IGMS Issue 46 Page 12

  The gap was easy to cross. She flew from one end of the severed cord to the other. Bodies spun around her in free fall. She rolled past them, through them. A floating drop of rainbow blood splashed her arm, left a long sticky trail, then burned off.

  She felt no mind within the drop.

  Landing on the opposite road, she waited for a challenge, but received none. She made her cup fill itself with blood -- the old, red kind -- and dipped her wing tips one after another in it. Capillary action spread the blood through translucent crystal, and soon her wings were crimson as the rebels'.

  Satisfied, she flew into the darkness of occupied territory. The city broken was dull and dim. Its walls did not guide her. She followed the smell of smoke past dark houses and empty courtyards.

  After several miles' flight she heard music -- with her ears. No chords of transcendent bliss, no mechanical beauty, no choir calling her to dissolve into its massed, conducted will. Only vibrations in air, caused by a stringed instrument. A fiddle, she thought. She opened her book to check, but its pages lay blank. A fiddle, played with feeling, though some notes skewed sharp and others flat, and the player lacked rhythm.

  She flew toward the music. Fire danced within darkened houses. The fiddler sat on a windowsill, silhouetted by flame. She rose to him, wings spread wide. He seemed sick, skin sallow, face lined and dim, feathers drooping. Only his fingers lived, dancing on the fiddle's neck. Beneath the music she heard fingertips strike the ebon board, and horsehair dragged over strings.

  Where he found the horse, she didn't know.

  He played his song three times more. Behind him the fire burned, a wood fire in a glass chamber with no chimneys, and in the shadows and smoke others tumbled making love. When the fiddler finished, he looked up, saw her, and tottered back off the windowsill in surprise. Thea grabbed his bow arm, arresting his fall.

  "I'm looking for someone," she said.

  "You've found someone." He was drunk. He reached for her waist, but she flew back from the window, still clutching his arm. He dangled from her grip, screaming. His wings flapped but did not fill. He struggled, though if he succeeded in breaking free he'd only die.

  "I'm looking for my brother. His name is Gabe. A little taller than me. His skin is dark and his eyes are blue." She sang Gabe's song for him, a brief microwave burst. He looked up at her, uncomprehending. Of course. "How much of yourself have you cut off?"

  "Enough," he said, half-angry, half-afraid.

  "Gabe of the Seventh Chorus, Second Tenors, Antiphon. He came three days ago to study your rebellion."

  "You won't drop me."

  She looked deep into his eyes. She wouldn't drop him, not here, to these dumb streets, not with the world-web broken and the resurrection engines off. She wouldn't, but he was afraid. The rainbow machines would have cushioned his terror with a fair appraisal of her, but they had long since gone to sleep. Hormones and glandular fear clogged the slow brain that was all he had with which to judge whether she might kill.

  "Someone who used that name," he said, "passed through three days ago. He went to Michael's Park, to join the crowd."

  That place-name, spoken and not sung, might have meant any of a hundred spaces within the web, three inside this rebel zone. "Where?" she asked, and relaxed her grip. The fiddler slipped an inch. He screamed again. The fiddle struck his leg, a deep hollow sound rimmed with a chord of vibrating strings.

  In the firelit room a woman cried with pleasure, as if to answer the scream.

  He told her. She returned him to the windowsill, and spared a cautious glance at the lovers before she flew on.

  She heard more music on the way to Michael's Park. A drum circle, with dancers inside, drummers' and dancers' wings alike dyed red, beats strong and slow and simple as they taught themselves to keep rhythm without aid. Singers sang, and not through any band or channel, their notes mere fading shivers on the air. In an abandoned lot a power trio burned through "All Along the Watchtower," with some words missing and others made up. A woman sang "Yi kuai hongbu" a cappella, standing on a box on a street corner, as a crowd listened. A thousand red-winged builders played "Ode to Joy" in unison on harpsichords. They repeated the melody four times as she flew overhead, and started on the fifth.

  Rebels swarmed the streets, wings red and useless at their backs. None flew.

