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Patreon Post: The Mage's Gift

Photo of a dangerous woman.
You can find “The Subtler Art,” featuring The Dark and Tericatus, in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Rogues, and Mercenaries.
The is the fourth Serendib story I’ve done. The others are: “The Subtler Art,” also featuring The Dark and Tericatus, which appeared in Blackguards: Tales of Assassins, Mercenaries and Thieves; “Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest,” which should appear in the science fantasy issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies tomorrow; and “The Owlkit, the Beekeeper, the Brewer, and the Candymaker,” which appears in forthcoming collection, Neither Here Nor There.

Sign up here to support my Patreon campaign and help me put out a story or two each month for public consumption.

The Mage’s Gift

This is a story of Serendib, the origami city where dimensions intersect and where you step between worlds as easily as turning down a new street to hear the stars singing overhead or the clanging steps of automata on patrol or centaur hoofs clattering over concrete. Everyone that comes to Serendib has a story, and sometimes those stories continue well after they’ve come to stay.

Once she’d hopped the glass-edged wall using gloves made of fish-leather from the deepest deeps, it had been easy enough to defeat the bloodsucking ivy and the centipede hounds contained in the first set of barriers. After that, she paused to change gloves to a new set, this time made of technology stolen from ancient Atlantis, made of ebon clay and silver circuitry.

The Dark rarely stooped to thievery nowadays but it was how she had started her professional life, long ago in a city whose name she had deliberately forgotten.

There she had been a child born to both privilege and indifference. At fifteen, she had left the school where her parents had deposited her and sauntered off to make her own living. This took the form of burglarizing her parents’ friends, at least those whose estates and townhouses she’d had occasion to reconnoiter in earlier years.

This was not as novel a revolt as it might have been, for that city accepts its criminals to the point of licensing them. The true revolt manifested in flouting paperwork until she came of age at sixteen.

Nimble, fearless, and adept in unexpected strategy, she did quite well by this. Well enough that she was able to spread the largesse to many of those less comfortable than her victims, and in doing so, became known as “The Dark Angel.”

When, thirteen months later, the infamous guild of assassins that had noted her exploits came to recruit her, they demanded she rename herself (for licensing purposes, since murder was as strictly regulated as theft), which she did by truncating the former name to the alias she had gone by several decades now.

She had kept that knowledge to herself as, over the course of those decades, she’d met any number of unusual characters, including her spouse for two of those decades, Tericatus the alchemist-mage; her sometime-enemy, sometime-friend Chig the Rat God; and quite a few fellow thieves and assassins who often failed to live up to the high standards she held when it came to both of her professions.

Of that group, only Chig knew of her thiefly beginnings. The Dark had kept meaning to tell Tericatus, but he did not come from a city where burglary or murder were government-sanctioned and so held a number of different opinions on such matters. In her secret heart, The Dark found her spouse a trifle sanctimonious at times and preferred not to give him license to pontificate.

She had retired from assassinations ““ aside from the occasional wager-related killing ““ some time ago. And now she returned to thievery not so much for entertainment but also because she was impelled by the yearly conundrum of a suitable anniversary present for a man who could, literally, conjure almost anything his heart could imagine.

The next wall was made of fricklebrick, which sounds amusing but involves a number of razor-sharp edges shifting frequently and somewhat randomly in their orientation.

She held her hands near the wall, palms in parallel to let the gloves sense the vibrations of the bricks and adjust themselves to countershift accordingly in a gentle grinding born of magic and machinery.

Casting a glance upward to make sure none of Serendib’s possible moons hung too high in the sky, she thought about Tericatus’ imagination and ““ not the for the first time ““ contemplated her luck in a mate who had long ago grown blasé with outer appearances and preferred inner qualities of fierceness and determined loyalty.

She wriggled upwards, features smeared with coalblack to match the midnight shadows around her, a silver box bumping on her hip. This year, she planned to snare something lovely that could not be bought. Her philosophy of presents was that such things were far better assembled when by effort than by coin.

