Subversion:
Science Fiction & Fantasy
tales of challenging the norm
Published by Crossed Genres Publications at Smashwords
Copyright © 2011 by Crossed Genres Publications. All rights reserved.
All stories are Copyright © 2011 their respective authors and are used with permission.
Edited by Bart R. Leib
Cover art: "New Generation of Leaders"
Cover art copyright © 2011 Brittany Jackson
Cover design by Bart R. Leib
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
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The stories in this anthology are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, contact Crossed Genres.
Foreword by Jennifer Brozek
A Thousand Wings of Luck by Jessica Reisman
And All Its Truths by Camille Alexa
Pushaway by Melissa S. Green
Phantom Overload by Daniel José Older
Cold Against the Bone by Kelly Jennings
The Red Dybbuk by Barbara Krasnoff
Pushing Paper in Hartleigh by Natania Barron
Parent Hack by Kay T. Holt
The Hero Industry by Jean Johnson
Flicka by Cat Rambo
Seed by Shanna Germain
Scrapheap Angel by RJ Astruc & Deirdre M. Murphy
The Dragon's Bargain by C.A. Young
A Tiny Grayness in the Dark by Wendy N. Wagner
Received Without Content by Timothy T. Murphy
To Sleep With Pachamama by Caleb Jordan Schulz
Jennifer Brozek
***
'Traitor' or 'revolutionary.' These labels are two sides of the same coin, just as 'hero' or 'villain' depends on the point of view of the person telling the story. These are obvious concepts when spelled out in clear cut settings. Because of this, how one goes about subverting the norm (as a traitor or revolutionary) is based on what the norm is. What is normal in one society can be, and often is, taboo in another society. This allows tales of subversion to be subtle, blatant, personal, communal, and endless in variation.
In this anthology, Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, each story has its setting and its protagonist (or perhaps this should be 'antagonist') and that protagonist rebels against something. Or incites an uprising. It all depends on which way the reader chooses to ponder the story. Some of these traitorous actions bring calamity to all while other brave deeds bring personal, intimate triumph.
One of the best aspects of this anthology is the number of different types of subversion showcased. There is the obvious fight against a reigning government as well as the rejection of long held religious tradition – to both good and ill effect. But then there are the stories of personal subversion: of building or destroying what is a family; of how to stop violent plans as well as do the right thing, while working for the Man; of giving up oneself in order to save both yourself and a loved one. Each story of subversion is different from the rest while remaining cohesively within the whole of the anthology.
Designed to entertain, Subversion is also built to encourage discussion amongst its readers, even if that discussion is a private mental one. The stories are layered in what is being rebelled against and which norms – societal or personal – are being subverted. While the authors lay out the setting and have their own bias towards the story they tell, it is up to the reader to reflect on what they've read and decide for themselves if the rebellion succeeded and if it was just.
Jessica Reisman
***
On the fourth of the Nine Days of Luck, the luck moths rose up out of the forest and descended on The House of Wren in a dry, rustling mist. They floated on eddies of river wind coursing down the house's stone corridors, massed in the air above terraces, obscured the gray and blue slate of the Wren School roof.
Rael, out in the garden between house and school digging carrots, looked up as the moths descended. The late sunlight steamed gold off the river, hazing the air as twilight seemed to seep up from the water's cold depths. There were clouds of wings: wings like thin tissues of gem and breaths of frost, like silk and dark water, wings colored silver, white, citrine, the fragile green of a new leaf, the rose-wash of blood in cheeks.
They lit on her, hands, nose, shoulders, and knees, clothed the ground and speckled the garden fences. Rael lifted her hand, made one with the trowel by a moving layer of moths. Tiny legs tickled her skin and clung to her clothes. Slowly, she stood and twirled, arms lifting out. Moths drifted up into the air.
***
Built in the grip of the forest at a bend in the River Shoon, the House of Wren and the Wren School had been much blessed by Luck. The school owned reputation up the river to the great cities of the north, and down to the rich houses of the south.
The Shoon's swift, deep waters connected house to town to village to city for a thousand miles. The forest sheltered in a craggy land that grew only steeper on its way to the mountains. Cliffs and towering trees cast the House of Wren in blue shadow for long hours into the morning.
When Rael and her cousin Garo were children, her uncle took them to explore the caves that riddled the ground under the cliffs, one of the moths' spawning grounds. Giant formations made up of thousands of individual cocoons hung in the crags and shelves of rock like strange, misshapen fruit. Stories were told, legends, of moths that cocooned for human lifetimes and only emerged once every hundred years, deep essence of the stuff of Luck.
As the moths descended, Rael thought of those caves, of the white globes of the cocoons, the air that smelled like spice and fern, and the way the place itself – something in the shadows, a turning in the slant of light – twitched at her skin and itched inside her skull.
A phrase from the Grot she had lately been annotating as her third-year project brushed through her thoughts. Chaos, their white-eyed fire came, the elder ones, to carve into the skin a map of chance – now skin touches the unseen currents of ever-rippling fate. It was from the final volume of Grot's tetralogy, a work most scholars agreed had been written when Grot was quite insane.
***
Rael took Garo's place at the kitchen sink as he hefted a pot of water to the hearth. Prithen, a sixth year student with no family to go home to during the holiday, stood at the counter kneading dough. Rael watched his hands a moment, then caught herself and turned to the carrots. She'd only been sleeping with Prithen the last half a year; it was still new.
When she turned from the sink with her bowl full of clean carrots, she saw a silvery moth fluttering down toward the uncovered hearth bed.
"Garo, the mesh!"
The moth blundered closer to the open flames. Garo lunged, sweeping it clear. Prithen resecured the mesh while Garo, cradling the moth between two cupped palms, took it outside. When he came back in and returned to snapping beans, his hands trembled.
