Descended from Darkness: Vol II Read online

  No wonder the ship had awakened Jiaotan.

  Sukuang raised bruised eyes towards her. "I can't."

  "What do you mean?" Jiaotan asked. "You're the best engineer we have. That's why the ship picked you."

  Sukuang shook her head. "I'm capable of repairing the damage. But what's the point?"

  "The point?" Jiaotan knelt by Sukuang's side, carefully, and laid a hand on her arm. "We're the only ones left. The hope of rebirth for the whole world. When we reach the colony---"

  "We destroyed Earth, Jiaotan."

  Jiaotan tried to ignore the images of the Fire, sweeping through the steppes and the grasslands, racing up towards the launch rail in the instant before the ship took off in a blaze of light. "The alchemists did," she said. "Whoever made the White Fire did."

  "We all did." Sukuang sucked in a breath, went on, her voice shaking. "The alchemists, the engineers, the soldiers. Every one of us with our little experiments, every one of us reporting on what worked and what didn't, building the sum of knowledge that they used to make the Fire. Do you really think we deserved to be carried away?"

  "The Emperor ordered us to board the ship. Would you go against that?"

  Sukuang's hands clenched. "There are higher powers than the Emperor."

  "Not many."

  "Enough," Sukuang said. "Please, Jiaotan. Just leave me be."

  "I can't. You know I can't. "Sukuang's presence had made the Exodus bearable---the knowledge that the Shun lineage wasn't reduced to Jiaotan alone, to a mediocre poet unable to pass the state examinations; that in the vastness of the ship, in the strangeness of their new home, they could still watch out for each other as they'd done when they were children.

  "And you know I can't ignore it anymore, either." Sukuang was silent, her lips compressed---she couldn't ignore Jiaotan without being rude, but neither did she agree.

  Jiaotan tried something else. "We're the only ones left. Father's flesh, Mother's blood. If we die, then the last trace of them will vanish."

  Sukuang's eyes were as dark as scorched meat, her pupils dilated by grief. "I know what we've done, Jiaotan. I still see them---they're in my dreams, in my waking days. Father and Mother and Aunt Qin, and the rest of them."

  All those we left behind, Jiaotan thought, shivering. But it didn't matter; it shouldn't matter. The dead were dead, and the future belonged to the living. It had to.

  "Sukuang," she said, "I share your grief. I understand." Truly, she did. She saw them, too: all the ones they couldn't save, all those the Emperor had been forced to abandon as they flew away, all those the Fire had taken. "But to commit suicide...." She paused, looking for a suitable quote to paraphrase, and finally settled on Grand Historian Sima Qian. "Some deaths are weightier than Mount Tai, some lighter than a swan's down. Your death will achieve nothing."

  "You're wrong," Sukuang said, but her gaze strayed to the dark blue light, still blinking in the shadows, and wouldn't come back to Jiaotan. "It would atone for what we've done."

  Jiaotan took a deep breath and called on the Classics, which Sukuang would know by heart, just like her. "A person's virtue is seen through the whole of their lives, not the manner of their death. It is seen by the benefits of their acts. You know this."

  "I used to, once."

  "You can't bring them back," Jiaotan said. "You can't change the past. And death is no atonement; it's just a way to preserve your dignity."

  "That's not what I'm doing. It's different, Jiaotan. You know it is." Her voice shook.

  Jiaotan said nothing. There was no need to.

  At length, Sukuang said, "You're right. I've been selfish, Jiaotan. And arrogant." Her smile was devoid of any joy. "And I have a ship to repair."

  She rose and laid her hand against the faulty berth. The wall softened, flowed up her wrist, her arm; the gleaming metal coated her skin and her clothes, burrowing into her body to connect her implants to the ship's Mind.

  "It's going to be a while," she said. "You might as well make yourself comfortable."

  Jiaotan propped herself up against the farthest wall, watching her sister. Nothing happened that she could see. Sukuang did not move, though the metal of the ship shifted from time to time, changing colours like a living being.

