Asimov's Science Fiction (18 page)

"Bull honky.
Come on, kid. Let me show you something about the brave new worlds."

Kid.
I hobbled over to her ship.

"How did you find me?"

"Actually, you found me. Finally. Remember what I said about wanting? Not just sitting around all vague, but
doing
something with the want. Paul, it's like ringing the doorbell, what those automatics used to do. Except you did it with your mind. You did it with your
want.
I heard you and came through. I'm telling you, Paul, you're a natural. If you practice up you could find doors easy as me—easier, maybe. I can teach you, same way the future people taught me."

Which is when I realized it was Maggie I believed in. Maggie I
wanted.

But it was still too late. At forty-six I was hobbled, bent, in constant pain. I said,
"Look
at me. What am I supposed to do?"

Maggie took me over. "You're supposed to get in."

She helped me into the forward seat and secured my lap belt, careful not to cinch it too tight. I was really sweating, and that tin jag in my bowels ripped a wicked cross-stitch. Maggie placed her hand on my chest and spoke softly in my ear. Her touch calmed me. My breathing slowed down.

"You don't look so good, Paul. You got something you're taking for all that pain?"

"Yeah."

She patted my chest. The prescription bottle rattled in my breast pocket. Maggie reached for it, squinted at the label... then threw it away. I made a sound in my throat.

"Thing is, Paul, a world full of people can still be an empty world for the person who never made it. Sometimes a guy needs a friend to point the way out, is all." I nodded, trying not to think about the pain.

"Paul?" Her face was close to mine, those blue, blue eyes big and wide as the sky. "You're going to have to fly us through the door. I made it open, but it won't let you through, if you don't believe. I mean
really
believe. You weren't ready at Arlington, but this time you have to be. You hearing me, Paul?"

"I hear you."

She climbed in the rear seat. Before she started the engine I said, "Wait. What's out there, on the other side?"

"Something real good, where the pain goes away. The trick is to keep moving."

The engine coughed blue exhaust and the prop turned, caught, revved up. The racket was tremendous. The airframe shook like it wanted to pop rivets. Then it smoothed out and we started rolling. After a few seconds we rotated into the sky, hooked around, and roared toward a white cloud painted flat above the tree line. A rusty blood taste percolated in the back of my throat. Maggie slapped my shoulder and yelled, "It's your airplane!"

I took the stick. Suddenly the cloud looked like a drifty, cheesecloth thing, ordinary and ephemeral. I concentrated hard, concentrated around the pain and doubt, until I thought I could see the fire blue sky beyond. A surge of power traveled up my arm. My heart beat wildly, and the sky portal painted itself white and flat against the sky.

We passed into it, and there was no pain.

Gregory Norman Bossert grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and currently lives across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. His path between these points passed through Lisbon, Vienna, Northfield, Minnesota, Manhattan, Silicon Valley, and Berlin. Greg started writing in 2009 on a dare over pizza and beer, attended the 2010 Clarion Writer's Workshop, and published his first three stories in
Asimov's.
When not writing, he works in the film industry, currently at Industrial Light and Magic. More information on his writing, films, and music is available at
SuddenSound.com
and on his blog—
GregoryNormanBossert.com.
In the author's fourth tale for us, artists battling the revolution with their hearts and their hands reveal the terrifying weapon that can be sculpted with...

Leena turned the Augur Bird's head in thin scar-flecked fingertips. From needle beak to jagged-cut neck it was no longer than her palm; it trapped the light like pollen-clouded honey.

"It's so small," Nadin said, frowned and tugged on his heavy black braid. "Less owl, more hawk."

"With the new yeast drivers and your over-wound control coils, we can fit everything except the eyes back into the body. Better balance, and faster."

"It's sharp," Nadin said, still frowning.

"It will be when it's cast in metal," Leena said. Nadin put a finger out, as if to stroke the delicate curve of wax. Leena set it safely out of reach on her worktable.

"When it's cast," she repeated with a raised eyebrow, tiny gold rings flickering under a stray bang. She picked a scalpel from the jar and trimmed the wax where the neck would meet body with small deft slices.

