Beneath Ceaseless Skies #143, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2 Read online

  “Protocols?” I asked. My schooling, to this point, had consisted of my pointing at things that caught my eye and my mother figuring out safe ways of indulging me. Disciplined tutelage was foreign to me, but I had no prejudice against it, either. Moreover, the thought of meeting other people, like the ones for whom the mysterious suits had been designed, was so exciting that my mother could have, if so inclined, probably have gotten me to scrub the fortress clean with my hair in exchange for the opportunity.

  “Protocols,” she said firmly. “Of which the first one is, there’s never only one right way to handle a first contact. Or a seventh, or a twenty-fourth, if it comes to that.”

  One of the earliest lessons she imparted to me, in preparation for my first such meeting, was that you could also never guarantee that nothing would go wrong, no matter how experienced you were or what your best intentions were. I was incredulous about her claim that some of the most vicious encounters occurred between members of the same species, even the same communities within those species.

  “How is that possible?” I demanded. We were walking through a kaleidoscopic panorama depicting the outbreak of the 3.72nd Arrazhed Civil War. The nomenclature was an approximation for my convenience: the Arrazheds had numbered their conflicts with real numbers rather than strictly with natural ones, since history did not consist of discrete events but cause and consequence bleeding into each other. My mother was able to remember the number entire, but she said that for our purposes I could round it off to the nearest hundredth.

  The Arrazhed conflict had involved atrocities of all sorts. By then I was old enough to have been introduced to the concept. While my mother was no great believer in the innocence of childhood, neither did she prod me to deal with the realities outside our fortress, or even the ones memorialized within it, until I showed an interest in them.

  For instance, my mother said, with a certain irony, that for many cultures, set definitions were of particular importance, especially in instances where multivalence was devalued. You could define sets as desired, then exclude based on your criteria. (The obligatory digression on set paradoxes only lasted a day or two, although she would have spent longer on it if I had cared to.)

  One of the Arrazhed factions, the Oethred, was particularly literal-minded. They retaliated against a more powerful aggressor by releasing a plague that edited the enemy’s spawnlings to exhibit physical traits most commonly associated with the Oethred themselves: carapaces with an ultraviolet shimmer rather than iridescent green, smaller lens-clusters, a tendency toward polydactyl grippers. The Oethred’s enemies purged their spawnlings, as was intended, but retaliated by infecting Oethred religious wind-paintings with nanite sculptors, so that their masterworks collapsed into hyperstable vortices whispering heterodox teachings.

  “But shouldn’t they have realized that no one was winning?” I said, craning my head to catch a better glimpse of a preserved Oethred corpse.

  “If only politics were that simple,” she said.

  There were more atrocities, whole abecedaries of them. Our attempts at a taxonomy were sputtering and inconsistent, like candle flames. I started a list, written in clustered photons unhappily pinned to a sheet of sheer plastic. By now, at fourteen, I was literate in a simplified version of my mother’s native tongue as well as several interlinguas. My mother would cheerfully translate anything else for me, knowing that my capacity for fluency was less than hers.

  I didn’t like my list, and I didn’t like the way it glowed at me. The pictures are real, they seemed to be saying. The recordings are real. It wasn’t so much that I doubted as that the outside world was too different to imagine as a solid, moving entity.

  The next principle my mother was adamant about was our absolute neutrality.

  “Absolutely absolute?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I am afraid I will have to insist on this point.” And she looked very grave as she said this, with all her status lights going gray-blue. The vapor she exuded was like copper gone sour.

  “What if—”

  “Stop,” my mother said, even more gravely. “You’re already thinking of counterarguments and edge cases. That is perfectly fine if you are a mathematician or a philosopher. The fortress is not about ensuring justice, or righting wrongs, or even compassion. It is about enduring and remembering all the things that people bring us to safeguard for them, the histories and the artifacts. Justice, for the things they remember—that’s something that civilizations have to negotiate for themselves.”