  Her mind drifted into the land of dreams. The metal flowed upwards, covering Sukuang as it had covered the trees and the flowers, choking them to death...

  She and Sukuang ran on the dry earth behind the wall of the Fire, which grew more and more distant as it swept away from them. The trees were shining masses coated with the melted metal of skyscrapers, the mountains sterile rocks with the corpses of acid-eaten forests; underfoot were ashes---and bones, crackling like corn in the frying pan, their pale fragments billowing in the air, small and sharp.

  The only light came from a figure dressed in white---a woman with an androgynous face who gathered bones in her hands with the plodding method of the desperate. She smiled bleakly when they came nearer, holding out her soot-stained hands. "See my children," she cried, and her voice was the quivering wail of oboes at funerals. "They are one with the universe, and the universe is no more."

  And tears ran down her cheeks, evaporating in the roiling heat, and the Fire ate at her skin and at her bones until her light had become that of the flames and her voice was overwhelmed by the screams of billions.

  See my children...

  Jiaotan woke up with a start, in the dark, the afterimages of the Fire imprinted on her retinas and the woman's grinning skull superimposed on the navigation room. The woman---Guanyin, Bodhisattva of Mercy---she, too, taken by the Fire, eaten away to nothing.

  Jiaotan's heart beat in her chest with the frantic desperation of a caged hummingbird. They hadn't done this---not any of this, it wasn't their fault, they couldn't have done anything...

  But, deep where it mattered, she knew it for a lie; a flimsy, unacceptable excuse.

  The light above the berth blinked red, the colour of good fortune and things gone right---slow and steady, the anchor for her flailing sanity. The ship's metal flowed away from Sukuang, revealing once more the green of her clothes, the pale colour of her skin, the exhaustion in her eyes.

  Jiaotan stood up, trying to calm the frantic beat of her heart.

  "It's done," Sukuang said. "We'll have a safe journey."

  Jiaotan forced a smile she didn't feel and held out her hand to Sukuang. "Come. Let's go back to sleep, then. With luck, they won't wake us up before we reach the planet."

  "No," Sukuang said. "I guess they won't." She sucked in a breath, her gaze shifting down to the welding knife.

  The hollow feeling returned in the pit of Jiaotan's stomach, sharp and cold. "Sukuang. Think of the others..."

  Sukuang raised her gaze again---eyes filled with such a desperate need that Jiaotan knew, with absolute certainty, that she couldn't stop her sister, that she didn't have the right to.

  Sukuang's hand moved towards the knife; the outstretched fingers hovered over the handle for an agonisingly long while. At length, and with a visible effort, she withdrew. "You're right," she said tonelessly. "Let's go back."

  She didn't speak again until they'd walked back to her own hibernation couch---close to the navigation room, along with the ship's engineers and the few remaining alchemists---until Jiaotan had wedged her into the couch and the cycle of hibernation had started.

  "Sleep well, sister," Sukuang whispered then, as the couch swung shut.

  Jiaotan laid her hand against the outer panel of the couch and caught a distorted reflection of herself in the metal: dishevelled and pale, her eyes bruised and haunted, her skin the colour of things that no longer saw the sun, and ten thousand ghosts on her back, bowing her shoulders and spine.

  "Sleep well," she whispered in return, though she knew the truth, as did Sukuang: that in sleep there was no oblivion. The weight of their transgression would never be erased. The dead were with them, carried in their minds and in their hearts---and, as the Fire had eaten those left behind, the
y in turn would gnaw at the sleepers, every hour, every day, tearing away at the will to live, at the fabric and sanity of their beings, until nothing was left.

  Red lights hummed on the control panel and from inside came a sound like rushing water: the hibernation fluid, filling the couch, flowing into Sukuang's nostrils and lungs like water into a drowning man.

  Drowning, Jiaotan thought. All of us, floundering in our couches, carrying our grief and guilt and madness between the stars, all the ghosts that we won't ever exorcise dragging us down; a slow, lingering death instead of the Fire. Drowning.

  She thought of the desperate hunger in Sukuang's eyes, and she wondered how many among them would ever come up for air.

