A World Named Cleopatra Page 13

  When Bao stopped to rest, the mist had lifted. The clouds had scudded away like frightened white animals. The world was bright and clean. Bao felt the warmth of sun on his face as he gazed at the valley below. A mossy lawn of varying shades of green gave way to furrowed fields and paddies. An irrigation canal reflected the morning sun into a stream of molten gold. Even without a field glass, Bao could make out the village hutches and part of the dinh. But something was wrong. There were no women in the fields, which was unusual, as this was prime working time. The rootstalks had to be tended daily. They resembled high sarissa, but were extremely light sensitive. By nightfall they would be submerged in the muddy water of the paddy. Like waterweed, rootstalks glowed under water.

  Bao sent Chi and a few soldiers to scout around the village. In the meantime, he scanned the village and its environs with his field glass. He could not see anyone about. No smoke rose from any of the hutches he could see. He scanned the paddies and fields, even the forest and scrubland. He had time for a ching-game. It would renew him, give him peace of mind and proper thoughts. But he had become uncomfortable with his dreams lately. Just as yin was not wholly yin, so the medicine could become a poison. When Bao dreamed, forgotten memories rose out of his unconscious like prehistoric creatures crawling out of the darkness.

  Once again, Bao tried to dream, play a ching-game. He dreamed of Tun. But Tun is composed of Ch’ien, the heavens, and Ken the mountain. Mountain under heaven: the image of retreat. The dream grew dark, and Bao saw himself as a child beating his dead father. The ching-game was spoiled.

  He felt nauseated and feverish when he came out of the dream. The fastflesh should have taken care of any infection, he told himself as he bent over, touching his knees with his chin. No more dreams, he thought. Such memories could not serve the state.

  It was early afternoon before Chi called in. So far, the fabers had found nothing. Bao told Chi to search the village and report what he found. Although his shoulder still hurt, Bao felt rested after a heavy dream-ridden sleep. He felt warm, but not feverish. The nausea had not returned.

  “The village has been checked,” Chi said. His voice sounded raspy over the transceiver. “All the hutches are clear of villagers. Many villagers are dead.”

  “What have they died from?” Bao asked, looking at the familiar cliffs and gutted hills which spread to the north. Perhaps mai had swept through on a raid, he thought.

  “They look like the soldier-fabers found. in the woods,” Chi replied.

  So the plague had spread, Bao thought. It was killing villagers and soldier-fabers alike. Bao remembered the faces of the soldiers he had found. Their faber faces looked almost human. In death we all look the same, he thought, suddenly feeling dizzy. And this is a new death.

  “What did, you find in the headquarters hutch?”

  “Only fabers,” Chi said. “Dead. No men.”

  “Is the cache cellar locked?” Bao asked.

  “Yes.”

  Bao would have to go into the village, for the heavy steel doorslide of the cache cellar was only keyed to soldier-missionaries. Neither fabers nor moi-missionaries could gain entrance. But Bao would find supplies and safety in the comfortable bunker. And he could use the laser transceiver to call command post for new orders.

  Before he could stand up, the nausea returned. He coughed and vomited a thin yellowish bile. He would rest a moment. His strength would return. But he was caught in a dream. He fought it. Old memories woke and left their dark places. Bao shouted. He was in a cold sweat.

  And then he remembered that base hai had once been his home. He could not go back there, he told himself. Everyone he had known—the children he had grown up with, his teachers, Giay, the old men, the women—would be ghosts or spirits or strangers who thought the same thoughts, believed in the same divine cycle, and lived in the same dream.

  He tried to shut out his memories, for he belonged to the state. He should not have memories, for the state had replaced them with ching-games and life-dreams and noble thoughts. Nevertheless, he remembered. Now he had a past. But he was lost. His memories were tearing him from the sacred web of state, the one true authority that presided over the earth and maintained the precarious balance of ying and yang.

  Bao tried to forget his past which had formed like frost on cold metal. But it was too late. Memories crawled out of the filthy caverns and stinking closets of his mind. He stood up and directed his fabers to fan out around him. Then he began walking toward his village. He imagined that he was already dead. He was finally going home.