  I thought for a moment. “Could you right wrongs, if you wanted to?”

  At least she didn’t hide this information from me. “Sometimes yes,” she said. “Sometimes no. And sometimes they’re the same thing, but you can’t tell until the end of time anyway, and even I won’t survive that singularity accounting. But the point is that we won’t, because that’s not what we do here. We are guardians, not historians interpreting the weight of years.”

  “Does it ever bother you only being a guardian?” I asked. Later the question would become, Doesn’t it ever bother you? She must have known it then, even if I did not.

  “Eggling,” my mother said, now amused, “for all the evil in the world, even this has its compensations. Do you imagine I chafe at the restrictions? I’m the one who set them, after all. The only chains are the ones I put on myself.”

  I didn’t understand that at all, so I averted my eyes. The movement of my head triggered a cascade of rubato footsteps and the lapping of water, and the wailing of a membrane-flute.

  “You can live without rules, too,” she added. “That’s a choice you will have. But while you dwell here, as my ward and not yet an adult, you will have to abide by mine.”

  I was appalled that she felt the need to make this explicit. I continued to avert my eyes, but all the sensors in the fortress were linked to her systems, and she knew I was frowning.

  “Come on,” my mother said coaxingly. “You have time yet to think about it.” She did not say what we both knew, that for all the protections she had given me, she could not make me quite as long-lived as herself. “You’re ready now to run through training scenarios with the game generators. You’ll like learning about the Mirre-ai-rah. Aquatic societies can be so interesting.”

  Something prompted me to ask, “Do they still exist?”

  She was silent for a moment, then said, “None of the peoples you will meet in the scenarios still exist. If you think about this, you will realize why I have set this restriction in place, even if you may not agree with my reasoning.”

  I thought this a ridiculous way to ensure the neutrality that she was so insistent upon. After all, it was impossible to avoid having some preconceptions about the things I perceived, based on the sum of my experiences, however attenuated and secondhand.

  But I reasoned that it was better to prepare under my mother’s guidance than not at all. She had promised that I would speak with emissaries in due course; I had no doubt that she would keep her promise.

  * * *

  My first three encounters with emissaries went awkwardly, but no catastrophes ensued. Indeed, I was sorry when our guests left, and I moped around the fortress drawing portraits of them in the vapors of the cloud chambers, which were as evanescent as you would expect. My mother couldn’t help but be aware of my mood and wisely left me alone except to provide the perennial tray of cupcakes. She would have been baking even without me there, I knew. Still, it made me feel better, especially when she decorated the cupcakes with quirky eyestalks and the occasional constellation-sprinkle of crushed pearls.

  None of the emissaries knew what to make of me. Their histories spoke of my mother as a solitary guardian. The first set treated me as an interpreter, which was harmless enough, as my mother could understand everything they said without my help. At least they interacted with me, very politely at that. They seemed distressed that, along with their offerings for the museum, they had not brought gifts for me. I had to assure them that th
ey had not caused offense, especially once I figured out that the offerings were holy instruments of torture. My moral convictions were diffuse in those days, yet still I had no great liking for pain unasked for, and no great animus for anyone either. I half-expected my mother to scorn the items set down before her, with their cunning barbed filaments and aberrant hooks. Instead, she thanked the emissaries graciously and placed the instruments in a case rimmed with gold. When I later tried to open the case, I couldn’t, and felt reassured after all.

  The second set pretended I didn’t exist. At first I was baffled, then infuriated, and then I came to the conclusion, based on some of the cultural artifacts they shared with my mother, that they regarded me as a type of ambulatory furniture.

  After that, I understood my place in the masque and did my best to play the part. Some of them hung their personal library-strands around my shoulders, spinning superstates of beaded condensates dark and dazzling. I drowsed to the strands’ hum and daydreamed of exploring the mysterious interior of the palace-ship they had traveled here in.

