Waiting on a Bright Moon: A Tor.com Original Read online

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  The body arrives during the second refrain. It slaps on the receiving dial with the wet sound of rendered flesh, and the processing officer, a young woman fresh from the originworld, screams.

  It’s the scream that alerts you. You didn’t see the body come in, didn’t witness its ungainly, sprawling materialisation through the white of the portal. When you lift your voice in concert with your song-sister on the originworld, the act consumes you. 怒发冲冠、凭栏处。 You are in rapture. You see nothing and hear nothing but the music your twinned voices produce. 抬望眼、仰天长啸、壮怀激烈。 Your existence dissolves from the throat outwards while you deform the shape of the universe: 三十功名尘与土、 八千里路云和月。 You are no longer a person, but ansible, transmitting matter and energy across light-years through your song.

  Like a clawed hand, the woman’s scream shreds into this ecstasy. It tears you out of verse and chorus. You look, and there lies the thing on the dais: naked, skin flayed, flesh laid open in petals. It came through the portal you and your song-sister created across the yawning gaps of space. A man, eyes open and filmy. There’s no blood.

  You scream. That too is a kind of song, of fear expressed in unorchestrated keys.

  The fear brings feet running through the door. First in are two rank-and-file in security red, gun muzzles up. Their faces go tight when they see the body.

  Then comes a buzz like a tide, low and inexorable. The processing officer goes stiff beside you. Everyone on the colony knows that sound.

  The starmage arrives ready for a fight, her suit lit up and crackling, the shapes of dragons swarming over its surface. Your heart stalls when you see her face. Officer Ouyang Suqing carries herself with laser intensity, focused and terrible. She throws a barrier around the body, a translucent shape of magebright, glass-thin and fire-white. Without a word she goes to one knee, her back to you, studying the mutilated corpse. You watch her raise her arm and pass it over the top of the barrier. Suit pieces flutter and reassemble over the elegant lines of her wrist, capturing the skew of the viscera below. Silence reigns but for the hum of the suit, cycling in concert to the starmage’s pulse.

  The security officers keep their guns alert and fixed on you. You understand their fear and suspicion: after all, the Imperial Executioner arrives on the colony this week to mete out his punishment to rebellious elements. He comes to end the life of one Traitor, but who knows how many heads will roll before he leaves? Any lapse in the accepted order could prove fatal. Better you than them that gets the blame, right? You are merely ansible, a replaceable unit.

  Officer Ouyang rises to her feet. Standing, the starmage considers the body for agonising moments more. Your heartbeat stutters like a frightened child. She turns to you, her eyes dark and wide in her duty mask. “Are you alright?”

  The mask distorts her voice and it comes out sawbuzz, rounded vowels turned to square waves. You had expected interrogation, and your mouth had been ready to offer fact and statement, situation and report. It opens and closes rhythmically, like ventricular flaps.

  The starmage frowns and retracts the mask, exposing the sculpted bones of her cheeks. “Ansible Xin. Are you alright?”

  Dumbly you nod, a lie.

  She takes your left hand in her suited ones and applies pressure. Her gift flares and pushes a wave of calm through you, warmth spreading from your wrist towards the heart. Everything grows heavy. Your breathing slows and the world thickens to honey. Her suit-buzz settles deep and languid in your chest.

  “You should rest,” Officer Ouyang says. “This must be upsetting for you.”

  She turns to the security officers. “At ease. There is no danger here.”

  The security officers hesitate, but only for a moment. A starmage’s word is law, and this one carries the name of Ouyang. They understand who her father is, and by extension, who her father’s mother is. Their guns, holstered, return to neutrality. Their expressions do not. The man on the left asks: “Will we open a murder investigation, then?”

  Officer Ouyang frowns. “There will be an investigation, but no murder has been committed here.” She points to the magebright-encased corpse. “This man was killed long before he arrived here. Other jurisdictions will become involved.”

  She looks back at you, and the processing officer. “Which jurisdiction are you connected with?”

  Your tongue is too sleepy to reply, so the processing officer does: “Great one, we connect with the originworld on fifth-days. Everyone knows that.”

  “Of course.” The starmage looks away. Her face registers coldness, or maybe offense.

  The processing officer swallows. “Great one, I apologise. I did not mean—”

  “At ease,” the starmage says. Her face is so carefully controlled as to be unreadable. She turns to you. “Ansible, are you able to speak?”

  You fight the blanket of slowness she has thrown over you, and nod. “This humble one can.”

  “That’s good,” she says. She does not ask you to speak again. Instead she says: “You will be taken off duty so you can recover.”

  Your wrist still tingles from the starmage’s touch, nerves carrying an afterimage of her fingers. You wonder what is happening on the other side of the broken connection. How did the body get here? Your song-sister Ren on the originworld, how does she fare?

  The two rank-and-file are still nervous, still exchanging glances. “Great one,” the one on the left says, “will this affect the execution?”

