Asimov's Science Fiction (21 page)

She still had his hands in hers, and she shook them gently. "Made by these hands," she said and Nadin could not think how to tell her that they two were the only ones who would see her hands as human.

It was one of those days of early spring where the air was cool and softly damp, but the sunlight sharp and suggestive, and your mood changed as you passed from one to the other and back. Leena was sitting at one of the outside tables at the Argile Rouge. Nadin almost passed her by; she had a cloche hat pulled down to her eyebrows and a neckcloth knotted over a buttoned white shirt and woolen waistcoat. She struck a pose in response to Nadin's double-take, chin up and shoulders back like the models in the
Evening Rebuke
's fashion plates, nodded toward the other chair.

"Auditioning for a play? A job as a mannequin at Moda?" Nadin guessed.

"Hoping to pick up a date."

"Anyone in mind?"

"I'm not particular," Leena said and batted her eyelashes, but she was smoothing a pair of pale grey gloves against the tabletop, the tips of her metal fingers leaving grooves in the thin leather.

Nadin took a glass from the next table, leaned past her for the carafe of wine. "So?" he asked quietly.

"I went to meet Albert Courant at the Bistro Indènt about his One-Way Birds."

Nadin grimaced and looked around for listeners. "I know, I know, we said we'd deliver next week. I think I've got the guidance problems solved, as long as his correspondents or whistle-blowers or whoever launch them from inside the inner twenty
divisiones.
They should be untraceable." Leena was shaking her head and Nadin rolled his eyes and said, "Less traceable than the damned PneuPost."

But Leena put her hand on his, cold brass against dark sun-warmed skin, leaned in and said, "They took Pensecour. A
golethe
took him out of the Indènt and across the Plana d'Oss and put him in a cage."

"Pensecour the philosopher?" Nadin asked, confused and too loud. "But I was just reading an essay of his in the
Gazette."
He patted his pockets, pulled out the crumpled broadsheet and flattened it against the table as if it were a counter-evidence. "He was writing against the riots in the 9th, against violent protest of any sort. Why would they take
him?"
He paged through the paper in search of the essay.

"Golethem
don't say 'why.' They don't say anything. Nadin, it took him while I was
there,"
Leena said and Nadin pushed the paper away and stared at her, but she was looking down at her hand with her mouth twisted in disgust. "I've never been that close. It was so big, and the smell... It didn't even notice us, it just filled the room and we got...
displaced
with the furniture and the air. I could see into one of its tanks, I thought it was copper gone green but it was glass and the cultures inside... Sobette has nothing like that. Old. Old and wrong and rotten." She looked up at him. "It dragged Pensecour out by the leg and put him in a cage alongside the rioters and rapists. He won't last a week."

He took a deep breath and another and realized he was expecting the soured beer and hot brass of the
golethem
in the spring air. He looked around again but no one was near; even the street was empty. "Were there 'Chemists with it? Militia? Were you seen?"

Leena shook her head again but said, "There's always someone watching." Her hand was shaking, the onyx claws that were her fingernails digging into Nadin's palm, but looking into her eyes he realized it was not fear but rage.

It was night and there were birds lying in the street, some of theirs and some of the kind with feathers that trailed blood instead of yeast and had been shot down incidentally. Nadin saw one of Courant's One-Way Birds outside the Argile Rouge; one wing was missing and the other beat a staccato rhythm against the cobbles. Somehow its acid vial had not broken and its message scrolled out of its body, an auspex for anyone to read. He kicked it into the curb without breaking stride and it shuddered to a stop, the message drowned in the dreck of the gutter.

There was more than bird's blood in the street, and other bearers of auspices. Rakel and some of his fellow students from the Elysium were outside the hardware store on Asmuth Street loading a trailer with shovels and buckets. The Picnic Protests against Pensecour's arrest had finally crumbled into violence. The 9th
divisione
was aflame, they said, and the militia had fled. They urged Nadin to come help fight the fires, but he shook his head. Rakel caught Nadin's arm, pulled him aside. "It's paraff in that's burning, and kerosene. I saw more barrels of it being taken up Carthal Boulevard to the 18th." The d'Anon estate was in the 18th, where the Boulevard wound around trees that had been there before the road had been laid. When Nadin reached the lower buildings along the river he could see those trees burning all the way up the hillside, and the bells of the Blue Tower were ringing.

