Anyway, I was stationed on the outskirts, far from the population centers but square on the site of this big old pre-March fort. We all were- sent to the margins where fighting was strike-and-fade through the forests and the line between civilians and combatants was drawn with a stick in the dirt and about as permanent. Where it was easy to write off mistakes as mistakes and massacres as blind shots in the dark. Can't trust the Broken Legion around people, not harnessed. We had to participate, in the name of our contracts and our families, but we weren't the ones needed in this war. Not yet.
I can only imagine how the locals saw us. Like the knights of their history, perhaps, eyeless giants clad in black and painted with laughing foreign symbols of teeth, of talons, of blood. An ancestral memory of the armies which swarmed across their frontiers, bearing dragon-banners which metamorphosed over the centuries into dragon-arms, powerful segmented tongues of metal that spit fire and death. A Quilin under harness is war personified, the ultimate sacrifice of self in pursuit of restraint: the terrible force of the Dragon directed and controlled, unleashed only when all other options fail. The very best are our generals, our negotiators, our poets.
A harnessed Quilin of the Broken Legion is a weapon of terror. Nothing less, nothing more. We're the ones who fight too well.
I'm on watch. The forest is dark and quiet, scarred by generations of logging and petty conflict. The animals we haven't shot are keeping their heads down and their mouths shut. The hissing background chatter of status and targeting brushes through my mind as it has for the last three years: -clear clear ready spun at ninety-two percent clear ready-
The dragon-arms swivel this way and that, probing for any foolish Genoans stumbling through the trees who might have an interest in occupying what is theirs. The fort is a historical site, after all. We're here to protect it from the fighting. For their own good.
Radar and heat detection reveals nothing. Only the upper two arms out of six possess this function, along with an array of nonlethal instruments designed to hold, to slow, to incapacitate. It follows a pattern: vigilance and prevention is the height of civilized conflict, so these tools naturally go above the heat rays, the grenade launchers, the antipersonnel shredders, the slashing blades and crushing claws and facemelting acids. The next two tiers, of course, are decisiveness and precision followed by shock and horror, which in turn rotates back to prevention. No one wants to fight a foe armed with so many nasty ways to maim and kill large groups of people.
I've furnished each civilized arm with a pair of bloodshot eyes. The others have teeth. It isn't regulation, but the Broken Legion is entitled its eccentricities.
-ready clear ready noted target target acquired traversing target engage?-
A bat wings its way just above the canopy, utterly absorbed in catching and killing mosquitos for the good of all mankind.
-target- clamors the harness, -target target target-
It zooms and tracks and calculates, bombarding the space behind my eyeballs with projections and trajectories and estimates of power required and power expended.
-engage? engage? target target-
Bats are good luck. In the old days, they were mediators between heaven and earth. I, however, am tired and annoyed and bored out of my mind, and the system seems even more persuasive than usual. It could be a suicide-bat, belly filled with explosive chemicals. Or even a machine cleverly disguised as a bat. Maybe it belongs to one faction or another and is fitted with cameras hoping to steal state secrets. Either way it's not transmitting the "friendly" signal and that means, bat or not, it's an enemy combatant like rebels or squirrels or anything else moving with a pulse that lacks the signal.
I shrug. The cooling vents of dragon-arm number four, already tracking, flare red.
A tiny comet ignites in the distance, and falls.
-target eliminated-
I grin. Just a little. Where else but in malfunction, in procedural error, in a scalpel just off the mark, would society find its killers? We're the ones who went wrong. Skirted too close. Took to it too well. We're the necessary unwanted cousins of the noble warriors, acknowledged as a problem yet never corrected. If anyone needs a city razed without remorse, we're there.
Too bad about the bat, but there are others. Smarter ones who stayed down. Just consider it a service to the species.
C for crazy.
I will never be a poet.
-ready clear ready clear ready spun at ninety two percent-
Watch resumes, and there's no more fire till morning.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
And Now For Something Totally New
Not even the Dragon could save us. A presence as constant as death and gossip, a god that insisted it wasn't, the Maker of the Modern World itself--
Taken.
Imprisoned.
Killed, maybe, though most everyone doubts that it can be killed. The Conquerors brought weapons that can punch holes through poor beleaguered Earth's crust, but the Dragon's made of... well, something it's never been able to really explain and we've never managed to produce. Probably won't ever manage.
Either way, I don't think it's dead. Just silent. And it hasn't been silent for over fifteen hundred years, ever since it arrived, crash, right in the middle of the Eastern Gulf and washed up on the Mayan coast. Ever since it set up camp at Siaan K'aan and transformed a dozen squabbling kingdoms of stone-carvers and jungle farmers into the first industrial civilization the world had ever seen. Ever since it set off on the Long March, all through the Old World and then across the Western Ocean to China, who gave it the name "Celestial Dragon" instead of "Quetzal Serpent."
