Asimov's SF, February 2010 (5 page)

"I will be there when you wake. We can face the world together,” Kanika said. She brushed her hand against Njeri's cheek.

"Touching,” General Yafeu said, “but it's time for you to go back to the hill. Unless you'd like another turn on the wall? I don't think anyone has ever faced it twice."

Kanika kissed Njeri's forehead, exactly on the spot that Odion would begin the first incision. She lingered a moment more, then walked past General Yafeu and up to the top of the hill. Odion stepped forward. It hurt the boy to see Njeri with someone else, sharing the intimacy that he himself longed for.

"You and I will share a different bond, Odion,” she told him.

He nodded, and his jaw clenched as he prepared for what he must do. For a moment she feared he would refuse this duty, as she had done. It would anger Yafeu if he had to take his second prisoner to a lesser fragment of wall, and it would mean death for her and Odion—they had no claim to the citrine throne, their blood wasn't powerful enough for Yafeu to fear their ghosts. She held her mouth open and waited.

Odion pressed the mindstone between her lips, and she closed her eyes and swallowed herself.

The stone became her body. She sensed its boundaries, smooth and round. Her mind swirled restlessly inside. It felt like something was missing. She was indigo-blue. Perhaps green was missing? She searched and found flickering flecks of green, like emerald rain in her river of blue. She found red and yellow and purple. All her colors were here, but something was fundamentally wrong with this existence.

She pressed against the boundaries of her stone, and discovered thousands of tiny windows. Speckles of color were stuck to the edges of each opening. She tasted one of the windows, and the flavor of otherness repulsed her. She withdrew to the center of her stone, checking her threads of red and yellow, her flecks of green, her river of blue. She was intact.

Her churning nature sent her out to her boundaries once more, and she tasted each of the windows in turn. She began to develop favorite spots, flavors she returned to again and again. Her extremities oozed out through those windows, the ones that tasted best, and her strands of rainbow-self brought images from beyond the stone.

The first was Odion. The boy held the obsidian blade in his right hand, and a bundle of muscle tissue in his left. The tissue belonged to Njeri. The name came without the sense of self that she knew ought to accompany it. Njeri was a painting of a memory, hanging on the wall. Njeri was the body, and she was the stone, and yet they were the same.

Odion flayed Njeri open. Tiny beads of blood leaked out from misplaced seams and poorly detached muscles. The tip of the blade tore into her and isolated every thread of her being. Odion cut Njeri's body apart, and every slice he made burned her in the space between her colors.

Odion plunged the blade into Njeri's breastbone and pried her ribcage open. She burned like a white-hot flame, a blaze too strong for her river of blue to extinguish. Ragged black canyons stretched out from Njeri's heart like festering wounds. Her colors recoiled from the darkness. Odion misted the body with water. The searing fire of pain died to glowing embers. He was finished, and he disappeared from her senses.

She stretched her colors toward the darkness. That was what was missing inside the stone. Her colors dimmed with the setting sun, but even as her red and yellow shifted into lavender and silver, there was no shadow. She reached into the dark canyons and tried to latch onto them, to pull the blackness out. Instead, the shadow pulled her inward, down through the center of Njeri's heart, and into the wall itself.

Bahtir was beside her. The cuts she had inflicted on his flesh drew her further out of herself, closer to her patient and deeper into the wall. Echoes of Bahtir's shadowself seeped out from his body and writhed in the cracks between the giant stones of the wall. She felt his flesh, still hanging, but he stayed inside his mindstone.

Someone new appeared. She recognized the woman by her shadow. Kanika. Tendrils of red and gold and green seeped out from Kanika's mindstone, but they wandered aimlessly, without direction or purpose. Kanika had stretched out from her stone and seen visions on the wall, just as she had claimed, but the wall did not guide Kanika backward. The wall did not pull everyone as it pulled her. She wanted to stay with Kanika, but the wall carried her away.

She moved backward through time. She felt every cut of every man and every woman she'd ever flayed open, and still the torture did not end. Talib's final patients were next, the ones that she had watched to learn his trade. Then people she didn't know, stretching back before she was born, before Talib was born. The knowledge that passed from teacher to student across the generations bound them all together as surely as if they'd shared blood. She was tied to the surgeons, and that bound her to their patients.

An infant appeared on the wall. Black threads grew out from his heart like mold, and covered the insides of his ribs. His blackness barely moved, it was a constant, steady thing. She did not know if it was greed or fear or rage. Perhaps it was something she had no name for, because a shadow grew within her people before they had the words to name it. She felt the infant's agony twice over—the searing heat of the blade that cut him open, and the anguish in her heart at learning that even the innocent held shadows.

Soon after that, she came to the earliest days of her people, when watchers threw stones at those who hung helpless on the wall. Each blow crushed her colors, smashing them together into a muddy brown.

Then, nothing.

She had seen all that the wall had to show her. She waited for Odion to return, to take her down. She sensed that in her distant present, Odion was taking the men down from the wall. The men, but not Njeri. He could not bear to heal her, after having seen her darkness.

The wall rebuilt itself.

Tiny fragments merged together to form a perfect ring of glassy stone. It happened so fast that she had no way to know what had destroyed the wall. All she knew was that it was whole now. The vastness of it made her feel small, a tiny raindrop of color in an ocean of stone and light.

