IGMS Issue 48 Page 12

  Mostly, he remembered Axatl's mother: small and gray-haired, and bowed with age; and watching them settle in Axatl's room around a meal of corn kernels and cooked beans, with the public screen tuned to the Texcoco-Cuauhtitlan game. She'd stood in the doorway, her hands smelling of jasmine rice and spring onions and soy sauce; and with an expression of terrible sadness on her face, as if she'd known all there was to say, and couldn't find words that would bridge the gap Axatl was putting between them.

  He'd wanted to say something then, but couldn't find the words that would make her listen.

  Years later, Mayauhqui met Axatl again, on Five Reeds Station. She was older then, dressed in the clothes of a warrior, with the marks of the shunt gleaming on her shaved head, and the naxotl insignia on her chest, marking her as a fellow graduate. He walked past her as if he had never known her; while by his side, Chimalli made pointed remarks on the yellowface's lack of taste - imagine, wearing green with a sallow skin like hers. He'd forced himself to laugh, the tight feeling in his chest vanishing after the first few moments, leaving him feeling warm and satisfied, proud that he hadn't given in, hadn't been weak.

  And of course he hadn't turned back; but he'd known, even then, that the expression on her face would be that of her mother, from so long ago.

  There is a song, in the starlight, if you listen closely - behind the endless lull of the stars, and the distorted shapes, and the pull of the darkness, like that of a current waiting to sweep everything away.

  It was words, once - human words, a prayer to the gods that inhabit the night.

  "Please please please . . .

  O Lord of the Near, O Lord of the Nigh,

  I throw myself before you, I abase myself

  With icy nettles I make my penance

  With thorns, with precious water

  Please please please, let it not have happened . . ."

  It was spring somewhere - Quetzalcoatl, probably, with that persistent haze of blue and green, as if the whole planet stood underwater. Axatl sat at a table with her best friend Mayauhqui - chatting in real time, and catching up on news via the shunt implants.

  "So can you imagine?" Mayauhqui asked. "She asked him out, even though she wasn't even a Leading Youth - just a warrior wet behind the ears with no captives and no status."

  "Mmm," Axatl said. She was not as good as Mayauhqui at multi-tasking. Her shunt showed blaring images of ships immobilising each other in the vast space between the stars: a rerun of the latest Flower Match, with the final tally proudly displayed. It looked like Quetzalcoatl won; though barely, with only a single captive made in the course of the battle.

  Mayauhqui rolled his eyes. "It's going to happen to you one day, you know. You should pay attention."

  Axatl shrugged. "Plenty of time."

  Mayauhqui mimicked exasperation. "You're hopeless. Come on. Let's eat."

  They both had boxes, provided by thoughtful mothers - both featureless green, with entwined black snakes on the cover. When Axatl slid hers open, she saw, not the maize flatbread she'd been expecting - not even porridge or fried newts, but something else.

  Rice - the sweet aroma rising from the box, making her stomach growl with memories of her early childhood - and prawns too large and shiny to have come from Quetzalcoatl. The whole thing reeked with the pungent, salty aroma of ginger and soy sauce.

  Mother, as a final afterthought, had even provided chopsticks: not plain bamboo or wood, but ornate, red monstrosities, with the ideograms for good luck and long life painted on the upper half. Axatl's own chopsticks, the pair she'd been given on her naming day.

  And she remembered - the furtive, yet oddly proud way Mother had handed her the lunch box, her face creased in a smile that had highlighted her alien features even more than usual.

  That's so tacky, was her first, slow, horrified thought. Black One take her, she was going to die of shame.

  And then she looked up, and met Mayauhqui's eyes - and saw herself reflected in them, small and slight, with almond eyes and teeth too large for her mouth, slightly curved like fangs. The mirror image of Mother.

  Foreigner. Alien. Worse, flaunting it here, at the House of Tears, among the youths - who were all equals, all worshipping the deities of the Sixth World, united through penance and blood-sacrifices.

  Desperately, Axatl tried to slam the lid back on - but a burly hand stopped her, effortlessly twisting her wrist.