And it's been the Dragon ever since. (The Crosslands call it the Walking Wyrm, granted, but that's a local thing and they've always been a bit backwards.) Over a thousand cultures and a thousand years it held the world together. And now it's gone.
We fought like jaguars, of course. But even a jaguar can't do much against twenty tons of metal hurled at half the speed of light.
I like to think we would have won if we hadn't been at war already.
My apartment: a form-stamped box of a place on the two hundred and thirty-fourth floor of Cloudrise Arcology. I've got approximately a million neighbors within a mile of my front door and I can walk the floor circuit in just under eight hours. Pretty spacious compared to the barracks and heaven knows I need my space.
Still wish they'd left enough for my door plate, though. "Auma Madlangbay" it says, no room for the "an" on the end so I've had to write it in with a marker (and then of course it doesn't match the rest of the calligraphy). Doesn't do much to reassure visitors when you can't even get your door plate fixed.
It isn't that I haven't tried. I have. Reparations paperwork just isn't the easiest when people like to pretend you don't exist. And now that I've been offered for service at Seventh House Station....
Well.
My name, as I've said, is Auma Madlangbayan, with that "an" on the end. Twenty-eight years old. Born on one of the unlucky days, but that's just a superstition, really, and has nothing to do with my present situation (and they aren't unlucky to -everyone-, just the people who matter). Card-carrying citizen of the Five Great Northern Nations of Old Haida, which everyone just calls the Five Nations for convenience's sake. Second-generation immigrant (father's from Tui Kaloa and mother's from Independent Damascus), first-generation veteran. No one in the Five Nations trusts a new family until they've given up at least one kid to the levies. Being female, I was disposable.
They didn't say that, of course.
Either way, off I went to the staging college, did well in the examinations, volunteered for the Quilin Division of Special Forces because they said it was a quick ticket to promotion and anyway the process was reversible and perfectly safe and ended up in C Division of the so-called Broken Legion instead. C for crazy, right? Anyway, we did the Crosslander peacekeeping thing as best we could until -they- showed up, and then we did our best against -them-, which I'm sure -they- thought was amusing. Not much of the old C Division left these days. Not much of any military left these days.
So now I'm here, and the Conquerors are expecting me at Seventh House Station. Something about a "variety of phenotypes." Got to study us in "all our forms," the better to decide what we're good for. We're not the first species to get this treatment. We're just the first to lose half a continent before anyone said hello.
And then they snared the Dragon.
This is my apartment, room 689 Northwest on the two hundred and thirty-fourth floor of Cloudrise Arcology. The doorframe is too low. The keypad is too small. I'm the black-haired giant shuffling down the hallway in weighted boots, hunched for lack of space and lack of balance and lack of two hundred pounds of hardware drilled into my spine. Seven years harnessed and you forget how to walk without it. Half my back and sternum is nothing but mount and interface points. Of course they wouldn't let me keep the guns. Aside from that, I've got it all: eyes like a jaguar, scales like a snake, voice like (so I'm told by my long-haired thrash artist brother) a dying seagull on steroids. The finest military-grade gengineering. Low-light vision. Bullet-resistant. Bones like steel columns. Totally reversible, if the Five Nations still had the capacity or the will to do it. Maybe someday.
In the meantime, I don't exist except as an interesting variant phenotype. I'd go to a support group but most of us Quilin didn't survive Conquest and we were an irritable bunch anyway. I've taken to insisting that eyes the same sickly green associated with vats of acid or radioactive sludge are the latest trend. Odder things have caught on.
I leave in nine days.
I still have to go to work.
This is the uniform of Maziar's Best Curries: whichever pants, shirt, and belted skirt you prefer, so long as they're black, the red restaurant sash and shoulder badge, and this silly sort of starched hat with points on either side and a golden disc in the middle. Technically speaking I ought to be wearing a headscarf, too, looped around to cover my face, but my mother isn't here to badger me and last time I tried to maintain family tradition I got scarf in the curry. As for the hat.... I'm not putting on the hat until I get there.
"Hey! Hey, Madlangbay!"
I continue my slow forward lurch, hat tucked like a dead pigeon under my arm. "Bayan, Sofi."
"Psssh." The other woman's voice lilts in early-morning mockery. "Didn't think you could sneak off without me, did you?"
"The least you could do is allow me my fleeting moments of hope."
"Psssh." Sofi ducks under my elbow and punches me in the side before skipping ahead and flashing me a perfectly symmetrical grin, teeth white against bright blue skin. Her eyes glitter with the mad abandon of one who is a morning person only through copious chemical support. Her sash is crooked. "Hope for what? That you'd beat me to the tables if you start a half-hour early? No go, Gimpy. You knew the risks when you signed up for my shift."
"And here I thought making curry was the least dangerous of my life choices."
She shakes her head vehemently. "Nuh-huh. That stuff -burns-. Especially when some supremely honored customer spills it on your leg."
I shrug. "Guess I wouldn't know."
"Not in the kitchens, you wouldn't."
