Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (4 page)

“Will you wait for the builders?” Kami asked.

“Yes,” Julian yelled. “Please.”

Kami placed a hand upon the mast. His entire arm sunk into the wood, as did his legs and chest, until his whole body melted into the mast. Lightning speared across the sky. With a thunderous crack it struck the mast and split it down the middle. The half nearest Julian separated from the ship and toppled into the sea.

Julian dove in after it.

***

Sand coated the right side of Julian’s face and body. He pushed to a sitting position and vomited salt water and a green slimy bile that left a syrupy taste in his mouth. He took in his surroundings, wondering where he was and how he got there. The sand on the beach reflected a blinding sun and stretched for miles in either direction, framed by a forest.

Then he remembered.

The storm. The sea.
The mast.

“Kami!” Julian struggled to his feet and shouted for Kami in every direction. His gaze rested on the forest. Something looked off about it, as though it were…false. He thought he might retch again when he realized the problem. Perfect rows of tall, straight trees spaced exactly twenty feet apart. All types, from hickory to coconut to balsam fir.

A balsam fir. Here?

Julian staggered to the nearest pine and stroked its needles with a tentative finger. Its waxy softness sent chills through him.

“The Island of Hope. Kami’s island.”

Julian ran from the trees until his feet soaked in the calm sea. The effort had him heaving. What had he done, made a pact with the devil herself?

You’re still alive. Act like you want to live.

Julian breathed deeply and closed his eyes, secretly wishing that once he opened them the nursery would be gone.
Nursery?
Thoughts of harvesting and cutting filled his mind. They soothed him, allowed him to think more clearly.

The fear he felt about the trees subsided. If he opened himself to them, he could almost feel them—an awkward kinship.

Only friends I got since Kami….

Julian allowed a distorted memory of Kami to flash into his mind. When Kami merged with the mast, just before the lightning struck. Then the memory was gone, banished until a time when Julian might better understand.

He flopped down at the edge of the nursery by an elm sapling.

***

Julian was content to sit for hours, for days. His skin grew dark and scabby. He wasn’t surprised when his feet disappeared into the sand—his toes spreading roots into the ground. On cloudy days he became hungrier than when the sun shone brightly. He felt the touch of his neighbors’ roots after a few months as they massed around his ankles and traveled up through his calves. After a few years, he stood as tall as the elm.

Then one day billowing sails appeared on the horizon. Four ships arrived. The builders had finally come.

Julian rejoiced at the first scratching of their saw blades. As they harvested him, they told him how he would be going back to sea. And this time he’d have his own ship.

Copyright © 2007 by Heidi Ruby Miller

********************************************

Eric Flint is the bestselling author of more than 50 books of science fiction, the former editor of
Jim Baen’s Universe
, and the current publisher and editor of the
Grantville Gazette.

--------------

A SOLDIER’S COMPLAINT

by Eric Flint

I don’t care what the genetic engineers say, I think it’s a bad idea.

I didn’t mind the rats, once I got used to them. (Yes, yes, I know—they’re not rats, they’re engineered from primitive insectivore stock. Only genetic engineers would know the difference. They look like rats, don’t they? So as far as we grunts are concerned, they’re rats.)

The truth is, most human soldiers get along fine with the rats. First of all, rats have a dark and pessimistic view of life, which any foot soldier can appreciate. From the first day, they fit right into the gripe sessions, predicting doom and disaster like seasoned veterans.

Maybe a little too much on the grim side, your rats. Even by grunt standards. Personally, I think it comes from ancient racial memories of being the favorite prey of practically every small carnivore in creation. But when I raised the idea with Corporal Laughs-At-Digitigrades (and don’t ask me why rats insist on these silly names—we just call him Lad for short) he immediately sneered. Well, actually, he wriggled his whiskers in that particular mode which conveys “sneer” better than any human sneer ever could.

“What a lot of crap,” he chittered. He took a hefty swig from his stein. (And that’s another thing I like about rats—they’ve got a proper appreciation for brew. Not like this new bunch! But I’ll come to that in a moment.)

He made a big production of wiping the beer off his whiskers. Then he leaned back in his chair and emitted that disgusting bray which rats have instead of a laugh. It’s their worst characteristic, in my book. The sound is bad enough, but the sight of those huge yellow incisors!

“Humans are so stupid.”

“We invented you, didn’t we?” I grumbled.