This garden, located on one of the great terraces built along the mountain slope bordering the city to the north, belonged to a recent arrival to Serendib, a merchant/scientist whose name The Dark kept having tremendous difficulty remembering. This spoke of certain magics laid upon the name to avoid notice, and that was intriguing. More intriguing yet were the rumors of the contents of the innermost garden, center of three sets of walls, which held a worthy anniversary gift.

Not quite atop the wall, she used a mirror-tipped steel strand to survey the territory. She frowned. She had expected to deal with golems, their lips lined with acid spitters, armored in Tesla coils, but they lay scattered about. Someone had preceded her.

Her lips firmed in an uncharacteristic surge of temper. She had throttled back anger since, as a young thief, she had first accidentally-on purpose knifed someone as they grappled.

Not a death she regretted more than any other. The young man (he and his twin sister had been her schoolmates) had followed her to blackmail her. His death had been very painless, very swift. She prided herself that every subsequent kill had also fallen in that category.

But still ““ she had learned not to give way to impulse.

And it was not as though she had been able to lay claim to this place. Serendib has no organized institutions of thieves. Indeed, it is one of the few forbidden things, and so there was no established way of marking a place as being the target of someone very dangerous to cross.
Sparks from the farthest golem’s body still smoldered, sending up bitter smoke, from the felted leaves, which meant that her predecessor had beaten her by moments. She moved across the space with assurance, still clinging to the shadows, careful of the snarls of razor-edged grass, ornamental and deadly, lining the pathway.

The stones of the inner wall were cemented with soul stuff, and she had never been good with that magic, so she relied on a wholly technological approach, letting a wand of phlogistonic radions spill its lavender light out along the pink-veined surface, soothing it, till she could climb without complaint.

She saw no sign of the intruder as she came into the garden’s inner heart. That was a very good thing, because it was such a pretty place that it stunned her momentarily, a phenomenon that rarely happened to the phlegmatic and sometimes a little cynical woman.

Here in the lambent center, lit by living lanterns, a thousand flowers swelled and bloomed, silky petals dappled and daubed with iridescence, each sending out great invisible clouts of perfume, each different, dizzying with its intensity: cinnamon and carnation, musk and mossrose, vanilla and vetiver.

Mechanical dragonflies and bumblebees, hummingbirds and hovering moths, flitted from one great head-sized blossom to another, posing for seconds in the scented depths as the biomagnetic fields recharged its visitor, letting them continue to dart about on patrol.

Crouched at the wall’s foot, The Dark lost no time setting the contraption she had carried at her belt on the ground and touching an ivory dial on its side. It unfolded spindly legs and began to totter about, looking like a walking cage made of silver wire and light, staggering towards a flowering bush circled by whistling bees.

She ignored it and looked for tracks, searching over the soft earth. As she moved, flying creatures sensed her and veered, but as each neared with tiny laser-lit eyes flashing and razor sharp mandibles and stings at the ready, it swung away, disoriented and warded off by the complicated magnetic field of The Dark’s earrings, fashioned of rare and subtle earth magics by her husband for their last anniversary, who had intended his gift protection rather than pilfering.

The Dark knew how to read subtle signs: a bent leaf, a displaced butterfly, a flower turned to an unnatural alignment. Whoever it was, they were of a certain height, and a certain weight, and wore a robe that flickered out just so”¦A frown grew on her face, and each time the moonlight licked her mouth, her lips were turned further down.

By the time she found the intruder, standing to watch carp seethe beneath the surface of a tiny pond, she knew enough to say, her tone irritated, “But I was getting a present for you.” And then, “You always have said thievery is a base form of art.”

“Well, that is true enough,” her husband said in a mild tone intended to smooth the rasp from hers. “But you must admit that you are very hard to find presents for.”

“Hrmph,” she said. “Well, enough, let us collect what we haVE come for and return home to exchange gifts a trifle early.”