"And we certainly don't let any supremely honored customers into the kitchens," I agree, ducking through the entrance to the elevator gardens. "Might see how food is made, or who makes it, and then..."
My boots crunch on the cobbles.
Sofi flinches. "Yeah. Well."
I glance down at her. "That wasn't—"
"I know-ohhey! Off for breakfast, are we? Maziar's is running a tea special- two for two and a bowl for good measure!"
The couple just up the path pauses at Sofi's frantic waving. Newlyweds, by the look of it, both draped in at least a dozen layers of richly beaded and embroidered silks. Exhausted, but then five days of family-hosted celebration can take their toll.
"Green-black-red-specialty!" patters Sofi. Her skin glows electric under the garden sunlights. "Momentous occasions merit extra shots!"
I hold up a hand in half-greeting, trying to look friendly. Can't put both palms together while carrying the hat.
The man's gaze slides from Sofi to me and then back to Sofi. The woman refuses to look at me at all. They confer a moment, voices obscured by wind and water and general garden acoustics. The place handles tens of millions of people a day and spirals almost the full height of Cloudrise; if it wasn't designed to muffle sound from level to level and path to path no one'd be able to hear a thing. Edgetrains glide along the rim but we're going far enough to need an actual elevator, the shafts of which run through the center, hidden inside a walled circular waterfall meant to evoke one of the old ceremonial cenotes. The nearest is ten minutes away if we walk fast. We being me: Sofi could probably make it in five.
"Extra shots?" finally asks the man.
"Extra as they come," replies Sofi. A few other people strolling past slow to observe the spectacle: a group of businessmen, a teacher, a four-man detachment of Arcology Security, a thrasher and his stage assemblers. An iguana-walker skirts around us with her charges firmly in tow. One of the lizards hisses at me.
"Be seeing you in the roaster, tough guy," I mutter.
The man blinks.
The iguana-walker gives me an apologetic look and tugs the lizard away.
"Well...." says the man.
The woman tucks an errand strand of hair back beneath her husband's headdress. "Oh, Cocijo, you haven't slept in days. And if they're willing to make a deal...?"
He sighs, eyes heavy. "All right. So long as it's quick. Got one more blessing to attend."
"Quick as they come!" grins Sofi. She jerks her head at me, at the couple, and at three or four other people who seem interested, and sets off down the path, brisk blue dynamite. I wait to take the rear (as I'd end up doing anyway), and follow. And hope I don't step on someone's iguana.
The couple's names are Cocijo Ehuan and Itzel Can-Ehuan. They're just now concluding the final stages of their wedding, and arrived at Cloudrise from Siaan K'aan City two days ago at the behest of their aunts and uncles and cousins who live here. They'll be leaving tomorrow.
They've never been to Maziar's. They've also never seen a Quilin. Minor civilian splices, sure, but like I said: most of the military types were wiped out and not many people like to keep the "massive serpent-warrior" look past their term of service. Mostly because things just aren't built to accommodate someone who runs over eight feet tall and weighs a quarter-ton. Also: drug expenses, in the name of not accidentally liquefying half of your own organs. Food expenses don't help, either. Expenses in general aren't helpful.
Anyway, the Ehuans have had curry before, but not Maziar's curry. They're lucky the owner got out of India before it started raining relativistic hard-titanium telephone poles. And now Heaven, as he likes to say, is only an edgetrain or an elevator away.
We take the elevator. Waiting for the edgetrain to spiral down forty stories would take far too long. While in line, we also toss a coin down the outside shaft.
"Good luck for the newlyweds," I explain to the confused-looking thrasher, who's come along with the rest of his group. A jaunty collection of shoulder badges declares that he's visited all nine continents and won a local basketweaving contest.
"Yah, yah," he says. About three dozen piercings in his ears jingle as he looks up at me. "Very good."
I eye the nearest bunch of Security. It had been my job to stand around casually and block their view of proceedings. "You're not really allowed to, but people do it anyway."
Jingle. "Very good."
"Family down on their luck even threw a baby down there once."
Jingle. "Very good."
I raise an eyebrow. The thrasher smiles blankly, revealing a set of sharpened teeth.
On the ride down I manage to deduce that he and his group are from the Ngoya Confederacy and that they somehow lost their translator somewhere but they´re pretty sure they'll do okay and find him eventually because this has happened twice before in other places and no one died and only one person lost their ID. And besides, the Dragon provides. Even now.
The name of the group: Keening Fury Eruption. I make a note to ask my brother about them next time we talk. And we -will- talk before I leave.
Nine days. The first is already turning.
A giant wooden whale greets us at our destination. Maziar's Best Curries: Dining 34 Southwest, Floor 196, Orca Crescent. The statue's carved in the national style, rounded squares inside rounded squares, hints of other animals and maybe even people suggested by each line. Bold reds, blacks, blues. Maybe if the real animals looked like that there'd be more of them (or, alternatively, less; wearing a live painted whale would be difficult.)
