Beneath Ceaseless Skies #142, Special Double-Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2

  Issue #142 • Mar. 6, 2014

  Special Issue for BCS Science-Fantasy Month 2

  “The Breath of War,” by Aliette de Bodard

  “The River Does Not Run,” by Rachel Sobel

  “Stonebones,” by Nathaniel Lee

  “The Goddess Deception, Pt. 1,” by Dean Wells

  For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit

  http://beneath-ceaseless-skies.com/

  THE BREATH OF WAR

  by Aliette de Bodard

  Going into the mountains had never been easy. Even in Rechan’s first adult years, when the war was slowly burning itself to smoldering embers, every Spring Festival had been a slow migration in armed vehicles, her aunts and uncles frequently stopping in every roadside shop, taking stock of what ambushes or roadblocks might lie ahead.

  The war might be over—or almost so, the planet largely at peace, the spaceports disgorging a steady stream of Galactic and Rong visitors onto Voc—but the pace was just as frustratingly slow.

  They’d made good time at first: coming out of the city early in the morning and becoming airborne at the first of the authorized takeoff points, the steady stream of soldiers repatriated from the front becoming smaller and smaller as they flew higher, like insects on the intense brown of the road; zigzagging on the trails, laughing with relief as they unpacked the fried dough Rechan had baked for lunch, almost forgetting that they weren’t setting out on an adventure but on something with far longer-reaching consequences.

  And then the flyer’s motor made a funny sound, and the entire vehicle lurched downwards with a sickening crunch that jolted Rechan against the wall. And before they knew it, they were stranded on a dusty little road halfway up the mountains, leaving Rechan’s niece Akanlam bartering with a local herder for a repair point.

  By the sounds of it, the bartering was not going well.

  Rechan sat against a large rock outcropping, rubbing the curve of her belly for comfort; feeling the familiar heaviness, the weight of the baby’s body in her womb like a promise. You’ll be fine, she thought, over and over, a saying that had become her lifeline, no matter how much of a lie it might be. You’ll be fine.

  “We should be able to solve this,” Mau said. The stonewoman’s face was as impassive as ever. Her eyes didn’t crinkle as she spoke, her mouth didn’t quirk; there was only the slow, quiet sound of her breath.

  “You think so?” Rechan shook her head, trying not to think of her dreams. It was so many years since she’d carved Sang—so many years since she’d gone into the mountains with little more than rations and carving tools—but, with the particular link that bound a woman to her breath-sibling, she could feel him every night: blurred images of him hovering over the plateaux, never venturing far from the place of his birth. A relief, because he was her only hope.

  On Voc, it took a stoneman’s breath to quicken a baby at birth—and not any stoneman’s, but the mother’s breath-sibling, the one she had carved on accession to adulthood and entrusted with her breath. Without Sang, her baby would be stillborn.

  “We’ll find a vehicle,” Mau said.

  Rechan watched her niece from a distance. The discussion was getting animated and Akanlam’s hand gestures more and more frantic. “Help me up,” she said to Mau.

  The stonewoman winced. “You shouldn’t—”

  “I’ve spent a lifetime doing what I shouldn’t,” Rechan said; and after a while Mau held out a hand, which she used to haul herself up. The stonewoman’s skin was lamsinh—the same almost otherworldly translucency, the same coolness as the stone; the fingers painstakingly carved with an amount of detail that hadn’t been accessible to Rechan’s generation. Mau was Akanlam’s breath-sibling; and Akanlam had put into her carving the same intensity she always put in her art. Unlike most stonemen, nothing in her looked quite human, but there was a power and a flow in the least of Mau’s features that made her seem to radiate energy, even when sitting still.

  “What is going on here?” Rechan asked, as she got closer.

  Akanlam looked up, her face red. “He says the nearest repair point is two days down.”

  Rechan took in the herder: craggy face, a reflection of the worn rocks around them; a spring in his step that told her he wasn’t as old as he looked. “Good day, younger brother,” she said.

  “Good day, elder sister.” The herder nodded to her. “I was telling the younger aunt here—you have to go down.”

