Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11 Read online

  Carefully, he set the mirror floating in the water, and chanted a hymn to Jade Skirt, Goddess of Childbirth and Running Waters:

  “Come, you my mother, stone of jade

  You of the Jade Skirt, You of the Jade Blouse

  Come, you my mother.”

  The face that swam into focus in the mirror seemed no different than the one above it, but then the water quivered, and a shadow flowed across the cheeks, darkening the skin until it seemed the color of the space between the stars.

  And if the face should darken, then the tonalli, the spirit that is in the heart, is gone, frightened away . . .

  No; that was mere superstition, not fit for this day and age. Acoimi did the ritual because it was expected of him, not because he thought it was going to bring any conclusive evidence. The gods were distant, and never intervened in the human world, no matter how much blood mortals shed.

  Acoimi unpacked the rest of his equipment. He laid a band across her arm, waiting until the graph of her heart’s voice coalesced on the cloth, slow and steady. He withdrew thought-nets, which he wrapped around her head, and watched the myriad beads of light slide across the metal mesh, like rain falling upon the world. Animal reflexes, all: data sent from the eyes into the cortex, little spikes flowing through the muscles and through the brain. But the pattern he ought to have seen—the blazing array of lights flickering in the familiar dance of the tonalli spirit—never came up.

  Through it all, she had no reaction. Her knee jerked up when he did the reflexes examination, but her face didn’t move, and she never spoke. And her eyes never did more than flicker.

  He’d seen soldiers in shock in the sick-houses, faces as slack as this one: babbling idiots and screaming, bloody masses with only the rough shape of humanity. But never . . . never anything that seemed so final. Huexotl didn’t have the rigidity of a corpse, and there was the occasional movement, but nothing, nothing that could be called life under any definition of the word.

  Perhaps the gods, after all, weren’t so distant. Perhaps Xoco was right and there was nothing left in here. Perhaps she was cihuateteo already: a goddess with shield and spear, accompanying the Sun in its endless rotation around the planets. Perhaps he should be on his knees, making offerings of blood—as if she’d ever take them, or see them.

  Xoco was waiting for him in the corridor, looking more wan and tired than before. He wondered if she’d received any other communications; but no, that was impossible, no radio would travel anywhere until the ship was quickened and that, patently, would not happen, not with Huexotl.

  “So?” she asked, though she must have seen the answer in his face.

  “She’s—” he almost finished it then, almost said the words that would seal her fate, make her death a reality. And then his sister Ixchel’s face swam out of the darkness—her eyes closed, her washed hair spread around her body like a fisherman’s net, her skin the color of things that never saw sunlight, and her lips downturned, as if she already knew how harsh and lonely the afterlife would be, fighting the darkness around the Sun as she’d fought the pain of birth. “I need more time. Just to be sure.”

  “Suit yourself.” Xoco’s tone suggested this would make little difference, but there was no hostility in it, just bored indifference. And something else. He’d been good, once, at reading faces and emotions, but somewhere in his abortive career in the army, details had ceased to matter.

  “You’re free to leave,” he said, finally. “I wouldn’t want to—”

  Xoco made a small, weary gesture as they moved toward her own quarters. “I saw this from the beginning. I owe it to her to stay till the end. Whatever it is.”

  Her own quarters were a riot of colors: an unexpected relief, after the bleach and the blankness of the other room. The walls displayed a slowly rotating array of frescoes, all of Jade Skirt, She who presided over childbirths, and of Her husband the Storm Lord, god of abundance and fertility—and of diseases, two sides of the same coin. A tortoiseshell pipe in the old style lay by the side of a disconnected terminal and the vid Xoco had been watching was frozen on the screen.

  She dismissed it with a flick of her hand, and set to brewing chocolate, which she poured into two small bowls. The smell of vanilla and spices wafted up, as familiar as home. They sat, for a while, in silence.

