by tais teng
"Your baby hasn't spoken yet?"
The Censor was standing next to Marat's cradle,
his humming diskos discreetly hidden behind his
back. Fredruk was the baby's uncle. The
potential baby's uncle, he corrected
himself. All newborn should be considered
ab-humans or animals until proven otherwise.
"Not a word," dame Gudrin sighed.
"He only wailed and blew milk bubbles," Marat's
father said.
The human race had been genetically upgraded long
before the Redoubt was built. Their newborn spoke
on their very first day, walked after a month.
Fredruk knelt next to the cradle. The baby looked
back when Fredruk studied his face, blinked. A
normal baby shouldn't have been able to focus yet,
but this one clearly remembered.
He has been here before, Fredruk thought.
A very old soul.
It filled him with a strange disquiet. The very
second his nephew took his first breath the last
star had winked out above the Redoubt, making the
dark absolute. Brindaban had been a red giant, so
far away and faint that only the trained eye of a
Monstruwacan could have located it between the
darting phosphenes of his own retina.
"Ta da?" Marat's mother tried. "Say it then.
Mama?"
The baby kept his gaze on Fredruk, opened his
mouth and clearly pronounced the master-word.
Fredruk flipped the switch of his weapon, put the
diskos back in his sling and rose. "Your Marat is
a true human, sister."
His favorite sister gave a shuddering sigh, tried
to smile. A single tear slid down her cheek.
"You, eh, you want a slice of the birth-pie,
Fredruk?" dame Gudrin asked. "A glass of spiced
alderwine?"
"Sorry. I have to get back to the Tower. The last
star died today and there are certain..." He
spread his hands. "You know."
He had come as a killer, an exterminator, not as
an uncle. Best to leave them to their joy.
Two dozen well-wishers were waiting under the
yellow hearth lamp of the patio. Pale, worried
faces, eyes as black as tar. Two little girls were
clutching wreaths of milk-glass lilies. Those
flowers would have been put in the tiny hands of a
dead baby. The baby would have looked peaceful,
for a diskos could be discreet and sever a spine
without piercing the skin.
"Go right in," Fredruk said. "It is a baby.
Human, not a single taint."
He saw smiles erupt, heads jerk upright.
Now why did that sound like a lie? The baby had
spoken the master-word. Nothing dark, nothing
touched by the night could pronounce those
syllables.
Marat, age 6
They were standing in the shadow of the big
darling tree: Marat, Jehann, Sylphira and Dunja.
Above them the titanium ribs of the ceiling
gleamed in the glare of the Great Lamp. On the
lower branches hung the embroidered girdles of the
girls who had gone courting. Take a flower from
the tree for your lover and leave your girdle. Only
virgins wear a girdle.
"I spiek of something gold en red," Dunja sang
and spread her arms. "It has wings."
Dunja was a solemn little girl. Her red hair and
emerald green eyes made her, if not the most
beautiful, then certainly the most exotic girl of
the Clan in the eyes of Marat.
Like Lurella of the Road Makers, Marat thought.
Lurella who slew a dozen giants and rode on
night-hounds. Compared to Dunja Sylphira was gray
and colorless as a toadstool.
He closed his eyes, tried to hier Dunja's
night-voice. The only sound was the whisper of the
serpentine leaves, the rushing of his own blood.
"It is red and gold," she repeated. "Come on. I'm
spieking as loud as I can. Any louder and it would
be shouting."
"Lord Randall!" Jehann cried. "I mean his
clockwork butterfly."
"Right. Your turn."
Jehann closed his own eyes, lifted a finger.
"It is also red and gold and it rustles."
Marat saw his lips move: Jehann wasn't that good
a spieker. Sadly, reading lips wasn't one of
Marat's talents.
"Autumn leaves," Sylphira promptly said. "Like
they have in the Museum of Man. I saw them
preserved in crystal." She grinned. "My turn now."
"It is..."
"The diskos of that dark-loving devil who almost
broke the Redoubt," Dunja said in a rush. She
snapped her fingers. "What was his name?"
"Rabath," Marat said. "Rabath, he founded the
Lesser Redoubt. Went out in the night to the Sea
of Giants."
"That doesn't count," Dunja protested. "That is
just knowing something. Not hiering." She put her
hands on her hips, glared at Marat. "Are you deaf
or something?"