Prithen observed him, shook his head just slightly, and went back to rolling out dough. Dry and bony as an oak stick, his long brown hair worn in a topknot, Prithen was already a published scholar, his reputation beginning to be made, his work on Thantuvius well regarded. As a Thantist, Prithen didn't believe in the Luck, but he acted with respect for the beliefs of the House.
Garo rubbed his face. "I can't believe I left the mesh open."
"It's okay," Rael said, "No harm, Garo. All's well."
She caught Prithen's expression and gave him a severe look. Then Garo caught it, too.
"Shut it, Prithen."
"I didn't–"
"You didn't have to. I know what you think about the Luck. Being the scholarly light of Wren doesn't make you right."
Prithen's mouth twitched. "No, it doesn't."
Rael focused on the carrots under her knife.
"Schools downriver have banned Thantuvius," Garo said.
"I know."
Rael winced; Prithen was annoying to argue with because he seldom got the least bit ruffled. In Prithen's mind, every school of thought deserved consideration, and no inquiry was without merit.
Once, after Prithen had engaged a visiting lecturer in a dialogue more interesting than the lecture had been, Rael had followed him to the library. She'd been ten, and it had been Prithen's first year. Curious, because they'd never had a Thantist at Wren, she asked him, "Do you really believe the Luck is nothing but superstition, Prithen?"
Already too tall, and at the time even more cadaverous, he'd looked down at her and nodded gravely. "I do. Of course the power of superstition should not be underestimated either."
Custom, faith, and law were on Garo's side, however. During the Nine Days of Luck, no moth should be killed. Though they would all die naturally within days of their arrival, to be swept up and burned in a ritual fire, until then every effort would be made to prevent the premature demise of any single moth.
If any member of the household killed, or, through negligence, allowed the death of a moth, it threatened the Luck of the House.
***
At supper, the few of them left at the school clustered near one end of the long, heavy wood table.
Only one moth had found its way in before the tall windows were all closed. The dark red of garnet, it floated in the heights among the unlit lamps. The hall was stuffy with the windows closed, and dim with only the evening light from outside and a few enclosed lanterns on the table, casting everyone's shadows in huge and shifting mantles on the walls.
Rael's aunt Teasel and the school warden, Sarduth, sat at the head of the table. Sarduth's appearance, as always, matched his acutely ordered mind. Teasel, in comparison, was wispy and unkempt. Her small hands were ink-stained and her thoughts forever tangled in the intricacies of her treatise on Luck doctrine, a work she'd been at for the last five years. It was Sarduth who kept the school and household running.
"Relays say Jummer's boat is due in tonight," Sarduth said.
"Oh?" Teasel looked up from some inner contemplation. Her fork had been hovering halfway between plate and mouth for a while.
"Yes," Sarduth said patiently. "Perhaps you could let me know if you need anything?"
Rael knew the warden had told Teasel this twice already in the last several days. Sarduth had already gotten a list of things needed and desired from everyone else. Rael kept the gardening and goat supply inventories and had asked for a new tiller. The librarian had ordered paper for Wren's new edition of first year texts. The cook had left a list detailing non-local foodstuffs to augment the larder, otherwise fed by their own gardens, an orchard, goats and chickens, river fish, and local inland farms.
"Oh. No, I can't think of a thing," Teasel said. She put the forkful of food back down onto the plate. "I suppose, since they're arriving during the Luck, I'll have to host Jummer to a sit-down welcome."
"That would be courtesy," Sarduth agreed, obviously relieved.
Garo, quiet and broody all through the meal, now looked up. "Teasel, the petition tokens, remember?"
She turned to her son. "Garo, we discussed this. Wren doesn't need to petition the Arcadia. Our Luck is not in question. And you know how I feel about petitions."
"But," Garo said, then sighed. "It's only–"
"Garo," Teasel said, suddenly quite focused, "what is the fourth doctrine of Luck?"
Garo pressed his lips together, but then he said, "Luck does not rule the intimacies of individuals, but only the balance of fortune and opportunity."
Since his father had left in the night on a tradeboat, Garo had believed that Wren Luck was turning. He took every mishap and setback, both personal and school-related, as evidence of such, begging his mother to petition the Arcadia with Luck tokens and House writs of promise.
Petitions, however, were a latter-day reform addition to Luck doctrine of which Teasel, wholly traditional and orthodox in her fashion, disapproved deeply.
A husband leaving, she had told Garo more than once, was not a turning of the Luck. Over the years, though, she grew ever more abstracted, and Rael knew that Garo felt the loss of her emotional presence as another signal of Luck's loss. No matter what the doctrines might say.
Rael attacked her food, frustrated and annoyed with both of them.
As she took her plate to the kitchen, another phrase from Grot went through her mind. There is no luck but luck, a fish in shadowed waters, a fish with silver scales, flashing. She thought on the words. By no luck but luck he meant that Luck was not good or ill in itself, but only in the way humans received it; the fish in shadowed water and the double meaning of its 'scales' addressed the endless turnings of luck on every breath and action of the world and the beings inhabiting it. Which went much against the way people wanted to think of Luck – as stable, dependable, with laws and structures that could be studied, quantified, understood. Grot had never been popular – and then he'd been insane, but she was drawn to his work.
***
Jummer's tradeboat arrived in the dark with a hail to the house. It moored at the dock, deck lights shining on the water.
While Teasel and Sarduth met with Jummer over tea and tobacco in the house's courtyard, Garo joined Rael in the kitchen, taking up the spices she'd set out. The scent of coriander rose into the air as he ground the pestle into the mortar with a frown.
Rael told herself just to let it go, but instead found herself saying, "Garo, the school prospers, we have food and shelter and warmth and light. You can't hold the actions of individuals against the Luck. People leave, people die, they disappoint you, surprise you – that's what they do."
