Mike Allen - Clockwork Phoenix

She rose slowly. “I was told to tell you, you have none.”

“But you cannot know for certain. You know only that, in the version of the history you know, I did not fire, but went away with you.”

She bowed her head and whispered a half-silent, “Yes.” But then she raised her head again. Her eyes now shone with unwept tears, and now she raised her hand to brush her straying hair aside. “But come with me, not because you must, but because I ask. Give up your world: you have lost it. You have failed. I have been promised that, should I return with you, great love would grow between us. We are destined. Is this ruined land so fair that you will not renounce it for eternal youth, and love?”

“Renounce your world instead, and stay with me. Teach me all the secrets of your age, and we will sweep my enemies away with the irresistible weapons of the future. No? If you change the past, you cannot return to find the future that you knew, can you?”

“It is so,” she said.

“You will not renounce your world for love? Just so. Nor will I, mine. Now stand away, my dear. Before the sun is set, I mean to fire.”

She whirled away from him in a shimmer of pale fabric, and strode to stand where she had been when first he saw her. Now she spoke in anger, “You cannot resist my will in this! I need but step a moment back ago, and play this scene again, till I find right words, or what wiles or arguments I must to bend your stiff neck, and persuade you from your folly. Foolish man! Foolish and vain man! You have done nothing to defy me! I shall make it never to have been, till finally you must change your mind!”

Now he smiled. “Let my other versions worry what they shall do. I am myself; I shall concern myself with me. But I suspect I am not the first of me who has declined your sweet temptation; I deem that you have played this scene before. I cannot think that any words or promises could stay me from my resolve.”

She hid her hands behind her face and wept.

He said, “Be comforted. If I were not the man you so admire, then, perhaps, I would depart with you. But if you love me for my bravery, then do not seek to rob me of this last, brave, final, act.”

She said from behind her hands, “It may be that you will survive; but the future which will come of that shall not have me in it.”

And with these words, she vanished like a dream.

The sun was sinking downward into night. Against the bloody glimmer of its final rays, the warship which held his enemies rose up in gloomy silhouette. Now he raised his weapon to his shoulder, took careful aim, and depressed the trigger. There came a clasp of thunder.

And because he knew not what might come next, his mind was utterly at peace.

Akhila fell out of the sky on Yule’s Eve, by lunar reckoning, and blazed across the icy twilight like a bright thing thrown by a god. She thought about dying while she fell, gave in to the tug of the moon’s mass and plummeted toward its embrace in the peace that precedes a suicide. Who would know, she wondered, that she hadn’t lost her way somewhere between thermosphere and troposphere? Who would be able to tell from the scattered fragments of her corpse that she had chosen to challenge gravity in the hope of failure?

It was only when she sensed a gathering of Organics around a bonfire that she questioned the wisdom of her choice. Her flight path would take her too near them; they might be killed when she crashed. So she slowed, turned and dropped, courting the ground and not crushing herself against it, the reflected light of planet rise illuminating her descent.

She was still a rocket when they approached but was struggling toward a different shape. There was a three-dimensional face on the skin of her silvery surface, and the base of her frame had toes. It was snowing, the first flakes of a heavy fall, and the frozen water evaporated as it fell toward her, leaving the hillside wreathed in mist.

They were naked from the waist up and led by a tall, youngish man with black hair that fell to his hips. She watched them climb the hill with part of her consciousness while she sought the weak, reflected light of the rising gas giant with the rest. It would be morning before she could morph completely, she thought. It was too dark to transform now.

The youngish man turned to wait for the others, and then she knew he was a monk, guessed that all of them were monastics. The skin of his spine bore the mark of each path he had traveled; the Valknut, the Pentacle, the Yin and Yang. After the company crested the hill he knelt down in front of her, too close for his safety, and pressed the tips of his fingers into the frozen grass.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m human.” She used the last of her energy to force breasts from her middle. “A woman.”

“I’m certain you’re many things, and I’m sorry for all of them. What is your business here, Augment?”

“My name is Akhila. I have a name.” I could have already been dead, she thought. “Do you have a name?”

“I do.” He didn’t offer it to her. “And I asked you a question.”

Organics weep when they feel this way, she thought, but I don’t have the energy for tears. Her eyes rolled left, then right. One of the monks was shivering; a fine, white dust covered his blond hair and shoulders. She imagined the snow was ash and then willed the vision away. “I’m not here to hurt you. I don’t do that anymore.”

The youngish man tensed like a predatory cat, or perhaps like its prey. She wasn’t sure. The other monks glanced at one another and backed away. Then she heard a roar, faint at first, louder as it approached the hillside.

“It’s a bomb!” The roaring man crested the hill and leveled the barrel of a hand weapon in her direction. His iron gray beard and hair whipped in the rising wind. “Vegar, get out of the way!” He gestured down the hillside with his free arm, and the mantle of symbols on his back and shoulders rippled as he turned.

Vegar rose, his hair falling forward as he looked from her to the weapon and back again.

“No, I’m a person.” Her desire for life rekindled then.

“Father, wait.” Vegar lifted a hand to block the weapon.

“You don’t know what it can do, what those things have done.”

“She hasn’t threatened us.”

“I said to get out of the way!”

“Sigurd, I can’t let you murder her.”

“I take refuge!” Akhila cried. They would take her in. They were obligated by their oaths. “I take refuge in the spiral that leads outward and in the spiral that leads inward. I take refuge in the one road of many paths and in the company of fellow travelers. I beg the sanctuary of this hostel.”

“You have no right to sanctuary!” Sigurd shifted his aim to avoid the younger monk and fired at the half bomb, half woman, but Vegar turned in that instant and flung himself over her frame. A stream of energy passed above them as they fell, and the sharp odor of burning flesh rose from their bodies. By the time they separated, several members of the priesthood had blocked the older monk’s path.

Sigurd’s lips curled downward, and he spat on the ground, but he didn’t fire again. Instead, he handed the weapon to one of the monks in front of him. “I’ll call the Councilor and let her know we have a problem.” His voice was flat. “Somebody treat Vegar’s burns and make sure that thing doesn’t go anywhere.”