  Officer Ouyang casts her glance over the contained corpse. “It will not. I will speak with the Starmage General and he will decide the best course of action.” She frowns. “But mind you don’t spread word of this to others. The hearts of the people are unsettled enough.” Starmage’s word is law. The two officers bow their heads.

  * * *

  满江红, the river bleeds red as the moon-tides: This is the twinning song your cluster learns in the temple. The eight of you—Jia, Yi, Bing, Ding, Wu, Ji, Geng, Xin—sit in an octagon around Ren while you practice, the sun warm in the room, the sky a circle of blue through the acrylic window.

  怒发冲冠、凭栏处、潇潇雨歇

  抬望眼、仰天长啸、壮怀激烈

  三十功名尘与土、 八千里路云和月

  莫等闲白了少年头、 空悲切

  Ren is your center, the spoke through which the rest of you are threaded, the one who must stay on the originworld and sing to the Eight Colonies. You keep your eyes open while you sing, so you can watch Ren’s lips, painted red, shaping the sounds of the first words: nu, ah, ong, an. Ove
r the months the shape of those lips have grown in appeal. The shape of her eyes, the shape of her bosom. The soft oval of her face. You sing eight hours a day, taking breaks to drink and eat and wash and please one another. At night the cluster sleeps in the same bed, skin against skin against skin against skin. Murmuring the song, murmuring sentiments of rage and patriotism.

  This is what it is, to be ansible. To be the same in song and in sex and in sisterhood. When you walk across the temple grounds as a cluster—no ansible walks alone, for there is no such thing as an ansible alone—the starmages stare at you. Whether in curiosity or in pity, you do not know.

  * * *

  When the starmage visits, unsuited and unannounced, she brings with her a basket of tropical stonefruit, plump and ripened: Smooth-peeling lychee, blood-red rambutan, dusky-skinned dragoneye with flesh that breaks between the teeth. The crate came in with the originworld shipment two days ago, passed through before the corpse’s interruption. An officer’s perquisite.

  “I wanted to make sure you were alright,” she says.

  You sit on the single stool by your table, your knees pressed together like a pilgrim’s palms, gaze fixed on her splendid silhouette, bright against the unfinished metal walls of your room. Penned in your quarters, she is close enough that you can see, in exquisite detail, the interfacing implants lining the length of her neck. A queue of coin-sized circles breath soft and green, vanishing under the curve of her shirt collar. Outside of the mage suit she looks oddly tangible.

  “This humble one is alright,” you lie. The corpse visits your dreams at night, its filmy eyes blank and unreadable. Sometimes it sits up from the dais, innards spilling like cutlery, and it tells you secrets with its grey tooth-filled mouth. That knowledge abandons you when you wake.

  “The investigation has ended,” the starmage says. “This was a triad affair. Nothing to do with us. The victim ran up insurmountable gambling debts on the originworld.”

  “Then it won’t affect the execution?”

  “Let us hope not.” She looks uneasy. The prospect of the Imperial Executioner’s arrival frightens even someone like her.

  “Why did they send it here?” You shouldn’t be asking questions of a starmage and an officer, and yet you are.

  “As a warning. They have a relative on the colony. Do you know Quartermaster Lu?”

  You twitch your shoulders. You know the name, possibly the face, but not the person.

  “This was his cousin.”

  “It is a great pity.”

  The starmage cracks a rambutan in her mouth. Its soft thick hairs curl around her lips as she sucks in the collected juices. “I’ve put you on three weeks’ leave,” she says.

  You are halfway through a lychee, its slippery flavour delicate on your tongue, wetness running over your knuckles and down to your elbow in a thin line. You swallow. “Why three weeks?”

  “You must have time to rest,” she says. “The colony can cope without the outside world for a short period of time.”

  You bow your head. “This humble one is most grateful.”

  “You need not be so formal with me,” she says.

  You study her face, noting how sharp and bright it is. She is as young as you are, perhaps younger. A terrible burden to carry, the title of starmage. You wonder if she ever tires of it.

  “Thank you again for the fruit,” you say. “I appreciate it.”

  She smiles and the expression triggers a memory of another face, a broad rectangle, dappled in the sunlight.

  As she leaves she hesitates at the door. Half a moment passes with her back to you. Then she turns, “May I visit you again?”

  Like a festival drum your heartbeat quickens. “My quarters are too small. They are not a suitable place for visitation.”

  “Then you must come to mine. I would like to ask you over for dinner. Seventh-day evening. Will you come?”

  Starmage’s word is law, but the confidence that comes imposed on her manner is missing. You wet your lips with a tongue still slick with lychee juice. “I will.”

  * * *

  Your separation from Ren is inevitable, yet it is no easier to bear when it comes. The night before you leave for Eighth Colony you cling to her damp skin, trying to breathe in as much of her as possible, terrified of losing the piquancy of her scent to the wash of time. She kisses your jaw and neck and lips with the fierceness of one who does not know when they will eat again. You are the last of the cluster to be assigned a position; the bed yawns with the blankness of missing bodies.

  “We have our song still,” she says, but you both know it is not the same, it is not sufficient, it will forever be insufficient. You spend the weeks in the lightspeed cocoon feeling empty, bereft, bereaved, halved.