"I can hier as good as you," Marat said. "Spiek,
too."
"So spiek." She looked at the others. "We are all
listening to your night-thoughts."
Marat balled his fists. Just whisper a word.
Whisper a word without sound. How hard could
thinking real loud be? Because that was all
spieking was, thinking real loud.
The sun, he thought and pictured that yellow orb
that none now alive had ever seen. The sun, the
roaring yellow lion of the sky.
"I don't hier anything," Sylphia said.
Jehann snorted. "Me neither."
"Deaf and dumb," Dunja concluded and Marat felt
them turn away from him. He was no longer of any
interest. Almost if he had become a statue or a
shrub.
"I can..."
"Deaf and dumb," Dunja repeated. "Like an
animal."
"Tell me," dame Gudrin said. She stood next to
his bed and Marat could smell her, even with his
face buried in his pillow: Freshly baked tortillas
and sweet-and-sour dumplings.
"They, they called me an animal, mother. Said I
was deaf and dumb. An abhuman."
"Who did?"
"Dunja en Jehann."
Dame Gudrin snorted. "That girl! You know, two of
her brothers were judged tainted? Her own father
went down in the Dark Cities and never did return.
An animal? Hah, look at her hair. Red as sin! She
is a throwback herself."
"She can spiek. She can hier."
"So what? Armin of the Yellow House makes dice
dance without touching them, but he can't even
write his own name or count past five.
Night-thought is just a talent and not even that
important a talent."
His mother just didn't get it. He had lost Dunja
forever. His true love would never pluck a flower
from the darling tree for an animal, a dumb and
deaf animal.
It took him several hours to ascent all the way
to the Tower of Observation. There were a hundred
elevators and moving stairs, empty shafts that
took you and flung you upwards a dozen floors in a
heartbeat. This time of the month uncle Fredruk
would be inspecting the Monstruwacans, because
even the watchers must be watched.
"Ah, young Marat," the clockwork guardian said.
"Come right in. Your uncle is expecting you." The
guardian looked like a cross between a greyhound
and a praying mantis, both animals that had been
extinct for close to five million years.
Uncle Fredruk was Marat's personal hero. Stern
and athletic while his father liked to laugh and
sported a comfortable potbelly. Now his uncle, he
was a Censor with a level three diskos that spat
blue sparks and could slice right through the
hardest steel. He had patrolled the Air Clog and
walked the road with the Silent Ones, killed
night-hounds and giants. But the most important
thing was that he would always tell the truth. No
comforting lie would ever cross Fredruk's lips.
He'll tell me what I am. If I'm worth
anything.
The Censor listened to his nephew, gravely
nodded.
"Only one in a hundred-and-twenty is a full
mind-reader. What your friends did is nothing very
imposing. They stood so close to each other that
plain speaking would have been more effective. And
if you go outside hiering only makes you more
vulnerable. A thousand voices are whispering to
you, invading your thoughts." He folded his arms.
"I'm deaf and dumb and that makes me a much better
soldier."
"But the Monstruwacans here in the Observatory,
they are all sensitives."
"That is right. They listen to the night, see
everything. Scholars, my boy, scientists, and
quite learned. They never, ever go outside." He
took Marat by the hand, put him in front of one of
mighty lenses. "Look."
The Night Land rolled away in the distance, hills
and mountain ridges, the silver serpent of an
ancient road. The power of the lens magnified
every photon until the land seemed clear as a
moonlit night.
"There, the Watcher of the South-West."
The being looked like a heap of rough-hewn
pillars, not organic at all. A single literally
blinding ray transfixed his right eye.
The lens rotated and focused on a road. The road
was made of slabs of self repairing diamond and
older than even the Redoubt itself. Three beings
came striding across the road, their faces hidden
by the caps of their cloaks. Their walking staffs
were five meters long and probably fashioned from
the thighbones of giants.
"Monsters and vermin," his uncle stated. "And the
Redoubt stops them all."
"The Redoubt and you," Marat said. It was all
right that he was deaf and dumb. He would become a
Censor and defend the city. The telepaths, those
sensitives, were delicate as spun glass: he and
his uncle were made of sterner stuff.
"Show me the House of Silence again," he said.