"You see how Teasel is – how is that lucky? How is that good?"
"It's not good or bad, Garo, it's just the way she is. She's still here. My parents died when I was two – should I curse the Luck and sit on the steps of the Arcadia with petitions for the rest of my life? Have you ever wondered what it would really mean to lose the Luck?" She gestured around the kitchen, towards the rest of the house. "It's not as if the goats' milk runs curdled or we don't have money for trade. The river sickness passed us by last year, but even if it hadn't, or if our enrollment dropped for a turn of seasons – Garo, don't you see, we'd still–"
"Don't say things like that!" He slammed the pestle into the mortar and turned on her, furious, voice tight. "You sound like Prithen – cold as a fish."
That brought the blood up in her face with a wash of anger and she snapped, "You're the only ill luck in Wren, Garo."
Silence attended the remainder of their kitchen work, but, unwilling to let it go, he appeared at her door as she was getting ready for bed. They talked, argued about Teasel, about Luck, for several hours. They were both exhausted when he finally fell asleep at the end of her bed.
Rael slept eventually, a few hours wrestling through thick, prickly dreams. When she woke, Garo was blessedly absent from the end of her bed.
She leaned on the wide sill of her bedroom window, reading the second volume in Grot's tetralogy with fractured attention. Her thoughts echoed with the previous night's discussion, the whole question of Luck and the individual. Expectation, perspective. That fourth doctrine Teasel was so fond of: Luck does not rule the intimacies of individuals, but only the balance of fortune and opportunity. Could you, though, truly separate fortune and opportunity from the daily twists and turns of life, or from the relationships between people through which life was lived? Most people didn't see the Luck in that larger tapestry, but in the intimacies of life lived moment to moment, breath to breath. Didn't the loss of a parent affect the balance of fortune and opportunity? If the whole of the river reaches suffered some natural cataclysm, how could one say that had nothing to do with daily moments?
Was Prithen right?
Bah. Enough. She focused on the text.
A delicate moth with trailing amber wings and another of searing green landed on the page she was trying to read. She blew them off impatiently. A copper-winged moth took their place.
"Muck," Rael said. She slammed the book shut. The moth fluttered free at the last moment, dipped onto an upshaft of air from the courtyard several stories below and sailed away.
Everywhere moths clung to the architecture like many-colored lichens. Most were sluggish in the daylight hours, but here and there one turned lazily on the air.
Rael stared out through blue shadows to the Shoon, its smoke-dark surface deceptively still-looking. She opened the book again and found her place.
Another moth, the color of biscuits, fell out of an eddy of air onto the page. Rael considered it for a moment, considered Garo and the question of Luck. Anger and an edge of challenge clicked over in her blood like a clockwork gear.
Very slowly and carefully she closed the book and mashed the moth.
She heard a noise and her heart jumped. Prithen leaned in the doorway. If he had seen what she did, though, he gave no indication.
"Sarduth needs you to choose which tiller you want; it seems they have an abundance. A good year for garden implements, apparently."
She left the book with the dead moth in it on the windowsill.
***
Jummer's wheelboat was wide and flat-bottomed, with an upper two half decks and ample hold below for trade goods. Including Jummer and his daughter there were nine crew, a Luck number. Jummer, small and deeply muscled with sun-toughened skin, consulted with Sarduth on the school's list, discussing payment in monies and trade goods – Wren's orchard fruit, jams, goat cheese, herbs. Teasel, having fulfilled her duty the night before, was not in evidence.
Rael chose between the two tillers Jummer had on offer, and then leaned beside Prithen on a barrel. The breeze off the Shoon blew chill and the boat knocked up against the dock with an arrhythmic thumping. On the far side of the river, the forest grew thick up into white and grey cliffs. Moths hung languorous on the wood of boat and dock.
Bargaining completed, Sarduth and Jummer shook hands.
"You three," Sarduth said with a gesture to include Prithen, Jael, and Garo, "go get what I noted here from the stores." He handed the list to Rael and she followed behind Garo and Prithen onto the slightly swaying railed plank to the dock.
As Garo went carefully ahead of her, a fish jumped high out of the water below, splashing a number of moths, which fluttered up into Garo's face. He waved a hand at them, missed his footing, tripped and fell over the rail before Rael could do more than reach a hand out. She heard a crack as one of his feet caught in the railing. Then a splash drenched her as he went in the Shoon.
She hurried to help him out, Prithen beside her. Garo was white-faced as he grabbed their arms and sagged to the deck.
"My leg," he gasped.
Sarduth knelt by him and felt up his calf lightly. He nodded. "There's a break."
No one said anything else for a moment, but several of the boat crew stepped back from them.
Rael watched them do it and cold shock pulled the blood from her face as she thought of the moth smashed in the book on her windowsill.
"Jolie," Jummer barked, "get the bottle of kava from my cabin." When his daughter came back with a dark bottle, the captain, instead of moving away from them, came in close and put a hand to Garo's shoulder. "Here, drink some of this, it will help." He ran a disapproving gaze over his crew. With a general ducking of heads, they withdrew to tasks elsewhere on the boat. "Don't mind them; the idea that Luck is catching, one way or another." He dismissed the notion with the fingers of one pudgy hand. "Pay them no mind," he said again.
They got Garo to the kitchen, where Sarduth, who doubled as school healer, straightened and set the bone.
The afternoon sun moved a slow fraction, light crossing the kitchen floor. Moths lifted and fell in the light and shadows outside the kitchen, clung to the walls inside.
***
That afternoon the fish and the bread for supper burned, when small emergencies elsewhere distracted those responsible at exactly the wrong moments. The school's printing press, acquired at great expense and recently fixed – at great expense – broke down for no reason that the librarian, who knew the machine inside out, could find. A hard, unripe quince fruit dropped from its tree into a small bee hive, causing the bees to swarm just as Jummer's daughter Jolie was taking a walk in the orchard; she was much stung and rather swollen. Both Wren's and the boat's nets came up entirely empty of fish.
