, dropping Herick like a sack of stones. The rest of us jumped through an open door, watching Herick bleed out less than ten feet away. Pulse-rifles barked in their harsh, throaty voices, sending small incendiary shells flying at near light-speed, so that bark and explosion were simultaneous. I lifted my own rifle, peeked around the lip of the door, took a bead on a Patrol thug and dropped him. Cully had a weapon that looked like a pistol, but fired silent needles with machine-gun rapidity; Lure and Dove had pulse-rifles like mine, and Apothika simply sat against the farthest wall, black, almond eyes unblinking and emotionless, hairless gray head bowed, thin arms and legs folded.

Of course, the dozen who ambushed us were just the fore party, the ones sent to corner us. When we had them whittled down to a manageable number, a hundred more poured out of a side-street a mile away and sync-marched towards us with unhurried arrogance.

We took our chances. Dove scooped up Herick and ran as hard as he could, dropping small, blinking black globes behind him. They beeped in a quickening pattern; I knew they were some kind of explosive. Cully was beside me, Apothika in front, running as lightly as a deer, its breathing unlabored. Then, without warning, Dove and Lure were down and bleeding at my feet and Cully was behind a door, a dozen feet away, Apothika behind her; three thugs faced me, close enough to punch, pulse-rifles leveled and firing. I felt a twinge in my brain, and time slowed. I saw rifle-round inching towards me; I dropped my rifle and pulled out my shock-sticks, jabbed them both simultaneously. When the pronged tips touched flesh, a burst of blue-white electric fire arced around their bodies, jerking them like rag dolls, dropping them instantly to the ground. The last one took a shock-stick to the throat, spraying me with bright blood.

I forgot to move out of the way. I was hit in the chest, blowing me back a dozen feet.

I laid on the ground, staring up at the girders and lights far above, dizzy, deaf, hurting, dying; Apothika's genderless face appeared above me, mouthed words I couldn't hear, bent over me, a needle in its hand. 

Cold washed over me; blackness swallowed me.

01.20.1004

I woke up underground, tethered to machines that hummed and beeped. I was awake, but my eyes were stubborn, refused to obey.. “We were able to save your life, Vargos Vale,” came Cully's voice. “But there was a cost.” I opened my eyes slowly, performed the unconscious routine of taking stock of one's self after an injury. I've been injured many times before, and nearly died once before as well; this stock-taking is no new experience for me. This time, however, was unique.

Where before I would flex my toes, wiggle my fingers, roll my shoulders and tense my muscles, this time I could do none of those things. I looked down at myself, and saw not flesh-covered bone and hospital sheets and blankets, but the dull metallic gleam of an un-fleshed Androidicon, or the version of that for this age. Horror spread through me like post-battle adrenaline wearing off. This wasn't a cybertronic leg or arm, this was...all of me. I felt myself, mentally, emotionally, in my spirit and soul, but...physical sensation was entirely absent.

“What...what did you do to me?” I asked. I turned my head to find Cully: servomotors whirred gently and my vision rotated a precise ninety degrees. Cully was on a platform a few feet away, a small hovering disc more than a dozen feet off the ground. How was that possible?

I lifted my hand, and the servomotors whispered again, subtly louder this time. The appendage that rose into my line of sight was five-fingered, as a human's but huge, big enough that Cully could have sat in the palm with room to spare. It was a hand made for the vacuum of space, for the arid landscape beyond the transtanium of the pyramidions, meant to clutch titanic tools and colossal weapons. I looked down, and the motion was again exact, mechanically precise. At least I was bipedal, with knees that bent the right way. I recognized the body model. It was an elaboration of the out-ship-ops exo-mech, except this one had been worked over by the Dual-sings. I saw these exo-mechs on the Rakehell, mechanized suits that could also be used remotely. They were used for everything from repairs done in vacuum to waging wars in human-hostile environments. They were amazing tech, and I'd always wished for a chance to take one out as an exo-suit.

This wasn't what I'd had in mind.

“I know this is a drastic change, Vargos, but it was the only way to preserve your entity. Your physical shell was too badly damaged to be saved.” I turned back to look at Cully. Sympathy and concern glittered in her eyes.

“So what did you do? There's no body inside this exo-mech, is there?”

“No, there isn't.” At least she didn't sugar-coat the answer.

I am a mech, now. All those ruminations on individuality suddenly seemed more apropos than I could ever had guessed.

Canto of Wording

I am inundated, deluged, avalanched, flooded, caved-in, buried in words.  Poetry, criticism, plays, ancient letters from stodgy dead men, essays, stories...they fill my thoughts like recurring waking dreams; like reciting the Hail Mary, my pen is a rosary, clicking and whirring in absent-minded ritual.  Am I about to go into 17th Century British Poetry, or Early American Lit? Am I writing an essay? A reading response? A daybook entry? Should this be in iambic pentameter and rhymed couplets?

I see words all around me, piling and pooling beneath me, rising up and bearing me heavenwards, lapping at my nostrils and wavering at my eyes; words whirl in a grand amalgamation of thoughts unconnected by so paltry a thing as punctuation and conjunctions.  I swallow in desperate gulps turns of phrase archaic and lyric and oft-insensible; I arch my back to float upon the rolling roiling press of words, I relax into them.  I slowly and suddenly evolve gills to breathe in this elemental profusion, I develop a taste for their acrid saltiness, their exotic tang.  I delve down now, twist and rush through through through the words which are my native land, my home my life and my reality; I arc through waves of words in a graceful glissade, rolling and porpoising with sheer joy.  I let the words lull me, let them lilt in my synapses, wash to and fro in my ear canals like tides rising, tides falling, all under the sway of silver-shrouded Lady Luna.

My words here are my song, sung to fill the heavy, quiet spaces, that shrill and lovely discordia concors, that silence ringing with the wails of ghosts, the shades of words unspent and yet to be born, words that haunt me, beg me in tolling syllables to give them voice, to give them their due moment of elegiac song.