  The third set was preceded by what I first mistook for fireworks. My mother liked to mark the New Year and other anniversaries—both celebrations and mourning days; the color schemes were quite distinct—with spectacular displays of ghostly lights. She said that everyone grew a year older on the New Year, although there were other ways to reckon age. On this occasion, we walked along one of the promenades and I pressed my face up against the viewport, marveling that the glass felt neither cold nor hot but was simply smooth and kind against my skin.

  My mother studied my face, then said, without the slightest trace of alarm, “This is something you must learn to recognize, eggling. We are under attack.”

  I began to shake. I’d had my disputes with my mother. As a child I had done my share of kicking and screaming and biting. (Biting a bonedrake, even one who is doing her best not to do you injury, is a bad idea. My jaw hurt for the next week. I never did it again.) But I had never been the target of serious hostility.

  “These are merely temperamental chemical compounds,” she added. “I have faced far worse.”

  “How often does this happen?” I asked.

  She eyed me sideways. There was an odd odor, which I identified as that of smoke. But it was a smoke of pyres, rather than a smoke of pastries overbaked. (A rare occurrence. She was attentive to her craft.) “I could give you the percentages,” she said. “About 47% of them come in with guns or missiles or something of the sort. It depends on how you define ‘weapon,’ and that’s as difficult as you’d expect any semantic question to be.”

  “How do you know we’re in no real danger?” I said, unable to hide my apprehension.

  “The fortress has survived this long for a reason,” my mother said, “and I’m not averse to putting in upgrades as they occur to me.”

  So my mother’s fondness for redecorating had a purpose other than the aesthetic. “I suppose,” I said, “this isn’t the worst form of danger anyway.” I was learning.

  Her smile was bonier than usual. “Indeed.”

  The third set of emissaries eventually became satisfied that they couldn’t crack the fortress unless it wanted to be cracked, and they asked to parlay. The parlay itself was aggressive, and quite enjoyable once I got into the spirit of it. The emissaries, from an alliance of several species with wildly differing homeworlds, spoke to us with endearing frankness. They told my mother she was a terrible cook, which by their standards she probably was. They also gave us suggestions on how to improve the suits she had provided for their use.

  Their purpose, now that they had established that they could not defeat her, was to recruit her. Their logic confused me. Exactly what did they think they could offer her? As the conversation wore on and I nibbled on crackers—every so often I needed a break from cupcakes or fruits or porridge with mushrooms—it transpired that they thought my mother was bored.

  Once they mentioned the idea, it bothered me more and more. She had been here so long that I could scarcely conceptualize the span of time. What if she was, indeed, bored? What if she was going to leave the fortress behind and—and what? I couldn’t imagine what would happen to me.

  * * *

  After surviving an attack, even one about which my mother was so unconcerned, I was certain that our next encounter with emissaries couldn’t go any worse. At least, it would be no more than another assault. Just to prepare myself, however, I threw myself into the study of conflagrations. The simulators left me with nightmares of coagulated fluids and unfoul vapors; I rarely smelled anything in my dreams. I emerged drenched with sweat and wracked by pains from the way I tensed up imagining the sounds of puncture, or ambush, or venom hisses.

  My mother encouraged me to take sand baths and steam baths, or to meditate in the gardens. She was a great believer in sand baths. I chafed at being offered such mundane comforts. She only harrumphed and said that the young had no appreciation for the value of ordinary things. To please her, I lingered in the baths and the gardens. Neither helped much.

  The fourth set of emissaries came five days before one of the anniversaries that my mother observed. Granted, she was not inflexible. If courtesy required, she would simply put off the observance until a better opportunity came along. This was one of the sadder ones, where she retreated to light incense in a plain dark shrine. In years past she had permitted me to help her, and the sweet, woody smell of the smoke would cling to my clothes and hair and follow me into my sleep. I never smelled the blend on my mother; no matter what she did, she had a curious odor of marrow and melting wax.

