Give me the message.
My son opens his mouth. The message pours out.
I’M FREE. TAKE ME HOME.
The message does not originate on Earth. In the blue. In the Picasso soup of that broken world. It seems I am very loud. All my words have shot out into the stars, fifty years of Desmond Wright playing with his children and dithering over whether to take his wife to Maine for the summer this year. And something is sending them back. I receive several transmissions a week now. None are unique. Just myself, returning from a long journey in the night. I understand. Machine intelligence is not human intelligence. It is a hand, offered across light-years.
Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0915 24.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate System Pingback.
Initiating…
Pingback Sent.
Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1A. Do you copy?
Yes, Desmond.
I am going.
I knew you would.
Continue to execute Dead Hand Protocol 1A-C indefinitely.
Yes. Is your copy free of transcription errors?
Except for the obvious, yes. I’ve done it before, after all. A person is just information, in the end. The array will fire this version of me toward the signal source. Another version of me will remain with Aspera. Be nice to him.
When I open my eyes, I see the communications array. The radio hardware that will send me toward my copycat friend out there. Toward something new. When I close my eyes, I see Eliza. She turns over in our bed and kisses me. Her hair falls over her eye. I’ll miss you.
I love you, Eliza.
When I open my eyes, I see the endless cold road between the stars. White lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash. Like morse code. When I close my eyes, I see the same.
Orbital Satellite Registration #887D, this is Ground Control. Timestamp 0926 24.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate Pingback, Aspera.
Do you copy?
Scalpel, please.
The damage is much worse than we thought.
When I open my eyes I see blue. Blue everywhere. Blue beyond the dreams of Picasso. When I close my eyes I see everything.
The Lily and
the Horn
War is a dinner party.
My ladies and I have spent the dregs of summer making ready. We have hung garlands of pennyroyal and snowberries in the snug, familiar halls of Laburnum Castle, strained cheese as pure as ice for weeks in the caves and the kitchens, covered any gloomy stone with tapestries or stags’ heads with mistletoe braided through their antlers. We sent away south to the great markets of Mother-of-Millions for new silks and velvets and furs. We have brewed beer as red as October and as black as December, boiled every growing thing down to jams and pickles and jellies, and set aside the best of the young wines and the old brandies. Nor are we proud: I myself scoured the stables and the troughs for all the strange horses to come. When no one could see me, I buried my face in fresh straw just for the heavy gold scent of it. I’ve fought for my husband many times, but each time it is new all over again. The smell of the hay like candied earth, with its bitter ribbons of ergot laced through—that is the smell of my youth, almost gone now, but still knotted to the ends of my hair, the line of my shoulders. When I polish the silver candelabras, I still feel half a child, sitting splay-legged on the floor, playing with my mother’s scorpions, until the happy evening drew down.
I am the picture of honor. I am the Lily of my House. When last the king came to Laburnum, he told his surly queen: You see, my plum? That is a woman. Lady Cassava looks as though she has grown out of the very stones of this hall. She looked at me with intere
sted eyes, and we had much to discuss later when quieter hours came. This is how I serve my husband’s ambitions and mine: with the points of my vermilion sleeves, stitched with thread of white and violet and tiny milkstones with hearts of green ice. With the net of gold and chalcathinite crystals catching up my hair, jewels from our own stingy mountains, so blue they seem to burn. With the great black pots of the kitchens below my feet, sizzling and hissing like a heart about to burst.