"And here we are!" announces Sofi, leading her pack of pilgrims past the bagged soybean and tamale hawkers towards a doorway that resembles a pair of crossed scimitars. The staccato sizzle of an electric zither choir spills into the concourse, mixed with an assortment of drums and a heavily synthesized female voice singing either too fast for me to understand or in a language I don't know. Possibly both. Maziar's really been pushing the "ethnic" angle lately. "Best curry this side of a crater, though don't tell management I told you that."
I wince. For someone who's blue because one grandparent or another decided to grant their children skin the color of God, she can show a startling lack of respect for the sudden demise of her native land. Then again, she's never been there and at this point probably never will.
Oblivious, she continues, "Step right in, find a seat, and I'll have the special out in just a few moments!" And then she vanishes.
The Ehuans glance at me. Most of the rest of the early customers also glance at me.
"Very good?" asks the thrasher.
I produce my only slightly squashed hat and perch it atop my head. "Yeah. Go on, sit down. She'll be with you in a bit."
After making sure band and bonded migrate towards the nearest pair of tables, both of which have non-stolen seat cushions and have been cleaned recently, I flee past paintings of many-headed snakes and blue-skinned gods in search of Maziar. The music shifts to something that sounds like an orchestra of tuned blenders.
Most of the kitchen staff has already arrived for the day shift. Riyyah, Li, Kim, Mountainbook.... the last looks up from his meat molding as I clomp into view.
"Well," he drawls, "I see you almost made it this time."
"Waylaid by customers," I explain. "Blame Sofi."
He dumps a batch of venison cubes into a bowl. There's machines to handle meat molding, but at Maziar's every cut, fillet, and steak is hand-formed. Gives it that authentic "just off a dead animal" feel without actually needing the animal. "If I could catch her, I would. Blazed through here like a rabid bat and just about killed poor Li here with a pot of boiling water."
I shrug. "Impromptu wedding special. Got a pair outside, four days in."
He chuckles. "Best regards to the ragged."
"Yeah." I squeeze past the curing vats, gagging only momentarily at the smell. "You seen Maziar?"
"Check the freezers," suggests Kim. His knives flash and the squash before him collapses into a lacy pile of paper-thin slices. Chok-chok-chok-chok-chok. "Something about a supplier delay or a misplaced order. Thinks we won't have enough slugs to last the month."
"Slugs?"
"Slugs."
"That drink must have been a hit."
Chok-chok-chok-chok. "You have no idea."
I make for the freezers. About half our produce is local, but any restaurant worth its place on the concourse knows to keep enough extra on hand to keep business running for at least three months of famine. Just in case. The lack of slugs in this instance is an isolated failure, one that Maziar will spend no time in fixing.
The freezer doors are uncomfortably low, the better to reduce lost cold when someone has to open them. The view through their round windows is one of precariously balanced packages, crowded shelves, and frost. I rap on the "Kitchen Staff Only" sign. "Mr. Maziar?"
No response.
"Mr. Maziar? I have to talk to you."
Still no response.
"It's about wor-"
An elephant head appears in the left window. It's wearing a quilted cap. "Madlangbayan. Heard you in the kitchens. Come in, come in."
"I think it'd be better if-"
"No, no, come in here. I need you to move boxes."
The head vanishes.
I mutter a curse against heat efficiency and somehow manage to finangle myself through the doors. The space beyond is too low for me to stand up straight even if I wanted to, and I swear I can feel my hair freezing to the ceiling. The squat, fan-eared form of Maziar has retreated to one of the far corners, inventory clipboard in hand and stylus in trunk.
"Did you know," he says as I creep over corn barrels and between hanging bags of tarantulas towards him, "that the Conquerors sank our supply ship?"
A protruding shelf attacks my hip. "Ch-! No, sir."
"Now can you imagine why they'd do that? I certainly can't." He taps a finger against a box marked with Crosslander script. "We've only got nine of these left. I need them moved to immediate storage and then some way of stretching them out for another two months invented. Might have to mix in... additives." His eyes, still brown and human in his wrinkled face, roll in exaggerated despair. "Can you imagine?"
"Staff'll make it happen, sir."
He stiffens. "Staff? Not 'we'? You're not leaving, are you?"
The metal sunk into my flesh burns with cold. "Er, well...."
"Is it Newar? I told you that woman's no good. Just wants you so she can brag about how generous she is, letting you work for full wages. And in the open, too! She might say she has very good lawyers, but you're still under contract and you and me both know that the government would come down on you like lightning. I've done the very best anyone can, and you know I would offer you full employment if I could. Haven't you heard about Lieutenant Xac?"
"Yes, sir. But it isn't-"
"Repossessed and sent to clear minefields in West Zamibia!"
I bend down, eye to eye, holding onto a shelf for balance. Maziar takes a step backwards despite himself. "They're sending me to Seventh House Station."
He stares. The capped stump of his right tusk, ritually broken, glitters with frost. "They bloody didn't."