"Tell me how you saved my father when he went
there."
The House seemed close enough to touch. A
dollhouse with a hundred gables and balconies,
perched on a peak with every ridge a razor-edged
dragon scale. None of the windows were lit.
According to the stories that hadn't been always
so. Once the House had formed a dazzling beacon,
luring beings from hundreds of miles around.
"I'll go there when I'm a Censor," Marat said.
"Burn it down."
His uncle laughed, ruffled his hair. "And the
Watchers will be next, I guess?"
Marat, age 12
Marat's teacher of seven years was ambushed by a
dark-dream and was found babbling in the courtyard
while he embraced the marble statue of a faun. The
hastily summoned Censor pronounced him tainted and
cut off his head.
For two weeks the classroom remained empty and
then a new teacher was found. Master Hindemar
hailed from quite a way upstairs where learning
was seen as an end in itself. The young man
believed in an all-round education even for those
of his pupils who would end up spinning mushroom
silk or herding giant beetles.
So, three days after the Festival of Broken
Amphoras, he took his charges to the Museum of
Man, all the way up to the 786th floor.
The Museum had been constructed in the shape of a
hundred interlocking nautilus-shells, master
Hindemar told them while the ancient elevator rose
hissing en puffing like an old man and stopped at
every floor. Like many Road Makers' artifacts the
Museum was self-repairing and almost alive. Each
year it grew new sections and not even the
Librarians had charted them all.
To go inside without a guide was foolhardy if not
suicidal: there were rooms that hadn't heard a
human voice in centuries and in some corridors the
dust lay ankle-deep.
"Impressive gate, eh?" the teacher said when they
stepped from the elevator. "Forty meters high and
carved from a single piece of asteroid platinum."
"It looks kind of dull for platinum," Sylphia
said. "I mean, my aunt has this ring and..."
"Look closer," the teacher urged.
"There are letters," Jehann whose eyesight was
hyper-acute finally said. "Very small letters."
"So there are. On this door you'll find the
complete texts of all seventeen thousand holy
books from the fifteenth millennium of the Second
Age of Space. Just before they were all burned as
superstitious nonsense and unworthy of a
scientific utopia." He laughed. "Only nine
generations later barbarians from Jupiter's outer
moons went over the whole surface, peering though
magnifying glasses, and wrote it all down again on
the tanned skins of their victims."
An old man stepped out of the wall.
"You would be the party from Gray Blossoms, on
level thirty-five?"
It was probably a hologram, Marat thought. No
more than a dozen sensitives in the whole Redoubt
could walk through a wall and they certainly
wouldn't waste their time conducting a guided tour
for a school class. Yes, I am right. The guide
doesn't throw a shadow.
"Follow me." The man waved his hand without
waiting for an answer and the platinum gate rolled
ponderously aside.
There wasn't a single straight line to be found
in the museum, Marat noticed. Even the display
cases showed a gentle curve.
"Now these are ceremonial knives from the First
Blossoming," their guide said, "forged from
Martian iron."
"They sure look wicked," Sylphia said. "Like
claws."
"Well, the followers of Cybele used them to cut
off their own genitals." The teacher looked
around. "Anybody know what the Recapitulation
was?"
Marat raised his hand.
"That was when they did the whole of history
over. Babylon and Rome, Egypt and the USA. To find
out what went so horribly wrong."
"Because they broke the moon," Dunja said.
"No, stupid," Jehann laughed, "that came later.
Much later." Dunja looked daggers with him, but
Jehann wasn't impressed. The last year a stretch
of his genetic code had kicked in, broadening his
shoulders, straightening his nose. Girls three
years his senior eyed him, giggled behind their
hands.
They walked through the Time of Retreat when all
colonist had fled back to the home world. Then
came the death of stars, the Cataclysm.
Ancient satellite photos showed the Earth split
like a rotten pumpkin, with all the oceans
draining in that immense wound.
"It wasn't the Eaters," the guide said. "Just the
eruption of a super-volcano. One that was long
overdue."
The next exhibition showed the ecology of the
Night Land itself. "The oceans are all still
there, deep underground," the guide lectured.
