Beneath Ceaseless Skies #90 Read online

  Issue #90 • Mar. 8, 2012

  Special Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month

  “The Mote-Dancer and the Firelife,” by Chris Willrich

  Author Interview with Chris Willrich

  “Scry,” by Anne Ivy

  Author Interview with Anne Ivy

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE MOTE-DANCER AND THE FIRELIFE

  by Chris Willrich

  Dust to dust.

  Nicolai was three years dead when I lighted to EZ Aquarii to forget him. Naturally he came along too. Nicolai was never someone you got rid of easily. I still had the ring to prove it.

  In the sun-speared and dusty-aired haunt of his killers I sipped a concoction of swirled beige and blue that the Spinies called alcoholic and my stomach called garlic-infused root beer, and I let him hold forth. “This isn’t the way, I-Chen,” he said, the sounds ee-zhen rolling from his lips like a lush mispronunciation of Eden and his rich, gold-brown eyes shining like the God-sized sunrises we’d see at the Epsilon Indi homestead. Dead, he was as apparent to me as the ruddy triple sunset flashing a crazy webwork across the contours of my glass. And just as blinding. “Violence only swaps one problem for another,” he pressed.

  “You might’ve thought of that before,” I said.

  That made him look away, toward shady nooks where cobalt-skinned Spine Flutists held forehands over flames. It looked like your classic cozy romantic restaurant—the kind Nicolai never took me to—the darkness cloaking the differences. Like the thurik, puzzle-pyramids of dried noodles whose collapse signaled who got the tab, and the mumwolka, bat-winged, bug-eyed scavengers gibbering in the roof’s arabesque lattices, conditioned to scavenge tables when the server snuffed the candles.

  And those little whirlwinds meandering along the street outside and blowing dust through the curtains—dust that wasn’t all dust, dust that sparkled a little, dust that was half the cause of my problems.

  “You’re right,” said the other half, “I wasn’t thinking at all.”

  “Damn right you weren’t.”

  Nicolai shook his head. His wavy brown hair was tangled, knotted, and utterly ignored, the way it always used to be, nothing idealized about it. “Had to stop them,” he said.

  “You were never a fighter. I was there. Just meters....”

  “You’re no marine yourself.”

  There was also nothing idealized about his voice. It was always a bit hoarse and frog-like when he’d been drinking. My madness had drawn a glass beside his hand. Nothing ideal about that calloused hand either, or the way he wiped his forever-leaky nose, and the crooked shape of it.

  He was dead. I was dreaming him up from dust. He farted, smiling apologetically. I could even smell it.

  “I’ve got training,” I snapped at that smile. “Why couldn’t you wait?”

  He shrugged. “I’m a man.”

  He never changed. That was the problem. “So that’s it? You got killed to prove you weren’t a whipped husband? Bravo.”

  That got through his calm. “Goddamn it. You want to drive me away, drive me away. Do it. Say I charged the Spinies because deep down I’m a coward. Say it.”

  I whacked down my drink. Our barmates snapped alert.

  One of the Spinies was older, more wrinkled, smaller than the others. He stood. He was the reason I’d come and now my heartbeat raced, outrunning my good sense. I said to Nicolai, “You did it because deep down you are a gutless, macho, idiotic, coward.”

  Face scarlet, Nicolai stood and stalked out through a curtain of leather strips of dubious origin. He even disturbed it a little. My madness wasn’t just inventing props now but twisting my perceptions of real objects. Not a good sign.

  My perceptions of the Spinies, alas, were quite accurate. Four more of them rose upon their three legs apiece to an average height of a meter-point-nine, glass bottles or obsidian swords in two of three arms. Not a good sign either.

  Because my life might depend on it, I surrendered to the influence of the dust-like glinting Motes drifting here and there, dancing through the air and inside my body and brain.

  That last category was the real issue here.

  Mad mortal I, I linked into the immortal network that was the Spinies’ inheritance and curse.

  Dust to dust.