He inclined his head.

But when they reunited some moments later in the garden’s center, The Dark held her walking cage, twisted and rent asunder by some force, and Tericatus had scraps of similarly shredded mist, smelling of ozone, clinging to a handful of glowing threads. The Dark eyed that device curiously, for it was not a spell that had occurred to her, but she said only, “Someone else is here, and they do not mean us good.”

“Two thieves for the price of one,” a voice fluted, “but I am only interested in the one. Man, you may go now, if you leave swiftly and without interference.”

The figure that stepped from the shadows was hard to see, for the mechanical insects whirled and fluttered around the slim form, not as though to attack, but to protect. It was a face that the Dark had forgotten, but she realized now she had remembered it all her life, for it was that of the young man who had been her first kill.

Then another step forward and she realized ““ not him, but his sister, who the Dark had known but little, and last remembered seeing at the very uncomfortable funeral.

“Alas,” Tericatus said, and his tone was still mild, but this time steel flowed beneath it. “I do not choose to leave my wife behind.”

“Your wife!” the lady exclaimed. The Dark remembered her curls as dark as her own, but now silver threads outmatched the ebon ones, vanquishing, and age and disapproval thinned the once-plump lips. “Not just a thief, but a killer, and a noted one, fattened on her murders over the years. I see that crime treats you well enough.”

“In all things,” the Dark said, “I have always acted within the boundaries of the law.” She glanced at Tericatus.

“That does not matter,” the sister, whose name The Dark still could not quite recall ““ Elissa? Alyssa? Elison? Whoever she was, she thrust her clenched fist out, tight knuckles upward, and let her fingers fly open as she slapped downward a few inches, releasing an alarming number of gnarly black tentacles that plunged for seconds then writhed upward with a swordblade’s swiftness, flashing up at the pair.

By mutual accord, they separated, stepping simultaneously in opposite directions. The Dark vanished into the shadows beneath a tree’s outgrasping branches while Tericatus thumbed three vials open with practiced swiftness, vapors from the first two combining to solidify around him while the third released a thimbleful of glittering motes that swarmed to halo his head.

But the tentacles moved unerringly only for The Dark, altering course and somehow picking up speed in the process, perhaps assisted by the mother of pearl moths, their wings edged with perilously sharp flakes of crystal, orbiting her head in paths that curved in to slash at her cheek, then shoulder.

Tericatus stepped forward, striking the tentacles with a lacy golden blade that shimmered with sunlight, but they ignored him.

“They only judge those who are truly guilty!” The noblewoman laughed, the sound high-pitched, relief achieved after decades.

Tericatus said, “My wife is not guilty. She tells the world she stepped down from her path for love of me, but I know it was because things weighed on her too heavily. She has worked to atone, and anyhow who are you to judge her and pronounce her fate?”

He moved between the Dark and the tentacles as he spoke, and they fell away from him as the sparkling motes danced over them, becoming more and more sparks in the process.

“I have been told of her misdeeds, over the years,” the woman said, and glittering beetles danced in time with her words, fever-quick. “She learned nothing from killing my brother, has gone on to kill again and again. I have spoken to her comrades, her companions of the blade.”

“Perhaps you had a particular informant,” The Dark said, coldness counterbalancing the fire. “Perhaps they were narrow of face and dark of hair.”

“That could describe many,” the noblewoman said.

“Much like myself, they dressed in blacks and greys, with the occasional touch of silver.”

The noblewoman shrugged. “That is a style, like any other.”

“And possibly from time to time, when you glimpsed them from the corner of your eye, they appeared to have”¦ whiskers.”

The woman wavered. “That,” she said, “is both idiosyncratic and true.”

“Chig,” The Dark said without intonation, but her husband muttered it under his breath in a very different tone.

“You are a pawn,” Tericatus said and glanced at his wife, “in a game that has been playing for a very long time, and which I thought was over.”