  Thea smelled Michael's Park long before she saw it: smoke and electricity and sweat, anger and hope and seared meat. She remembered a few of those smells from her wars, and others she knew only through her mothers' memories, and their mothers', back up the warp and weft of time. She made herself invisible, knowing she could search best from the air.

  Then she emerged from the close, tall towers into the open sky above the crowded park, all carbon paths and green grass, flowers and fruit trees and fountains covered with bodies and life. The rebels made music. The rebels made love. The rebels roasted meat and sang songs and danced and practiced war. At the park's outer edge, someone was killing oxen, imported probably from deep inside the timestream. They'd brought works of art here too, from the museums, bits of genius saved from obliterated worlds. One of the dragonflies' dream arches glinted million-colored beside a Gnathi obelisk. Again and again, she saw a slogan, on walls, on the sides of buildings, on paths and statuary: Gardens Do Not Grow.

  Flying, alone, above the mass, she sought her brother. The book stayed blank, no help at all. She sang for him, but he did not answer. No surprise there.

  She asked the rainbow machines to cut her fear as she flared her wings and let the crowd see her. Cries of fear and protest rose from the rebels beneath. Out of their mass four took flight, builders clothed and girded for war, rippling with rainbow clouds and waked by plasma spume. She recognized the forms into which their bodies swelled as their rainbow machines prepared to fight, waking dormant organs, spinning up silent subsystems, drinking singularity radiance to feed their weapons.

  Theirs were standard combat forms. Not as grand as hers once was, but then, she had long since left the fleet behind. She could fight, but she had not come here to destroy. So she left her sword in the bag, and removed her pen.

  The four ringed her, weapons burning.

  "I don't want trouble," Thea said.

  "Spies aren't welcome here," said the first. "Leave us in peace."

  "I'm no spy. Just a tourist."

  He lunged for her before she had finished her sentence, and she drew a quick circle in the air between them with the pen. He struck the circle's solid center and fell back, stunned. Another of the guards jumped her from behind -- she felt him move -- and she turned, drew another circle, connected the two. The guard swept through the second circle and out the first without crossing intervening space. The pen burned in her hand, almost overheated.

  "Thea!"

  She recognized the voice. Before her assailants recovered, she folded her wings and dove down to the crowd. Revelers leapt back as she fell, leaving a clearing on green grass.

  She landed hard, and when she looked up her brother stood before her, thin, sheepish, shocked. He held a book, open, like his mouth. As the guards neared, beating powerful wings, she wondered for a single panicked second if he would not vouch for her, if he would not let himself be found, if she was about to die in this dark corner of the city on what she'd thought was a mercy mission.

  He embraced her. He was warm and soft, and a simple, old-style heart beat within his breast. He breathed, even. He must have made himself lungs.

  "It's okay," he said as the guards landed around them. "It's okay. She's my sister, come to join us."

  "That's not why I'm here," she said later as they walked through the crowd, past papier-mâché effigies and sitting circles, past tents that fumed incense smoke and statues built from torn-up masonry.

  "Doesn't matter." His smile had softened in the last three days, and he moved with purpose. They paused during their ramble so he could jot down notes. At first Thea thought his book functioned in spite of the web's silence
, but she soon saw her mistake. He wrote on the blank pages in pen, leaving depressions and mute ink behind. As for what he wrote: details. Acrid scent of massed mixed bodies. Grass trampled and torn by dancers to uneven drums. The smoky taste of burnt lamb. A few lines of the long speeches delivered by those who climbed the rubble-strewn cairn at the park's center, to the lectern. A man with shining hair shouted about freedom, about self-sustenance, about independence and virtue and music. About peace and the strength of wild things.

  "How did it start?" she asked.

  "Dangerous question." He tapped the book's cover. "I've recorded many answers. They say the dragonflies pushed us over the edge, or the campaign before that against the Cascade, or that we've been on this road ever since the Dawn War only no one realized it till now. They say Luke refused to lead the fleet again. They say the mob was already here before him, veterans of Creation who came home to find they didn't recognize the place. They say this was inevitable, that any system so perfect contains the seeds of its own destruction. They say this has never happened before. They say the city is weeding the multiverse to extinction. They say we are a sacrifice. A vanguard."