Nadin linked his fingers behind his own neck in sympathy and shifted so he could look over her shoulder without blocking the light. As much as he could: his shadow was as wide as the window and stretched lengthwise across Leena's studio and the stacked crates of wax and metal to break amongst the slag and sand of the casting pit.

Leena marked a spot in the hard wax with a small brass pin. A white crescent creased under her thumbnail as she pushed. "You want sharp," she said, head almost down to the rough wood of the table, "check out the model of the new wing from Rakel."

"I don't want sharp," Nadin said and found the wing in the clutter of the table. It was a long thin curve of biofoam-layered brass with the merciless beauty of physics, scimitar-sharp.

"You've been saying for months now that the Birds need to be harder to catch."

"Which is why I've got them flying at street level now, and weaving," Nadin said. "No one's going to start shooting at head-height down Carthal Boulevard."

Leena looked back up at Nadin, dark eyes in a dark face. He shifted again until the light plated her face its natural bronze, but her eyes stayed dark. "The bounty is up to ten
marca
a bird, fifty if the message is intact. There are folks who'd shoot their neighbors for less. The militia's proof of that. Someone tries to grab one of these, they're losing fingers," she said, with a grin that dimpled the fang-curl of tattoo on her cheek. "And the
golethem...
"

" 'Sblood, girl, this won't even scratch a
golethe.
But it will take the bird for a weapon and come looking for those who made them."

Leena shrugged. "Who knows what a
golethe
will do? They're acting more random every day. Dragging Bidot to the Blue Tower for playing the concertina on a street corner?"

"For playing worksongs full of bold young navvies and starving lovers and fat 'Chemist overseers."

"So now the
golethem
are enforcing musical tastes? Anyway, you got a better idea for the wings, you can go—"

"Do it yourself," Nadin said along with her and she smiled and swept the wax trimming into the melt bucket.

"Not like we did this ourselves," he said. The clutter had somehow rearranged itself and Nadin had to clear a fresh spot on the table for the wing. "Strange to have other people working on the Birds. And who knows who's using them for messages now, and why." He tugged his braid again. "Not ours anymore."

She put her hand on his chest, leaving crumbs and smears of wax on his almost-clean shirt; she herself was rimed with wax and curled brass shavings and hide glue gone somewhat rank. She leaned into him and this time her eyes did catch the light.

"Feel like my wings, our wings, when they're flying, no matter who builds them," she said. "Like our bodies have gone brass and lost across the city."

He gently took her hand from his chest and set her upright on the stool, brushed some of the grime from her arm to reveal the riotous underlayer of tattoo. "Not lost. See, there's always a pattern underneath. Scattered, maybe, but not lost," he said.

Nadin's rooms were at the top of a long flight of wooden steps that clung to the outside of a patched and tottering mansion, a relic from the Halec Revival that itself clung to the low bluff that separated the river and the warehouses of the 4th
divisione
from the bistros and boutiques of the 10th and 12th. Leena leaned against the railing in swirls of spice and browned butter spilling from the roof vents and watched swallows flit in the afternoon light.

Nadin answered the door with a sleepy look and his finger in a book.

"If we could only make our Birds fly like that," she said.

"I'll settle for making them fly straight. I got a Bird from Courant today that missed my box entirely and flew in Mr. Nounat's kitchen window. Thank goodness it missed the soup."

"What did he have to say?"

"Oh, the usual, 'could be he reporting me to the militia' and 'aren't I too old for playing of toys' and 'why do crazy friends all stuck like pincushion walk up the stairs so loud' and then he gave me the Bird and a pot of the soup."

"He
could
report you to the militia, and anyway I meant Courant, not Mr. Nounant," Leena said and ducked under Nadin's arm through the door. She sprawled in Nadin's tattered leather wingback chair. "Mmmm, still warm."

"It was," he said mournfully.

"Plenty of room for both of us," she said and draped one leg over the chair's arm, patted the few free inches of seat-cushion with a wanton wiggle of her brows.