  "Here, what'you got, Chink?"

  She hadn't seen the boys. They must have been sitting at some other table, laughing at something - probably spring movies with couples in improbable positions, the typical adolescent fantasies that would pass or segue into uncomfortable marriages.

  Axatl didn't say anything - she'd learnt that, if nothing else. But the speaker reached out, all the same, lifted the lunch box effortlessly out of her hand, and peered into it theatrically.

  "What've we got inside, then?"

  They were grinning all of them, with small white teeth shining like pearls, their round faces contorted in cruel amusement.

  "Leave me alone." The words bubbled up before Axatl could quench them.

  They looked at her, much as they would have looked at a dog. "That what you wish, Chink?"

  "Yes." Axatl couldn't back down, not now - her father's stubbornness, her mother's quiet, indomitable will. "Leave me alone."

  The lunch box tilted towards the ground; the rice started tumbling on the floor, grain after white grain. "Alone," the boy said. "Why not?" His lips moved up, in thoughtful contempt. "Alone with your kind, gods rejoice."

  He dropped the box. Axatl forced herself not to move, not even when it crashed on the floor with a sickening sound, not even when the lid spun outwards, out of control.

  The chopsticks spun on the asphalt, red over black, black over red - one whole, and one snapped in half like a bent twig. Chopsticks, Mother was always saying, were two parts of a whole, like yin and yang, like day sun and half-night sun: one couldn't think of one without the other.

  Axatl would have wept, if she had been weak enough.

  Instead, she waited in silence for them to be gone; then knelt, quietly, and put back the shards of the box together; and the chopsticks, picking up the pieces one by one.

  They were tacky by Mexica standards, but the half of her that Mother had taught knew them to be beautiful - polished wood and the calligraphy of masters, flowing like water around their length. They had been hers, and their loss hurt more than she'd have thought.

  But it wasn't that which hurt most; never was. What did; what twisted in Axatl's heart like a sacrificial knife, is what she saw when she rose, the chopsticks against her chest: Mayauhqui's face, frozen halfway between contempt and shame - his eyes shifting, already turning away from the Chink, the tainted half-breed.

  And she swore it, then and there: that she wouldn't go to the clergy as was expected of her, but that she'd take her chances and apply for the army - that she'd join the Flower Games and win captives and status. That she'd be on the shunt-news and on the clans' message-boards, her skill at war the talk of every Dominion planet - in every way indistinguishable from a true Mexica.

  Chopsticks, and entwined snakes: they make no sense. She is the ship; and the ship is her. That's how it's always been.

  Axatl-who-is-the-ship hangs in the deep planes: the void beyond the stars, a layer beyond reality, accessible only to ships. Within her is blessed silence - no radio chatter, no incessant photon noise relayed through her systems. Once more, she is as she was: inchoate, unquickened, with little sense of her body beyond the frontier of the hull's composites. The starsong lulls her, as it always does.

  She could stay here forever.

  Something in her - some distant part, some small and insignificant pathway in the vast system of her mind - protests, beats small fists against a pane of glass. She is no metal, no optics; she was born - other. Her place isn't in deep planes; humans shouldn't -

  But that voice is drowned beneath the thousand mess
ages relayed through her coms; and it gradually fades, until even its memory is overwritten, its blocks dissolved among millions of others.

  Running running around the city walls, with only the faraway light of the stars - distorted through the perpetual haze of the atmosphere, nothing more than a distant reminder. Running all alone, with no one to watch his back, no one to warn of holes ahead; of marshy grounds; of beasts stalking him in the darkness.

  Alone.

  Mayauhqui's face would burn, if it wasn't so cold. He remembers being held to the ground by three of Chimalli's cronies, desperately struggling to free himself, while Chimalli herself - all muscles, with no fat to spare - smiled at him, lips spread over black-stained teeth. "So you're the Chink-lover, aren't you? The one who's all sad because he left his 'friend' back in Cuauhtitlan?"