  Overclocking

  James L. Sutter

  They're waiting for him when he comes out of the tank. Whether plainclothes or just another pair of clockers, he can't quite tell, but the way they avoid looking in his direction tips him off in a heartbeat. When Ari Marvel walks by, you look.

  They start drifting idly in his direction, and that clinches things. Reaching down into the lining of his pocket, Ari palms the whole batch and trails his hand over the edge of the bridge railing. The brittle grey modsticks crumble with ease, and by the time the two have dropped their cover and made the sting he's moved smoothly into position, hands against the brick and legs spread wide. The pigs don't even thank him for being so efficient. The patdown's rougher than necessary, but after a minute they throw their hoods back up and move off down the street.

  Ari runs his hands through his faded blue-green spikes, then takes the stairs down to the tube. A beginner might have lingered at the railing and thought about all the time and money now floating down the culvert, but Ari doesn't look back. Necessary expenditures. Expected losses.

  It's just business, baby.

  Back at the pad, Maggie's waiting by the door. She looks like hell: hair in ratty dreads, shirt stained with god-knows-what. Crust in her eyes.

  "Hey, Ari," she says.

  Ari slides his keycard into the lock, checking first to see if the hair he put over the swipestripe has been moved. Still there. It doesn't mean that nobody's been there, of course---just that if they have been, they're good enough that there's no point in worrying about it. You win some, you lose some.

  Inside, it looks like he's won. Maggie plops down on the couch, worrying a hangnail that's started to bleed. Her foot taps on the coffee table.

  "Hey," she says again. He drops his coat onto the chair and moves into the kitchen to get a soda. She picks up the remote and begins flipping rapidly through the channels, then turns the set off again. Eventually he leaves the can on the counter and comes back into the living room, sitting down on the coffee table across from her and taking her hands.

  "Maggie, look at me." She does---or, at least, as well as she's able to at this point.

  "I'm only going to say this once. You're welcome to crash here, but you're not getting a fix. I won't have that in my house. You understand?"

  She nods---those wide doe eyes the color of egg yolk---then goes back to gnawing at her thumb. He stands and leaves her there, entering the bedroom and closing the door. Once it's locked, he jimmies loose the bottom drawer of the dresser and flips a wad of sweaty bills into the crudely carved hollow. Then he drops fully clothed onto the mattress and covers his eyes with his forearm, blocking out the ruddy afternoon light that still filters in through heavy curtains. Out in the apartment, he can hear her moving about restlessly.

  He's doing it again. It doesn't matter that he knows how it'll end, that he knows how it has ended more than once. It's simply a given: she'll show up. He'll let her in. Things will proceed accordingly. He bears down with his arm until the muted red of his eyelids turns to black, and then to stars.

  The worst of it is that even through the filth, he can still see her. Inside the shell of those dreads, her hair is still gold verging on white, so fine as to be almost intangible. Behind the bruises and bags, her eyes would still crinkle upward if she smiled. And if he opened his arms, she might still flow into them like water, sparkling and warm and full of life.

  Ari is not a stupid man, but Maggie is an exception.

  Eyes clenched tight, Ari curls up on his side and falls asleep.

  Any idiot with a fifth-grade education can get into it. If X is the price you pay for the product and Y is the cash you get from the girl-boys and junkies down on Madison, how many hits do you have to sell to earn one for yourself? Simple algebra.

  The problem is that so few people get beyond that phase. Buy the goods from a lifer like Mickey or C.T., sell enough to pay for the rest, then get blasted in an alley or flophouse and hope the pigs don't raid until you come down. That's the killer, right there---as soon as you stick that junk in your head, your profit margin drops immediately to zero. Do not pass Go.

  Ari knew better. Where small-time boys like C.T. were just middlemen, Ari cut straight from the source code. Where Mickey would drop his stash and run at the sight of a pig, Ari tied his shoe and made the product disappear, only to have it back in his pocket by the time they rounded the corner. It was an art and a science, but always---always---a business.