"Most of the water is boiling furiously,
supercritical and saturated with sulfur. A million
kind of thermophilic bacteria flourish in those
lightless deeps. Algae and weird armored fish with
silicon bones and boiling blood." He pulled
pictures and videos of those bizarre monsters from
the thin air. The denizens of the deep were
many-eyed and tentacled, studded with poison
thorns. Just like outside, Marat thought.
"Actually the biomass of the Earth is three times
greater now than in the sun-lit times. Geysers and
erupting volcanoes fill the upper world with a
haze of algae and bacteria. A veritable rain of
manna to feed the fungi and the land-coral."
"And now we get to the central hall," the guide
said. They must have walked for miles, through
more rooms than Marat could count while the guide
kept droning on. Dust burned Marat's nasal
passages and the soles of his shoes seemed
transmuted to pure lead. It was almost impossible
to lift his feet.
"Ladies and gentleman, I give you... The
Redoubt!"
The model was at least fifty meters high and
disappointingly featureless. The double view-ports
were all that was visible.
The guide seemed to read Marat's mind. "The Road
Makers made it slick, polished it down to the
micron. It is hard for claws and tentacles to get
a grip on a surface slick as oil."
"I see." Marat frowned. "They had pictures in the
Observatory. Of the outside. There were craters,
places where you could see the supporting beams
and cables of woven diamond."
"Time tears anything down. When I was still alive
the Redoubt shone like a mirror." He nodded and
grew almost transparent. "Like a mirror," the
guide whispered.
Marat drifted away from the group. A hundred
meters beyond a second pyramid rose, the Lesser
Redoubt.
Rabath's pyramid, Marat thought. Rabath the Great
Traitor. Even his uncle kind of admired Rabath.
"He was wrong and he almost killed us, but by the
gods, he was a real man!"
Rabath had railed against the complacency of the
citizens.
"You huddle like fearful sheep in the circle of
your hearth lamps!" he had accused them. "So
afraid of the Dark, of the night. It won't go
away, you know. It will creep closer, invade your
very dreams." He had spread his arms. "The dark
has its own ecstasy. Embrace the night! We are
men, we are strong and once we ruled the whole
world. All the planets.
"We can take it back. There are other places to
tap the earth current."
The Censors had stripped him of his rank, exiled
him. They didn't quite dare to kill him: Rabath
was just too popular and he voiced the concerns of
too many other citizens. When he left the Redoubt
he had taken a quarter of all guild-masters with
him, almost half of the sensitives.
Three years later the Dark launched a new
assault. The earth current failed for a horrible
half an hour and the Redoubt was almost taken.
That earned Rabath the name of the Great Traitor.
He had fatally weakened the Redoubt and it didn't
matter that the Censors had exiled him themselves.
In front of the model an exhibition case stood,
with panels of clear ruby. He studied the hologram
of Rabath and he could feel the charisma, the
sheer power of the man. Such a strange quirky
smile on his lips. As if the Dark had told him the
very secret of life and it had turned out to be a
big joke.
I would have followed him outside, Marat
thought. I would have followed him right into
the clean dark, far from this dust and the tired
corridors.
"When a man dies his diskos is given back to the
earth current," the voice of the guide spoke in
his ear. Marat started, looked around. The guide
was still standing a hundred meters away, in the
middle of the group. It must the exhibit itself
that was talking.
"They took his personal weapon away, made him a
non-citizen, less than abhuman. They couldn't very
well give the weapon of a traitor back to the
current, eh? The mind of man and diskos meld,
become one. Rabath's weapon would have poisoned
the current, so it is still here."
A light-beam flipped on, made the length of the
diskos glitter. Marat stared at the weapon, unable
to avert his gaze. He bent his left thumb like he
had seen his uncle do a dozen times. The diskos
stirred and the circular blade started to rotate.
Marat's blood turned into ice water.
Now I know who I have been before. Who I still
am. And his next thought was: If uncle
Fredruk ever finds out, he'll kill me without
the slightest hesitation.
Marat, age 14
It was his uncle who gave him his first diskos
and instructed him.
"See it as your third arm," the Censor said. "Or
as the claw evolution decided to deny us. Now a
diskos will cut anything material."
"But not a pneumavore. Not a soul-eater."
"That depends. If it decides to materialize..."
He placed the diskos in Marat hands. The grip
quivered, almost as if the weapon was alive. It
probably was, by any definition of "life".