  Now I could detect my barmates’ thoughts, flickering all around me like a separate collection of candles, burning in some deeper end of the spectrum. I even sensed those thoughts quiver a little toward me as the Spinies detected me in turn. The flickers had an angry red billow about them, with a green tinge of fear. They surely weren’t worried by my appearance—a short Asian-European woman whose only modifications were harmless gills, webbed hands and feet, and ocean-rated eyes—but rather by my own mind-flame, proof that although human I, too, was a Mote-Dancer.

  I decided to encourage that fear. I rose, my hands spread, but my old Survey sidearm visible.

  The old Spiny, the one I’d marked earlier, stepped to one side. His only weapon was a sheathed dagger, and his backpack bristled with thick bone flutes. He said nothing, just rocked a little on one foot, watching.

  He was about to get a show. One of the belligerent ones howled and squeaked, and the Motes supplied a translation like a whisper in my ear. “You are a noxious smoke. Take your diseased little dung-brain to the street.”

  Another roared. The translation: “Siblings! Let us help it get there.”

  Now, their looks didn’t bother me. I was comfortable with the wrinkled blue skin and the long black vision-slit in the mouthless head, the gummy maw in the chest and the rubbery third arm jutting beneath it, the prominent spine in back carrying a good half of the brain matter. I didn’t see the Spine Flutists as monsters anymore. I’d decided they had their species stupidities, just like us.

  No, what bothered me was that these fellows were all too ready to demonstrate them.

  Their weapons, dark or clear, glinted in the triple sunset, and their mental flames now flickered a private blue, suggesting an intimate discussion of just how damaged I ought to be when I left.

  But first, they needed the right music.

  So three new Spinies rose. Like the old guy, they wore backpacks and from these withdrew flutes fashioned of vertebrae bolstered with metal.

  I’d seen this bifurcation of the warrior class before. The “Quixotes” advanced, while their “Sanchos” pressed flutes to their chest-maws and trilled a maniacal improvisation, to my ears something like Chinese opera filtered through jazz and spliced with a catfight. Not what I’d call music to die for, but my opinion didn’t count much.

  Spiny Customs had generously allowed me to keep my pistol, after draining its battery to red. I had maybe three shots. Worse yet, if I killed someone, that was the end of my journey to sanity. I’d be deported or executed. And either way I’d had enough of dead people.

  So I turned toward an empty table and shot the candle.

  The laser pulse spattered wax; the flame went out. The mass of mumwolka on the ceiling screeched down to investigate.

  I grabbed the candle from my own table and rolled it toward the lead Quixote, who was pirouetting backward away from the dark-winged beasts. I fired a second time, and the mumwolka dove for the obliterated second candle. The Spinies flailed with bottles and blades.

  The old Spiny would have to wait. I fled the way Nicolai had gone. Had seemed to go.

  Once on the dusty street, with its low aqueduct gurgling cool beneath baking desert air, I would not have paused had not the city of Gwumnok assaulted me.

  Tornfar (the original Spiny word does something like that to my v
oicebox) is a roughly Earthlike moon but with lower gravity, and its cliffs soar higher. Whatever weaponry the extinct Glyph Lords had employed in branding planets with Mediterranean-sized symbols, it had exposed rich mineral veins here upon this coast, where waterfalls and a good harbor further ensured a near-vertical city would rise in a half-mile of zigzagging splendor. Twisted narrow streets crammed with spindly buildings made no concession to clumsy bipeds, except down in the reassuring grid of the harborside Earthtown.

  Reaching Earthtown meant safety, of a sort, if Quixotes or constabulary or gravity didn’t catch me first. I had only one real advantage. The downside of the Motes was continual distraction from the physical world (as I knew too well.) Spinies relied so much on Motes and other legacies of the Glyph Lords that they underestimated human tricks, like our biotech.

  Readying gills, I climbed into the murky aqueduct.

  “I-Chen!” Nicolai shouted, as though standing above the water.

  “Shut up,” I mouthed, and swam.

  The current quickened and I shucked my shoes. I struggled at a switchback, limbs flailing, taking a beating from intricate stonework portraying the Sigil Sea. Sometimes I imagined I heard shouts, bells, scuttling feet in sets of three.