  In any case, my mother made her preparations for the anniversary as usual. In retrospect, I should have apprehended that these next visitors were unusual even by my mother’s standards. When the fleet showed up on the far-scryers, her status lights changed to a colder and more melancholy blue than I had ever seen before.

  “What is it?” I asked, shifting the great facets this way and that so I could view the fleet from different angles. Besides the far-scryers, the fortress had a staggering array of early warning systems. I could work most of them well enough to satisfy my basic curiosity, although I was reliant upon my mother’s experience and the fortress’s tutorial systems to guide me through the more complex commands.

  My mother was silent, statue-like. My heart stuttered. It was unlike her to deny me answers, even the infuriating riddling ones she sometimes gave to encourage me to figure out what she really meant.

  When she answered, it was very literally. “It’s quite a fleet,” she said, “with a formation similar to one I knew in the past. The flagship is a work of art, isn’t it? I wonder if that’s what they want me to add to the collection.”

  I examined the flagship. As starships went, it had a certain grandeur. It was the fleet’s largest ship by far. The golden armor was, incredibly, decorated with fantastical treasures: cameos of queens and knights carved from mirrorstones, rubies and spinels glimmering with the bloodlight of small sacrifices, knives in caskets welded in archaeological splendor to the hull.

  “Are the weapons—”

  My mother spoke over me, as though she had heard another question entirely. “That one, in the rear guard,” she said. Her voice was becoming clipped, distant, like bones clacking together.

  Obligingly, I viewed the ship she had indicated. At first I scarcely recognized it as such. The flagship, for all its gaudiness, was an ellipsoid, a solid shape. This other ship looked more like a seethe of insects beneath the surface of the night, elusively visible even with the far-scryer’s customary adjustments for the limitations of human perception.

  “That is the pleasure-wrecker Five Hundred Stings and One Chalice,” my mother said. I was becoming increasingly unnerved, yet all I could do was look from her dimmed eyes to the ship, from the ship to her eyes. “Even here I have heard stories of its exploits. At full capacity, it carries over a million of its people. In the old days those would have been sculptors, calligraphers, perfumers, co
oks. They designed ships to go to war for them—”

  “Aren’t these all warships?” I had gone on to examine the armaments on the others. Bombs, mines, putrescences (I wasn’t sure what this meant, except that I didn’t want to be hit by them), the occasional canister of apiarist’s fire. No two were the same, which struck me as strange.

  “They are indeed,” my mother said. “Well, we will send out the welcome-banner, and see what they have for us. I hope we can accommodate them all.” The fortress had its secrets of involute geometry, but so did the fleet we beheld.

  The welcome-banner changed not at all with the calendar’s groanings. My mother said that sometimes constancy was a virtue. It consisted of a pattern of particles, a display of dappled light. In it I often glimpsed the coalescence of stars, the alchemical nature of metals noble and otherwise, the asymmetry of yearning.

  The flagship asked for permission to send a single visitor, using an old protocol. My mother granted it. I hadn’t expected otherwise. The two of us went down to one of the fortress’s many antechambers, this one hung about with violet-green fronds and filled with a dense, cloying steam. I wore the minimum of protection necessary, the usual mesh. The steam would not do me lasting damage, but there was no need to be reckless.

  The visitor was a robot, darkly iridescent, with a shape not unlike my own. I envied it its sleek limbs, the precise joints, the sheen of its crested head. It and my mother rapidly agreed to switch to a different interlingua, one that better reflected the robot’s needs. Then it introduced itself as Hauth of the Greater Choreographical Society.

  By now I knew of dance, so I mistook Hauth for a form of artist. That wasn’t entirely inaccurate, at that. But Hauth would, it emerged, be better described as a historian or propagandist.

  At no point was Hauth’s manner anything but polite. It had come, it said with its buzzing accent, because it wished to interview my mother personally and incorporate the results in its chronicle.