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

  “If that is your wish,” my mother said, still burning with that sad blue light. “My hospitality is yours.”

  Hauth explained its recording instruments and editing procedures and the musical conventions by which the final work would be scored. Then it looked at me. I had lost interest and was examining a fern’s spores. It added, smoothly, “I would like permission to interview your ward as well.”

  “Eggling,” my mother said when I didn’t react; I hadn’t been paying attention. “I advise against it—”

  “Is she old enough to make this decision for herself?” Hauth interrupted.

  My mother sighed. “She is.”

  “Then I wish to hear her answer.”

  “Mother?” I asked waveringly.

  “I advise against it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you can’t unknow things once you know them,” she said. “Because you can’t return to being a child once you become an adult.”

  I should have been paying attention to her phrasing here; I was not. Not that I was the first to make such a mistake, but I hope you will grow to be wiser than I was.

  “I would prefer,” Hauth said, even more crushingly polite, “that the decision be wholly her own.”

  “No decision is wholly anyone’s own,” my mother said, “but I take your point. It’s up to you, eggling. I will not send our guest away. However, if you would rather not hear what it has to say, I must insist that you not be further involved in its investigations. I will handle them myself.”

  This made me stubborn. She gave me a warning look, which I ignored; I had gotten to that age. At the time, I thought only that Hauth might be able to tell me things about my mother that she hadn’t wanted me to hear. I didn’t realize my mother was more worried about the things that I would have difficulty facing.

  “I will be available whenever you need me,” my mother said, addressing Hauth. “Ask what you will of my child, if she consents to answer. Eggling, if you want this to stop at any time, you know how to find me.”

  I watched as she snaked around toward one of the two doors out, her status lights flaring bright, then dimming almost to black.

  Hauth stood with its masked face, its edged patience. I stared at it, then said, “I can show you around the fortress.”

  It spoke. This time the buzzing accent sounded more harmonious, but that might have been my imagination. “I would be grateful if you would show me the places that make you think of your mother,” it said.

  What a peculiar request, I thought. Still, surely there was no harm. I glanced at the door where my mother had just left. “Come with me,” I said.

  * * *

  These were the places I showed Hauth, and which I hope to show you:

  First was the kitchen. Well, one of the kitchens. There were multiples. For the purposes of baking cupcakes for me, my mother only used one kitchen, even if she occasionally strayed to the others if she thought I needed fish stew in my diet. I had to explain cupcakes to Hauth. It didn’t eat. I worried about what to offer as refreshments.

  I didn’t know whether Hauth never laughed, or robots in general never did, but it said, gently, “You will have figured out that I don’t metabolize the way you do. I am well-supplied for this visit. I appreciate that you are thinking of my needs, however.”

  Hauth asked me what cupcakes tasted like, perhaps because the chemical analysis was lacking in metaphor, or else because it was amused by how much I had to say about different flavors and textures. I believe its interest was genuine.

  Next came one of the gardens. Not my favorite one, because that wasn’t what Hauth had asked about, but the one where my mother spent the most time. I rarely went there unless specifically invited to. My mother had never forbidden my presence. Rather, the pillars of ice, the ashen winds, and the metallic light like bronze wearing thin, filled me with a tremulous unease. It was difficult to convince myself that I felt no physical chill, that my billowing mesh gave me plenty of protection. Yet this was where my mother came for the unnamed anniversaries that meant so much to her.

  The floor was raked by claw-marks, which formed sinuous and self-intersecting trails. Ordinarily my mother sheathed her claws. Even on those occasions when some accident necessitated scratching up the fortress, she was assiduous about repairs. Here, however, she wanted to leave some trace of her agitation.

  Hauth approached the shrine that formed the centerpiece of the garden and peered at the burnt-out stubs of incense sticks. Ash and sand stirred slightly, glimmered palely. It did not touch anything. “What does this mean to you?” it asked.