  "What do you say?"

  He ate a second kabob. Juice flowed over his chin, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. "I like eating things. And I like hearing music, with my ears." He offered her a kabob, but she laughed him off. "It's not so disgusting once you get the knack, I promise."

  "Where did the instruments come from? The wood? The animals?"

  On a nearby stage, three redwings attacked a grand piano with axes while a crowd clapped their hands to keep time. "We stole them," he said. "From the timestream. Those who come from the outer worlds bring gifts. Whatever they think we can use, from wherever they happen to be stationed."

  A few square miles of redwings marched through military drills, bearing metal swords, and fléchette rifles, and antiparticle cannons. "You should be preparing to fight. Not playing these games."

  "The fighting's done." He turned and flared his wings and scanned the park. "We broke the bridges. Cut ourselves off. Turned the choir away. We have become living examples of the alternative, of the wild, in a world that has never known the meaning of the term. The hardest war we face now is internal, the struggle to keep our purpose pure."

  Lovers twisted on a nearby flower bed, a tangle of limbs and bodies and breath.

  "In my experience," she said, "the internal's not the hardest part of war."

  He didn't answer.

  "Come away with me. The fleet broods outside the shield wall, building strength. You don't have long. One day, maybe. Two."

  He bowed his head. "So soon."

  "You will all die, for nothing."

  "Not for nothing."

  "You can't win this battle."

  "We never could," he said. "Not if we conceived it as a battle. The fleet, the choirs, can break any armed resistance. We defeat all enemies raised up against us -- even ourselves."

  "So you mean to die here."

  "We mean to live here. We mean to show how the city might have been. How it might be. If the choirs break that model, they betray their fear. And others will follow after us." His voice shook as he spoke, and sweat, real sweat, rolled down the side of his face.

  "Come home," she said. "Our mothers miss you."

  They reached the top of the long slow hill, where a circle of grass lay bare save for a stick someone had planted in its center as a sundial. Gabe entered the circle, and looked out over the host, a sea of glinting skin and red-peaked wings. The singularity shone on lovers and guardians, butchers and musicians and breakers of instruments, bad poets and passionate speakers. Dusk-colored crystal walls towered on all sides. Beyond, the diamond lattice curved, up and in and around, millions of miles where nothing in Michael's Park mattered, save that it would be over tomorrow. All this reflected in Gabe's skin, in his lapis eyes.

  "I have to finish the book," he said. Whispered, rather. "Finish my notes. Nothing like this has happened before, or will again. Someone has to remember."

  "Turn yourself on, then. Stream your memory into the book, and we'll leave together."

  "That's not the point. My sense data -- it could mean anything. I want this to be my story, as I tell it."

  "Selfish."

  "If by that you mean conscious of myself, sure. That's why I'm here. What's a choir without voices?"

  He didn't seem to want an answer. She didn't try to offer one.

  She stepped beside him and threw an arm around his shoulder. He felt warm from within. Digestion at work. The body turning meat to meat.

  "I will drag you from this place," she said, "if you don't come on your own."

  "Give me tonight to work," he replied. "Then we'll leave."

  He sat on the hilltop with his book and pen. The lattice turned, and a shield-sail leaf passed between the singularity and Michael's Park. Shadows fell in place of night. Thea descended into the crowd, past bodies every shade of metal and flesh. A woman ladled out plastic cups of red liquid, and on a lark, Thea took one, and drank, and tuned down the filters in her blood so she could feel the buzz. She joined a dance, thrashing to the beat with others more used to thrashing. After a second drink, she felt like she danced better.