"Girl," he said with a shake of his head, both in exasperation and explanation, and sat at the book-laden kitchen table. "Courant wants an article for the
Gazette
on the history of the Fort Majore and the Congress of Militias."

Leena sighed and hung her head over the other arm to look at him upside down.

"The militias realized that their 'Chemist allies and the
golethem
make their weencie guns look limp, overcompensate with a wanking great building. There, you're done. Let's go to the Argile Rouge and eat."

"I've got Mr. Nounat's soup," Nadin said. "And this article might run with an essay from Pensecour, the philosopher, on the
golethem
and the extension of moral agency so perhaps I should do a
bit
of research."

"Okay, we'll eat soup and then go to the Argile for a bottle of wine." And when Nadin rolled his eyes she added, "You write better there anyway."

The soup proved to be a thick tomato with chickpeas and curry and they each had two bowls and scraped the pot clean with some bread, and then Nadin gathered a few books into his satchel and they strolled through the little alleys of the 4th toward Burthen Street and the Argile Rouge. The stone cobbles still held the sun's warmth though the days were shortening toward autumn and so they took the longer route past Leena's studio.

There was a Bird there from Rakel, a test of the new wing design, and another from Sobette with a clipping out of the
Evening Rebuke
headlined "Auger Birds: Art or Insurrection?"

"It's Augur with a 'u,' " Nadin grumbled.

"Better to keep 'you' out of it, and me," Leena pointed out. The article described the birds as "hatching from some unknown nest to become the latest craze among the artisans of the lower
divisione."

Nadin nodded glumly. "We've got to convince people to stop sending Birds in the daytime. And not to waste them on useless messages. Sobette's a dilettante."

Leena said, "Sobette is brilliant with trans-yeasts and programmed cultures. And he's been working against the 'Chemists for decades."

"Only because they kicked him out for being a reckless—"

They raised their heads together. They could hear the irregular clang and scrape of a
golethe's
tread in the street and then the bubbling of its yeast and cultures, the churning of its pistons and bladders. They held still until it lumbered past the studio door, heading west toward the river. Once it was quiet they got up and slipped outside with the sudden shared need for human company. The air was rank with the
golethe
's passing, the street slick where its tanks had overflowed.

They went a few blocks in silence and were almost to the café when Nadin said, "When did an idea that was too crazy and beautiful to possibly work turn into something serious?"

"The Birds are no more dangerous than your article for the
Gazette."

"Dangerous to the establishment or dangerous for us?"

"Exactly," Leena said and put her hand on the brass knob of the door to the Argile Rouge but turned to Nadin before pulling it open. "That's another thing the
Rebuke
got wrong. It's never art
or
insurrection."

Ma'am Roenard's Cuttlefish Cabaret was back at the Court Theater. Nadin got tickets from a professor at the Elysium—"have them, dear boy. We're all a bit... what was your word?
Sated
with the cephalopods"—and fluttered them in front of Leena's face as she squinted and prodded inside a tiny faceted eye. Ten minutes later they were on the street grabbing finger pies and shave ice on their way to the theater.

The show was not much changed from the last tour but neither of them minded; they breathed in the briny air and sighed it back out as the swimmers spiraled in shifting colors. " 'Sated with cephalopods,' " Leena muttered as the
pas de duex
began. Nadin nudged her silent; she captured his elbow and gripped it tight as the great Sepiida traced the lines of his partner's lithe arms and legs with tentacles of fleeting green and gold.

After the performance, the audience sipped chilled liqueurs in which drifted clouds of inky spice, and mingled with the performers, human and otherwise. Leena and Nadin floated through the crowd, bubbly with drink and delight, washed up against the big tank in which a dozen of the smaller cuttlefish tossed shades of blue and green back and forth.

"They're each other in colorspace," Nadin said.

Leena laughed and took Nadin's hand and hugged it to her chest. "In sculpting, chasing means buffing out the mold marks, the little imperfections. Evenings like this make me think there's a chance for..." She rubbed her cheek against his knuckles, propped her chin there and blinked at the cuttlefish through her own reflection. "... for the city," she said after a bit.