  Eighth Colony greets you with huge metal struts and too much air, cold and recycled, the sounds of swarming multitudes carried upon it. You spill from the belly of the cocoon into lifelike chaos. The mage-crafted glass floor of the arrival dock hangs over a marketplace, and beneath your feet shouting, haggling bodies weave between the bright lights, citizens and officers and grey-clad auxiliaries. Their faces are hidden from you; all you see are impenetrable black dots.

  And then you raise your unhappy eyes from the ground and your heart trips over itself. The old ansible has come to greet you, to introduce you to the life you are meant to take over. Beside her grey-clad self stands a starmage, dragons alive on her suit. Her hair is short, her eyes deep-set, and her jawbone could shatter iron. When you look at her all you see is someone else, laughing in leaf-filtered sun, glowing in blue-tinted moonlight.

  “Ansible Xin,” she says. “I am Officer Ouyang Suqing. Welcome to Eighth Colony.”

  * * *

  The Imperial Executioner’s ship arrives on sixth-day. Its shape eclipses the stars, an arrowhead of pitch blotted above the glass domes of Eighth Colony. The sounds of life go quiet in its shadow.

  In the main atrium, couples stroll between drooping fringes of vegetation, framed by starscape and warmed by lantern balls suspended in the air. You enjoy spending your off hours as a spectator to this thoroughfare of romance, collecting impressions of smiles and shy glances as if for a vault.

  Then the Imperial Executioner appears on the walkway circumnavigating the upper dome, robed in red and gold and black, and masked. White bisects crimson across its furious features. The citizenry freezes. Trailing in the Executioner’s wake are two starmages, Officers Ouyang and Wu. Tigers prowl the latter’s suit.

  Faces in the atrium turn white with terror, sharp with anxiety: A tableaux of miseries drawn up by the Imperial Executioner’s pull. A burning spreads in your belly, too.

  The three of them pass through the upper deck of the atrium in a wreath of silence. When the last glimpse of brocaded robe vanishes through the doorway, the whispers boil to the surface. Brows furrow, tongues curl desperately around fears of saying the wrong thing. Rebellion burns throughout the breadth of empire, and the Imperial Authority is less than pleased with Eighth Colony’s involvement in it. Their bliss shattered, the couples dotting the atrium retreat into the shadows.

  You imagine that, in her passage, Officer Ouyang turned her head to look at you for the briefest moment. A comforting thought. A terrifying thought.

  * * *

  Your first lover is a girl named Mingyue. Her face is broad and rectangular and her laugh fills the atria of your heart. You met on the grassy courtyard of the temple, two young mages beginning their journeys towards greatness, away from their hometowns for the first time. The days lengthen into weeks spent enraptured, intoxicated. Lying in the sun under the nesting swallows she reaches for your hand, and you pull it away. Later that day, in the evening, she says: “We can meet where no one will see us. No one will know.”

  And you are young, and you have the gift, and the world is wide, so it’s easy to believe those words. Her flesh dances tart, sweet, bitter, and hot against your tongue.

  But of course, you are found out. They come for you in
the moonlight when your unclothed limbs are entwined like vines, so it is impossible to deny what has happened. Like a startled rabbit you try to run, but Mingyue freezes, and you cannot abandon her. So they take you, too. Where would you run to, anyway? They know who you are.

  They separate the two of you in ansible training; you never see Mingyue again. On the second day, when your crying has stopped, they bring you to meet Ren and the rest of the cluster. Your name becomes Xin, the last to join them.

  You hate Ren. You hate her soft round face, you hate her meekness, you hate her sweetness toward you. The twinning song feels rancid on your tongue, cuts like grit in your ears. You sing it tonelessly and improperly and the portals won’t form within the cluster. If the other ansible girls resent you, you don’t care. When Ren tries to take your hand to pull you aside you hiss at her. You sleep alone, even if it means curling on the cold floor with your back to the cluster.

  Ren never gives up. She keeps reaching for you, keeps talking to you, keeps coaxing your voice into the harmony. She joins you on the floor at night, wrapping thin arms around your rigid shoulders. Placing kisses on the line of your bones. You watch her grow pale and tired and wish she would just leave you be.

  Hatred turns to pity turns to exhaustion. No one has the energy to fight forever.

  One day Ren sits by you during the afternoon meal, her leg pressed flush against yours. “I too had a name before this,” she says. “My father named me Wang-sun. I am the third of three girls.”

  Wang-sun, a wish for a son. The sentiment her family wanted her to carry for the ages. You ask: “Do your sisters have the gift also?”

  “No. I am the first. They thought there was to be a starmage in the family.”

  But instead she became ansible, just like you.

  You study the shape of her face, which has become familiar to you over the weeks, if not quite cherished. You realise you can choose to be happy, and accept the love you have been given, or you can remain in despair forever.

  You take her hand. “My name was Tian,” you tell her. An empty field, a paddy waiting to be filled. The relief that envelops Ren’s face provokes deep shame and guilt.