  There was no dignified answer; and he'd made none.

  "There is no place for your sort here." Chimalli spat the word "sort" as if it were filth.

  "All warriors are welcome here," he'd said, softly, whispering the words that had welcomed them all to the academy. "All those who would shed their blood to honour the gods-brothers under the skin."

  A mistake - he'd known as soon as the first words left his mouth, and Chimalli's face contorted in a grimace, but he couldn't go back now. Might as well try to dam the lakes at flooding season. "You think you're clever?" Chimalli held something against the starry sky - gleaming bones, shining the same pale white as the moons overhead - his worship thorns. She wouldn't - wouldn't dare . . . He arched against the hands holding him pinned to the ground; but it did nothing, nothing to stop Chimalli dropping the thorns to the ground, and smashing them underfoot, with a crunch like broken spines.

  Chimalli bent down, until her face was close: not close enough to reach, not close enough to bite, but close enough to see her distorted, almost alien features; close enough to breathe in the sour, heavy smell of chewed beans - and of stale perfume, its scent withered away by sweat. She held up a thorn shard - as sharp and as cutting as a sacrifice knife, with light shivering on its edge. "Enjoy your run, Chink-lover. I'm sure the gods will smile on you."

  The pressure on his wrists and legs disappeared; and he heard laughter, moving away. Then he was alone in the darkness, the shards of his worship thorns crunching underfoot. He could have run after them; but, short of revenge, he wouldn't have achieved anything. For what good was a night run, without blood shed to honour the gods?

  So he'd gone back to the temple, begged the priests for another set - he'd pay for it on his rankings, but he hadn't cared about that anymore, at this point. And then he'd set out again, with all the others far ahead of him, leaving him utterly alone - as they'd intended all along.

  Ahead, there was only darkness, shot through with glimpses of the stars. Mother had used to say that stars were the eyes of monsters waiting to consume mankind - but the Fifth World had ended in fire and acid, not the earthquake that the prophecies promised - and now the gods owned the stars and the sky from end to end.

  Now it was the planets that were dangerous. It was Quetzalcoatl itself that would kill you - the marshes that hid the claws and fangs of the nazotls, the scratches of the cuayo trees that ballooned and released streams of incompatible proteins into your veins. Cycles of terraforming, and still the planet tried to shrug them off, like a cub scratching at an itch.

  Running running in the darkness . . .

  In the darkness, Axatl-who-is-the-ship becomes aware that the starsong has changed. It's still the same lullaby; but something else overlies it: a steady, insistent beat with two voices, that seems to distort everything it touches, to flense the metal and reveal the truth underneath.

  It's not the background noise of the deep planes, but something much closer. Twin stars circling each other, she thinks, and isn't sure where the thought comes from.

  And beyond them - hundreds, thousands of other songs in other systems and other galaxies, their echoes subtly penetrating her outer hull - tugging and twisting at it, endlessly renewing her into new shapes, new pathways of thought.

  And she realises they were wrong, all along: it's not the planets that should be named after the gods, but the stars. The demons of Heaven have been defeated, and the gods have taken their place - a god for each star, for every mass hanging over her in deep planes, every song woven into a terrible, compelling symphony of atoms merging into each other, changing each other from core to periphery, a storm of notes and harmonies that resonates in her structure like a heartbeat.

  It was the morning before the Flower Match, and Axatl woke up - stretched, with a mild ache in her back. The hymns were already broadcast on the system - the reedy sound of flutes, the haunting, throbbing beat of the drums interspersed with the chant to the glory of the Sixth Sun, He who keeps the universe whole.

  Axatl's roommate had already left for the morning meal. In the silence, she knelt, and drew her worship thorns through her earlobes, letting the blood drip over the metal bowl in the centre of the room.

  In the other station, the symmetrical of this one, other warriors would be preparing themselves for the game - no, not a game, this was a battle fought in earnest, a war providing prisoners and blood to each side, in order to keep the Sixth World whole. That was how it always been done for the true Mexica.