“If so,” The Dark returned, “and I am neither confirming nor denying such things, I would have anticipated such a contingency but would, as welcome your sage advice on the subject of my imprisonment.”

“Given my knowledge of magic, I would suspect that the things holding you might be dispelled by truths.”

“Or magic of one variety or another,” The Dark suggested, feeling the tentacles tighten around her.

But as he sighed and readied two new vials, she said, “My dear, the truth of it is that I began my working life as a thief, and I have never told you that because I thought you would think the less of me.”

Tentacles withered and fell. The woman gaped, and somewhere from the deepest shadows came a murmured curse, the slither of a great tail and a plomph of displaced air that might signify a rat god vanishing.

“I personally would count that truth a gift, but perhaps you might remove one of the flowers and several of its attendant insects for our garden, as I had intended, as a token for our trouble. Take your present, my dear, and go ahead,” The Dark said. “I’ll be along in a little while.” She eyed the woman.

When she caught up with Tericatus at the outermost wall, he said, “An assassin who had repented might stay their hand from killing someone who they thought might pose a future danger sometime.”

“That is true,” The Dark said, cleaning some substance from a silver stiletto. “And it is also true that even such a one might think it best to avoid future trouble if it might affect others that one cared for.”

“That is indeed another truth,” Tericatus said and reflected, not for the first time, on the value of growing blasé with outer appearance and preferring inner qualities of fierceness and determined loyalty in a mate.

-THE END-

Let me know what you thought! Shall I keep writing Serendib pieces, go back to Tabat, or venture elsewhere?

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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."

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Who's the Mayor of Your Data?: What You Do When You Like Something on Facebook

Picture of a mask
Do you need to put on additional masks when dealing with the Internet, or should you present yourself in all your glory?
Recently I’ve been mulling over implementing a new policy with my social media practices. I’m thinking about calling a moratorium on likes and check-ins, pins and stumbles.

On the one hand — and this is certainly how the marketers eying all those tasty bits of data would like you to think of it — you are engaging in social expression, you are singing to the world with your own individual song made up of pop culture references and color preferences. You are bonding with that cousin in Colorado, that sister-in-law of a friend, or even your bff. You are finding the gems of the Internet and sharing them. For me as a writer, I’m (or at least I hope I am) continuing to build and deepen my fan base, so they’ll buy my books.

But the other hand is more sinister. You’re providing marketers with your data, telling them how to most effectively sell to you, letting them know what images, what songs, what memes have resonance for you. Talk about the ultimate consumer survey – this one’s as long and exhaustive as you care to make it. Everyone who uses Gmail (and I’m one of them) has more than once been spooked at how the ad in the sidebar seems to target exactly what you’re thinking of with a precision worthy of a Twilight Zone episode. Imagine if every ad getting served to you is precisely tailored to convince you that you need that particular thneed.

This worries me. We are imperfect creatures, our brains are easily tricked, and subliminal tricks can be played upon us. Oxytocin makes us more trusting, advertising surrounds us on an unquestioned daily basis, and we are, after all, predictable and manipulable creatures.

Or what would a game tweaked to our individual quirks be like? (I envision something for myself filled with Amazons, talking animals, an assortment of literary figures ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer to James Tiptree Jr., and pop culture references to children’s cartoons from the late sixties to early 70s.) Such a game, perhaps one formulated with by then automated algorithms of gripping narrative construction, would be awesome.

And on that sinister hand again, it would be so addictive. I say that as someone who gave at least three night a week to D&D all through my high school years, as a WoW player since the beta, as someone who laid a decade and a half of work on the altar of the entity known as Armageddon MUD, which has eaten lives, grades, careers, friendships, and even marriages over the course of its existence. The thought of a game more addictive than that terrifies me.

So while I’m not quite so worried about my data getting used nowadays, I do have concerns about the future and how my data footprint may someday be used. So what are strategies for dealing with this concern? None seem perfect, but three spring to mind.