“Your only intelligent move, in a racial lifetime of blunders. It’s like they say—put a monkey in front of a typewriter long enough, and eventually he’ll write all of Shakespeare’s plays.”

I didn’t get offended. Before they integrated our battalion, they gave us lectures on how to get along with rats. Stripped of the psychobabble, the gist of it was: don’t get offended. Even if they are a lot of offensive rodents.

“The fact is, Sergeant Johnson,” he continued, “rats never gave a thought to predators. We had the world on the run! Any biologist will tell you that. The most successful order of mammals ever known—the rodents. And the rats were the most successful of the rodents.”

Another sneering twitch of the whiskers.

“Humans are so stupid! Always worrying about lions and sharks and crocodiles. Ha! Between the diseases we spread around and the famine we caused by gobbling up your food, we rats bumped off a thousand times more of you monkeys-with-delusions-of-grandeur than all the predators in the world put together. Kings of creation, the rats. Think we lost any sleep worrying over cats and owls? Ha! Sure, they’d catch one of us now and again. So what? The way we breed?”

He finished off his beer. “I mean, look at them!” He gestured with his snout toward the corner where a handful of mutated felines were sitting at a table. One of the cats caught Corporal Lad’s eye, and he chittered at him. The cat looked away, hunching his shoulders.

“Make love, not war—that’s the ratly road to triumph.” He emitted a great belch and chittered for more beer. The falconoid running the bar stumped over with another pitcher. The big bird avoided the corporal’s eyes. I hate to admit it, but the truth is that once the rats arrived they terrorized the cats and the birds to the point where all the predators are good for is being mess orderlies.

“The rats don’t fight fair.” That’s the complaint you always hear from predators. “They gang up on you.”

And what can you say? It’s true. That’s why rats make such good soldiers and predators don’t. You put a cat or a raptor on a battlefield and the silly bastards right off start trying to engage the insects in honorable single combat. An insect’s idea of single combat is let’s you and my swarm fight. God only knows what their notion of honor is. Doubt if they have one, actually. The universe’s great pragmatists, the bugs.

It’s odd, really, how the whole thing turned out. When the bugs invaded the earth (they started in Poland, naturally—do those people ever get a break?), and after the Umpires of the Galaxy intervened and explained that weapons were forbidden in ecological warfare for bizarre theological reasons that nobody’s ever been able to figure out (but there’s no point arguing about it, as the Umpires made clear when they nuked Paris and Butte, Montana—and why Butte, anyway? Paris I can understand), the genetic engineers right away charged out and mutated cats and dogs and bears and owls and falcons.

Disaster followed upon disaster. The bugs made mincemeat out of the mutated predators in no time. Oh, sure, the predators look great. But the simple truth is that they make worthless soldiers. No discipline. No sense of teamwork. And talk about lazy! A cat’ll kill one bug and sleep the rest of the day. And the raptors are so disgruntled over the fact that they can’t fly because they’re too big that they don’t do much except sulk and write letters to the editor.

Yeah, things were looking bad for the home team until Professor Whitfield finally convinced SACRECOEUR (Supreme Allied Command, Reunified, Ecowar Europe—the French insisted on the acronym; like I said, I can understand nuking Paris) that they were approaching the whole problem upside down.

In his words, which have become as famous as e=mc
²
: “To kill bugs, breed bugkillers.”

Naturally, the idiot geneticists started off by engineering giant intelligent frogs. “Intelligent frog” is an oxymoron. Not only do the amphibious dopes stay in one place waiting for a bug to come within reach of their tongues (which they never do, because there’s nothing wrong with
their
brains, which you’d expect from a collection of species that mastered interstellar travel), but the frogs can only fight when it’s warm. And since the bugs aren’t really bugs, but a group of species which descended on some far distant planet from a rootstock of warm-blooded arthropods, they just waited until the sun went down and—voila! Frog legs for dinner. That’s how we lost the Ukraine.

So then the geneticists charged out and—well, that’s when the jokes got started. You know the ones:

“How many genetic engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Eleven—one to do the work, and the other ten to figure out why it doesn’t have a double helix.”

“What’s the definition of a virgin genetic engineer? A nerd with too many pocket protectors.”

My personal favorite: “Why did the genetic engineer cross the road? To get to the other slide.”