The door of Leena's studio was open. Nadin's toe caught a PneuPost cylinder on the floor and it spun across the floor and into the casting pit. A few birds lay open on the workbench, a message in Sobette's splotted scrawl fluttered in the breeze from the door. The crates of Birds that had been stacked along the walls were gone. As was Leena's not
-golethe,
the stands and cables that had held it torn and scattered on the ground.

Leena was not there.

Nadin stopped and squatted, one hand up on the workbench for support and the other on the floor. His vision blurred and blackened but his sense of smell was stubborn and he was unable at first to free a hand to cover his nose and mouth. There was the copper tang of brass and bronze and the flat iron stink of blood and the beer belch of living yeast and the stench of things no longer living. He managed to lift his hand from the floor to his face but it was no help, it was fouled because the floor was covered with the contents of vats and bottles and of a human body. Impossible that Leena's thin form could have held that much, Nadin thought with a strange sort of hope, impossible that someone could be
emptied
so thoroughly without rending the building as well. But the room was barely disturbed, no more than it ever was when Leena was deep in a project, and the footprints that had tracked red and grey and the bubbling yellow of yeast out the door were huge and in no way human.

Those footprints drew him back into the street and then the crowd took him up and he was lost for a while. Someone started singing an old drinking song, "Scatter your seed, John Barley," and then everyone was singing it but there were new verses that Nadin did not know, nor did half the crowd it seemed, so the song scattered down diverging paths. Someone said that Pensecour was dead in his cage, which seemed likely, and others that the Blue Tower had fallen, which did not. "Listen, listen," the word spread, and for a moment they all stopped and did just that, hundreds, maybe thousands standing still on Burthen Street and the only sound was their breath and their hearts and the swish of Augur Birds overhead. The bells of the Blue Tower had fallen silent.

Nadin decided then to go up the hill to the d'Anon estate and find Frans. He would not have abandoned his mother, and the Marquesa d'Anon would not have abandoned her estate; that seemed sure if anything did.
I would save the people I love,
he thought. But it was almost impossible to move counter to the flow on the main streets, and if the side streets and alleys were less crowded the people there were more unpredictable and many of them were armed. Nadin was somewhere in the 6th
divisione,
and he thought his best chance of getting out of the lower city was to pass through the Plana d'Oss and from there onto the wide boulevards of the 14th. The mob at first obliged and ebbed toward the Plana, where a new rumor had Pensecour leading the sack of the Blue Tower. But then word spread that Fort Majore was surrounded and protected only by militia—the
golethem
had pulled back to the Towers of the guilds—and the tide shifted south toward the river.

Nadin swore and fought the crowd, and finally had to risk the side streets; when challenged he cited the Augur Birds or the Viscount d'Anon depending on the accents of the challengers, the cut of their clothes.

In a little square behind the Agricultural School he stumbled onto a scene that seemed nonsensical at first: a
golethe
sprawled in a fountain, the metal of its vast torso torn and crumpled like cloth. Its vats and tubing were tumbled out and empty and the fountain—a sculpture of Spring as a maiden bearing an armful of grains—spewed a foul-smelling grey foam. A few dozen people, some of them families with children, stood solemn and silent in the square. "Who did this? What did this?" Nadin asked; some lowered their eyes and others stared at him but no one spoke. After a minute he ducked his head in awkward acknowledgment and passed on.