  Rechan shook her head. “Going down isn’t an option. We have to get to the plateaux.”

  The herder winced. “It’s been many years since city folks came this way.”

  “I know,” Rechan said, and waited for the herder to discourage her. She’d gotten used to that game. But, to her surprise, he didn’t.

  “Exhalation?” he asked. “There are simpler ways.”

  “I know,” Rechan said. He’d mistaken Mau as her breath-sibling and not Akanlam’s—an easy mistake to make, for in her late stage of pregnancy, having a breath-sibling at hand would be crucial. “But it’s not exhalation. She’s not my breath-sibling; she’s hers.”

  The herder looked from her to Mau and then back to Akanlam. “How far along are you?” he asked.

  Too far along; that was the truth. She’d waited too long, hoping a solution would present itself; that she wouldn’t need to go back into the mountains. A mistake; hope had never gotten her anywhere. “Eight months and a half,” Rechan said, and heard the herder’s sharp intake of breath. “My breath-sibling is in the mountains.” Which was... true, in a way.

  The herder grimaced again, and looked at the bulge of her belly. “I can radio the nearest village,” he said, finally. “They might have an aircar, or something you can borrow, provided you return it.”

  Rechan nodded, forcing her lips upwards into a smile. “Perfect. Thank you, younger brother.”

  * * *

  The village didn’t have an aircar, or a cart, or any contrivance Rechan could have used. They did have mules and goats, but in her advanced state of pregnancy she dared not risk a ride on an animal. So they radioed the next village, which promised to send their only aircar. Rechan thanked them, and hunkered with Akanlam down in the kitchen to help with the communal cooking. There was a wedding feast that night, and the community would need the travelers’ hands as much, if not more, than their money.

  Mau came by the kitchen later, having spent the afternoon gossiping with the village elders. “They say there’s rebel activity on the plateaux,” she said, handing Rechan a thin cutting knife.

  “Hmm.” Rechan took a critical look at the seafood toasts on the table. Half of them looked slightly crooked; hopefully in the dim light the guests wouldn’t mind too much.

  “Herders don’t take their beasts into the mountains, and especially not on the lamsinh plateaux. They say people go missing there. Crossfire, probably. They say on quiet nights you can hear the sounds of battle.”

  Rechan thought of her dreams—of Sang’s savage thoughts, the thrill of the hunt, the release of the kill, permeating everything until she woke up sweating. What kind of being had he become, left to his own devices on the plateaux? “You’re not trying to discourage me, are you?”

  Mau shifted positions; the light caught her face, frozen into the serene enigmatic smile that had been Akanlam’s as a child. “Ha. I’ve since long learnt how useless that is. No, I just thought you’d like to know exactly what we’re going into.”

  “War,” Akanlam sa
id from her place at the stove, her voice dour. “The last remnants of it, anyway.”

  The Galactic delegation had arrived a couple of days earlier, to formalize the peace agreement between the government and the rebels; the spaceports were being renovated, the terminals and pagodas painstakingly rebuilt. “I guess,” Rechan said. “It always comes back to the mountains, doesn’t it?” She shifted positions, feeling the baby move within her, a weight as heavy as stone. “Legend says that’s where we all came from.”

  “The prime colony ark?” Akanlam scoffed, chopping vegetables into small pieces. “That was debunked years ago.”

  A cheer went up outside. Rechan shifted, to see onto the plaza. A gathering of people in silk clothes, clustered around the lucky trio. She was young, even younger than Akanlam; wearing a red, tight-fitting tunic with golden embroidery, and beaming; and her groom even younger than her, making it hard to believe he had cleared adolescence. The breath-sibling was a distinguished, elderly gentleman in the robes of a scholar, who reminded Rechan of her own grandfather. He was standing next to the bride, smiling as widely as she was. The sunlight seemed to illuminate his translucent body from within: it had been a beautiful block of stone he’d been carved from, a white shade the color of Old Earth porcelain; likely, so close to the plateaux they could pick their blocks themselves, rather than rely on what the traders brought them.