"They bloody did." One more sacrifice thrown down the steps, hoping to appease the new gods. And I've got no choice in the matter so long as that service contract hangs over my head. So long as I've got serpent-scales. "I'm leaving in as many days as we've got boxes. I'll move them for you, but tomorrow I'll have to call in my resignation."
He shakes his head, slow with disbelief. "Space. Sending my best packer to space...."
"It's only a few thousand miles." I point at the ceiling. "Just up, is all."
"Dragon protect you," he mutters. "You'll be on Its home ballcourt, at least." He reaches out to grasp my shoulder and gives it a shake. "Introduce those Conquering bastards to my curry, you hear? Maybe then they'll stop sinking ships. Stop...." His trunk wobbles. Attempts to tie itself in a knot. "Stop," he concludes.
I nod. Mr. Maziar hasn't always had a trunk. Grief makes people do funny things.
"Good girl," he says. He looks down at his clipboard. "I expect those boxes in immediate storage by the end of the shift."
"Yes, sir."
"And if you would move out of my way..."
I shift around enough to let him past, slipping sideways between the spider-bags. His cap bobs up and down in the silence, threaded through three months of emergency supplies, and then he tugs open a door and is gone. The seals re-engage- sss-chunk- and all that's left is me and the Crosslander script and the slugs. If I wasn't clearly the superior creature by right of size and brainpower, I'd almost find myself empathizing with the slimy things. Tossed in a box and sent off into the unknown.
They, at least, get to go together.
Five years ago. We'd been sent overseas to Genoa, where the Five Nations and an assortment of allies was hoping to swing a local civil war in their favor. Officially, we were peacekeepers. Stand around, look intimidating, keep major trade centers more or less intact and the trains running, offer protection to any civilian who asked. Not that many did- the locals consider snakes evil creatures and most didn't know that the mythological Quilin, despite its intimidating appearance, is a creature so gentle it can walk on grass without bending a single stalk.
Well, and kill evil-doers with fire and lightning, but that's only if you really piss it off.
Taken.
Imprisoned.
Killed, maybe, though most everyone doubts that it can be killed. The Conquerors brought weapons that can punch holes through poor beleaguered Earth's crust, but the Dragon's made of... well, something it's never been able to really explain and we've never managed to produce. Probably won't ever manage.
Either way, I don't think it's dead. Just silent. And it hasn't been silent for over fifteen hundred years, ever since it arrived, crash, right in the middle of the Eastern Gulf and washed up on the Mayan coast. Ever since it set up camp at Siaan K'aan and transformed a dozen squabbling kingdoms of stone-carvers and jungle farmers into the first industrial civilization the world had ever seen. Ever since it set off on the Long March, all through the Old World and then across the Western Ocean to China, who gave it the name "Celestial Dragon" instead of "Quetzal Serpent."
And it's been the Dragon ever since. (The Crosslands call it the Walking Wyrm, granted, but that's a local thing and they've always been a bit backwards.) Over a thousand cultures and a thousand years it held the world together. And now it's gone.
We fought like jaguars, of course. But even a jaguar can't do much against twenty tons of metal hurled at half the speed of light.
I like to think we would have won if we hadn't been at war already.
My apartment: a form-stamped box of a place on the two hundred and thirty-fourth floor of Cloudrise Arcology. I've got approximately a million neighbors within a mile of my front door and I can walk the floor circuit in just under eight hours. Pretty spacious compared to the barracks and heaven knows I need my space.
Still wish they'd left enough for my door plate, though. "Auma Madlangbay" it says, no room for the "an" on the end so I've had to write it in with a marker (and then of course it doesn't match the rest of the calligraphy). Doesn't do much to reassure visitors when you can't even get your door plate fixed.
It isn't that I haven't tried. I have. Reparations paperwork just isn't the easiest when people like to pretend you don't exist. And now that I've been offered for service at Seventh House Station....
Well.
My name, as I've said, is Auma Madlangbayan, with that "an" on the end. Twenty-eight years old. Born on one of the unlucky days, but that's just a superstition, really, and has nothing to do with my present situation (and they aren't unlucky to -everyone-, just the people who matter). Card-carrying citizen of the Five Great Northern Nations of Old Haida, which everyone just calls the Five Nations for convenience's sake. Second-generation immigrant (father's from Tui Kaloa and mother's from Independent Damascus), first-generation veteran. No one in the Five Nations trusts a new family until they've given up at least one kid to the levies. Being female, I was disposable.
They didn't say that, of course.
Either way, off I went to the staging college, did well in the examinations, volunteered for the Quilin Division of Special Forces because they said it was a quick ticket to promotion and anyway the process was reversible and perfectly safe and ended up in C Division of the so-called Broken Legion instead. C for crazy, right? Anyway, we did the Crosslander peacekeeping thing as best we could until -they- showed up, and then we did our best against -them-, which I'm sure -they- thought was amusing. Not much of the old C Division left these days. Not much of any military left these days.