  1. I can stop using these networks. I’m reluctant to do that, because I enjoy the experience. I like looking at Pinterest pins and seeing all the pretty colors. I like being able to see what my friends are up and who’s got new stuff out that I can help promote.
  2. I can introduce bad data into the mix. I can introduce some contradictory things in there, like saying I like licorice or Mitt Romney. Tracking that seems odd, but I’m capable of it, much like the friend who periodically buys items he doesn’t need with his shopping Advantage card, just to screw with the machine minds.
  3. I can use networks with a persona. I can figure out my alternate Cat Rambo. We all do this to some extent already – no one showcases all of their bad selves online except for the truly narcissistic and deluded.

So what to do? I guess the first step is realizing there’s a problem. What do you think, am I just being paranoid and should break out my tinfoil hat or begin preserving my precious bodily fluids from contamination? Or is this something we should all be thinking about?

(And if I die under mysterious circumstances in the next couple weeks, it only confirms the corporate assassins exist…)

Enjoy this musing on social media for writers and want more content like it? Check out the classes Cat gives via the Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers, which offers both on-demand and live online writing classes for fantasy and science fiction writers from Cat and other authors, including Ann Leckie, Seanan McGuire, Fran Wilde and other talents! All classes include three free slots.

Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.

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Five Ways to Fall In Love on Planet Porcelain

Picture of broken cupsHere’s my holiday gift to you. This story was original to the collection that came out in September, Near + Far. It’s one of my favorites. Here’s the print version as well as a link to the audio version, read by me and edited by the wonderful Lauren Harris.

UPDATE: Thank you to the people who put the story on the 2013 Nebula ballot! I am tickled pink.

Audio version.

Five Ways to Fall In Love on Planet Porcelain

Over the years, Tikka’s job as a Minor Propagandist for the planet Porcelain’s Bureau of Tourism had shaped her way of thinking. She dealt primarily in quintets of attractions, lists of five which were distributed through the Bureau’s publications and information dollops: Five Major China Factories Where the Population of Porcelain Can Be Seen Being Created; Five Views of Porcelain’s Clay Fields; Five Restaurants Serving Native Cuisine at Its Most Natural.

Today she was composing Five Signs of Spring in Eletak, her native city.

Here along the waterfront, she added chimmerees to her list as she watched the native creatures, cross between fish and flower, surface. Each chimmeree spreading its white petals as it rose, white clusters holding amber centers, tendrils of golden thread sending their scent into the air along with the most delicate whisper of sound, barely audible over the lapping of the water.

The urge towards love beat along every energy vein of her silica body, even down to her missing toes, but she resisted it. She would remain alone this spring, as she had every spring since she had made her vow and inscribed it in the notebook where she kept her personal lists, under “Life Resolutions,” 4th under “Keep myself clean in thought and mind,” “Devote myself to promoting Porcelain’s tourism,” and “Fall in love.” The third item had been crossed off at the same time, in vehement black pen strokes.

Her first sign of spring had been the singing of the tree frogs, which had awoken her three nights ago, in the small hours when most of the citizens cracked, gave way to despair, and crumbled in the manner of the elderly.

She was afraid of cracking, examined herself with obsessive care in the sluice for any sign that her surface was giving in, allowing the forces of time to work at her. She’d lain awake in the darkness, checking her mind with the same care. Were there any sorrows, any passions that might lead her thoughts along the same groove till it gave, eroded into madness?


She knew of one, and she kept her thoughts away from it as though it were made of thorns. Pain surrounded its edges and she could not avoid brushing against them even as she avoided it, but she kept herself from touching its tender heart, when silica melted in emotion and loss. She clicked her eyelids shut and contemplated what the morning would bring: ablutions and prayers, and a walk to the stop where the balloon-tram would take her to work. The sides would be hung with flower-colored silks in honor of the season. That would be her second sign of spring.