  By their side was someone who had to be the bride’s sister, carrying a very young infant in her arms. The baby’s face was turned towards the couple, eyes wide open in an attempt to take everything in; and a little brother in fur clothes was prevented, with difficulty, from running up to the bride. The baby was three months, four months old, perhaps? With the pudgy fingers and the chubby cheeks—her own child would be like that one day, would look at her with the same wide-eyed wonder.

  “Life goes on,” Akanlam said, her face softening. “Always.”

  “Of course.” That was why Rechan had gotten herself inseminated, against the family’s wishes: she might have been a failure by their standards, thirty years old and unmarried—for who would want to marry someone without a breath-sibling? But, with the war over, it was time to think of the future; and she didn’t want to die childless and alone, without any descendants to worship at her grave. She wanted a family, like the bride; like the bride’s sister: children to hold in her arms, to raise as she had been raised, and a house filled with noise and laughter instead of the silence of the war, when every month had added new holos to the altar of the ancestors.

  “I’ll go present our respects,” Akanlam said.

  “You never had much taste for cooking,” Mau pointed out, and Akanlam snorted.

  “Elder Aunt cooks quite well,” she said with a smile. “Better to leave everyone do what they excel at, no?”

  “You impossible child,” Rechan said as she so often did, with a little of her usual amusement. Akanlam was the niece with the closest quarters to her own; and she and Mau and Rechan often got together for dinners and after-work drinks—though none of them ever let Akanlam cook. As Mau had said: not only did she not have much taste for it, but left without supervision she’d burn a noodle soup to a charred mess before anyone could intervene. She did mix superb fruit chunks, though. “What are you going to do when you get married?”

  “You’re assuming I want to get married,” Akanlam said, without missing a beat. “And even if I did, I’d stay with you. You’re going to need help with raising those children of yours. How many did you say you wanted?”

  “I’d be lucky to have one,” Rechan said, finally. But she’d dreamt of a larger family; of the dozens brothers and sisters and cousins of her youth, before war carved a swathe through them—a horde of giggling children always ready to get into trouble. If she could find her breath-sibling again.... “And I’m old enough to do what I’m doing.”

  “Oh, I have no doubt. But it’s still a job for two people. Or three.” Akanlam smiled. “I’ll see you outside.”

  After Akanlam had gone, Mau swung from her wooden stool and came to stand by Rechan. “Let me have a look.”

  Rechan almost said no, almost asked what the point was. But she knew; too many things could go wrong at this stage. It wasn’t only birth without her stoneman that could kill her baby.

  Mau’s hands ran over the bulge of her belly, lingered on a point above her hips. “The head is here,” she said, massaging it. “He’s shifted positions. It’s pointing downwards, into your birth canal. It’s very large.”

  “I know,” Rechan said. “My doctor said the same after the scan. Said I’d have difficulty with the birth.” There were new systems; new scanners brought by the Galactics, to show a profusion of almost obscene details about the baby in her belly, down to every fine hair on its skin. But none of them had the abilities and experience of a stoneman.

  “Mmm.” Mau ran her hands downwards. “May I?” After a short examination, she looked up, and her face lay in shadow.

  “What is it?” Rechan asked. What could she possibly have found?

  “You’re partly open,” Mau said, finally. “You’ll have to be careful, Elder Aunt, or you’re going to enter labor early.”

  “I can’t—” Rechan started, and then realized how ridiculous it would sound to Mau, who could do little more in the way of medical attention. “I have to get back to the plateaux.”

  Mau shook her head. “I didn’t tell Akanlam—because you know this already—but the path gets impracticable by aircar after a while. You’ll have to walk.”

  As she had, all those years ago. “You’re right,” Rechan said. “I did know.” She braced herself for Mau to castigate her, to tell her she couldn’t possibly think of taking a mountain trail in her state. But the stonewoman’s face was expressionless, her hands quite still on Rechan’s belly.

  “You’ll have to be careful,” she repeated at last.

