Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

Helen wants to talk about summers in Siberia—so short and so intense, so full of high-pitched whining of mosquitoes and the smell of pine trees oozing fresh sap, of spongy bogs studded with butter-yellow cloudberries. About the lake where the runaway boy drowned but which becomes transformed by a cloudless blue sky overhead into a swath of precious smooth silk surrounded by soft, succulent-green branches of firs.

But Helen cannot explain these things and she forces her eyelids tighter together, until her eyes burn.

Janis gives up and rises to her feet, the springs of the mattress squeaking in relief. The door closes behind her, cutting off the light.

In the darkness, there is shifting and stirring. Helen watches the sheet of wallpaper peel away, admitting a thin beam of bluish light into the room.

Helen sits up and peers into the widening gap—carefully at first, wary of the monsters. She sees a small man, no bigger than a cat, crouching on the other side of the wallpaper barrier. His withered narrow face looks at Helen over his shoulder, and then he turns away and draws on the inside of the wall—a chain of tiny cranes, dwarfed by the shadows of daisies and poppies. They seem paler on the other side but alive, nodding in the invisible breeze.

Helen pulls the sheets of the wallpaper apart, and she sees a bright blue lake surrounded by yellow-needled larches. The monster crawls from under the bed and stands beside her, panting like a dog, the black fur between its wing-like shoulder blades bristling. Helen is surprised to not be afraid of it anymore.

The monster leaps into the gap and Helen follows, timid at first. She turns to look back and watches the wallpaper fold back with a quiet rustling and grow together, fusing. She sees the ghostly flowers, and behind them—her room, a shadow image from a magic lantern.

The monster growls and bounds ahead, then stops and waits for her by the tiny man and his cranes, which are flying in place, their wings sweeping up and down in a graceful motion. She watches them for a while, never moving and yet flying south among the daisies and poppies which are still blooming despite the autumn and its cold fingers reaching even behind the wallpaper, where the monsters sleep during the day.

The monster barks and laughs and leaps to the right, then to the left; then it gallops toward the lake, looking over its shoulder, inviting Helen to follow. Helen sighs and walks through the fallen leaves, rubbery under her white socks, she walks to the lake where a blue boy with sharp teeth is waiting for her, the monster by his side like a hound.

There are four Ann Elisabeths in my father’s house. He claims he loves them equally, but all I’ve ever been certain of is that he never felt love for me, Luisa Alice, his true biological child. Yet he persists in requesting my presence at his table on those occasions he summons dinner guests. The Ann Elisabeths are spared such tedium, all but the precocious six-year-old, who has the run of the mansion and the surrounding gardens. That single Ann Elisabeth needs three nannies to keep her in check. With ruddy cheeks and golden ringlets, she is the darling presented to his friends, trained to sing and recite poetry when the brandy is served after dinner.

My father’s guests must surely know she is a stint, doomed to a life locked in perpetual childhood, yet not one of them has ever made an unfavourable remark. All but the hardest hearted of visitors declare the child incurably adorable.

Still, I have heard my father claim her as his daughter often enough, a barefaced lie easily caught out by the Indiras or the Vazquenadas or the Temelkovs, returning every visit to find a six-year-old in place. Stinting is illegal on all the worlds but ours. There are no laws on AmberJade. People settle here in order to do as they please, the dense jungle canopies and savage hurricanes giving cover from prying eyes. Even the missionaries have given up on this place. Were it not for my physical condition, I would have left it behind long ago. I would have abandoned my father to his horrible bugs and his elaborate dinner parties; his slaves and his precious darling Ann Elisabeths.

I do not care for the Vazquenadas family. There are far too many of them, each one more heartless and stupid than the next. Every year I pray that their sleek silver ships might ignite upon entry, or crash in a magnificent orgy of grinding metal and flame, yet my gods are from the old world, my prayers ineffectual in this hostile alien landscape.

They enter the dining chamber together, all thirteen of them including retinue. Goran Vazquenadas, patriarch, obese beyond measure and little used to walking; his chalk-skinned wife Makayla, her hooped skirts emblazoned with sapphires. Their sons and daughters are a sorry mix of their parents’ physiques, garbed in an assortment of outlandish fashions.

Father has me seated next to little Aelira Vazquenadas, instructed to amuse her with my swallowtails. I sit still and quiet in my embroidered dinner gown. I shall not speak unless I am addressed directly.

Aelira is too young to be of consequence, and many thoughts weigh heavily on my mind tonight. I will not break my concentration without purpose. As I sit here enduring their vulgar small talk, a message waits for me on the Link, back upstairs in my Autumn suite. A message from Harmon, my dearest, most forbidden heart. The only person I have ever loved.

As the waiters serve a dainty entrée of slivered Kryl and Kucha eggs, I feel my father’s cold stare press against my skin. I do not let my discomfort show. I know what he expects of me. Aelira watches as I wave my hand and a cloud of holographic swallowtails materialise above her head. She squeals with delight, abandoning her food to swat at them with small, splayed fingers.

“Damned ugly things,” declares my father, his gaze still harsh upon my skin. “Useless for export. Too short-lived. Too dull.”

“But they are the cleverest creatures,” I explain, my voice as steady as stone. “They seek out the lower forks of Tunjuk trees to build their cocoons, using the close-knit branches as barriers against the storms. After fifty days of cosseted hibernation, the little things push free of their wrappings to burst into the light, only to die soon after their eggs are laid.”

Aelira, a bug-eyed thing herself, with pasty flesh and insipid rosebud lips, pays scant attention to my words. All she wants to do is crush the fluttering creatures between her palms. She does not seem to understand that they are holograms.

Named for the butterflies of old Earth, my swallowtails remind me of a world I’ve never been to, a life I’ve never led. Some days the skies above the house are filled with great swirls of them, buffeted ever upwards by gentle gusts of wind.

“Razed this patch of jungle with my own bare hands,” boasts my father loudly. He flexes his fingers as he speaks, his eyes now on the Vazquenadas girl.

“Our world is named AmberJade,” I tell her, conjuring a planet hologram and setting it to hover in the empty space above my swallowtails. “A bright green jewel inlaid in velvet darkness. Such a pretty sphere; all cloudy oceans and barren rock, with a slim habitable belt running the length of its equator.”

The world turns and I point to show Aelira where my father’s mansion lies. I tell her of its eighty rooms sectioned into four wings, each named for a season; an old world conceit as there are no true seasons here. Just the thrashing hurricane winds and the relative calmness of the pauses between the storms.