  Once Axatl was done with her worship, the bowl flushed the blood outwards into space - no spillage aboard the space station, no waste, everything for the glory of the gods.

  Sometimes, Axatl wondered, not if she believed in the gods at all - for the mark of Their presence was all around them, from the twin stars around which Quetzalcoatl orbits, to the stability point in which the station nested - but if the gods had any time for her. Was her blood tainted - was that why her offerings had no effect, why everyone still whispered and sniggered when she walked past, and why her ship felt sluggish and strange in her neural shunts, less an extension of her will than an unwelcome limb?

  No point in asking questions - not today.

  She dressed - soberly, in the featureless grey of unproved warriors, and walked to the docks.

  Everyone had assembled in silence, their ears still glistening under the harsh lights. They listened to the priests' harangue, the eternal reminder of their purpose in securing human blood for the continuation of the world, the repayment of their debt to Grandmother Earth and the Sixth Sun for the world's rebirth on a myriad planets among the stars.

  Tochtlan, the veteran who had instructed her, was waiting for her by the pod-launcher. "Ready?" he asked.

  Axatl shrugged.

  Tochtlan's face, as usual, revealed nothing of what he felt. But he seemed unusually preoccupied. At length he said, "Check your ship, girl."

  "I don't --" Tochtlan liked her, Axatl knew: he'd never said anything or had any behaviour outside the bounds of ritual; but equally, he'd never treated her as less than a full-blood Mexica.

  Tochtlan's chin rose, pointed to a pod-launcher further down the line, where a trio of boys stood just a little too casually. Axatl's face burnt. The tallest among them was Mayauhqui - who'd not spoken a word since she'd arrived on the station. He kept hanging with his cronies - with Chimalli, the beefy girl who looked as though she could down a naxotl with her bare hands, and whose easy, arrogant bearing reminded Axatl of the bullies who'd tormented her at school.

  "They look too smug," Tochtlan said. "They're planning something."

  Axatl could have said, "they wouldn't dare," but she knew better, now. At first it had only been slugs in the morning porridge, sliding under the aroma of chilli like the touch of a drowned corpse; but then they'd tinkered with her schedule - and worse, with her ship. Several times, she almost hadn't made it to training; or climbed into her ship to discover distorted ideograms scrawled all across her canopy. She nodded, with a nonchalance she didn't feel . "Thank you."

  Tochtlan shook his head - and bowed, formally, one warrior to an equal. "May the Southern Hummingbird walk in your shadow, girl. May He grant you luck i
n battle, and a swift ascent into the warriors' Heaven."

  Axatl's pod was emblazoned with the image of Quetzalcoatl - the god rising from the underworld with the bones of the dead in His hands, all broken into pieces of different sizes and colours. She put her hand on the pad, and the hatch dilated, revealing familiar darkness. The comforting smell of recycled air wafted up to her - and then Axatl was inside, harnessing herself into the pilot's seat.

  Outside, through the canopy, there was only the void of space - and silence, flowing to fill the cabin. The pods hung off the surface of the ship like clumps of cactus fruit, every one of them painted in bright colours, with the good-luck glyphs of their owners.

  Axatl's neural shunts connected with the interface with an audible click. Gradually, her eyes became used to the darkness; and she felt the weight of the ship in her mind, like an itch waiting to be scratched.

  Out, Axatl thought, and the door closed. There was the hiss of pressurised air leaving the airlock; and then the pod peeled away from the mass of the station, and slowly launched itself into space.

  Check your ship, girl, Tochtlan's voice whispered in her mind - and, sure enough, she paused just outside the station's hull, watching the other ships peel away from the walls like sown maize kernels, and nudged the system into a full diagnostic.

  Nothing felt amiss. But -

  But something was wrong. Something was - missing?

  Her shunt buzzed: a com, relayed through the system. When she accepted, the overlay on her vision was from three different ships: the same three Tochtlan had pointed out to her earlier. They were grinning, showing blackened teeth that remind her of jaguars' maws.

  "Hey, yellowface," Mayauhqui said. "Having fun?"