  It's eight o'clock and she looks better, if one corpse can look better than another. Head back and mouth wide, snores threaten to shake apart her tiny frame. Setting his gear down, Ari gently takes the hand trailing onto the carpet and lays it across her chest, scrawny and thin as a prepubescent boy's. She doesn't even stir. He moves past her into the bedroom.

  Slipping on a pair of thick glasses he'd never be caught dead in on the street, he unfolds the laptop and sets up shop. With the software loading, he spools up the burner and busts out a package of generic modsticks. Cheap, easy, and infinitely upgradable, whatever's on sale at the pharmacy is usually fine. Tonight it's anti-flu mods. He checks the make and model, then logs into the company's network remotely and anonymously, sliding past the firewalls and into the secure servers.

  Back in the day, this would have been an all-night affair, chugging coffee and stayawakes as crack after crack failed to breach the infrastructure. Now it's down to a simple login---as long as he never shifts stuff around, the nanoceutical corporations never notice him. A ghost among giants.

  Once the modstick's code downloads, he begins the real work: slicing and fusing lines, carefully reprogramming to remove certain safety features and incorporate his own. It's more than just tripping the right biochemical switches---there are the secondary effects, the sweet afterglow that gives his mods the edge over everyone else's. For a minute, he forgets about the business and lets himself be carried away by the beauty of it, the purity. Just code. No junkies. No pigs. No cash. Just code.

  He inserts the first stick and cues the burner.

  Cutting was everything. Amidst all the bullshit, the simple act of cutting was the one part of school that Ari truly enjoyed, and it showed. Time and again the teachers would hold up his latest creations and ask why he couldn't apply the same level of commitment to, say, physics or history. How was he supposed to explain it to them? They might appreciate his code, but that didn't mean they understood it. When one of them uploaded a bioexe, they saw expediency. Function. Utility. They never saw it in the way that he made it. Codecutting was art. Efficiency wasn't enough---it had to be elegant.

  He'd been nicked jacking the editing software from the educational consoles, but that was only to be expected. He wasn't a hacker like the petty script kiddies that filled the labs, joyriding across systems and leaving their graffiti everywhere. For him, hacking was a means to an end, and once he'd hidden the backups he handed over the software and did his time in juvie like a man. At eighteen the smear was wiped from his record, and Ari "Marvel" Magnusson was free from the stigma of youthful indiscretion.

  God bless America.

  It's not like he was doing anything immoral. The store-bought nanoceuticals already ripped you apart and reformatted you according to their programming, he just removed limitations and cha
nged objectives. Of course, it was the voluntary serotonin reuptake inhibitors that paid the bills---the happy sticks. Like all mods, bliss hacks were a temporary fix---once the programs ran their course, half a million years of cell memory took over again. But use often enough and the body forgot exactly where it left its natural set point, leaving you with a full-on case of the jones. By themselves, the hacks were harmless---as long as you had another mod headed your way, you could keep going indefinitely, and plenty of rich folks did just that. The problem was always the cash. Maybe you started out buying top-grade stuff, but once the need got its claws into you, you started to take what you could get, and sooner or later someone slipped you some bad code. The results could be seen in doorways up and down Madison or Seventh, when they hadn't been rounded into a public health van and whisked away to finish festering in a nice quarantine somewhere.

  The whole thing was beyond stupid. Ari never touched the stuff.

  She's cooking when he wakes up. From the doorway to the bedroom he can smell the eggs blackening, hear them growing crumbly and bitter on the Teflon coating.

  She smiles, a little shakily, but her eyes are clear and steady. The dreads are clean, and she's found another shirt somewhere. He drops his coat and wanders into the kitchen. To his surprise, the eggs don't look as bad as they could---as they would have, once upon a time. A pepper lies minced on the cutting board, waiting to be sacrificed to the flames.

  "Hey, Ari," she says, and the smile makes her face a little rounder. She looks like she wants to say something else, but before she can he moves forward and wraps her up from behind. Her head nestles into the gap between his collarbone and neck, and their breathing slows into unison, eyes closed. Her hair smells like his shampoo.

  He reaches out and turns the burner down.