So now I'm here, and the Conquerors are expecting me at Seventh House Station. Something about a "variety of phenotypes." Got to study us in "all our forms," the better to decide what we're good for. We're not the first species to get this treatment. We're just the first to lose half a continent before anyone said hello.
And then they snared the Dragon.
This is my apartment, room 689 Northwest on the two hundred and thirty-fourth floor of Cloudrise Arcology. The doorframe is too low. The keypad is too small. I'm the black-haired giant shuffling down the hallway in weighted boots, hunched for lack of space and lack of balance and lack of two hundred pounds of hardware drilled into my spine. Seven years harnessed and you forget how to walk without it. Half my back and sternum is nothing but mount and interface points. Of course they wouldn't let me keep the guns. Aside from that, I've got it all: eyes like a jaguar, scales like a snake, voice like (so I'm told by my long-haired thrash artist brother) a dying seagull on steroids. The finest military-grade gengineering. Low-light vision. Bullet-resistant. Bones like steel columns. Totally reversible, if the Five Nations still had the capacity or the will to do it. Maybe someday.
In the meantime, I don't exist except as an interesting variant phenotype. I'd go to a support group but most of us Quilin didn't survive Conquest and we were an irritable bunch anyway. I've taken to insisting that eyes the same sickly green associated with vats of acid or radioactive sludge are the latest trend. Odder things have caught on.
I leave in nine days.
I still have to go to work.
This is the uniform of Maziar's Best Curries: whichever pants, shirt, and belted skirt you prefer, so long as they're black, the red restaurant sash and shoulder badge, and this silly sort of starched hat with points on either side and a golden disc in the middle. Technically speaking I ought to be wearing a headscarf, too, looped around to cover my face, but my mother isn't here to badger me and last time I tried to maintain family tradition I got scarf in the curry. As for the hat.... I'm not putting on the hat until I get there.
"Hey! Hey, Madlangbay!"
I continue my slow forward lurch, hat tucked like a dead pigeon under my arm. "Bayan, Sofi."
"Psssh." The other woman's voice lilts in early-morning mockery. "Didn't think you could sneak off without me, did you?"
"The least you could do is allow me my fleeting moments of hope."
"Psssh." Sofi ducks under my elbow and punches me in the side before skipping ahead and flashing me a perfectly symmetrical grin, teeth white against bright blue skin. Her eyes glitter with the mad abandon of one who is a morning person only through copious chemical support. Her sash is crooked. "Hope for what? That you'd beat me to the tables if you start a half-hour early? No go, Gimpy. You knew the risks when you signed up for my shift."
"And here I thought making curry was the least dangerous of my life choices."
She shakes her head vehemently. "Nuh-huh. That stuff -burns-. Especially when some supremely honored customer spills it on your leg."
I shrug. "Guess I wouldn't know."
"Not in the kitchens, you wouldn't."
"And we certainly don't let any supremely honored customers into the kitchens," I agree, ducking through the entrance to the elevator gardens. "Might see how food is made, or who makes it, and then..."
My boots crunch on the cobbles.
Sofi flinches. "Yeah. Well."
I glance down at her. "That wasn't—"
"I know-ohhey! Off for breakfast, are we? Maziar's is running a tea special- two for two and a bowl for good measure!"
The couple just up the path pauses at Sofi's frantic waving. Newlyweds, by the look of it, both draped in at least a dozen layers of richly beaded and embroidered silks. Exhausted, but then five days of family-hosted celebration can take their toll.
"Green-black-red-specialty!" patters Sofi. Her skin glows electric under the garden sunlights. "Momentous occasions merit extra shots!"
I hold up a hand in half-greeting, trying to look friendly. Can't put both palms together while carrying the hat.
The man's gaze slides from Sofi to me and then back to Sofi. The woman refuses to look at me at all. They confer a moment, voices obscured by wind and water and general garden acoustics. The place handles tens of millions of people a day and spirals almost the full height of Cloudrise; if it wasn't designed to muffle sound from level to level and path to path no one'd be able to hear a thing. Edgetrains glide along the rim but we're going far enough to need an actual elevator, the shafts of which run through the center, hidden inside a walled circular waterfall meant to evoke one of the old ceremonial cenotes. The nearest is ten minutes away if we walk fast. We being me: Sofi could probably make it in five.
"Extra shots?" finally asks the man.
"Extra as they come," replies Sofi. A few other people strolling past slow to observe the spectacle: a group of businessmen, a teacher, a four-man detachment of Arcology Security, a thrasher and his stage assemblers. An iguana-walker skirts around us with her charges firmly in tow. One of the lizards hisses at me.
"Be seeing you in the roaster, tough guy," I mutter.
The man blinks.
The iguana-walker gives me an apologetic look and tugs the lizard away.
"Well...." says the man.
The woman tucks an errand strand of hair back beneath her husband's headdress. "Oh, Cocijo, you haven't slept in days. And if they're willing to make a deal...?"