  Bao entered the village from the east. He followed a muddy path around hutches which were in various states of disrepair. In this climate the crude huts had to be mended daily. Village life was a constant battle against wind, rain. moi. and the ever encroaching jungle of flatfronds, saucerleaf, silverglitter, and crawler-vine. Beyond the hutches was the silvery dinh—the village longhouse, and beyond that was the pebble garden which contained the eternal spirits of the village.

  As Bao approached the dinh, he was overwhelmed by the stench of putrefaction. Villagers were sitting and praying inside, a circle of dead bodies. Women, children, old men and fabers had been laid out to form a mandala of flesh. The human corpses were black and blue; they looked as if they had been beaten. Their bellies were distended, and their bloated bodies were covered with large sores. The few fabers that were laid out on the outside edge of the mandala were also swollen and discolored. Their scale-plates had fallen away to reveal sores and mottled grey flesh. Effigy-dolls hung from high poles which were positioned north, south, west, and east of the mandala. They represented the four keepers of death.

  “What are you doing there?” Bao asked the villagers who stared past him, as if looking into private worlds or watching invisible spirits swimming in the clear air.

  No one answered him. Even the children seemed to be lost in the magic of the mandala. But Bao remembered something Giay had said to him long ago: “What you see with your eyes is not always real. Your mind can see much more clearly.” Then Bao understood that the mandala of the dead;was made to keep out ma quy. The villagers could only see their village spirits. They were blind to anything outside the mandala.

  Keeping a good distance away from the villagers, he walked over to headquarters hutch, which had been scorched and structurally damaged. The villagers probably did it, he told himself. They would blame the plague on outsiders. He could almost visualize the brown mud and sarissa hutch as a great wounded animal hunched over on its forepaws. He stepped over the bits and pieces that had once been a porch.

  Chi was waiting for him in the doorway.

  “Three faber-soldiers were found inside,” Chi said, as he helped Bao into the hutch. Bao felt weak and sweaty again. He sat down in a worn wooden chair.

  “Where are they now?” Bao asked, looking around the room. Then he looked outside at the faber-soldiers regrouping in front of the hutch. They huddled close together, as if to keep warm.

  “They were taken behind the third hutch.”

  “Bury them,” Bao said as he activated the doorslide to the cellar cache. As the door slid open and the bunker lights blinked on, he heard a woman’s voice speaking in a soft monotone.

  “…remain calm…an antidote has been found ..remain at your posts ..help will arrive…shortly…in the meantime…keep your distance from any-one…faber or human being…who…the symptoms of the virus are…corpses must be burned immediately…attention…”

  Bao climbed into the bunker and switched off the laser transceiver. The room stank. A missionary was slumped over the small workbench beside the transceiver. Bao did not touch him, as he could see the sores on the man’s hand. He called Chi, told the faber to have the dead man taken outside where be would be burned. Then Bao checked the storeroom, which was little more than a closet. Although most of the food and medical supplies had been removed, Bao was grateful for the few ration packs and food canisters that he found.

  The men must have us
ed the tunnel, he thought, resting his hand on the metal handle of the tunnel-hatch. The tunnel was a narrow passageway, barely wide enough for a man to crawl through, which opened behind a copse of redknob outside the village.

  Just as he was about to leave the bunker, Bao experienced a slight delirium. And he felt something growing inside him, something alive and slippery, something with tiny claws at the end of thinsmooth feelers. He fell, and the room seemed to be whirling around him. His fingers scrabbled about on the floor like live things searching for darkness and cool safety.

  When he awakened, he found that he was drenched in his own sweat. He shivered, made a resolve to fight his weakness, and crawled out of the bunker.

  “All the corpses must be burned,” he said to Chi, who had been waiting in the hutch for further orders.

  Then Bao stepped out of the hutch into the bright sunshine. He took a deep breath of fresh air, and imagined he was breathing the effluviums of death.