Fortunately for the vertebrate world, Professor Whitfield came to the rescue again. His immortal words:

“To fight low, think low.”

Bingo. We got the rats, the rats started breeding, and we stopped the invasion in its tracks. Natural soldiers, rats. Born bug-killers. And, like I said, not bad guys once you get to know them.

But enough’s enough. I hate to say it, as much as I admire Professor Whitfield (and who doesn’t?), but I think his latest idea is just plain goofy.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all the arguments.

“The greatest insectivores in the entire history of the vertebrate phylum.” “The greatest night fighters ever produced by evolution.” Blah, blah, blah.

That may all be true. Probably is—I’ll admit these new guys are a terror on the battlefield. The bugs won’t even move at night, anymore.

But I don’t care. Study your history and you’ll find that it’s always the morale factor that ultimately prevails in warfare. Don’t take my word for it—read Clausewitz. Or Napoleon.

And these new guys are just wrecking the Army’s morale. This is not shape prejudice! Sure, the new bunch are uglier than sin, but that’s not the problem. The rats are ugly too—but do I care? Not in the slightest. Some of my best friends are rats.

The problem isn’t the way the new guys look. It’s their lousy sense of humor.

That’s all, you say? All right, smart-ass civilian. Let’s see you get any sleep at night, lying in your bunk, with the new guys hanging from the rafters, chuckling and chortling, telling the same stupid joke over and over again:

“I vant to trink your bludd.”

Copyright © 2007 by Eric Flint

********************************************

Laurie Tom is the winner of the 2010 Writers of the Future Gold Prize. She’s recently been published in Solaris Rising, Penumbra, and Story Portals.

--------------

THE HELD DAUGHTER

by Laurie Tom

I realized that Heaven had a different fate in store for me when Imperial Father married off my younger sister while I was still unwed. The celebration was held at the Palace of the Tranquil Sea, where the waters of the southern ocean lapped at sandy beaches and the dragons could easily climb from the surf to give their blessings. Guests consumed meat and wine, and tried not to look my way, to look at Fourth Princess with only a guardian lion at her feet and attendants for company.

Sek-fung’s fur was not the coarse stone it appeared to be, though, and I rubbed her shoulders vigorously as an excuse to ignore the questioning glances that people gave when they thought I could not see. Stone lions did not judge and she did not know this celebration from another. She lay her head at my feet, bored.

“Don’t worry, Fourth Princess,” said Mung-laan, who had been my attendant since we were thirteen. “I am certain the Emperor is being particularly careful with your marriage.”

But even when we returned to the imperial palace, he did not speak of marriage, either to me or my mother. Imperial Father was old, and no matter how many concubines he took, had produced no children beyond the fifth princess, and no sons at all. Mother folded her hands confidently and told me to be sure to keep the Emperor’s favor. Though unlikely, it was not impossible to think that he would still manage a son, and that would ruin my chances. Mother was only an imperial concubine, but still she dared hope that one day she would be Empress Dowager regardless if her issue had been a girl instead of a boy.

It helped that I was born a geomancer and blessed by the Five Gods with command over the elements. Most emperors were geomancers. It was easier to claim the favor of Heaven that way.

But I was only sixteen and my situation could change, so I resolved only to be a dutiful daughter, come what may. As Emperor, my father had many things to consider. He made decisions like a farmer grows rice. My future was but one patch of the land he tended.

Since my younger sister’s marriage, Imperial Father bade me to sit whenever he spoke with his ministers. He showed me the petitions that came to the capital from across the Kwanese Empire and tested me on what I read, asked if I understood. Eunuch Lei told me in private that the Emperor had said I was the brightest of his daughters. Imperial Father said nothing to me himself.

When I was twenty, the eunuchs and maids bowed to me deeper than they had when Fifth Princess was still unwed, but sometimes I caught them unaware in the midst of gossip. The Emperor is still trying, they said, when they thought I could not hear. He must be very anxious. Maybe one of the new concubines will do better. But for now poor Princess Gwan-yu has to wait.

A proper emperor wants a son, a Crown Prince who will take his place as
wongdai
when his time is done. But if one isn’t born, the Emperor cannot be without an heir. He cannot marry off all his daughters where they will honor the ancestors of their husbands and leave no child for himself and his own.