Rael tried to work out whether all of this was her fault, while the rest of the household grew silent, their faces thoughtful, grim.
Over a meager dinner and the lingering smell of burnt food there was no conversation.
***
That night the moon stared through the forest's tall trees and the air smelled of rain coming.
Rael went by Garo's room to check on him and collect his dinner tray. She found him sitting up in bed, pen moving intently over the top sheet of a sheaf of paper on a lap desk. The one lantern on the bedside table cast a dim puddle that barely reached his work, and moths spotted the wall and empty dishes on the dinner tray beside it.
He barely looked up as Rael gathered the dinner tray, the pen moving furiously.
"I'm going to do the writ myself. I've saved from the copy work I did last session, so I can get the petition tokens." His face was set in its most stubborn expression as he paused and looked up at her. "But I have to have the Wren seal on the writ for promise and Teasel won't give it."
"Garo–"
"You can forge her writing and sneak the seal out, you always could."
Rael sat on the end of the bed, the tray in her lap, her thoughts circling like scavenger birds.
"You saw what happened today," Garo pressed, "the Luck is turning; if we petition before it's totally tainted we're more likely to heal it. Do you want to end up like Branth House?"
"Branth! Garo – Branth House is a child's tale."
"Tales have truth in them. Please, Rael, just help me do this?"
She took in his pinched face and set mouth. "Okay."
He smiled, face lightening, looking less like a pucker fish.
"I'll try tonight – no guarantees, though."
First she went to her room and sat at the window, staring at the book. After a while, she opened it to the dead moth and carefully shook it out. It left a splotchy, silvery stain.
Small sounds of night drifted through the window; music came faintly from the tradeboat. She picked up the dead moth and removed the globe from the lamp, set the moth on the flame and replaced the globe. The smell of burnt moth rose into the room.
Outside of Teasel's study she stood to listen at the heavy wooden door. She held her breath, one hand to the stone of the wall; this deep in the house no moths had penetrated, and the covered lamp hanging from the high ceiling was un-attended by fluttering wings. Memory echoed all the times she'd stood here, since childhood, listening to see if Teasel was there.
She heard the rustle of pages and was about to move on and leave the seal until later when she heard something else; the rough drag of sobs.
She eased the door open. Teasel, red-eyed and damp, sat drooped over some papers at her desk. Rael was trying to decide whether to go in or slip away when her aunt looked up, wiping tears back into her tangled hair.
"Rael."
"I'm sorry, Teasel, I – what's wrong?" This last as her aunt heaved another broken sob.
"Wrong? This day, Garo's leg, the press, poor Jolie, and then, then, this," she gestured at the papers she'd been crying over. "The Council of Schools says they never received our licensing fees – they were sent months ago, and a runner brought me this today, just today, saying our failure to attend to the oversight has accrued us a huge fine. I don't know what to do, we can't afford the fine, and the damage to our reputation if we're shut down while it's sorted out–" She stared into the space between them. "Has Garo been right all this time? I know I'm not an attentive parent…but, is all this because of me?"
"Teasel, no."
"Garo – what must he think now, what will he think," she gestured to the papers again. "He's begged me to petition the Arcadia so many times."
Rael said softly, "Maybe you should."
"What? But it goes against everything–"
"Aunt Teasel, isn't one of the reasons for petitions for the sake of attitude, of hope? Garo needs that."
Teasel's next words were bleak and quiet, "You think Wren is losing its Luck?"
"No, but–"
"I do," Teasel interrupted. "I do. But petitions – no. No."
"For Garo – surely to do it out of love, that's not a violation of doctrine, not really?"
Teasel shook her head, deep in thought. Rael watched her. After a few moments with no answer, she slipped back out of the room, her stomach muscles tightening into knots.
Outside, the moon rode high; the tradeboat rocked on the river in a cradle of dark broken only by one lantern. Moths brushed by her in the chill. She smelled thyme on the shifting wind, then goat.
In the residence wing of the school she found Prithen's door ajar, a golden line of light cut into the hall, the scritch of his pen audible. She pushed the door open without knocking. He looked up, welcomed her with a slight nod, and went back to writing. He sat on one end of an old couch at his desk, his hair down. Rael curled up on the other end and waited for him to finish his page. It smelled of Prithen in the room, a dry musky smell she'd come to love, and of the citrus oil he burned in his lamp. It was expensive oil, one of his only extravagances. Its sweet, clean scent always made Rael a little drowsy.
As he set the pen down and blotted the page, Rael said, "Isn't there a saying somewhere, the first sign of Luck's turn will always come by water?"
"Yes, it's from Faren, I think."
"And a fish made Garo break his leg."
"I wouldn't say that was precisely correct."
"It's my fault," Rael said, brushing his objection aside.
He sat back, brows raised. She told him about the moth, and he was still quiet.
"I know," Rael said to his silence. "It's just…you've read Grot."
He nodded.
Rael shifted restlessly. "Do you accept the assertion that he was insane when he wrote the tetralogy?"
"You don't?"
"I'm not sure. I guess I don't. Something happened to him, no question. The style of the tetralogy is cryptic and murky, full of ambiguities, but…I just feel like he understood something." She shook her head and looked up into his eyes. "Prithen, what have I done?"
"Rael, if it's a proof you're looking for, you'll have to give it more than one day."
She thought of Teasel and the council letter. "Wait for Teasel to fail in some duty and Wren's reputation to wane? For sickness to strike or the roof to fall in?" She wrapped her arms around herself.
Prithen shifted closer. "Would those events be proof? Can we foresee the consequence of every broken moment, lost opportunity, or wrong action? No. That is the fallacy of Luck law."