  In spun-sugar sparks of successive moments the dance drew her deeper, into crowds that tore a cow apart with their hands, into webs of wings pulsing to a deep bass beat. In the blood and rush, she found herself face-to-face with a tall blond who looked like the speaker from that afternoon, the gorgeous one with the tongue of flame. He'd grown sex organs, and he kissed her hard and pulled her toward him. She kneed him in his new-grown genitalia, burned the rest of the drugs and alcohol from her blood, and walked away.

  When she returned to the hilltop, her brother sat cross-legged and writing.

  "I don't like this kind of party," she said.

  He gnawed on his pen cap. "I don't either, to be honest. They're scared, and fear puts an edge to pleasure."

  "They know the fleet will strike soon."

  "We hope it won't, but we know better."

  "Then why come here in the first place?"

  "Because someone must remember," he said. "Because once they kill us, they'll wipe this little discord from the song, surely as they -- as we -- remove all else we deem unworthy save the trophies we take. If it isn't written down, it goes away."

  "That's not what I mean," she said. "Why stand against the choirs? The wars we fight are horrible. But they save lives. Preserve civilization. Or civilizations."

  "Do they?" he said.

  Drugs burned off, she lay on the ground beside the useless sundial. "Yes."

  "As we fight we interfere. We smooth conflict, ennoble genius, we cull godlings and grand empires before they bloom. But think: even we came from somewhere, before we stepped outside of time, before we began the long war. Could the Crystal City of today let itself be born? What if all our work only builds a world in which we are impossible? What if we only exist now because we didn't? What if time needs pain as much as harmony?"

  "Paternalism," she said, too tired to form the full sentences of her argument. "Privilege of place. Ask someone in the timestream dying of a blood infection what they think of your playacting."

  "That's why I'm here," he said. "I need to know if I'm lying to myself."

  "And?"

  "I don't. Yet. But I will."

  "I love you," she said before she drifted off to sleep.

  "I love you too. And our mothers."

  She woke alone, to the tolling of bells.

  Stars thronged the sky, all moving, all singing, between a ring of eclipsed suns. The guns must have drifted through the shield wall in the night. Stars: an infinite horde of builders kitted out for war, wings flared white with absorbed radiance, power gathered in rainbow cascade. Eclipsed suns: the Angelus Guns pointed down at Michael's Park, lips aflame, the darkness inside them deep. After so much silence the fleet's music deafened, washes of consensus an
d rage, righteous hunger and restrained wrath and sorrow passed through tachyons and entangled particles, along meson and microwave, the song conducting itself.

  The hilltop where she lay was empty but for the useless sundial.

  Bells rang: the tolling of the guns, and answering alarms in the crowd beneath. Gabe was gone. She stood, cried out his name, but even though she amplified her voice a thousand times it did not carry over the screams of praise and rage that rose against the guns.

  Stars fell, flashing, toward Michael's Park.

  "Gabe!"

  Guards streaked up from the park to meet the stars. They all unfolded, songs clashing with songs. Swords met, and rainbows razored through rainbows.

  "Gabe," she said for the third time, and did not bother crying out, because she knew he would not answer. Of course. He'd said his goodbyes the night before.

  She spread her wings and took flight, and told the rainbow machines in her blood: find my brother. Find him however you can.

  Battle songs clashed around her. Plasma seared her skin and hair; she dove to evade a fog of knives but some still cut her, and she hurt. Her blood burned as the rainbow machines shed waste heat, all their capacity devoted to digesting the data her eyes and other senses fed them. None left over to help her fly or dodge. She slowed in the air. Her strength faded.

  There, the rainbow machines whispered: alone, by the grand stage, his eyes skyward. She swooped toward him as a fierce crescendo broke the sky behind her.

  She landed in front of Gabe, and grabbed his arm. "Come on," she said.

  "I'm not leaving."

  She pulled him toward her. "Then I'll take you."

  He did not raise his hands to stop her, nor did he let her move him. "Thea. Go."

  "Not alone."

  "You won't be," he said, and touched the bag slung at her hip. "I'll be with you always. And I'll always be here, too."

  "You're mad."

  "You can't fix this with force," he said. "Look up."

  She did. Up, into the fire.