Everyone in the palace knew why he could not arrange my marriage. He still hoped for a son, and so I would have to wait until he no longer wished to try. Sometimes I would hear of other daughters held back from marriage while their fathers tried for sons. Then when no son was born, their fathers would arrange for a groom to marry into their family. The groom’s children would bear his bride’s name so there would still be someone to continue the family line and honor the family’s ancestors.

But my father was the Emperor. A man with just a wife could only try for so long before his wife would leave her childbearing years. My father took new concubines every few years in hope of a son. I could wait a very long time.

I was twenty-two the first time I traveled to the northern territories. Every other year Imperial Father would take a retinue of courtiers with him to keep ties with our nomadic cousins, to camp in tents like our ancestors and remember what it was like before our armies swept through Kwan and made this country ours. They would be out there for weeks.

Imperial Father requested I accompany him. I would have to learn, just in case.

My days were spent sitting quietly behind a low-slung table in the largest tent, listening to Imperial Father praise the virtues of living on the steppes and hearing the Hangul clan leader compliment the skill and fortitude of my father’s servants. Though we slept in tents, we lay in beds with blankets and there was tea and sweet meats enough to last throughout our stay. The servants, long accustomed to such biennial sojourns, had prepared well.

Our only cause for worry came the time it rained and we thought the camp would flood. The geomancers in Imperial Father’s retinue streamed out around the perimeter, calling on the strength of their prayers to move the earth and water to dig trenches and form new rivers around us. But the ground was hard and would not yield.

Imperial Father strode out of his tent and glared out into the rain, with one of the eunuchs scrambling behind him to hold an umbrella over his head. The Emperor’s gaze swept over the soggy camp and he barked a command for the geomancers to clear a space for him. I watched from the opening flap of my tent as Imperial Father knelt in his fine golden robes, heedless of the muck at the camp perimeter, and placed his hands on the stubborn ground.

The earth trembled as the Yellow Dragon, patron of the imperial throne and highest of the Five Gods, answered his call. Prayers from the other geomancers echoed around him as they joined in the channeling. They dug grooves around the camp, diverting the water away from us.

It was not just for our safety, but also a subtle display of power toward our nomadic cousins. Imperial Father was satisfied, I could tell, as he raised himself to his feet. He was not simply a man to whom others would bow. The Five Gods themselves had seen fit to bless him with the power of their domains, and he wielded it better than any other geomancer here.

Though most of the geomancers knelt panting, arms crossed over their bodies from the pain that came from strenuous prayer, Imperial Father walked stoically back to his tent without a hint of discomfort. In private, I knew, he would allow himself to feel the pain, but not where others could see. It was a privilege to see a member of the imperial family command the elements. The servants would remember this.

Once the rains had passed and the ground had dried, the Hangul leader suggested a friendly competition to brighten the mood and take our minds off the work we had done to repair the camp. Imperial Father and the clan leader would select men from both our camps to participate in some archery on horseback. I came out to watch, glad for the reprieve from always sitting.

When Imperial Father asked Eunuch Lei to suggest someone to represent Kwan, the old eunuch immediately suggested a young soldier who had come to him highly recommended. He told the Emperor that the son of General Syun-hoi, of the Tiger Clan, was with them as part of his escort, but Imperial Father simply shrugged.

“If he represents us well, that will suffice.”

I struggled to even recall General Syun-hoi. He was not a favorite of the Emperor, though if he was general he could not be incompetent.

The Hangul set up rows of targets for the riders to strafe, and the two chosen men rode out on their sturdy mountain horses, quivers at their sides and bows in their hands.

That was when I first saw Jing-lung. He rode as one who had grown up in the barracks, and shot arrows with the eyes and nerve of a hawk. One. Two. Three. The arrows planted themselves deep in the thatched grass. Four. Five. Six. He guided his horse with just his knees and did not miss a single target, leading the Emperor to proudly proclaim that the Dorgan people had not gone soft since taking residence in the palace in Kwan.

Imperial Father called Jing-lung to him and the young soldier dismounted, handed the reins to a groom, and knelt before the Emperor. He did not even flinch before the two stone lions that flanked the Son of Heaven day and night. Imperial Father told him that in honor of his performance he should ask for a gift. Jing-lung looked up, and though he beheld the face of the Emperor, he also looked past him and saw me. I smiled at him, and he almost did in return, before catching himself and lowering his head once more.