She hid her face in his hair, just breathing in the scent of him, but her thoughts kept straying to fish and Grot's "elder ones" and a particular reference in Grot about propitiation.
***
When she left Prithen, all of Wren was silent. Instead of going back to her room she went to the library.
The familiar dim cavern of the great room was comforting, even in the deep of night. Taking a lamp from the librarian's desk, she threaded among the shelves of books, scrolls, manuscripts, and maps, under carved stone arches and high windows. Far back in the stacks she found the volume she wanted and took it to a carrel.
The book was a copy of an ancient text which Grot had argued to be a primary source behind the origins of Luck Law. Most scholars and all the orthodoxy disagreed with him and dismissed the work as a collection of dark and rambling tales in vaguely poetic mode.
An hour later, beyond tired, her eyes burning, she finally located the passage she was looking for. She only had a reference to it from Grot's cryptic writings.
It was even more cryptic and strange than Grot's work.
The passage spoke of a ritual of propitiation undertaken when the connected limbs fall under angry shadow. The ritual seemed to be a simple one in which the seeker journeyed to the fruited groves of night's children and offered the body's humors to an elder multi-deity which the text referred to only as the white-eyed ones.
Fruited groves of night's children: a breeding ground of the moths. That she thought she understood.
***
Retrieving a jacket, a lantern, and a small knife used to trim lamp wicks, Rael went into the forest and was quickly deep among vine-hung trees. Going slowly on trails that rose and fell raggedly, Rael moved from familiar paths to less-known ones, searching out the route her uncle had taken them on so long ago, finding her way with the shielded lantern and the moon's light.
Eventually she came among a set of tall standing stones. Moss grew damp and thick on them. Ferns, grey in the moon's light, overhung the walls of a small cliff. A cave breathed cold and dark from behind the ferns.
"Well," she said aloud, and felt the word eaten by the dark. Setting the lantern down, she knelt in front of the tallest stone. Several feet behind it was the cave in which Rael remembered seeing the clustered cocoons of the moths as a child.
The body's humors. She pricked one finger with the knife until blood welled, then smeared it on the moss at the base of the stone.
"I'm sorry I killed that moth," she whispered. "Please… please restore Wren's Luck."
She sat there feeling stupid for a few breaths, and a few more.
Then a chip of deep darkness detached itself from the cave's depth. It floated out into the glen. She wasn't sure she really saw it until another followed. And another – and then many others.
Moths.
Thousands of soot-black wings cloaked the air. One drifted close to Rael. Small, burning white spots on its wings winked in the dark.
Grot's white-eyed ones?
She lifted a hand and a moth landed on her bloodied fingertip, wings slowly moving. Another landed in her palm, another on her arm. One by one they settled all over her.
A small sting of pain in her palm startled her. She watched a drop of blood well beneath the moth and stared, not comprehending.
She began to feel pin-pricks of pain all over.
In a rush, she thought she did understand. She brushed at the moths, but found herself falling. She hit the wet ground and, in helpless horror, realized she couldn't move.
More and more moths brushed their wings across her skin, settled into her clothes, pricking her. They landed over her eyes, covered her nose and mouth, found their way into her ears, crawled down her shirt, over her thighs and groin, pricking through cloth as easily as into bare flesh.
Just under her skin, all over her body: a shiver. It pulsed down into her blood, tiny needles stitching fine thread through her, stitching her to the air, to soil and stone, to the pulse of life behind her own breath.
Her blood burned white fire, the fire that smoldered in the moths' eye-spots, the fire at the heart of the world.
A rush of wings turned the wind, and a single brush of one wing turned a footstep. Cause or reaction, was there a difference? The thousand facets of the air, of all breath, into the throat of time and out.
***
She woke to wet cold. Rain sounded softly in the trees, down to the bracken; the ferns dipped and showered continual beadings of silver water. Rain-light pooled down from a grey morning sky.
Rael clutched fingers in the bracken, found she could move, climbed slowly to her feet and stood there swaying. She pulled off her jacket and looked at her arms, turned her palm to the dim morning light. No blood, no wounds – but patterns traced over her skin, the silvery, opalescent tracings on a moth's wing, faint, but visible.
She made her way back to the house through the rain and was able to slip past Teasel as she drifted distractedly onto the porch with a cup of tea in her hands.
Once in her room, shivering, Rael tore off her wet clothes and dried off, wrapped her hair in a towel. Then she examined her body.
The moth patterns covered her all over, light and dark by turns, a moiré that shifted as she moved. She looked at herself bleakly in the tarnished mirror.
…to carve into the skin a map of chance.
Bloody Grot.
With angry jerks she pulled on a long-sleeved shirt and pants, leaving her hair loose to cover her neck. But the patterns were on her face, too.
When Prithen came to see why she hadn't appeared for breakfast, she hid under the covers and said she felt ill.
Despite the turmoil of her thoughts, she fell asleep, exhausted. When she woke in the late afternoon, she watched the day's light die slowly away at the window. Wings brushed through her mind, things shifting, Grot's words and the shiver of something – knowledge? – that now owned her blood gaining clarity. The turmoil in her mind was gone, though its remnants were jagged.
Prithen came up with her supper. As he set down the tray and leaned over the lamp, he said, "Teasel signed Garo's writ, then gave her seal – can you believe it? And the council sent a runner to tell Teasel something had been a mistake, I don't know what, but she seemed very relieved."
He finished with the lamp and turned, coming to join her on the bed. "So you see, your concerns were unfounded."
It wasn't until she shifted, moved somewhat, that he saw. He fell absolutely still, staring.
"What – what did you do?"
"What Grot did, I think. I think now I can see why he became somewhat lunatic, though I don't feel inclined to do so. He must have been unstable to begin with."
