CLOCKWORK PHOENIX 2: More Tales of Beauty and Strangeness (12 page)

Her mate was gone from his plinth. Only the stumps of his legs remained. Her stomach convulsed, she dry-retched. The dust in her palm felt like ash.

She crossed the space to the plinth at a faltering run, tripping once but catching herself, the ground turned unsteady beneath her. She slowed, had to force her feet to take her around the plinth, visions of her hand shattering on the cobbles replaying before her eyes.

She heaved again, this time with a sob of bittersweet relief. Her mate lay on a bed of briars, broken off whole above the knees, his left arm raised plaintive to the sky. Scars from magic fire pocked the length of his right side, a finger gone from the hand and his ear ruined in the mess along his neck and jaw. She sank to her knees beside him.

She caressed his undamaged cheek with her stump. Her fist ached, closed tight around the angel’s dust.

Her hand shook as she held it over his chest.

She lowered her arm.

Unbidden, her stump brushed the necklace at her throat.

“Pearl,” she whispered.

She wondered where Cassiann was, if he was safe.

Her clenched fingers began to cramp in the cold. Snowflakes drifted down. Her gaze fell on black stone shards, still lying where her stone hand had slipped her grasp. She looked at the broken stumps of her mate’s legs. Could she do it to him? Bring him into this world, a cripple?

Could she not?

Made to adore him.

But did that mean she had no choice? She thought of Cassiann’s gentleness, his kindness. Cassiann had made a choice: to leave, and live, when his compulsion would have bid him stay with her and die. His choice must have hurt him, but he had made it even so, and he was better for it.

The East Road
, he’d said.
To the mountains
.

But did she want to follow? Did she need to? Her gaze fell on the soldiers, over by the tower gate. What better did Cassiann offer but a measure of gentleness?

Live
, he had bid her. She touched the roll of her waistband, felt the key still there.

Pearl bent and touched her lips to cold stone. She tasted the salt warmth of her own tears. Gritting her teeth against a cry, she pushed herself away, and up.

She touched the roll of her waistband, felt the key still there. With unsteady steps, she walked from the plaza.

Glittering dust trailed from her fingers. Poppies sprang from the cobbles in her wake.

Ann Leckie

After the terrible push to be free of the Earth was past, we could stand again. In a while, the engineers had said, everything would float, but for now we were still accelerating. We were eight in the small, round room, though there were others on the sky-boat—engineers, and nest-guardians examining the eggs we had brought to see how many had been lost in the crushing, upward flight. But we eight stood watching the world recede.

The floor and walls of the room were of smooth, gold metal. Around the low ceiling was a pattern of cycad fronds and under this scenes from the histories. There was the first mother, ancestor of us all, who broke the shell of the original egg. The picture showed the egg, a single claw of the mother piercing that boundary between Inside and Outside. With her was the tiny figure of her mate. If you are from the mountains, you know that he ventured forth and fed on the carcass of the world-beast, slain by the mother, and in due time found the mother and mated with her. If you are a lowlander, he waited in the shell until she brought the liver to him, giving him the strength to come out into the open. Neither was pictured—the building of the sky-boat had taken the resources of both mountains and lowlands.

On another panel was Strong Claw, her sharp-toothed snout open in a triumphant call. She stood tall on powerful legs, each foot with its arced killing claw, sharp and deadly. Her arms stretched out before her, claws spread, and her long, stiff tail stretched behind. The artists had worked with such skill that every feather could be distinguished. Behind her was the great tree that had carried her across the sea, and in the water were pictured its inhabitants: coiled ammonites, hungry sharks, and a giant mososaur, huge-mouthed enough to swallow a person down at a gulp. Before Strong Claw was forested land, full of food for the hunting, new territory for her and her daughters yet unhatched.

A third panel showed the first sky-boat departing for the moon that had turned out to be farther away than our ancestors ever imagined. That voyage had been a triumph—the sky-boat (designed, all were ceaselessly told, by lowlander engineers) had achieved a seemingly impossible goal. But it had also been a disaster—as the mountain engineers had predicted, and the lowlanders refused to believe until the last, irrefutable moment, there had been no air on the moon. But as we had now set our sights on Mars, the artist had left off the end of the tale, to avoid ill-omen.

The engineers had used mirrors to cast an image of the Earth on the last, blank panel of the curved wall. It was this that held our attention.

As we watched, disaster struck. A sudden, brilliant flash whited out the image for an instant, and after that an expanding ring began to spread across the face of the world, as though a pebble had been dropped into a pond. Almost instantly a ball of fire rose up from the center of the ripple and expanded outward, obscuring it. I blinked, slowly, deliberately, sure that my vision was at fault. Still the fire grew until finally it dissipated, leaving a slowly-expanding veil of smoke.

There was silence in the sky-boat for some time.

Out of the speaking tube came the quiet voice of an engineer in the chamber below us. “A great stone from the void.” There are many such, it seems, but no song speaks of them, no history tells us what happens when one strikes the Earth. This would not hinder the engineers, who are full of predictions and calculations.

“I was not informed,” said White Ring into the tube. She was facing the image, her back to us. “Why?”

“We did not know,” came the faint voice of the engineer.

“Do we not watch the skies?”

“The skies are vast. The stones are dark. We might have seen it if we looked in precisely the right place, at the right time. Or perhaps not.”