  In a reverie, I swam other alien waters, the subsurface ocean of icemoon GX Andromedae d3, trying to rescue Nicolai and my other Grand Survey crewmates from lamprey-like aliens we called Naiads. I saw his helmeted face winking at me, mocking death and all toothy monsters; heard his crackling radio-voice cracking stupid jokes, making me laugh at our situation so my brain could reset and think of a plan. Which I did, because otherwise he was going to get himself killed. By the end of it I wanted to rip that helmet off and silence those jokes with my lips....

  I slammed into a steel cap and clung. Apparently this portal could divert water somewhere deeper inside the cliff. Though connected by mechanisms to the surface, there was a manual release....

  I yanked, and water sucked me into darkness. I barely managed to pull the cap behind me, scraping my wedding ring.

  Down I went, riding a chute into muck. As a metaphor for how my life had been going, it didn’t stink. That was good, because everything else did.

  I splashed into a gently-sloping track of foul water—nasty stuff, but the current was mild. Crawling onto a stone walkway, I switched over from gills and found my bearings. My eyes, crafted for deep-sea diving (thank you, Mom and Dad), perceived a tunnel goring the gloom. I’d be safe here a moment, if uncomfortable.

  At least Spine Flutist sewage smelled a trifle better to me than the human variety. A hint of burnt onion about it, actually, and wet grass.

  I recalled the scents of the island homestead at Epsilon Indi—the farmhouse, the goats, the hot sea-breeze, the rusty shuttle donated by our ex-crewmates aboard Nightgift. Never should have kept the creaking thing, even if Nicolai had torched a slice of metal from it to make the perfect wedding ring. It wasn’t spaceworthy but it flew, and the reminder of the past made us restless. Without it we wouldn’t have taken so many trips to the mainland, wouldn’t have been there when the Spiny warband landed to claim as theirs any world bearing Glyph Lord relics. Relics like the Motes....

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. A human hand.

  “That was fast,” I said, not turning around.

  Nicolai sighed. “It was futile, goading you like that. Of course I’m still here. And I had no right to speak that way.”

  “Of course you did. Damn it. You, you’re—”

  “Your spouse?” Nicolai chuckled. “Forget it. He’s dead. Remember that sealant for bulkhead breaches? How the undertaker used it to reconnect his stubborn neck?”

  “Shut up.”

  “Can’t. He wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself. Don’t look for vengeance on Tornfar. Or a quick death.”

  “Not vengeance,” I said. “It’s....”

  A splash and a roar interrupted us.

  A ghost-white, almost translucent creature sprang from the muck, whipped three tentacles around me, and yanked me in.

  I passed through Nicolai’s nonexistent body on the way down. My brain was too shocked to preserve the illusion. Nicolai disappeared. Then light and air did too.

  I switched to gills. I was in less danger of disease than if I’d frolicked in a human sewer, but this surely wasn’t good for my health. Even so, I had to fight on the thing’s turf. I strained to reach my pistol. Our struggle shoved me into the air again, and I got a better look.

  The beast had a Spiny’s basic body plan, only swapping the pair of triple limbs for suckered tentacles, the head for a nub, and the gummy mouth-ridges for sharklike teeth. It snapped at my left hand, slicing my nerves with hot slivers of pain. I got my right hand around the pistol and pressed muzzle to maw.

  There was a flash and a shudder, and a reek like a cookout at a garbage fire. The thing toppled backward as I teetered.

  Screeching, it rose again, blue ooze burbling from the mouth. It looked near death but determined to go down eating.

  I pulled the trigger again, was rewarded with a tiny firework spark. Further attempts yielded sad little clicks. Yup, I thought inanely, three shots left! That Fisher girl knows her gear!

  I scrambled back; Toothsome advanced.

  Then it shuddered as someone behind it stabbed once, twice, thrice, and upon the final thrust, cut sideways through unseen vitals. The sewer-thing collapsed, sinking into the murk.

  Behind it stood the old Sancho I’d marked earlier, his obsidian dagger dripping blue.

  “Thank you,” I managed.

  The Spiny nodded to me in the human way. He helped me onto the walkway. There we sat like old friends at some polluted fishing hole.