***

At work, there was jostling going on over a corner, windowed office. A writer had given way to cracking, premature, as sometimes happened with those who lived carelessly. Tikka was keeping back; she liked to do her work outside, and didn’t think herself enough in the offices to merit such a coveted space. Not that she would have been first in line for it; of the three Minor Propagandists, she was the most junior, with only six years to the others’ respective ten and fifteen.

Attle met her with a list in hand.

“Not again,” Tikka said. “I like doing my own, you know that.”

Attle shrugged. She was tall and willowy to Tikka’s squatter lines. “He says they’re only suggestions.”

Tikka took the list and studied it. “Suggestions that are heavily encouraged,” she said. “If I don’t take at least half of them, it’ll affect my next review.”

“No one really worries about reviews,” Attle said. It was true; the small Bureau’s turnover rate was glacial. Like most government jobs, it was steady and guaranteed work in a place where poverty was rampant.

“I do,” Tikka retorted. She was all too conscious that she didn’t resemble most of the other citizens in the office. She had won her post through a scholarship, was one of the tokens allowed positions so they could be held up to the lesser advantaged as what they could be if they kept their mouths shut and worked hard.

More tourists meant more money for everyone, even if it did have to trickle through the layer of upper citizens at first. She didn’t think many of the topics were designed to attract tourists.

“‘Five spots celebrated in the works of the poet Xochiti’? Who reads him? We need things that tourists are looking for, new experiences and new trinkets to buy. Five places where they serve fin in the manner of the Brutists is not going to do it.”

“He believes in niches,” Attle murmured in habitual response.

“Some niches are so small that no tourist would fit in them!” Tikka waved Attle off when she would have spoken again. “I know, I know, it’s none of your doing.”

She went to her desk, situated in a paper-walled cubicle. The patterns were from several years ago; the department’s budget had been shrinking of late and even the plants that hung here and there were desiccated but unreplaced, delicate arrangements of withered ferns draped with dust that no one wanted to touch, lest they be mistaken for a lower-class servitor of the kind the Bureau could no longer afford.

Her fingers danced across the transparent surface of her data-pad, which dimpled beneath her touch. She pulled up a master document and transferred the least objectionable of the Master Propagandist’s “suggestions” into it, scoffing under her breath.

A clink of drummed fingers behind her snatched her attention. She turned so quickly she nearly collided with the author of the suggestions himself. “Sir!” She stepped back to a safer, more polite distance.

“Am I to believe you feel you have worthier candidates for your time than those I have advanced?” he said. Master Propagandist Blikik was made of smooth white clay, a material so fine that it gleamed under the office lights in a way Tikka’s coarser, low-class surface could never match, even with disguising cosmetics. His colors would never fade, while hers would eventually succumb to the sun, give way to pale, unfashionable hues.

She dropped her gaze to the felted carpet beneath his feet. “No, sir.”

He waited.

“I’m sorry, sir.” She met his eyes. “I thought perhaps we might consider some alternative ways of attracting tourists.”

Clatter of halted movement behind her as others stopped to listen. She could feel the shockwave reverberate through the office as whispers of her boldness were hissed to outliers who hadn’t heard.

Blikik’s robes, swirled with gold and crimson, a style as outdated as the cubicle walls, rustled as indignation drew him upwards, made him tower over Tikka.

“You will do as you are told,” he barked, so crisp his teeth snapped together with an unpleasant, brittle sound. “You are not paid to think. If you wish to think, other accommodations can be made for your employment. Is that what you wish?”

“No, sir, not at all, sir,” she rushed to supply into the shocked void his words had left.

He nodded once, turned on his heel, and walked away.

***

After she’d drafted a couple of lists, Tikka escaped outside to the terraced gardens overlooking the sound garden (one of Eletak’s five most impressive sites). Its massive steel structures were strung with cabling and wire that sang whenever the wind stopped sweeping across the water and came to investigate the inland. Shapes huddled on the sculptures, the winged monkeys that made them their nesting grounds, where they raised their thumb-sized offspring and lived the lives of one of Eletak’s five most distinctive native species.