"That," Prithen said, "does not answer the question." He took her hand and pushed the shirt sleeve up, turning her forearm slightly in the light. The moiré patterns glimmered and faded from view, glimmered back. "That's… remarkable."
"It was something in Penorin, that Grot references: a ritual to propitiate the elder gods of Luck when you've trespassed on Luck Law. There were black moths, a kind I've never seen before. They…well, they did this. And…"
Prithen waited.
Rael looked down, turning her hands and watching the patterns move. "I don't know if killing that moth really affected the Luck at all. But this," she shook her head. "It's like I tore at the fabric of Luck and…and made myself part of it in a different way than before. We're all part of it, obviously, but now…I think I'm like some kind of Luck rod, or catalyst, or something." She pulled the sleeve back down over her hand. "It's just a feeling. Connections, I don't know, movements, or currents, I can sense somehow now."
"A Luck rod? Like a lightning rod?"
Rael nodded. "Which means I should leave Wren. My being here could cause the Luck to turn again."
"If it ever really turned at all," Prithen said mildly, but with a firm expression on his face. "No, Rael, you can't leave. At least, not yet – or how will you, or any of us, know if what you say is true?"
"I don't want to be a–" a freak. All right, she was, but, "I don't want to become some kind of scholarly exhibit to study."
"Rael," he spread his hands helplessly, "You have to talk to Teasel, and just – give it some time. What would you be if you leave? A traveling exhibit? At least here you're home. And, who knows – you might end up making Wren's reputation beyond the river reaches."
"Is that supposed to make me feel better?"
"You could change all we know about Luck – maybe you'll even convert me." His twitch of a dry smile made her shake her head, almost ready to meet his challenge and laugh, but not yet.
***
For the next few days Rael kept to her room, hiding in shadows when others came to check on her.
One night the moths began to die, falling to the ground in drifts of color. In the blue shadows of the following morning, Rael watched Teasel come out into the courtyard with a broom and begin to sweep the moths into piles. Feeling the shift in currents she couldn't yet read, Rael went out to help her.
***
Jessica Reisman's stories have appeared in numerous magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Cross Plains Universe, Passing for Human, and Otherworldly Maine. Five Star Speculative Fiction published her first novel, The Z Radiant, in 2004. She lives in Austin, Texas and likes a Mexican martini with extra olives. For more exciting information, visit http://www.storyrain.com.
Camille Alexa
***
She's not a number. She's a creature of flesh and desires and the thousand burning stars of her wounds. Constellations of agony, those wounds. Galaxies of pain.
"Prisoner 7537 will come forward for nutrient dosing."
The mechanized voice is the only one Prisoner 7537 knows anymore. Her own voice is as lost to her as the name she doesn't remember, though she senses the lingering of its previous existence. Her name has left behind ghost pain, like an amputated limb.
"Prisoner 7537 will show efficient compliance in five seconds. Four. Three. Two ... 7537 is cited for non-efficiency. Forced dosing sequence activated."
Doors roll back on invisible steel tendons, the bone and sinew of Machines. Built of oiled tubes and metal cables, they sound like Death when they move. Death comes rolling in on wheels – no, not Death; just Death Deferred. The Machine sprouts wings: tiny, articulated wings of whirling metal, which quickly blossom into the many-segmented limbs of a torturer. She who once had a name and a voice is caught, pinned against the hard cold floor like an insect on a slab. Though she doesn't cry out loud, she screams inside.
The Machine doesn't gloat, doesn't require her submission or revel in her pain. It's a social efficiency Machine designed to keep Earth Colony IV in perfect running order, and exists solely to do the bidding of its Program. Unruly citizens are not efficient, and at this instant, this particular Machine exists to ensure the thousand tiny healing wounds of inefficient prisoner number 7537 are wounds, renewed.
***
Sister Beatrix of the Order of the Third Supreme Deity pushes the gurney and sloshing bucket down the long narrow hall. Trails of warmish soapy water follow her like charmed snakes across the dank metal floor of the automated prison. Water sploshes, soaking the heavy fabric of her leggings.
She wipes oil-smeared palms on her woolen smock and with impatience shoves a stray black curl back under her linen wimple. She squints at the tiny digits on the data card she took from the slot by the prison entry.
Prison light is not good for inefficient human eyes.
"Seven, five, three, seven," she reads aloud. "Interesting."
She doesn't consult the dull glow-map on the wall representing the tight angling corridors of the Compliance prison. She's been here eight times before, and the design is very efficient if one has a good head for recalling numbers.
At the stained steel door of cell 7537, Beatrix drags her cart to a halt, sticks the data card into its slot. A mechanical voice programmed to ring with maximum authority echoes in the empty hall: "Data card received. Entry permitted."
"So let me in already," says Beatrix, hand on hip, one foot tapping to invisible drummers. "Ali Baba and Open Sesame."
The corroded door rolls away. Beatrix heaves her bucket with both hands and lugs it into the dark room, water sloshing. Her eyes sting at the scents of old blood, stale urine, rancid machine oil. "Where are you, poor primie?" she calls, as if expecting an answer. Primie is what she calls all these last survivors, these prisoners left only with prime numbers instead of names or flesh or life. "It's just me, Sister Beatrix, come to offer Final Solace."
She plunks down her bucket and peers into the gloom. Thin pale light filters from a narrow horizontal slit high in the wall, too high for Beatrix to touch even if she stood on her own shoulders and lifted both arms over her head. But she sees well enough the steel bench, the filthy toilet basin in the corner, the metal platform of the only bed, without pillow or blanket but with the bony ankle protruding from beneath.
