The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (30 page)

Knowing I would someday hunt
him down. And I will, someday.

The distant city lights
flickered. I saw instead the terrifying flickering within her broken crystal
brain.

I had wandered, lonely and
dazed, ever since. But not toward the city. Where?

Part of me
had known. As a girl, I’d studied the way birds know where to go, when the
seasons turn. Cranes and storks, they have no maps and no names for the places
they abandon, breed in, and return from, but they know the places just the
same. They are called, just the same.

That was the instinct I felt.
Like a crane being called softly, insistently northward.

I fought it, at first, so hard
my hands shook and I spat blood onto the ground. The city lights filled me with
fear.
But I could hide there
, I told myself. My stomach squeezed tightly
at the thought, and my throat closed off until I turned my eyes from the city
to the mountain in the distance.

Taishan
. I was being called
back to Mount Tai.

No
, I thought to myself,
desperate in a way I’d never been before.
I could hide on a farm, sleep in
the millet fields, pay a farmer by washing his prick inside me, or kill him.
Nobody would ever find me.
I felt my legs shaking, and my bowels released
suddenly as I fell to the ground.

I turned my mind’s eye back to
Taishan, and suddenly I could breathe again.

Later—how much, who
knows?—within my scarlet chamber in the Taishan complex, I curled up in
mind-wrenching pain.

Since my return, my belly had
slowly expanded. I had hidden it as best I could. It was all wrong. Vomiting,
craving sour oranges and plain rice, a soft kick inside the belly. Those were
the correct signs. Not this brutal, sharp-edged scraping. Something within me,
hard and vicious, was quickening.

It was supposed to be
impossible. No
peng-zu
wife had ever borne a child. That night, some
shadow within me rejoiced, finally to have its own possession, something
actually
mine
. This part of me seemed not to notice my terror and agony,
not over its bitter, gleeful revenge on my husbands.

I hissed a curse for the
nameless—now probably immortal—soldier who’d fathered the thing. Just then, the
door to my chamber opened.

It was the oldest
peng-zu
in Taishan, with a lustful look in his eyes. He wasn’t always that way.
Sometimes he only came seeking a game of
weiqi
, or some tea and a long
nap beside me. But that night, the old monster had come looking for a wife.

“I don’t think...” I began, and
then I winced and leaned forward as a shock of pain exploded inside me.

“Are you pretending?” he asked.
“You can’t get sick of sex. You’re programmed that way.” He knew that I knew
how it worked, infection and all. He even described himself in the same way,
programmed.

“It’s not that...there’s
something wrong.”

“Let me see,” he said, not at
all seriously, and pushed me onto my back. I complied, unable to make myself
say no or explain. Pulling apart the hems of my robe, he ran his hand over my
body, cupping one breast and squeezing it softly before slipping his other hand
between my thighs. I went slick in moments, just as I was programmed to do.
Then he touched me inside.

I felt a sharp jolt of pain, as
something inside me grasped his fingers and held, tight. He tried to pull his
hand away from me, but he couldn’t move it at all. When he realized this, he
looked at me in horror. “What are you? What have you done?”

“Please,” I said, because I
knew if he left the room, he would tell the others. I’d heard of what they did
with disobedient
cai
.

Another jolt of agony exploded
within my abdomen, and his body suddenly went tense from terrific pain. “What
have you done?” he roared, and tried to tear his hand back away from me. But
the grip held firm, and he ended up on the floor with me standing above him. I
gasped, wondering what could have done this to him, what I was carrying inside
me.

“Please,” I begged, but he
began to scream as loudly as he could and pounded his free hand against the
wall.

I couldn’t breathe or think
clearly. I did the first thing that came to mind, grabbing the oil-lamp-stand
beside the bed and slamming it into the back of his head as hard as I could.

After the first strike he
collapsed, but I kept pounding at him until his skull split open and the
crystal threads spilled out, jittering into a mess of blood and brains. Panic
gushed up within me, the same drowning panic I’d felt when I thought of fleeing
the
peng-zu
world forever. Terror forced me to slow down, but it did not
master me.

When I calmed for a moment, his
hand dropped down to the ground with a thud, fingers bruised black and crushed
flat. Staring into the still-flickering, trembling bloody filaments of
braincrystal at my feet, I realized that nothing could stop me as long as I
could swallow the pain. I could be like a giant snake, too, and swallow the
stricken crane of my instincts.

My mind choking, I fled the
palace into the night.

The other
cai
were
horrified when, a few days later, I returned at dawn. I told them, all these
wives of the monsters, about the abandoned truck I’d found not far away full of
guns and bombs and dead soldiers, and told them what I wanted to do.

“Come with me,” I begged.

“Are you insane? Leave, now,”
hissed the thinnest
cai
, who’d never liked me. “They’ll kill us all.
After the murder...”

“I want to,” I explained,
bristling at the word murder. “I can’t go unless I destroy this place. I’m
bound here. It’s some kind of...” They wouldn’t understand the notion of
programming. “A... a spell,” I said.

“We can’t leave either,” whined
a younger
cai
. “You know that. The pain...it’s too much.” She shook her
head.

“You can. If I can do it, you
can.”

“No,” several of them said at
once, and backed away from me. I worried that they might call the
peng-zu
.
They didn’t.

“Please,” I repeated over and
over again, weeping. “I’ll carry you. Anything. I have to destroy this place.”
A sharp-edged squirm tore at my insides, and I knelt down in pain. “I’m going
to burn it to the ground.”

They all stood there staring at
me. Most of them frightened, but a few looked relieved to know it might soon
end. A few of them even smiled.