The air smelled of monkey shit, which, combined with the unpleasant sensation of the vibrations from the sound garden, drove most visitors away. Rumor held that the sound garden could set off interior echoes that might leave someone dust on a pathway, but she had never believed it. Childhood prittle prattle, don’t do this or that or you’ll fall afoul of unseen forces. Meaningless superstition.

She leaned on the wooden railing, using her jacket to cushion her arms. The wires sang a song she’d heard years ago, love love careless love.

She could give way to it. She could go find a mate and the two of them could pose, take on the shape of love and freeze together in the most intimate contortion. She hated the helpless feeling afterward, where you were caught still mingled with the other person until the rigidity that came with orgasm, lasting hours, seeped away and you were your own unique person, rather than part of the larger construction, again.

How freakish, the ways of love on this planet, or anywhere else. The illusion that you had become something other than you were. The illusion that you could be something other than alone.

She would not succumb.

Love, love careless love, the wires complained. It was unseasonably cold. Two monkeys huddled together for warmth in a metal Y only a few feet down from her. Pathetic.

She would not love again.

Too many memories were in the way.

***

It had happened the second spring that she had been working for the Bureau. She had traveled a lot the first year, taking pictures and conducting interviews of tourists in various areas to find out what had brought them there. She had written a private list: Five Things Tourists Dislike about Porcelain.

  1. The standoffish nature of its people.
  2. The unabashed attitude of greed towards tourist money.
  3. The slowness of the balloon transit center.
  4. The number of political uprisings.
  5. The number of native species prone to throwing shit at tourists.

The man had been trying to clean monkey shit off himself near the sound garden. She’d intervened, led him to a public sluice.

“No wonder all your people seem so clean,” he’d said, washing himself off in the stream of heated water.

“Down here,” she said. She didn’t know why she said it. It was forbidden to speak to tourists with anything other than pleasantries. She’d had to go through weeks of training to do it.

“Other areas don’t have these?” he said.

“Other areas don’t have running water,” she said. “Why waste technology on lesser clay?”

A monkey screamed behind him and he flinched. His eyes checked the badge on her chest. “You can deal with tourists, can’t you? Not like most of these, forbidden to talk to us. Come and have lunch with me.”

So few restaurants catered to both kinds, but she took him to a place near the Bureau, disks of aetheric energy which she slotted into her mouth, a salad for him, odd grainy lumps scattered through it.

Humans. The richest of all the multi-verse dwellers, at least many of their branches were. Was he from one? She rather thought so, given the cut of his clothing, the insouciant ease with which he leaned back to survey her and the restaurant. His was not a species accustomed to scraping or scrabbling.

He said, “I’ve never understood why more people don’t come here. A world peopled by china figurines.”

There were more interesting worlds in the multi-verse, she knew. Paper dolls, and talking purple griffons. Intelligent rainbows and everyone’s favorite, the Chocolate Universe. She shrugged.

“I want you for my tour guide,” he said, staring at her. “Can we do that?”

It was unorthodox. But he had unexpected pull. Blikik had been forced to allow it, although he heaped her with instructions and imprecations. Porcelain must preserve its public face for tourism, he had said. No talk of politics, no talk of clays or those who did not live in the cities.

She nodded until she thought her neck would give way from the motion.

***

Places to take tourists on Planet Porcelain:

  1. A birthing factory, where the citizenry are mass produced. The list is short; tourists are only taken to the upper class factories, where citizens are made of the highest quality porcelain, rather than one of the more sordid working class manufactories.
  2. The bridges of Etekeli, which run from building to building in a city more vertical than horizontal. There is a daring glee to the citizenry here; the ground is littered with the remains of those who came to this place, which has a suicide rate twenty times that of elsewhere on the planet.
  3. The Dedicatorium.