  Before him, just beyond the pebble garden, the villagers sat inside their mandala, their backs facing outward. They chanted the prayers of exorcism. Bao walked to the edge of the garden and shouted to them. But they ignored him. He was only moi.

  Bao signalled to Chi, and the fabers moved in to carry away the corpses. A pyre of sarissa and softwood had been prepared behind the hutches, well away from the village center. The corpses would have to be burned immediately.

  But the villagers would not permit their mandala to be disturbed. They snarled and shouted and prayed. They pummelled and kicked the faber-soldiers, called them death-moi, shouted at Bao, told him to take away his demons, for he was ma quy, and he would never find his way into their souls. They would hold their breaths if he came near; they would not breathe his death-fumes.

  Bao understood their threats. He felt like a ghost or a demon, a maleficent spirit that had somehow escaped from the darkness of the caves of hell. He fired a warning shot over the villagers. They became silent and turned away from him. The soldiers quickly removed the corpses to the pyre which had just been set afire.

  As Bao watched the corpses blacken in the flames, he remembered events and emotions of his childhood. He imagined that his past was just another corpse burning in the fire. His memories were streamers of black smoke drifting skyward.

  But they would return, he thought, as the black rain of his dreams.

  The moi-attack came with dusk. The new offensive had begun. It was as if the grey-turning-into-darkness had brought all the noise and shadow-figures and pinch-bombs. Hutches exploded. Villagers were shot as they ran toward the dinh or into the fields which had been set aflame. Moi-fabers rushed into the village. They tripped mines, died in trapwire and automatic crossfire. But still they came. It was as if they had been spawned from dragons’ teeth. For every moi-faber that fell, there would be another to replace him. Everything was soon covered in smokeover mist. The crackcrack of rifles and the yellow flares of small bombs became the thunder and lightning of a deadly storm.

  Bao knew that he could not hold against this attack. Although his fabers still held their positions and slaughtered moi in a carefully planned crossfire, they would soon be overwhelmed by sheer numbers of moi-soldiers. Somewhere in the hills, Bao told himself, there was a missionary directing this attack and watching the smoke and fire from a safe distance, as if he was playing a ching-game that would come out right in the end.

  But Bao was sick. He vomited every few minutes. The yellowish bile stank, and he imagined that he was rotting from the insides. Still, he tried to make his way to headquarters hutch. His only chance was the tunnel, he told himself as he took cover and rested for a moment behind a hutch. The hutch burst into flames. The heat was a wave pushing outward, overtaking him, wafting over him. He rolled away and screamed. His past had overtaken him.

  Chi pulled him behind another hutch. Bao could hardly see in the smokeover. He hoped moi would shoot him. He imagined that ghosts were drifting through the smoke.

  “Stay here,” Giay said. He bad become just another smoke-ghost. “If you leave, your soul will remain behind with the bones of your ancestors. You’ll destroy your past and future. You’ll have nothing left but an eternal present.”

  “This is your home,” his mother said as she drifted in the flames.

  Bao cried as an explosion changed the pressure in his ears. He could hear only a constant roaring. Something knocked him over, and he was lost in darkness. He dreamed that the world was slowing down, unwinding, dying.

  He, dreamed that he was dead.

  When he awoke, he felt Chi’s dead weight on top of him. He pushed himself away from the faber and crawled through the roiling smoke to die alone. He laughed and imagined that he was a smoke-ghost. Moi could not find him, he thought. He dreamed that he was crawling with Chi. He had only the present, the dead comfort of now. Each now was a dream, an empty space. Ying. Yang.

  Bao had made it out of the smoke and fire. He rested near a copse of sleeping willows and Christmas memory. Below him, past sarissa and paddies aglow with rootstalk, the village was buried in smokeover.

  It didn’t matter if he was caught now, he told himself. His diseased spirit would escape through his mouth to deliver death to the enemy. He would be a tool of the state. But Bao did not care: It could be ying or yang, love or hate, the wheel would still turn. Perhaps not, he thought. Then the divine cycle would be broken. He felt the gentle touch of childhood memories.