Beatrix's heart crimps into what she imagines as tight, mathematically perfect spirals. She controls her breathing and kneels. Gently – as if mottled bruises on skin across tissue-covered bone are still capable of feeling pain – she tugs the ankle. Cold leaches into her kneecaps through wool. Fluids glint on the dead primie's vacant face: blood and spittle, and oozings from a thousand tortured places. Beatrix winces as the body scrapes across cold gritty floor.
Sister Beatrix of the Order of the Third Supreme Deity is small, but the inert form on the floor is little more than scab and bone. She rolls the body onto the metal sleeping platform. "Poor primie," she says. "Not much left of you, is there?" She straightens the body's broomstick legs and folds the scarecrow arms across the sunken chest, humming a wordless tune. Lullabies for the dead. Or perhaps to comfort herself, the living.
Beatrix straightens the corners of her wimple and reaches for the soapy rag to bathe the chilled surfaces of the skin-covered bones. She begins at the cold flesh of the bare feet. She moves across the bent ankles mottled with bruises from the manacles of the automated nutrient enforcers. Beatrix washes away machine grease and the rust of dried blood from the thousand pinpricks of dosing needles: fluids from the veins of human and Machine mingling on the cold flesh of prisoner 7537, who is, according to her data card, the last human occupant of the Machines' Compliance prison.
"It's part of their original programming that people be allowed to confirm the prison's dead," she tells the dead woman. "More efficient for settlement population records and whatnot. Not that there's a settlement anymore. Or a population to speak of. Or a Colony, really, unless you count this place."
But the dead woman doesn't answer, leaving Beatrix to wipe the pale mottled flesh in silence and cold and stillness. The only sounds are sloshing water and Beatrix's own voice.
She always talks to them. For four years, three months, and two days it has been her duty to regularly check the slot by the prison gate for data cards, to come offer Final Solace, to prepare the bodies for immolation. So much went wrong in those mechanical minds, with their evolving efficiency programs designed to help the small colony survive so far from Earth. Is it irony that Machines have maintained one of the least efficient human methodologies, the opportunity for Final Solace? Or is it something else: fate? Or perhaps a joke played by the Third Supreme Deity – if you believe in her, which Beatrix does not. She is not a very efficient member of her Order.
"I've seen the same thing, performed the same Solace for eight others, all with prime numbers encoded on your data cards," Beatrix tells the dead woman as she dabs her with the damp cloth. "You're my ninth. Nine's not prime, but it's lucky. A lucky number, like in the sequence: one, three, seven, nine, thirteen, fifteen, twenty-one..." The spirals blossom again in her chest and her breath catches. She waits, hand midair, for the feeling to subside. When she resumes, she whispers in awkward apology, "Not lucky for you. I'm sorry."
She bathes the shoulders, the arms, the pitifully gnarled claw-hands dangling from wrists with identical bruises to the ankles like a matched set of vulgar jewelry. As Beatrix runs the cloth along the bony lengths of the woman's fingers she murmurs, "That's an old, old hand you've got, primie, for a woman probably much younger. How old are you? Thirty-five? Forty? You've spent at least twenty years here. The Machines stopped incarcerations then; nobody left to take, practically. Everybody in the Colony settlement had been incarcerated or eliminated for non-compliance, for physical imperfection, for personality irregularities, for resistance to social efficiency..."
Gently she scrubs the neck, wipes the brow and the cheeks and the needle-pricks across their surfaces. She smooths her hand over the shorn head. The woman's skull looks delicate in the faint light, her hair prickling from her scalp like the tender, stubbled feathers of a newborn chick. Even the lids of the closed eyes have the round red welts of the dosing Machine littering their papery surfaces.
"You're the last Colony inmate by three months, four days, and nine hours according to your data card. That's three, four, nine; and three hundred and forty-nine is another lucky number. A lucky prime number." Beatrix reaches for the satchel beneath the folded canvas on her gurney. "But it's always like this when they post a card outside, when I come down the mountain to perform Solace. I always feel the person might still be alive, like the chest still rises and falls. But wishing and hoping doesn't make it so."
Beatrix watches the dead woman's chest rise and fall, knowing it for an illusion. The Sisters say it's the Order's continuing sacred duty to the Third Deity and to the Colony to check prison postings, to confirm and record the deaths and offer Final Solace. Beatrix wept countless impotent tears of rage for the prisoners when she was old enough to understand, taking no comfort when the Sisters cited the unknowable will of the Third Supreme Deity. For a time she left the abbey each afternoon to hide in the cliffs above the prison, to spy on its stark metal angles. But by then nobody ever went in or out anymore. Not even Machines.
After all these years the prison has become part of the landscape, unmovable as the mountains. The Sisters say she's too young to recall the scent of charred flesh as the Machines rampaged and burned, efficiency programs run amok. And here in the sunless cells of the automated Compliance prison, Beatrix's skin grows clammy and cold, until the waxy quietude of the dosed and the dead are of a oneness with her own flesh. All she has to do is wrap up this primie, load her onto the gurney, and wheel her to the immolation chamber. This final witnessing of the dead is her duty, and this is the last time she will perform it.
Without knowing exactly why, she bends to kiss the dead woman's lips before covering her face with the cloth. Beatrix is startled to find herself looking directly into a pair of very green eyes, which are very not dead.
***
The woman doesn't recall being folded nearly double and smuggled from the prison on the undershelf of a rolling cart along with buckets and sponges and the items of ritual for Final Solace. She doesn't remember being strapped to the back of a huffing donkey, or immersed in warm water at the abbey and scrubbed clean and placed in a real bed with real sheets and blankets. All she knows is, she's not a number.
She's a creature, and when the soothing murmur of a fellow creature finds its way through the canals of her ears, across the tautness of drums and the softness of minuscule hairs and into the lonely corridors of brain; when that murmur finds its way, she wakes, and listens.