"Bend your thumb."
The blade of the weapon started to move, became a
deadly blur.
This was power. Marat felt his penis stiffen and
a dark ecstasy flooded his soul. I can cut
anything, kill all my enemies.
The whirring became a shriek and the diskos spat
sparks of searing jale.
"That was fast," Fredruk said. "I never saw a
weapon meld so quickly with his handler."
In those days nobody stopped you if you wanted to
go Outside. The Redoubt believed in survival of
the fittest and would never mourn a suicidal fool.
"You bear your diskos?" was the only thing the
tame mansonyagger asked. The guardian of the gate
had two heads: one, turned to the Redoubt showed
the savage simplicity of a ferret, the other was
angelic, smiling with an infinite compassion.
Marat showed his weapon.
"Good. See you your next incarnation." He
laughed, a harsh bark that sounded almost human.
The Air Clog formed a wavering wall a mile
distant. It seemed curiously indistinct, more a
bank of mist than the roaring wall of fire Marat
had imagined.
One of the Watchers loomed in the distance,
wearing a crown of blue fire. He heard the savage
cry of a night-hound and his blood seemed to move
faster, filled his veins with a sparkling joy. I
am finally outside. I am walking the Dark.
"Embrace the night," he whispered.
"Yes, embrace the night. Kiss me."
A very beautiful girl stood just beyond the
barrier. She had long curling hair, the color of a
fox-tail. Her eyes would probably be emerald.
He laughed. "You are so out of date. I no longer
love Dunja, lady soul-eater. Haven't loved her for
years."
"I can be all she isn't. Walk with me. We'll
knock on the silver gate of my House of Silence
and couple on nests of eiderdown. Each kiss will
last a thousand years."
"And then you'll eat my soul. Destroy me
forever."
The girl licked her lips and she must have been a
bit careless because the tongue was long and thin,
like the tail of a lizard.
"We have met before, Rabath. You didn't scorn me
then."
He lifted his diskos, bent his thumb. Ultraviolet
sparks leaped from the blade and he knew he could
hurt her, perhaps even kill her. She was solid
enough to cast a shadow.
"Begone, Eater! This is just a shape you have
stolen."
"Yes," the girl said. "I'm much more beautiful
than this."
She turned and just before she vanished behind a
man-high shrub she looked over her shoulder. "You
still love Dunja, you know. You still lust after
that red-haired harridan."
The Air Clog rooted in the black sand, rising in
wavering flames. Marat laid the diskos down and
the flames crept over it. It promptly became
transparent and crumbled into a fine dust. The
death cry of the diskos echoed in his brain.
"I'm sorry," he said. "You were a fine weapon. A
very fine weapon for anyone but me."
Lemurel the Elder had written a poem about the
love of a warrior for his diskos: "My third arm,
my second soul." Dumping your diskos was surely
the ultimate betrayal, like leaving your child for
the night-hounds.
"You are a strange one," the mansonyagger said.
"Destroying your weapon and conversing with
darklings." His angel-face extended an eye-stalk,
switched filters. "I have met you before. Though
not in this body." He raised one of this claws and
Marat saw droplets of fresh nerve poison appear. A
bitter, acrid smell filled his nostrils, the smell
of death, of oblivion.
Running was no use. The nervous system of a
mansonyagger was woven from glass fiber, with
reaction times twenty times faster than a human's.
"No." The guardian shook his head, retracted his
claw. "It is so much more amusing to see what
develops. I'm to deny all darklings entrance in
the Redoubt. You are no darkling. Not exactly." He
stepped aside.
It was full night when Marat reached the Museum
of Man, the great lamp dim and the ceiling filled
with projected stars.
The old man stepped from the wall, regarded him
with eyes that seemed very much awake.
"Do you need a guide?"
"I know the way."
"Learn and enjoy then." The hologram winked out.
Marat didn't even have to break the ruby pane of
the case. He just bent his thumb and the diskos
came on, cut a circle in the crystal.
When Marat took the diskos it felt exactly right.
Yes, like a third arm, a second soul.
When he looked in the mirror the next morning
Marat saw the first pale hairs of adolescence
sprouting on the crown of his head. Soon all his
his hair would turn snow-white and he would be
wearing the white cap of a true human.
© tais teng
11 Nov 2011
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