My days out on the steppes still consisted of meetings and formalities, but sometimes I would see Jing-lung as I walked through the camp. Our eyes would meet and I would smile and give him a wave if circumstances allowed. Since he was currently in the Emperor’s grace, I thought it acceptable to speak with him, and I knew I would be in no danger with Sek-fung beside me. There were few chances to speak with men my own age in the palace, save for my cousins, and they were too familiar.

“Have you been in many battles?” I asked him. He was young, perhaps even younger than me.

“A few,” he said. “Mostly on the western border. Guarding the Emperor is a first for me. My father worked hard to get me this assignment.”

General Syun-hoi had done well in that regard, because the Emperor now knew who Jing-lung was. It was an auspicious start to a military career.

“Do you think you will be a general as well someday?” I asked.

“If the Son of Heaven sees fit,” he said. He smiled. “But I would like that. Fourth Princess will need someone to protect the empire, am I correct?”

I grinned. “How do you know I will not protect it myself?” I picked up a twig and held it between us. It smoldered for a moment, curls of smoke rising from its bark, before it bloomed with a tiny flame.

He chuckled. “The barbarians will flee before your burning twigs. I am serious, though. Even the most blessed emperor will take comfort in knowing that he has a shield.”

The stronger the prayer, the more the prayer demanded of the body. The imperial family did not often call on the Five Gods because the strongest prayers left us vulnerable, and so were not to be used except in times of need, and then not all of us were as powerful as geomancers of legend. Imperial Father was very talented. I was not so much.

“That proverb,” I said. “It was the Hung-ying Emperor who said that.”

“My father is fond of it,” said Jing-lung.

“Do you know any more?”

“Proverbs? I can see if I remember…”

Jing-lung was no scholar, and his brief attempts at poetry made me laugh, but he was good company, and my time in the steppes was not so boring because of him. When summer ended and we packed the tents to return to the capital I was sad, not because I would never see him again—as the son of a general he was likely to visit the palace from time to time—but because we would no longer be able to talk freely. I watched him ride ahead of me on the trip home. I wanted to remember how the long braid of his hair swayed against his back.

We next met at the Black Turtle Festival, when I and my maids went out into the wind-swept city to watch the fireworks and eat lotus cakes. Sek-fung padded alongside us for protection, a clear sign that we were a party of nobility. It was the start of winter, so we bundled ourselves well in our fine things, though it rarely snowed in the capital.

Mung-laan saw him first, recognizing him from our sojourn to the north, and she giggled when she told me that a bunch of young fellows were teasing that fine soldier, trying to get him to come over and speak to me. I saw Jing-lung shake his head, but when his friends realized that he had my attention, they gave him a push.

Unable to escape, he walked up to me and bowed. “Greetings to Fourth Princess.”

“Please rise,” I told him.

“Is Fourth Princess enjoying the festival?”

“The fireworks and the dances are very pretty. But I have yet to taste the lotus cakes.”

My heart beat as I considered my words. Could I ask? Would Imperial Father hear of it? I heard giggling behind me. Mung-laan. If Imperial Father asked her of course she would tell him. But, I was very valuable to the Emperor right now, and if I was to be heir, I should not be shy about speaking to the men who would be in my army. Moreover, Imperial Father had approved of Jing-lung and rewarded him with silver taels for his performance out on the steppes.

“I am on my way to Madame Wu’s,” I asked. “I hear her staff rib the crust of the lotus cakes so that they resemble the shell of the Black Turtle herself. Would you like to join me?” I asked.

The silence behind me gave me a perverse joy. Mung-laan had not expected me to be so forward. Jing-lung’s fellows were equally stunned.

“Of course, Fourth Princess.”

Jing-lung was so formal—he had to be—but when I looked in his eyes I saw how happy he was.

I still remember eating the lotus cake with him and learning that he had yet to marry, though at twenty he was certainly old enough. He said he was a younger son and his father busy. He didn’t mind that he was still unwed.

And a part of me was foolish enough to wonder if I could ask Imperial Father. But Jing-lung’s family was not prominent enough. I knew now that General Syun-hoi was in charge of the training barracks in the south, a quiet but responsible position with little chance of action seeing as we had an ocean for our southern border. Jing-lung would be a fine match for a minister’s daughter, or perhaps one of my cousins, but not for a princess. It would have helped if he was also a geomancer. The gift was not always passed on to one’s children, but bearing such a blessing would surely enrich any household.