“And now?”

Around me, not a feather stirred. “The cloud will continue to expand. The impact will leave a crater.” Here the voice hesitated. “My colleague thinks perhaps twenty-five to thirty-five leagues wide, though I believe she has miscalculated the object’s size. Perhaps forty-five to sixty leagues.” White Ring’s killing claw clicked on the floor. “I have not calculated how long it will take the cloud to disperse,” the engineer continued. “I fear it will grow to cover the whole world. There may be fires as rocks fall back down to the ground. It hit water, so—”

“Silence!” ordered White Ring. “How far will the damage reach?”

A moment of silence from the tube. “It depends,” came the voice, slowly, carefully. “On how thick the cloud is, and how long it stands between the Earth and the Sun. And if there are fires. And other things we haven’t calculated yet.”

For just a moment White Ring’s feathers ruffled as though a breeze had stirred them. Nearly every other face was turned towards the view of Earth, but I looked at her, sidelong, without moving my snout. I felt the muscles in my back and my legs tense, and I forced them to relax lest the click of my largest claw on the deck betray my thoughts.

“We must go back,” White Ring said. Snouts turned towards her in surprise. She turned her head to look behind her, and then turned fully, her daughter ducking low to avoid her tail. Others in the ring ducked and turned so that all who had faced forward could face the center of the circle. “We can stay above until the cloud disperses, and then land.”

“
Can
we go back?” One of the younger females.

“We must,” said White Ring, her tone admitting no dispute. “This venture was risk enough with the world safe behind us. If we are the only ones left alive . . . ”

White Ring’s daughter called through the speaking tube, and an answer came back. “We might be able to, if we act soon enough. We will have to make some calculations. But . . . ”

“Make them,” said White Ring. Her daughter eyed the rest of us, watching.

They had told us that leaving the Earth would be difficult. Three of our number had died in the punishing climb. But all of us standing here had survived it. Could those so silent and still around me be willing to throw that away, to throw away everything we had worked for? It seemed so.

The engineer had said
If we act soon enough
. A question of fuel, no doubt. If I did not speak up now, the time would be gone.

But here was my difficulty: every other person in the room was a lowlander. The superiority of mountain optics had ensured that some of the engineers aboard were highlanders, but I was one of only two surviving who was not either an engineer or an egg tender. If I spoke now, no one else would speak in support of me, unless they were completely convinced of my argument. Or unless I killed White Ring, in which case they would likely follow me out of fear if nothing else. But as things stood, I would not be allowed even to strike.

But I am no coward. “We must
not
go back,” I said.

My neighbors sidled away, as far as they could in the cramped space, claws clicking on the metal floor. I stood face to face with White Ring.

“I hear nothing,” said White Ring. Her killing claw tapped once, twice.

“This ship won’t be built again,” I said, “not in our lifetimes. Look!” I gestured at the picture with one clawed finger, at the still-spreading smoke. “Will we reach Mars, or will we die having made all this effort and accomplished nothing?”

White Ring looked around the circle, watching the faces and the demeanor of the others. I did not dare take my eyes off her to make the same survey. “I hear nothing,” she said again.

“Coward! You disgrace our ancestors!”

Instantly White Ring’s neck snaked forward and she snapped her teeth together a breath from my neck. I stood still as stone.

“Will you challenge me?” White Ring hissed. “At this time? Is your ambition so great?”

I would not allow my feathers to lift, or flutter. I would not allow a single twitch that I did not intend. “Did Strong Claw turn back?” I asked. I would have pointed to the picture, but I did not wish to move.

“She knew all was well behind her,” said White Ring. “If none survive on Earth, and we die attempting Mars, what then?”

“We don’t know there’s air to breathe where we’re going,” said the daughter beside White Ring, when I didn’t answer. “There was none on the moon.”

“What a wonder this is! You lowlanders disbelieved when the engineers from the mountains said there was no air on the moon. Now you disbelieve when you are told that Mars certainly has an atmosphere.”

“Bent light,” White Ring began, her voice scornful.

“There is more than just the bending of light to prove it. There are plants, the astronomers have said so. We see them wax and wane with the seasons. There is no reason to think that Mars will not be much like Earth.”

“The astronomers are not all agreed. Not even those from the mountains.”

“But you have staked your life on it,” I pointed out.

“While other lives were sure to continue,” said White Ring. “What if everyone else is dead?”

“Then they are dead because Earth is now unlivable,” I said. “And in that case, why turn back?”

“I know your ambition of old,” said White Ring. “I had not thought you would exercise it at a time like this.”

My feathers twitched then, I couldn’t avoid it. I allowed them to tremble and rise. White Ring and her daughter watched me with malice, the other five with fear, or perhaps something else.

The moment stretched out. Time—time might be an enemy or an ally. Prolong the contention, and the moment to turn back would have passed. Allow the return to begin, and there would be only a short space, if any at all, in which it would be possible to correct our course.

“You call me ambitious,” I said, “and I am. I would reach Mars! Did any of us embark without a similar ambition? But now you abandon what we have all worked so hard to attain! And when I point this out, I am threatened. Why is this? If one of you,” and here I pointed around the circle, “had spoken, would this have been the response?” Had I seen movement among the others? Someone about to speak, some thoughtful twitch of feathers? “You may kill me if you like, as I am clearly outnumbered. But it will not change the truth.”