"...And so I said to myself: Beatrix, you're not a very good Sister of the Order of the Third Supreme Deity, may your Sisters forgive you, but numbers, numbers you do get, and they get you. And if seven plus five plus three plus seven equals twenty-two, well, that's a master number."
Warm water from a warm sponge, wielded by a warm hand, crosses her temple.
"And I tell myself: Beatrix, if this primie – whose prime number is seven thousand, five hundred, thirty-seven – if she's your ninth, and that's a lucky number, and she's a master number too, well then that's someone very special, in truth."
She's reluctant to open her eyes; every time she does is perhaps the time she wakes. And then there'll be only hard metal and the interior echoes of her own silent screams and the embrace of cold limbs of segmented steel. And so she does not, does not open her eyes, but sobs instead. Sobbing she has done a hundred times, a thousand times, a million. But never once in these past two decades has it been answered with an embrace from human arms.
***
"...So I'm certainly not going to mind if you aren't talkative." Beatrix ducks her head beneath the ribs of the cow, milking with renewed vigor. "I go days here at the abbey without hearing a single other human voice. Vows of silence are a tradition with the Sisters, and there aren't so many Sisters left anymore. If I'm the only one for myself to talk to, might as well keep myself company. It's all I've got, other than the dozen Earth books hidden in the abbey belfry by some long-gone Sister before I was born, when Social Efficiency programs first started getting out of hand." She smiles askance at the other woman. "Books promote deviance from social norms, you know. Very inefficient!"
With an affectionate slap to the cow's side, Beatrix stands, stretches. "Besides," she says, reaching to adjust the blanket across the other woman's bony shoulders, "maybe you don't understand a lot of what I say. The Sisters say the original settlers came from several Earth origins. You could've been practically anybody, done practically anything for the Machines to put you away. Or done nothing: turns out the most efficient human settlement has no humans in it at all."
Beatrix looks into the other's green, green eyes. "Sure you don't remember anything? From before?" The silent woman shakes her head, her movements slow, painful to watch. Beatrix squeezes her shoulder before turning to put away the milking stool. "That's okay. Those Machines nearly wiped out every human on the planet, but they weren't built to last. Just a generation or two, until the settlement got on its feet. Problem now is, they're smart, see? They learn, their efficiency programs evolving, teaching them new stuff. All these years of nothing, and now they're making a new wing at the back of the prison. For all we know, they're building machines to build Machines. If they do, well..."
She studies her tiny, work-roughened fingers. "Well maybe I'll just have to learn to pray to the Third Deity after all. Come on, then," she says, straightening. "Let's get you inside. Hey, we'll go to the belfry! I'll read you one of Scheherazade's stories to the King, about how Sinbad escapes the rocs in the valley of diamonds. His method isn't very efficient, but it's very effective."
***
Beatrix leads through cobbled-together whitewashed halls. Older portions are built of stone or wattle and daub; newer are built of salvaged settlement detritus, cinderblock and chunks of cement and hammered metal or crumbling plastic. The silent woman stops to run her crooked hand along a plaster section embedded with empty glass bottles. The bottlenecks open to daylight, the bottoms glowing circles of brown, gold, blue, green: a multi-hued constellation of beveled suns.
Running both hands along the uneven surface of dimpled glass, Beatrix says, "I call this the Augustine Wall, after an ancient Earth philosopher from my hidden belfry books. See that brown bottle? Only two of those. Seventeen gold, fifty-nine green, one hundred and three blues." Her finger brushes each color as she names it. "Two, seventeen, fifty-nine, one hundred and three: all prime numbers, together equaling one hundred and eighty one – also prime. Subtract back out the first two browns, and that's one-hundred and seventy nine, which is twin prime to one-eighty-one. And that," her hands drop to her sides, "is how I figured my path to Truth wasn't through prayer and silence, but through numbers. Earth Augustine wrote, 'Numbers are the Universal language offered by the deity to humans as confirmation of the truth.' If nothing else, I do believe in Truth."
Sister Beatrix leans to kiss the closest blue circle before continuing down the hall. With only brief hesitation, the silent woman trails after, leaving behind the bottles and the wall of multicolored light and all its Truths.
***
Beatrix drops her hoe, careful to aim its fall away from the tended row of little cabbages. She rubs both hands along her spine and grimaces. "If hoeing vegetables didn't eventually lead to eating them, weeds would lead a happy life."
The other woman unfolds slowly from her hunched position. She places her hoe carefully alongside the other on the ground and massages the stiffly bent twigs of her fingers.
Stepping to her, Beatrix closes her strong little hands with their tidy calluses over the scarred ones with the twisted lumpy joints. She smiles. "Stronger, Lucky. Much stronger this week. 'Heal Thou all my bones'..." Smiling, she smooths a wispy lock off the woman's forehead. "And your hair, almost as long as most of the Sisters' at the abbey now, though twice as fine." She curls one tendril about her finger, but that's the extent of its length, and it slides away. "Like the silky ends of the embroidery thread the Sisters are forever despairing me to stitch. And brown; brown as the bottles in the Augustine Wall."
She stoops to retrieve her hoe. "Goodman Cropper has requested Final Solace for his mother," she says, returning to her labors. "They're an old family, worshippers of the Third Supreme Deity from before the Machines, like the Sisters. Not many Sisters left, Lucky. They found me at the abbey's postern gate when I was a baby, but their order was modest even then, and the youngest not so young. I'm the only one left can easily make the trip over the mountain." She pauses, tilting her head to meet the green gaze of the other woman. "Thought you might like to come."
The other woman, as always, says nothing. Beatrix shrugs, the movement lending momentum to her hoeing. "Final Solace is really for those left behind. Earth Augustine writes: 'Human friendship also is endeared with a sweet tie, by reason of the unity formed of many souls.'" She pauses again to study the other woman. After a moment she nods, deciding. "Good. We leave tonight before dark."