There were
golethem
in the Plana d'Oss as well, but they were whole and on their feet. There were uniformed militia as well, and some who had the arms but not the uniforms; they were taking occasional shots at each other with no apparent regard for state of dress. Many of the cages that had lined the Plana and had held those condemned to slow death were down and broken on the cobbles, their burden of bones scattered. Nonetheless, the square seemed strangely calm to Nadin after the mobbed streets and tense barricaded alleys. The tables and chairs of the Picnic Protest stood about, some still covered with checkered tablecloths and plates of food. Nadin paused by one such and ate a piece of bread from a basket, feeling nothing at all for a moment beyond a vague sense of hunger.

There was an Auger Bird on the table. Nadin picked it up: it was of a type he had never seen, hand-made, not based on Leena's and his designs but something new. Its head was missing, and Nadin looked about for it, saw it crushed on the ground maybe ten feet away and standing over it a
golethe.

Despite Leena's description of the
golethe
in the Bistro Indènt, despite seeing the broken one in the fountain, despite a lifetime of anticipating their stink and heavy steps, the sight of the thing standing that near was shocking. I haven't really
looked
at one since that first time as a boy, Nadin thought. It was half again as tall as him. Its knees were higher than its hips, its feet huge and turned out instead of forward. The bronze torso was vast and asymmetrical; if there was any logic to the shape, it was obscured by protruding vats and intakes and decades of corrosion and the dribble of corrupted yeasts. Two massive arms hung from either side. There was no head, just a cluster of valves.

The
golethe
had caught a man by the arm, and the man's other arm was held by a second
golethe
that faced the other way and seemed oblivious to the first. The man hung suspended between the two and kicked weakly at first one and then the other as he was tugged about. Nadin started that way with only the bird in his hand, but a group came from somewhere behind him, well armed and dressed in the green jackets and caps of the Mechanics High School, and began firing at the
golethem.
The shots rang and ricocheted around the suspended man, and Nadin shouted at them to take care but the sound of the guns was too loud.

The table next to him began to jerk and shudder across the cobblestones, shedding its plates and cups and stained blue cloth, moving for all the world like some squat wooden
golethe,
and Nadin stared at it for a few seconds before realizing that it was being driven by the bullets that were streaming around him. This was not the rebound of the students' shots; a group of militia, down the hill from the 18th
divisione
by their uniforms, was standing a dozen paces away and shooting with arguably poor accuracy but great determination. There was a dull throb in Nadin's thigh and a sharp stinging all across his back as if from a hundred splinters. The numbness that had overtaken him shattered so suddenly and thoroughly that he thought the militiamen must have heard it because their faces had gone white and wide-eyed over the sights of their rifles; he saw that as he ran toward them screaming his rage and brandishing the headless bird like a weapon.

Arms wrapped around him, impossibly strong, lifted him up off his feet and turned him away toward the edge of the Plana with the
pang
and chime of bullets on metal and the smell of yeast all around, not the stale stink of the
golethem
but the tart warmth of rising bread. He struggled against the arms, which were carbon black and tattooed in woven bronze and ended in thin fingers that curved like bird wings and were tipped in onyx claws, and managed to twist himself around and look up into the calm face with its dark faceted eyes and eyebrows of looped gold.

"Leena?"

"Nadin."

" 'Sblood, girl," but that wasn't right anymore for that great voice, this broad chest. "What have you done? The floor of your studio. Your body."

"My
body," it said. "Lost wax."

The voice was deep and thrummed through his chest like the fallen bells of the Blue Tower, but it was Leena's voice nonetheless. They had reached the shelter of the roads that led up the hill but the long legs did not stop, the arms still held him, too strong to throw off. "Hush. It's okay," she said.

The author tells us she began writing this first tale for us in 2010, during her stay at the Clarion Writers Workshop, but couldn't bring herself to finish it for almost two years. "While the story and characters are entirely fictitious, there are snippets of truth in it. My father did instill in me a great love for science fiction (although he devoured Phillip K. Dick, not Michael Moorcock), for which I can never thank him enough, and he has grappled with epilepsy for fifteen years." Readers can find more of Leah's work in
Futuredaze: An Anthology of YA Science Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Ideomancer,
and
Weird Fiction Review.