  “I-Chen Fisher,” he said. “I am pleased you have not attained your final glory.” He pronounced my name right, ee-zhen, and even strained to confine his voice to human listening range, so much that it came out monotone. Otherwise, his Chinglése was better than my Warrior’s Voice would ever be.

  “I was told,” he said, “you wished to meet. I regret I did not introduce myself at once.”

  “Well,” I said, trying to compose myself from battles both minutes and years ago, “at least this way we have a private place to talk. You’re the Sancho. Who....”

  “Yes.” The Spiny’s third arm ended in sucker-studded wedges like the arms of a starfish, an evolutionary connection to the dead thing in the water. The wedges unfolded and plucked one of the many bone flutes nestled in his pack. “I am Omz—” he said, with a hesitation as if there was another, unheard syllable in ultrasound. “I am celebrant-and-psychopomp to Awo—” again his voice shifted beyond my hearing, “—nom.”

  “Your Quixote,” I said, and Omz nodded.

  “I-Chen,” Nicolai broke in, manifesting on the parallel walkway across the muck. “What do you want with him?”

  Omz looked around, a full-body motion for a Spiny. “Yes, there it is. The anomaly in your mind. I sense another human nearby. Yet I see no one. Few Mote-Dancers can hide from me. Yet I barely detect his presence. Your mate?”

  “Yes.”

  Omz was silent for several hissing breaths. “I had thought such survivals impossible among humans.”

  “That’s usually true.” I twisted my ring and heard my voice go clinical, as Nicolai’s golden eyes shifted warily to me. “But among paired Mote-Dancers, sometimes a death-imprint appears in the surviving partner.” No one, human, Epsilon, or Spine Flutist, knew just how the Glyph Lords’ tiny computer nodes operated, whether they transmitted via gravitangles or warpknots or pinhead angels. We just knew they worked—for most of the Spinies, and for a handful of us. Nicolai had barely connected with the Motes, but my link had been strong, one of the strongest among humans.

  I remembered standing beside him on top of a city-sized Glyph Lord mausoleum on Lacaille 9352 d, gold-glinting dust swirling around us in the aftermath of our shuttle’s landing. I remembered his wink as he popped open his helmet, and my foolish need to prove myself as
daring, my exhalations making whorls in the dust like puffs of breath on a snowy day. I remember him grabbing for me as my vision blurred and the dead world spun. When I came to, his head was wreathed in a silver nimbus of concern....

  It wasn’t quite the old fantasy of telepathy, but it was close. And the experience of sharing Nicolai’s thoughts had swirled together with my memories to concoct a strange brew of madness. A ghost too real to go away; almost a splitting apart of my own consciousness.

  Omz was quiet for a while, except for his short, hissing breaths. “You are blessed,” he said.

  “You think so?” My head ached; maybe I’d gotten infected after all. “He’s dead. He and I both know it. But I can’t forget, and I can’t grieve. I don’t have the real him, just a facsimile.” Like someone had shoved a knife into my gut, and there it stayed. I could walk around, pretend to be okay, but I didn’t feel much except the blade. I couldn’t get rid of it and I couldn’t bleed.

  “I’m sorry,” Nicolai said.

  “Not your fault,” I murmured.

  “I can almost hear him,” Omz said. “He is very strong. It is strange.... He has nearly attained the firelife. Yet you both regret it.”

  “What is this ‘firelife?’” Nicolai said.

  “Wait,” I whispered, and now my very own personal ghost looked angry. I knew he wanted to rifle through my mind now, but I had to hold him back.

  “If you wish vengeance,” Omz said, “you must know that Mnat—” here the voice again squeaked out of human range, “—the Quixote who slew your mate, has already entered the firelife.”

  “I know,” I told Omz, focusing on his gummy mouth, trying not to return Nicolai’s stare.

  I remembered firing again and again into the mass of Spinies at Epsilon Indi, heedless of which were combatants and which not, the blue blood never spattering fast enough. I remembered rage that I hadn’t been the one who gunned down Nicolai’s slayer....

  “Awo()nom,” continued Omz, “he who prevented our conversing just now in the House of Flame and Spirits, is my new charge. You cannot take your revenge on him either. And to harm a Sancho is a grave crime. Indeed, we have not forgotten that many Sanchos died at human hands.”