He sighs, eyes heavy. "All right. So long as it's quick. Got one more blessing to attend."
"Quick as they come!" grins Sofi. She jerks her head at me, at the couple, and at three or four other people who seem interested, and sets off down the path, brisk blue dynamite. I wait to take the rear (as I'd end up doing anyway), and follow. And hope I don't step on someone's iguana.
The couple's names are Cocijo Ehuan and Itzel Can-Ehuan. They're just now concluding the final stages of their wedding, and arrived at Cloudrise from Siaan K'aan City two days ago at the behest of their aunts and uncles and cousins who live here. They'll be leaving tomorrow.
They've never been to Maziar's. They've also never seen a Quilin. Minor civilian splices, sure, but like I said: most of the military types were wiped out and not many people like to keep the "massive serpent-warrior" look past their term of service. Mostly because things just aren't built to accommodate someone who runs over eight feet tall and weighs a quarter-ton. Also: drug expenses, in the name of not accidentally liquefying half of your own organs. Food expenses don't help, either. Expenses in general aren't helpful.
Anyway, the Ehuans have had curry before, but not Maziar's curry. They're lucky the owner got out of India before it started raining relativistic hard-titanium telephone poles. And now Heaven, as he likes to say, is only an edgetrain or an elevator away.
We take the elevator. Waiting for the edgetrain to spiral down forty stories would take far too long. While in line, we also toss a coin down the outside shaft.
"Good luck for the newlyweds," I explain to the confused-looking thrasher, who's come along with the rest of his group. A jaunty collection of shoulder badges declares that he's visited all nine continents and won a local basketweaving contest.
"Yah, yah," he says. About three dozen piercings in his ears jingle as he looks up at me. "Very good."
I eye the nearest bunch of Security. It had been my job to stand around casually and block their view of proceedings. "You're not really allowed to, but people do it anyway."
Jingle. "Very good."
"Family down on their luck even threw a baby down there once."
Jingle. "Very good."
I raise an eyebrow. The thrasher smiles blankly, revealing a set of sharpened teeth.
On the ride down I manage to deduce that he and his group are from the Ngoya Confederacy and that they somehow lost their translator somewhere but they´re pretty sure they'll do okay and find him eventually because this has happened twice before in other places and no one died and only one person lost their ID. And besides, the Dragon provides. Even now.
The name of the group: Keening Fury Eruption. I make a note to ask my brother about them next time we talk. And we -will- talk before I leave.
Nine days. The first is already turning.
A giant wooden whale greets us at our destination. Maziar's Best Curries: Dining 34 Southwest, Floor 196, Orca Crescent. The statue's carved in the national style, rounded squares inside rounded squares, hints of other animals and maybe even people suggested by each line. Bold reds, blacks, blues. Maybe if the real animals looked like that there'd be more of them (or, alternatively, less; wearing a live painted whale would be difficult.)
"And here we are!" announces Sofi, leading her pack of pilgrims past the bagged soybean and tamale hawkers towards a doorway that resembles a pair of crossed scimitars. The staccato sizzle of an electric zither choir spills into the concourse, mixed with an assortment of drums and a heavily synthesized female voice singing either too fast for me to understand or in a language I don't know. Possibly both. Maziar's really been pushing the "ethnic" angle lately. "Best curry this side of a crater, though don't tell management I told you that."
I wince. For someone who's blue because one grandparent or another decided to grant their children skin the color of God, she can show a startling lack of respect for the sudden demise of her native land. Then again, she's never been there and at this point probably never will.
Oblivious, she continues, "Step right in, find a seat, and I'll have the special out in just a few moments!" And then she vanishes.
The Ehuans glance at me. Most of the rest of the early customers also glance at me.
"Very good?" asks the thrasher.
I produce my only slightly squashed hat and perch it atop my head. "Yeah. Go on, sit down. She'll be with you in a bit."
After making sure band and bonded migrate towards the nearest pair of tables, both of which have non-stolen seat cushions and have been cleaned recently, I flee past paintings of many-headed snakes and blue-skinned gods in search of Maziar. The music shifts to something that sounds like an orchestra of tuned blenders.
Most of the kitchen staff has already arrived for the day shift. Riyyah, Li, Kim, Mountainbook.... the last looks up from his meat molding as I clomp into view.
"Well," he drawls, "I see you almost made it this time."
"Waylaid by customers," I explain. "Blame Sofi."
He dumps a batch of venison cubes into a bowl. There's machines to handle meat molding, but at Maziar's every cut, fillet, and steak is hand-formed. Gives it that authentic "just off a dead animal" feel without actually needing the animal. "If I could catch her, I would. Blazed through here like a rabid bat and just about killed poor Li here with a pot of boiling water."
I shrug. "Impromptu wedding special. Got a pair outside, four days in."
He chuckles. "Best regards to the ragged."