When I left, to return to my
truck, I went alone. But not one of them tried to stop me.

Why haven’t the soldiers come?

Surely they’ve seen the smoke
by now, pouring skyward. Perhaps their programming, like mine, went silent
after the palace was burned to cinders. Or have they fled, terrified that
whatever burned down Taishan complex–the center of
peng-zu
society—will
come for them next?

I can’t be bothered to kill
them. Standing outside the ruins, I have stared for hours into the smoking
mess. The sweet stink of burning flesh turned my stomach as I waited for their
piled corpses to finish burning, but now it is done. They are as charred as
possible—a fire that would turn them to ash and cinder was too much to ask for.

First, the wives. Rummaging
through the charred mound of bodies, I dig out each of the skulls. With a
hammer, I smash each one open. The blood is baked around their crystalline
brains, and I have to completely shatter the skull to free it. Still quivering
and glinting—still
thinking
—their crystal brains wriggle free and, as
they do, I hammer them to tiny, mindless fragments. The tiny shards are still
budding new filaments, glittering, but they cannot house a whole mind. This is the
best mercy I can show them, to make them finally free.

Then I turn to the
peng-zu
’s
shot, stabbed, bodies, now burned as well. So many tried to flee. And failed.
With their skulls, I am far more careful. If they break free and connect to
other crystal brains, perhaps they will build or steal themselves new bodies
and live again.

I handle each skull like a
fragile egg, wrap it in a thick square of plastic cut from the tarpaulins left
on the truck. That will do until I can embed them in iron and bury them. Minds
whole, they can flicker alone, forever, in darkness.

That tug: I feel it again.
Smoke still thick in the air, human grease and ash caked on my hands and face,
I turn northward...to Beijing. I can see the ruined city, the red gate, and the
peng-zu
palace beyond it, in my mind. I touch my bulging belly, wonder,
“How can I go there like this?”

I begin to sing my mother’s
song, for strength.

Dark Planet

Lavie Tidhar

One:
Weirdies and Bombies

The Weirdy was
directly ahead of Chamberlain, partially obscured by the thick foliage of the
jungle, but
there
. Chamberlain’s gun was in his hand but it was hard to
take aim. The Weirdy was moving. It looked like a localized maelstrom of air, a
cone of turbulence tapering onto the ground where it stirred the rotting leaves
into new configurations. The only organic part of the Weirdy was at the top
where air gave way to a face like a dragonfly, at least if the insect had been
gene-spliced with a tiger. Worse, the head remained still while the body-storm
continued to rotate. Chamberlain’s gun was a Vacuum 300 and, theoretically, it
could take out one of the Weirdies,
no
problem. Theoretically.

Chamberlain took a
careful step forward and brought the gun up...

The maelstrom
stopped moving. Dark multi-faceted eyes seemed to look directly at him and for
a moment he thought—it
knows
I’m here.

He pressed the
trigger.

The blast tore
through the foliage, bursting veins in the living trees’ trunks, creating a
localized implosion that threatened to suck Chamberlain into it. He’d fallen
down as soon as he’d fired, minimizing the amount of exposed body, but still it
tugged at him, trying to drag him into the temporary vacuum. He shut his eyes
and his fingers dug into the mud.

When the blast had
abated, Chamberlain opened his eyes and stared forward. Total devastation.
Where before there had been a thick, almost impenetrable jungle, there was now
a clearing, and the ground was covered in bleeding, fresh kindling; the only
remains of the living trees.

There was no sign of
the Weirdy. A blue-black insect as thick as an eye-patch buzzed over
Chamberlain’s head and settled on his outstretched fingers. He stared at it for
a long moment. The insect’s feelers moved as if in a greeting. Then some
knowledge forced its way back into Chamberlain’s mind and the fear was back, a
thousand times worse, and he had to bite down on his lip, drawing blood, trying
to stop himself from moving, to be perfectly and absolutely
still
.

The insect was a
Bombie.

It seemed to stare
at him. Chamberlain stared back at the Bombie, trying not to blink. Silently,
he counted planets, based on their distance from the sun: Monkey, Jaguar, Wolf,
Fly, Elephant, Dog, Firefly. There was a song by Li Tsheng you learned, like a
children’s song, like a nursery rhyme, (although it didn’t rhyme), when you
came here:

Firefly is dead and
cold

Monkey burns, Jaguar
sleeps

Wolf and Dog circle

Elephant is home

—Don’t send me to
Fly.

The Bombie buzzed at
him. How did he get into this mess? It was Colonel Piet, old Colonel Piet with
his yellow teeth and close-cropped grey hair who sent him like this, to his
death. So calmly, too. The order came in the night. Chamberlain, Mastorakis and
Shen, report to Command immediately. When they came, Colonel Piet saluted them
and then showed them a map of the nearby territory. “Having some problems
around this area,” he said, circling one bit of jungle that looked exactly like
any other bit of jungle. “We need some people to go in and take a look, thought
of you. Got good records. If you could just pop in there and look around, see
what you can find, why the Weirdies seem so bothered about this particular
area. Think that would be all right?”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

“Good.” The colonel
gestured at the projected map. “Kill any Weirdies you find, of course. And come
back, do you hear? We need at least one of you alive.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

“Sir.”

“Dismissed.”

Mastorakis got it
not five hours out of base: a living tree engulfed him in its branches and by
the time they got to him, the tree was pulsating with blood, its branches
shaking, and Mastorakis’s emaciated corpse was lying on the ground. They had
torched the tree, but that didn’t help Mastorakis.

Shen was with him up
to and including the region of penetration. A Gorp got him. Chamberlain
shuddered. He didn’t want to think about the Gorp.