  Above him, above the ticktick rattling of rifles, the sparkling fragments of the ring were moving imperceptibly across the clear night sky. It was as if the hidden fires of the village were reflected in the heavens, Bao thought. He remembered the legend of Tan Ming Hoang, the ruler of the world who was trapped in the sky.

  A flare burst beyond the mountains. It was a white flower of pure daylight. Shadows lengthened, then faded back into the soft depths of night. Bao listened for the barking of rifles, but heard only familiar nightsounds.

  He awoke, as if from a dream of grace, when he saw the ocean of red light behind his closed eyelids. He sat up and watched the red flowers blooming on the western horizon beyond purple mountains. The sky was like dark water, and a red dye was leaking, taking over the night with bleeding arms. As Bao watched the distant fires, he understood that the cycle had been broken. The ring could barely be seen in the sky. Surely Tan Ming Hoang could make his way back to earth now.

  This was the time to leave, he thought, trying to die. But he could not push himself into death so easily.

  He stared into the bright night and waited, knowing that beyond his land a greater war had begun…

  3298 A.D.

  The flowing characters of history turn blood red. Casca and a few small states drag Dardania and Pindaria into a war involving biological as well as nuclear weapons, a conflict which ends in holocaust.

  The only fortunate aspect in the use of atomics in those final days was that targeting was confined to a few large cities and to pre-emptive strikes against military bases…

  …but the plagues engineered by biologists made little distinction between fabers and humans…

  A terrible silence descends on Cleopatra…

  —Hela Fenn, Psycho-Soc,

  Colonial Survey, 3300 A.D.

  WAYSIDE WORLD

  by George. Zebrowski

  The city sat in the hill, rising upward from deep within the mass of earth, rock and vegetation to tower a kilometer into the night sky, its angled windows dark, reflecting only the bright stars and the faint rainbow of the ring; ten thousand windows, centuries old and unbroken, staring westward across the valley. Meteors flashed in the plastic panes, mute fireworks showing in black, sightless eyes long past celebration. The structure was an empty shell which had once housed a million people. A few still used it because the windows caught the sunlight, warming the outer layer of dwelling spaces through trapped heat.

  At the edge of the world a morning storm flickered in the clouds which hid the dawnlight. The city’s clear panels be
came blinking eyes, the sudden brightness of lightning destroying the mirrored ebony surfaces which held the cold starlight and dying meteor trails.

  In rooms a third of the way up from the vegetation of the hillside, six people slept, derelicts in need of a dawn to stir them from their troubled sleep…

  I

  He opened his eyes suddenly and saw the light flashing through the windows, flooding the world with a blue-white wash. In a moment the drops were beating against the windows, running like tears down the inclines. The rain would make things grow; summer would last just a little longer. Sadness welled up within him. He started to repeat his name in the way his mother had once spoken it.

  Call him Ishbok, his father had said a long time ago, but his mother had made it sound special. Ishbok, he whispered softly to himself, trying to catch the musical quality of his mother’s voice.

  The others did not waken, and the storm seemed to rage over their stillness. The water washed downward in a river; the thunder walked with the footsteps of a giant. The full force of the storm rode over the valley, holding back the light of sunrise.

  Ishbok looked around at his sleeping companions, at Foler, who also wanted Anneka; at Foler’s younger brother, Thessan, who would never be well; at Anneka sleeping next to her dying parents. The old couple were fading fast, sleeping away most of each day; there was nothing to be done except make them comfortable and bring them what little food they were able to eat. Why could we not have been trees, Ishbok thought, or the stones which seem able to keep their pride. We are soft and filled with blood, and a dried sarissa bamboo point is enough to kill us…

  Foler already spoke as if Anneka belonged to him. His every glance was a challenge. Ishbok was avoiding a fight, hoping that Anneka would say how she felt. Sometimes he felt shamed and angry at her silence. He did not want to fight Foler, even if a fair fight were possible; Thessan would join in like a stupid dog defending his master. The dark-haired older brother’s friendly smile hid the truth—he was always ready to let things happen, as long as it served his wants.