  Not: What does this mean to your mother? I supposed it already knew the answer to that. I was seized with the simultaneous and contradictory desire to know and not to know. But Hauth had asked first. I explained about the anniversaries. “She comes here at such times,” I said, irrationally convinced that I was betraying her. Surely, though, she would have told me if there was anything I should refuse to answer? For that matter, I couldn’t imagine that she wasn’t monitoring us anyway, or incapable of intervening if she needed to. “I don’t often accompany her here.”

  Hauth walked around without fitting its footsteps to the claw-paths. I wasn’t sure whether I liked that or not, for all its respectful demeanor. “You don’t know why she comes here,” it said.

  “Do you?”

  “She hasn’t told you?”

  “I’ve asked,” I said. “Her answers are vague. I don’t want to hurt her.”

  “I can tell you,” Hauth said after a pause, “but I will keep it to myself if you prefer.”

  It was too much, especially combined with my mother’s mysterious behavior earlier. “I want to know.”

  “Around now,” it said, “she is remembering the deaths of her comrades.”

  Comrades? I wondered. Certainly my mother could defend herself, but I rejected the image of her fighting alongside others of her kind—if, indeed, they had also been bonedrakes.

  “The most important one,” it went on, as if it had not noticed the way I was shivering, “commemorates the day she deserted.”

  “I can’t imagine—” I stopped. My mother, who loved cupcakes and carillons. I could see her as a deserter more easily than I could see her as a warfighter.

  Hauth turned away from the shrine. “Many people died,” it said.

  “Let’s go somewhere else,” I said, before Hauth could tell me anything else. “I can show you the observatory.”

  Hauth was amenable. Doubtless it sensed that it had me trapped, and all it had to do to wait for me to succumb. The observatory didn’t have much to offer someone who had, I presumed, traveled a great distance to visit the fortress. Still, Hauth admired the telescopes with their sphinx-stare lenses, and the way a particular view of a nebula complemented mobiles that spun this way and that, catching the light. It told me about sites it had visited in the past: symphony-bridges of tinted ice, to be ruined attractively whenever the universe exhaled; stars in the process of colliding and merging; moons turned into sculptures exalted by sgraffito depictions of elemental valences.

  As the day wore on, I showed Hauth everything I could think of. Inevitably, I thought, it would demand to speak to my mother. But no: it listened to everything I had to say, however hollow it started to sound.

  Finally I cracked, and asked what it had not volunteered to tell me. “Why are you really here?” I said.

  “I came to find out more about your mother’s past,” Hauth said, “just as I told her. Since she still lives, it seemed appropriate to seek her out.”

  “Then why talk to me?”

  “Aren’t you a part of her life, too?”

  I bit my lip. I hadn’t seen her in all this time, showing Hauth around. We were sitting in the kitchen because I needed to be in comforting surroundings. For the first time, I didn’t feel comforted at all. The kitchen had been designed, I saw now, so that it could accommodate both a bonedrake and a human, for all that my mother could compress he
rself astonishingly when she had to. When had she thought to do that? And when, for that matter, had she fixed on cupcakes as her hobby of choice, when she didn’t eat them?

  When had she decided to rear a human child?

  “What are you going to do with your chronicle?” I said.

  “Share it,” it said. “With everyone.”

  “I want to see it,” I said.

  “Yes,” it said. “Yes. When it’s done. But it’s not, yet.”

  I knew what it was asking. “I will take you to my mother now.”

  We found her in the shrine of ashes, naturally. There was no incense. The place was as ethereally cold as ever, a cold that sapped the place of color and settled over me in a gray pall even as my mesh kept me incongruously comfortable.

  Hauth bowed to my mother. It looked both awkward and serious, because the length of its limbs weren’t right for the gesture. “Guardian,” it said, or an approximation thereof.