"Yeah." I squeeze past the curing vats, gagging only momentarily at the smell. "You seen Maziar?"
"Check the freezers," suggests Kim. His knives flash and the squash before him collapses into a lacy pile of paper-thin slices. Chok-chok-chok-chok-chok. "Something about a supplier delay or a misplaced order. Thinks we won't have enough slugs to last the month."
"Slugs?"
"Slugs."
"That drink must have been a hit."
Chok-chok-chok-chok. "You have no idea."
I make for the freezers. About half our produce is local, but any restaurant worth its place on the concourse knows to keep enough extra on hand to keep business running for at least three months of famine. Just in case. The lack of slugs in this instance is an isolated failure, one that Maziar will spend no time in fixing.
The freezer doors are uncomfortably low, the better to reduce lost cold when someone has to open them. The view through their round windows is one of precariously balanced packages, crowded shelves, and frost. I rap on the "Kitchen Staff Only" sign. "Mr. Maziar?"
No response.
"Mr. Maziar? I have to talk to you."
Still no response.
"It's about wor-"
An elephant head appears in the left window. It's wearing a quilted cap. "Madlangbayan. Heard you in the kitchens. Come in, come in."
"I think it'd be better if-"
"No, no, come in here. I need you to move boxes."
The head vanishes.
I mutter a curse against heat efficiency and somehow manage to finangle myself through the doors. The space beyond is too low for me to stand up straight even if I wanted to, and I swear I can feel my hair freezing to the ceiling. The squat, fan-eared form of Maziar has retreated to one of the far corners, inventory clipboard in hand and stylus in trunk.
"Did you know," he says as I creep over corn barrels and between hanging bags of tarantulas towards him, "that the Conquerors sank our supply ship?"
A protruding shelf attacks my hip. "Ch-! No, sir."
"Now can you imagine why they'd do that? I certainly can't." He taps a finger against a box marked with Crosslander script. "We've only got nine of these left. I need them moved to immediate storage and then some way of stretching them out for another two months invented. Might have to mix in... additives." His eyes, still brown and human in his wrinkled face, roll in exaggerated despair. "Can you imagine?"
"Staff'll make it happen, sir."
He stiffens. "Staff? Not 'we'? You're not leaving, are you?"
The metal sunk into my flesh burns with cold. "Er, well...."
"Is it Newar? I told you that woman's no good. Just wants you so she can brag about how generous she is, letting you work for full wages. And in the open, too! She might say she has very good lawyers, but you're still under contract and you and me both know that the government would come down on you like lightning. I've done the very best anyone can, and you know I would offer you full employment if I could. Haven't you heard about Lieutenant Xac?"
"Yes, sir. But it isn't-"
"Repossessed and sent to clear minefields in West Zamibia!"
I bend down, eye to eye, holding onto a shelf for balance. Maziar takes a step backwards despite himself. "They're sending me to Seventh House Station."
He stares. The capped stump of his right tusk, ritually broken, glitters with frost. "They bloody didn't."
"They bloody did." One more sacrifice thrown down the steps, hoping to appease the new gods. And I've got no choice in the matter so long as that service contract hangs over my head. So long as I've got serpent-scales. "I'm leaving in as many days as we've got boxes. I'll move them for you, but tomorrow I'll have to call in my resignation."
He shakes his head, slow with disbelief. "Space. Sending my best packer to space...."
"It's only a few thousand miles." I point at the ceiling. "Just up, is all."
"Dragon protect you," he mutters. "You'll be on Its home ballcourt, at least." He reaches out to grasp my shoulder and gives it a shake. "Introduce those Conquering bastards to my curry, you hear? Maybe then they'll stop sinking ships. Stop...." His trunk wobbles. Attempts to tie itself in a knot. "Stop," he concludes.
I nod. Mr. Maziar hasn't always had a trunk. Grief makes people do funny things.
"Good girl," he says. He looks down at his clipboard. "I expect those boxes in immediate storage by the end of the shift."
"Yes, sir."
"And if you would move out of my way..."
I shift around enough to let him past, slipping sideways between the spider-bags. His cap bobs up and down in the silence, threaded through three months of emergency supplies, and then he tugs open a door and is gone. The seals re-engage- sss-chunk- and all that's left is me and the Crosslander script and the slugs. If I wasn't clearly the superior creature by right of size and brainpower, I'd almost find myself empathizing with the slimy things. Tossed in a box and sent off into the unknown.
They, at least, get to go together.
Five years ago. We'd been sent overseas to Genoa, where the Five Nations and an assortment of allies was hoping to swing a local civil war in their favor. Officially, we were peacekeepers. Stand around, look intimidating, keep major trade centers more or less intact and the trains running, offer protection to any civilian who asked. Not that many did- the locals consider snakes evil creatures and most didn't know that the mythological Quilin, despite its intimidating appearance, is a creature so gentle it can walk on grass without bending a single stalk.
Well, and kill evil-doers with fire and lightning, but that's only if you really piss it off.