  “You can take up quarters of your own for the night,” Xoco said. “Unless you want to call back the ship you came on—”

  No. Ten days aboard that one had been more than enough—ten days of feeling the walls move around him, shifting every time he turned his back, ten days of slow dislocation as the Mind drew them further into the deep planes, into the lands of light and fractured colors that lay between the stars. Every time he did this, he remembered the first time: taking a quickened ship with his parents, to claim Ixchel’s body from the faraway place where she’d died giving birth—the grief and rage coiled within him, unable to find their release.

  It wasn’t a good place. It wouldn’t ever be.

  He ran a hand on the wall behind him, finding it slightly warm, and frowned. “It’s dead, isn’t it? The Mind she—birthed.”

  Xoco’s gaze flickered, for a brief moment. “It wasn’t stillborn. It tried to drag itself through the heart-room, to project its essence into the ship’s core. But it wasn’t strong enough. Nothing happened.”

  An image leapt into his thoughts: some large and dark thing, dragging its way out of the womb, struggling to reach the center of the heart-room—extending glistening protuberances, desperately trying to cling to the core of the ship with the last of its strength, the same thing that had killed Ixchel . . .

  He clenched his fists, and did not move until the image faded into insignificance. “Except that it took her sanity as it left.”

  “It happens.” Xoco’s voice was quiet, that of a teacher to her pupils. “Minds aren’t only in the womb. They’re in the body and spirit, in a very real sense. Sometimes, they can’t disentangle themselves from their bearers.”

  Acoimi shivered. “So this ship is still unborn.”

  Xoco shrugged, a little sadly. “There are echoes, in places. Odd noises, things that shouldn’t be here. But they’re just ghosts. A memory of dead things.”

  “I see,” Acoimi said. “I’ll sleep in Huexotl’s rooms. Just in case.” Too late, he realized it was Xoco’s responsibility: to watch over the pregnant women in her charge from beginning to end.

  Xoco’s lips were a thin arc—of anger, disgust? “You take your work to heart, ticitl.” It seemed almost a curse in her words, not a measure of worth.

  “I do what is needed,” he said, as he’d said to her before.

  She wasn’t looking at him, but at the frescoes. Jade Skirt stood tall and proud, Her clothes turning into water from the waist down; tiny babies swam in Her stream, the color of jade and turquoise, the most precious things in the mortal World. “Tell me what it is, being a man.”

  “Everything I wanted,” he said. A path to the blood-wars, to the glory of successful warriors, the riches showered upon the victors. Even if—

  Her lips quirked up again, as if she were amused. “At first, I should imagine. But it’s hard, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps.”

  She watched him, a vulture about to pounce on a dying animal. “How many have you captured in battle?”

  She knew the answer to that; she had seen his middle-aged face, the lock of hair falling down his back: that of the unproved warrior, the one who had taken no ships captive, and had sacrificed no prisoners.

  “None,” he said, and met her gaze, defiantly.

  He’d expected to make progress through the ranks, just as his brothers had, laughing their way to finer clothes, larger rooms, and more privileges—but found himself, inexplicably, lagging behind his peers. Perhaps ruthlessness and fanaticism were a man’s province, after all. Perhaps women just weren’t suited for the blood-wars, no matter how far they’d come. Perhaps that was the reason he’d become a physician, nurtu
ring patients back to health.

  Or killing them, when the need warranted.

  Enough. He wasn’t going to wallow in self-pity forever. He had to strike back. That was what a warrior would do. He asked in turn—knowing the answer already, knowing it would wound her as deep as her questions had. “How many Minds have you borne?”

  She didn’t move, for a while. Then she inclined her head, in that effortless grace they taught in all the girls’ schools: a caged bird presenting itself to a master. “I’m afraid I’m sterile. Nothing can quicken in my womb, neither Minds nor children, for that matter.” She laughed, a little bitterly. “What a pair we make. I watch women ascend to glory, and you minister to the fallen warriors, the sons of the Fifth Sun. The watchers in the shadow.”

  We make no pair, Acoimi thought. The chocolate was warm in his hands, like the touch of a woman. “You could have asked for a gender-change.”

  She smiled. “I could. But not everyone has your courage.”