  “Say it,” she returned. “You know my old name as well as anyone.” She was coiled around the shrine, eyes slitted. If possible, her status lights were bluer than ever, almost to the point of being shadow-silvered. The tip of her tail lashed back and forth like a clock’s tongue. I could feel the seconds crumbling away.

  “Unit Zhu-15 Jiemsin,” Hauth said. “You haven’t answered to that name in a long time, but I imagine even now you remember the imperatives programmed into you, and the importance of rank hierarchy.”

  I didn’t know anything about imperatives. Military hierarchy, on the other hand, was a reasonably common concept. This intruder had come into our home and accused my mother of being a deserter, had made her sad and strange. If I had known that that was going to upset her like this, I would have begged her to turn it away, no matter how splendid the grave-offering of museum-ships it had brought.

  “Mother,” I said. She wouldn’t look at me, and I spoke again, louder. “Mother. Tell it to leave.”

  She shook her head. “Ask your questions, Hauth,” she said wearily.

  I wanted to grab one of her legs and shake it. It was a wonder that I restrained myself.

  “I will tell this side of the story too,” it said, as though an entire conversation to which I had not been privy had passed between them already. “I know the rest already.”

  “The rest of what?” I asked.

  Hauth turned its regard not on me, but on my mother.

  “Go ahead,” my mother said, “and tell her what you will tell the world, if she wants to know. It is not, after all, any news to me.”

  Hauth’s mask grew translucent. “Do you want to know?”

  “I cannot fail to know forever,” I said unsteadily.

  “Your mother is one of the greatest war engines ever devised,” Hauth said. “She was not the only one. The bonedrakes’ creators slaughtered their way into an empire. But the creators had not been as careful with their imperatives as they thought, and eventually the bonedrakes turned on their masters. Then they fought over their masters’ leavings.”

  “This means nothing to me,” I said. It was almost true.

  “There was one exception,” Hauth said. “Unit Zhu-15 Jiemsin, who did not turn against her masters, and did not turn against her comrades, and did not do anything but run.”

  I opened my mouth, resenting the critique implied in Hauth’s tone.

  Hauth wasn’t done. “Of course, she had few options, and all of them were bad. So she ran and hid and didn’t emerge until nothing was left but the smoke of legends. And then she retreated to this fortress, to guard the fossils of history even though no one was left to put them in any context.”

  “Which is where you come in, I suppose,” I said. I meant it to be savage. My voice betrayed me. “Mother, is this true?” Do you want this to matter to me?

  All she had to do was say something calming, call me “eggling” the way she always did. She had raised me. I owed nothing to this robot and its stories of a world that I needed not involve myself with. Besides, it itself had described the past as the “smoke of legends”; what did it matter anymore?

  “It’s all true,” my mother said. “I learned that there were things that mattered more than war. I did not want to fight anymore. So I left. But that can’t be the sum of your purpose, Hauth.”

  “I want to ask you to add my chronicle,” Hauth said. “To persuade your visitors of the futility of war. Which you know about better than anyone else.”

  My mother blinked at it. “Yes to the first, no to the second,” she said, crisp, sharp, unfailingly kind. “The fortress is neutral in all matters. I will answer questions if asked. I will accept new artifacts for the collection. But I will not press any viewpoint on another. That is all.”

  “I must insist,” Hauth said. “The Greater Choreographical Society, as an ally of the Everywhere Pact, feels strongly about this point. Already the Pact would see you brought down. I was hoping to save a valuable historical repository by persuading you of the rightness of our cause.”

  My mother’s only response to this was a snort.

  “In that case,” it said, “the Everywhere Pact will have no choice but to turn against you. And my chronicle will only rally more to their cause.”

  “And you came here looking for help finishing it?” I demanded incredulously. My heart was thumping horribly.

  “Your fleet can’t do anything to me,” my mother said, “and nor can anything else that you care to throw at the fortress.” She had not moved, except that her tail-tip continued to lash back and forth. “But you’re right that I won’t keep you from departing, or sharing your chronicle with everyone who wants to hear it. With people who want to think of us as a monument to war rather than a simple collection of things that happened, good or bad or indifferent.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said, appalled. “Stop it from leaving.”

