Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

The feet stop: leather moccasins, and emerald-green feathers, and the tantalizing smell of pine cones and copal incense.

Tecipiani. No, not the girl she knew anymore, but Commander Tecipiani, the one who sold them all to the priests—who threw Xochitl herself to the star-demons, to be torn apart and made as nothing.

“Come to gloat?” Xochitl asks; or tries to, because it won’t come out as more than a whisper. She can’t even tell if Tecipiani hears her, because the world is pressing against her, a throbbing pain in her forehead that spreads to her field of vision—until everything dissolves into feverish darkness.

Onalli took the ball-court at a run, descending from the stands into the I-shape of the ground. On either side of her loomed the walls, with the vertical stone-hoops teams would fight to send a ball through—but it was the season of the Lifting of the Banners, and the teams were enjoying a well-earned rest.

It did mean, though, that only one imperial warrior guarded the cordoned-off entrance: it had been child’s play to take him down.

One thing people frequently forgot about the ball-court was that it was built with its back against the Jaguar House, and that the dignitaries’ boxes at the far end shared a wall with the House’s furthest courtyard.

That courtyard would be guarded, but it was nothing insurmountable. She’d left Atcoatl at the entrance, disguised as an imperial warrior: from afar, he’d present a sufficient illusion to discourage investigation; and he’d warn her by radio if anything went wrong outside.

The boxes were deserted; Onalli made her way in the darkness to that of the Revered Speaker, decorated with old-fashioned carvings depicting the feats of gods: the Feathered Serpent coming back from the underworld with the bones of mankind, the Black One bringing down the Second Sun in a welter of flames and wind.

The box was the highest one in the court; but still lacking a good measure or so to get her over the wall—after all, if there was the remotest possibility that anyone could leap through there, they’d have guarded it to the teeth.

Onalli stood for a while, breathing quietly. She rubbed her torn ears, feeling a trickle of blood seep into her skin. For the Black One, should He decide to watch over her. For Tonatiuh the Sun, who would tumble from the sky without His nourishment.

For Xochitl, who’d deserved better than the fate Tecipiani had dealt her.

She extended, in one fluid, thoughtless gesture: her nails were diamond-sharp, courtesy of Atcoatl’s nanos, and it was easy to find purchases on the carvings—not thinking of the sacrilege, of what the Black One might think about fingers clawing their way through His effigies, no time for that anymore. . . .

Onalli hoisted herself up on the roof of the box, breathing hard. The wall in front of her was much smoother, but still offered some purchase as long as she was careful. It was, really, no worse than the last ascension she’d done, clinging to the outside of the largest building in Jiajin Tech’s compound, on her way to steal blueprints from a safe. It was no worse than endless hours of training, when her tutors had berated her about carelessness. . . .

But her tutors were dead, or gone to ground—and it was the House on the other side of that wall, the only home she’d ever known—the place that had raised her from childhood, the place where she could be safe, and not play a game of endless pretense—where she could start a joke and have a dozen people voicing the punchline, where they sang the hymns on the winter solstice, letting their blood pool into the same vessel.

Her hands, slick with sweat, slid out of a crack. For one impossibly long moment she felt herself fall into the darkness—caught herself with a gasp, even as chunks of rock fell downward in a clatter of noise.

Had anyone heard that? The other side of the wall seemed silent—

There was only darkness, enclosing her like the embrace of Grandmother Earth. Onalli gritted her teeth, and pushed upward, groping for further handholds.

Commander Tecipiani’s investiture speech is subdued, and uncharacteristically bleak. Her predecessor, Commander Malinalli, had delivered grandiloquent boasts about the House and its place in the world, as if everything was due to them, in this Age and the next.

But Tecipiani says none of that. Instead, she speaks of dark times ahead, and the need to be strong, and the need to endure.

She doesn’t say the words “civil war,” but everyone can hear them, all the same.

Xochitl and Onalli stand near the back. Because Onalli arrived late and Xochitl waited for her, the only place they could find was near the novices: callow boys and girls, uneasily settling into their cotton uniforms and fur cloaks, still too young to feel their childhood locks as burdens—still so young and innocent it almost hurts, to think of them in the times ahead.

After the ceremony, everyone drifts back to their companies, or to the mess halls. The mistress of the novices has organized a mock battle in the courtyard, and Onalli is watching with the same rapt fascination she might have for a formal ball game.

Xochitl is watching Tecipiani: the Commander has finished shaking hands with her company leaders, and, dismissing her bodyguards, is heading straight toward them. Her gaze catches Xochitl’s—holds it for a while, almost pleading.

“Onalli,” Xochitl says, urgently.

Onalli barely looks up. “I know. It had to happen at some point, anyway.”

Tecipiani catches up with them, greets them both with a curt nod. She’s still wearing the full regalia of the Commander: a cloak of jaguar-fur, and breeches of emerald-green quetzal feathers. Her helmet is in the shape of a jaguar’s head, and her face pokes out from between the jaws of the animal, as if she were being consumed alive.

“Walk with me, will you?” she asks. Except that she’s not asking, not anymore, because she speaks with the voice of the Black One, and even her slightest suggestion is a command.

They don’t speak, for a while—walking through courtyards where Knights haggle over patolli gameboards, where novices dare each other to leap over the fountains: the familiar, comforting hubbub of life within the House.

“I wasn’t expecting you so soon, Onalli—though I’m glad to see you have returned,” Tecipiani says. Her words are warm; her voice isn’t. “I trust everything went well?”

Onalli spreads her hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “I have the documents,” she says. “Williamsburg Tech was making a new prototype of computer, with more complexity. A step away from consciousness, perhaps.”

Xochitl wonders what kind of intelligence computers will develop, when they finally breach the gap between automated tasks and genuine sentience—all that research done in military units north of the border, eyeing the enemy to the south.

They’ll be like us, she thinks. They’ll reach for their equivalent of clubs or knives, claiming it’s just to protect themselves; and it won’t be long until they sink it into somebody’s chest.

Just like us.

“The Americans have advanced their technology, then,” Tecipiani says, gravely. It’s the House’s job, after all: watching science in the other countries of the Fifth World, and making sure that none of them ever equals Greater Mexica’s lead in electronics—using whatever it takes, theft, bribery, assassination.

Onalli shakes her head impatiently. “This isn’t something we should worry about.”

“Perhaps more than you think.” Tecipiani’s voice is slightly annoyed. “The war won’t always last, and we must look ahead to the future.”