  Oh, but it wasn’t courage, not at all. It wasn’t blood-lust, or the desire to fight, or even ambition. What it boiled down to—once the skin had been flensed, the bones picked clean—was a simple enough matter.

  It was just fear.

  That night, he dreamed of Ixchel—or of Mother, he wasn’t sure—a confused mixture of faces distorted in the agony of birth, of ceremonies praising the women who gave their time and their lives making starflight possible. There were drums echoing in the emptiness of his ribs, and screams that might have been those of prisoners, but were not.

  Mother moved through the glass panes of their home, the way she always did: carefully and quietly, as if every gesture might break an unexpected bone; the three Minds she’d borne lurked in the background, dark and distorted. He chased them, but they fuzzed out of focus, carried away between the stars like dandelion seeds in the air. Ixchel coalesced into being, fragile and insubstantial, a ghost with clawed hands—a warrior with spear and shield—a woman screaming in pain as her womb was torn apart. She lay quiet for her vigil, and the midwife whispered the prayers, over and over, assuring them that she was with the Sun now, that her fate was glory and light. And he looked upon her, ice slowly creeping around the hollow in his chest, and thought, one day, I’ll lie here as well—and doubled over in pain, as if something were already in his womb, already trying to claw its way out . . .

  Acoimi, someone said, and it was the voice of the Hungry Coyote’s Mind, echoing under ceilings vaster than any planet. Acoimi.

  He woke up, heart hammering in his chest. The room was silent . . . No, wait. Something was wrong.

  The room was empty. Huexotl was gone.

  Where could she have gone?

  He got up, hastily slipping into a formal cloak over his suit, and went in search of her. She might have gone to Xoco’s room, but no light or noise came from inside, and he could not face waking up the midwife and admitting to his failure. Accursed men’s pride. At least, if nothing else, he’d got that from the gender-change.

  Instead, he wandered the wide, bending corridors, desperately cocking his ear for any sound, any noise. Surely she couldn’t have gone far. Surely—

  Wall followed wall, a mass of protective symbols all jostling each other, piled atop each other like offerings in the storeroom of the Great Temple: human hearts, sleek eagles, curved, fanged snakes. There was nothing but his own panicked heartbeat and the single, wryly amused thought that at least she’d reacted to something. But surely that, too, was no more than an animal frightened by an unfamiliar face, running away without a destination in mind?

  The corridors blurred and merged into each other, seemed to become those of the other ship, the Hungry Coyote and its Mind, piercing even his thoughts.

  He should have known he’d never be rid of them. He should have known that, just as one of them had killed Ixchel, they would—

  Faint snatches drifted toward him: the echo of a song, coming from very far away. “Huexotl?” he called. His voice echoed under the vast metal arches, coming back without warmth or substance.

  The corridor flared open like a split ribcage. There was light ahead, the bright, harsh yellow of suns and corn. Everything seemed to bend and run together: crooked walls, doors twisting out of shape like melted metal, odd scratching noises as if rodents were onboard.

  Ghosts. Memories. There was nothing here . . .

  The song insinuated itself into his thoughts: a wordless rhythm like drums in a temple, like the hymns at a sacrifice, a plaintive litany that wouldn’t leave his mind. Under his hands, the wall was warm, and a faint heartbeat throbbed under his fingers, a mirror of the one in his veins. His head was light, insubstantial, as if they were no longer in the mortal world . . .

  He came to with a start, his hand still clenched against the curvature of the wall. It was cool now, and nothing remained save for the song, coming from somewhere ahead of him. For a brief, timeless moment, he’d hung suspended away from real-time and real-space—as he had in the deep planes onboard the Hungry Coyote.

  Dead. The Mind was dead, and whatever small part had leaked into the metal was dead, too. He was letting his imagination play tricks on him.

  After what he’d been through to reach it, the heart-room seemed almost disappointing. It was a perfect circle, almost bare, save for the contraption set at its center: oily metal twisting upward toward the ceiling, a mass of angles and rods poking like bones out of Lord Death’s throne. The light reflected itself on it like a hundred distant stars—but did not quite hide the darker patches on the floor, the memory of what had happened here.