  “Why?” she said. “It is my choice.”

  Her agitation was palpable, however. The tail lashing was one thing, but her claws came out with a snick and the gun mounts at her sides coruscated.

  “I had originally thought you would have figured out this part of your mother’s past,” Hauth said. “In my interactions, however, it became clear that you had no idea. In all this time, then, you had no idea that your mother was a soldier, and that she had masters, and what kinds of orders they gave her.”

  My mother reared up to her full height. The ceiling was far above; nevertheless, her shadow fell over me like a shroud. “I don’t take orders from children,” she said to me, very quietly. “My masters were not that stupid. Adults are another matter. You were the last one. Your parents had put you in an ice-egg before they were obliterated; the other egglings didn’t survive. You slept for eons while I deliberated and gathered my strength. I thought enough time had passed that we could start over.”

  I had no weapon on me, nothing that had any chance of harming an entity of metal and shielded circuits. But I launched myself at Hauth anyway, then choked back a shriek as something slammed into me and knocked me aside: my mother’s tail.

  My side hurt and I couldn’t breathe. My mother stood between me and Hauth. She was crowned in blue fire, and she resembled nothing so much as a skeleton stitched together by sinew of shadows.

  “It won’t matter if you kill me,” Hauth said. “I am not an entity like you or your mother. My experience-sum is copied to alter-selves at regular intervals. The same mechanism suffices to distribute the chronicle.”

  It said something about Hauth that it expected an appeal of pure reason to sway me, and more about me that the appeal moved me not at all. The irony was that my mother and Hauth fundamentally agreed on the value of peace; but she would not impose it, while Hauth would. And Hauth now returned her hospitality with a threat. I could not forgive that.

  I did not know how to fight. I did not know how to use my fists or feet, or any of the guns or knives amenable to human hands. My teeth, as I had learned early in life, were practically useless. But Hauth’s remarks,
and my mother’s hints, had given me to understand that I had one weapon after all: my mother.

  “You were waiting for me to grow up all that time,” I said to her. “To see if you had raised me true.”

  She gave a terrible cry. For all the defenses the fortress boasted, she was its greatest one. “If you kill it,” she said in a tattered voice, “then we have nothing more in common. But I will not fight you either, weapon though I am.”

  “Then what will you do?” I said. I didn’t recognize my own voice. I might have been crying.

  “I stopped fighting so many years ago the number has no meaning to you,” she said. “I am not going to start again now. It is always possible, of course, that my imperatives are stronger than my ability to resist them even after all my edits, and that I will do as you order anyway.”

  She did not say: I thought I had taught you better than this. We were beyond that now.

  My hatred for Hauth was passionate and sharp-edged and did not hurt nearly so much as the grief in my mother’s eyes. I whirled and fled as fast as I could, down the corridors I had grown up in. No one came after me.

  * * *

  I could not go back to my mother after that. The fortress was closed to me now. I was given time to adjust to the idea that I was to leave. Only certain doors opened to me, for all that meals were provided, along with any other diversion I asked for.

  Eventually I came to a small ship, as beautiful as a flowerbud. When I finally brought myself to enter it, knowing that I must then depart for good, I found waiting for me a single cupcake decorated with azalea-pink frosting. I made myself eat it, and never managed to remember how it tasted.

  My exile was a centrifugal one. Any path was open to me except the one I wanted to take, curving back home. As you grow older, I will tell you of the times I almost died, and the lifetimes I spent in ancestral halls looking for mentions of my mother’s origins, however thready, not already discussed in Hauth’s chronicle. I took lovers who murmured poetry-of-absences into my dreams, and wept when I left them; I learned everything from surgery to cloud-gardening. One thing I never took up, however, was baking.