  She couldn’t read Mau at all. Perhaps it came from never having lived with a breath-sibling of her own. “You never told me why you came,” Rechan said. “Akanlam—”

  “—came because she’s your niece, and because she knew it was important to you.” Mau nodded. Was it Rechan’s imagination, or was the baby stirring at her touch? Mau was Akanlam’s breath-sibling, not hers. She could deliver the baby, but couldn’t give it the breath that would quicken it—yet still, perhaps there was something all stonewomen shared, some vital portion of the planet’s energy, a simmering, life-giving warmth, like that stone she’d touched all those years ago before she started her carving. “I came because I was curious. You’re a legend in the family, you know.”

  Rechan snorted. “The one without a breath-sibling? That’s hardly worth much of anything.”

  Mau turned, so that the light caught on the stone of her arms, throwing every vein of the rock into sharp relief. “But you do have a breath-sibling, don’t you, Elder Aunt?”

  How much did she know, or suspect? Rechan’s official story had always been she couldn’t remember, and perhaps that had been the truth, once upon a time, but now that they were in the mountains again—now that the sky lay above them like a spread cloth, and the air was sharp with the tang of smoke—memories were flooding back.

  “I know the story,” Mau said. “They measured you when you came back down, attached electrodes to your chest and listened to the voice of your heart. You had no breath left in you; even if they gave you lamsinh, you wouldn’t have been able to bring a carving to life. You’d already given your breath to someone. Or something.” Her gaze was shrewd.

  So that was it, the reason she’d come with them: knowledge. Akanlam was happy with her art gallery and her shows; but of all the curious apathy she could show with life, none of it had gone into her breath-sibling. “You were curious,” Rechan said.

  Mau smiled, that odd expression that didn’t reach her eyes. “You carved something in the mountains—came back covered in stone dust. What was it, Elder Aunt?”

  * * *

  She remembered her
last trip into the mountains as if it was yesterday: going barefoot in the morning, with a curt message left on her parents’ comms unit. She’d taken the set of carving tools that had been given to her on her sixteenth birthday—the straight cutter, the piercer, the driller, and all that would be necessary for her exhalation ceremony. It was a beautiful set, given by Breath-Mother: the finest hardened glass, as translucent as the best lamsinh stone, and hardly weighed anything on her back. As she walked away through the sparse scattering of buildings on the edge of the city, she heard, in the distance, the rumble of bombs hitting the Eastern District—the smell of smoke, the distant wail of militia sirens—and turned her head westwards, towards the mountains.

  The mountains, of course, weren’t better—just further away from any hospital, Flesh-Mother and Father would say with a frown—more isolated, so that if you were captured no one would know where you were for days and days. They’d have a block of lamsinh brought to her for the exhalation; everyone did, paying militia and soldiers and the occasional daredevil to cart the life-sized stone into the city. She just had to wait, and she’d be safe.

  Rechan could not wait.

  She was young, and impatient; and tired of being cooped up for her own safety. She should have been off-planet by now, sent off to Third Aunt for a year’s apprenticeship in the ship-yards; except that the previous summer all spaceport traffic had been halted when a bomb exploded in the marketplace; and the apprenticeship went to some other relative who wasn’t from Voc, who didn’t have to cope with bombs and battles and food shortages. By now—if it hadn’t been for those stupid rebels—she could have had her hands in motor oil; could have climbed into pilots’ cabins, running her hands on the instruments and imagining what it would be like, hanging suspended in the void of space with only the stars for company.

  Life wasn’t fair, and she certainly wasn’t going to wait any longer to become an adult.

  * * *

  There probably was a divinity somewhere watching over thoughtless adolescents; for Rechan had made it into the mountains, and to the plateaux, without any major trouble. She hitched a ride on a peddler’s cart—so many things that could have gone wrong there, but the peddler was nice and friendly, and glad for the company—and then, when there no longer were villages or people, she walked. From time to time, she’d had to duck when a flyer banked over the path. At this height, it had to be rebels, and they’d kill her if they found her, as they had killed Second Uncle and Seventh Aunt, and Cousin Thinh and Cousin Anh; all the absences like gaping wounds in the fabric of family life. Demons take the rebels, all of them; how much simpler life would be if none of them were here.