  He shivered, in spite of himself. The image of a Mind crawling across the floor was a hard one to banish.

  Huexotl knelt in a corner, her gaze on one of the stains. She was the one singing, a hymn that he thought wordless at first, but then he recognized in the mangled, halting syllables familiar sentences.

  “Spread your wings upward, O Mother

  O Giver of Life, O Yielder of Life . . .”

  “Huexotl,” he said.

  She jerked up, her gaze dark and frightened, and pressed herself closer against the wall.

  More higher functions and more emotion than he’d seen over the past day. Perhaps there was still hope.

  Perhaps he was trying to solve the problem the wrong way. She might have retreated inside herself, so deep all he could see was the veneer, like the layer of chalk over a sacrificial victim, disguising the man into the incarnation of a god. And if that was the case . . . He had to draw her out.

  “I’m here to help you,” he said, kneeling by her side. She watched, eyes wide, as frightened as a cornered deer. Black One take him, what would it take? She hadn’t been frightened of Xoco, or even of his examination. But it was night on a dead ship, with only the two of them in this wide, strange place where her mind had scattered. And he was a man.

  Carefully, he relaxed, groping for memories that seemed to have fled. It had been instinct, once: something he’d never stopped to think about, just as the swagger and the urge to impress had come with the gender-change. Or so he’d thought. But, really, they hadn’t rewired his brain, or remade his heart. His tonalli was still there, the spirit still the same. He could remember. He—

  He thought of a time, so far ago it might have been another age: Ixchel and the girl he’d been, sitting together watching a vid of suitors fighting for a woman’s hand. The girls were smiling, bragging to each other of how many Minds they’d bear—of the beautiful cloaks, of the jewelry and the land holdings that were the rewards for the enduring, for the brave. They had been young, then. They had been fools.

  Ixchel had held herself that way: slightly hunched to disguise her size, turning her head carefully, deliberately, her lips slightly parted, as if to smile or blow a kiss.

  “I’m not as I once was,” he said. His voice slid and slipped, all the careful work he’d put into pitching it low and grave gone the way of fallen warriors. “You have nothing to fear.”

  Huexotl tu
rned, slightly. Her eyes were blank again.

  “I don’t know what you’re going through,” he said, slowly. “I don’t think anyone can who hasn’t, not even those who’ve borne Minds. But I lost—someone, once, and I know how much it can hurt. I guess you’re even worse than that.”

  “Spread your wings upward.” Huexotl’s hand rose, pointed at the metal at the center of the room. “Wings.”

  “That’s good,” Acoimi said, soothingly. “But you have to do something else. You’re alive in there. I know it.” He wished the conviction in his voice were also in his heart, but it wasn’t. He’d seen Ixchel and he’d seen Mother, and he had known that bearing a Mind took something out of women, something that would never be recovered. He had known that he was more than a womb—and he’d thought, foolishly, that he could be a weapon, take the men’s way into the Heavens. “Show me. Please.” He held out his hands, palms out, like a man, showing he had no weapons. He shifted, bent closer to Huexotl, a sister sharing secrets, a friend confessing a crush: the woman he’d been, no more than a veneer of his own, indeterminate self.

  Huexotl watched him, as imperturbable as an effigy of the goddess Jade Skirt: eyes shadowed, crouching against the wall like a hurt child, mumbling the same words, over and over, while her hand trailed over the metal as if its coolness were a comfort.

  Who was he fooling? It was hopeless. “Come on,” Acoimi said, straightening up. “Let’s get back to our rooms.”

  He thought he’d ease back into the male stance, but, as they walked, he found he couldn’t. Was it because of Ixchel? Huexotl didn’t look anything like her, but still, she could have been her. But for an accident of fate . . .

  That was the problem; that was why he couldn’t let go of her. He didn’t know how men hardened their hearts, how they could kill, ruthless, for the good of abstract, distant ideas like country, like gods. He could only see the small things: men and women, each different from each other, each enclosed within their own worlds and their own rules. He’d have killed for Ixchel, but it was too late.