Two Ancients touched the wall, and she felt them as though they touched her skin. It was the end of their time, and the knowledge of that fact filled them with sadness. She waited for the surgeon, the last true surgeon, but then she realized that each of the Ancients that touched the wall also held an obsidian blade. Moving in perfect synchrony, each Ancient sliced open the other. They controlled the blades in a way she did not understand, and even after they were opened, they continued to cut each other. The surgeon and the patient, the judger and the judged—in the time of the Ancients, both went together to the wall.

Like them, she knew both ends of the obsidian blade.

Odion appeared before her.

Not yet, she pleaded. They were almost done. She wanted to see the Ancients, to see if they had blackness. Odion began to take her down, removing the amethyst pins one by one as guardsmen held her in place. Her colors pulled back into her heart and toward her mindstone. With just one hand still pinned against the wall, she could not see the Ancients, but she could feel them, and what they did here was not punishment, it was not judgment. For them, the wall was love. The Ancients did not hide their shadows—not from each other and not from the wall. And in the moment of their union, when they lay open to each other, they drew knowledge from the wall. They absorbed the history of their people, the wisdom of countless generations.

She caught fleeting images of cities a thousand times larger than the capital, and weapons that could scar the earth itself, and ships of glassy stone that sailed not on water but in space. Her river of blue wept in undulating strands of turquoise at the beauty and the horror of their past.

Njeri's hand came free of the wall, and the connection was broken.

She watched from the mindstone as two guardsmen placed Njeri on a stretcher. They moved the body to a table, and Odion spent hours stitching it together, stopping once to sleep. The boy made two mistakes, and had to tear out the seams and start again. It didn't matter. It didn't matter how long it took, or even if he never woke Njeri at all. She had been wrong about the wall, wrong about the blackness. They had taken something beautiful, and sullied it with their imperfections.

Odion checked every seam seven times, then reached into Njeri's mouth. His touch shattered the boundaries of the stone. Her colors whirled outward, searching for structure. She dissipated into the space around her, traveling down her tendrils into Njeri's body—her body—the form she had lived in all her life. The shape of the body was wrong, like a shell that was too big.

Her eyes wouldn't open. Her body was desiccated and weak, and she couldn't stretch tendrils into the world beyond. She longed for her colors, for the fullness of history within the wall, for the knowledge of the ancients. After such vivid truth, the drab reality of life seemed false.

Strong hands pressed against her back, and her body bent at the waist. She felt so brittle she feared the action would snap her in two. Something warm pressed against her lips. The world was out there, acting on her, shaping her body, inflicting this warmth. The heat spread down from her lips, over her skin and down her throat. It smelled of mint. Tea. Odion was giving her tea.

She wished she could open her eyes.

"The light of the wall shines upon us and reveals our shadows,” Odion said. “Its light is a gift, from a race long gone from this earth. You have faced the wall and returned. Speak your name..."

Njeri heard the words. She heard the boy falter, and waited for the rest.
And you may go
, she thought, prompting him to finish. But she found comfort in the pause. Comfort in knowing that Odion still did not want to let her go.

"Speak your name, and you may go,” Odion whispered.

Njeri opened her mouth, but no words came.

"Oh, Njeri,” Odion said, breaking with tradition and speaking her name before she had spoken it herself. “I would have sewed you sooner but the general forbade it. He insisted I start with Bahtir. But I didn't check him. Not a single seam. I was too impatient to get to you. Then, after Bahtir died, a soldier stood guard while I sewed the second man, watching work she didn't even understand to make sure I didn't unleash another vengeful ghost ... Oh, please don't die. Please come back."

She heard the desperation in his voice, but how could she go back to the world, after what she had done? She had ruined so many lives, on a wall that wasn't meant to be used that way at all. Time passed, and more tea flowed over her. She passed through several cycles, the warmth of the tea followed each time by Odion's words. She could not speak.

Kanika's voice came from across the room. “You can't hide forever, Njeri. Speak your name and come back to us."

She was right. Njeri couldn't hide. She had seen what no one else knew, the true nature of the wall. If she did not wake, no one would know what she had discovered, and the wrong would continue. The Ancients did not hide their shadows, they learned from both their darkness and their light.

Njeri opened her eyes and spoke her name.

Copyright © 2010 Caroline M. Yoachim

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In time we find a way to remember

our past lives. Some souls stretch back

to the invertebrates, while some

began last century, but none, we learn, will end.

—

And there is no such nonsense as karma.

The deadbeat dad can return

as the thoroughbred horse, hourly groomed

and fed with top-shelf oats.

—

All you know is that you're coming back.

At first the suicide rate triples.

Unhappy with your lot?

Pitch yourself across the tracks.

—

Spouse shacked up with another?

Just try again (apparently the grackle

mates for life). Singles over thirty, all

of middle management, entire continents

—

decide to do themselves. Only those

with some responsibilities hold on,

parents and some presidents, but soon,

those too resolve to try again.

—

The Grand Canyon fills with leapers

and razor blades bedeck the streets

the way scratchcards once did.

Those few that were happy with their lives

—

are soon helpless as children—

no one to run the factories,

or write pop songs, or bury the dead.

They too take the only way out—it's a game

—

you're bound to win again and again.

Eventually the few humans left on earth,

diehards they call themselves, settle

for death, leaving, in the end,

—

one child, a forgotten infant girl

who's torn apart for a hyena's meal. Then