The first sight of the Dedicatorium awed him. She understood how it must look: from afar a wall of thorny white. Then as one approached, it resolved itself into a pattern made of feet and hands, arms and legs.

“People leave these here?” he half-whispered, his voice roughened by the silence.

“They do it for several reasons,” she told him. “Some in gratitude for some answered prayer. Others to leave a piece of themselves behind.”

As they watched, a woman approached. She carried a bundle in her only hand. When she got close to the wall, she fumbled away the coverings to reveal the other hand. She searched along the wall until she found a place to fold it into a niche. It curled there, its fingers clustered as though to form a hollow where a secret might be whispered.

His face was flushed, but she could not read the emotion. “Your people can detach their own limbs?”

“It is easier to get someone else to do it,” she said. “It is not without pain. The joints must be detached, and it usually breaks them to do so.”

“I have seen no amputees on your streets,” he said. His eyes searched the wall, taking in the delicate point of a toe, the rugged line of a calf’s stilled muscles.

“It is an injury that often leads to cracking,” she said. “Few survive unless they take great care of the point where the limb was severed.”

“It’s barbaric,” he said, but she heard only love and appreciation in his voice.

***

“You spend too much time with him,” Blikik complained.

She let his complaints wash over her like water, eroding irritation. Through his eyes, she was learning to craft lists tailored to humans, their petty desires for restrooms and food that tasted like the food they had at home. And their greed, which must be fed with lists of the cheapest markets, the most inexpensive hostelries, free performances.

Tourism had increased a very small percentage, but it was due to her efforts. She could not spend enough time with him. He was too full of valuable information, conversation, insight.

He was such good company, so interesting to listen to, so fascinating in his different viewpoint. She wrote lists specifically for him, five restaurants that served his favorite condiment, five places to view a sunset shaded with indigo and longing.

Five places to be alone with your native guide.

***

Ways to fall in love on Planet Porcelain:

  1. Slowly, so slowly. At first just a hint of delight at his face when he heard the chimmeree singing.
  2. Like a revelation, a book opening as he told stories of his childhood, life under a different sun, where different songs held sway. He never talked of taking her there, but she was content. This was his story now, its happy ending on Planet Porcelain.
  3. Knowing that it was wrong, unheard of. And knowing that its forbidden nature gave it extra savor, gave it the allure of something that shouldn’t be, overlying the touch of the exotic that it held for them both.
  4. In snatches and glances, moments seized outside the monitors. In a corridor, his fingers touched hers, warm against cool, and she felt a liquid warmth pervading her brain until she could barely think. Apart from him, she dreamed of him, and totted up list after list of the things she loved: the hairs on the back of his wrists, the way his teeth fit into the gum, the shape of his ankle, the burr his voice took on when tired or irritated, the flush that mounted to his cheek when he felt aroused.
  5. Verbally. Word after word, opening secrets. He asked her about coupling and she told him how it was, how the urge drove you together, touch and caress until the moment where you froze and fused, knowing yourself a single part of a larger thing. And how, afterwards, that feeling faded, until you could see the body that had been part of yours and think it something entirely different.

“Can we go to bed together, you think?” he asked her. At first she didn’t understand what he meant. There was no reason they could not share a bed. But his words, the heat in his face, made her realize her mistake.

Could they? Lovemaking was mental as much as physical, she had always been told. As long as they took care, could they not touch each other to arousal and beyond?

She could find nothing about such moments in her research. Unthinkable that they could have invented a perversion new to the multi-verse. And yet perhaps they had.

He circled the topic, over and over. She could feel her resistance wearing away.

Wearing away.

It was the only flaw in their affair, his curiosity about her body. Everything else was so perfect.

Asked again. And again.

At some point she realized she would give in eventually. Her determination crumbled beneath that assault.

In his hotel room, she removed her clothes, let him stroke her.

“How would we do this, if we were the same?” he demanded.

“As we become aroused, our flesh softens,” she said. “Can you feel how mine has changed?”

He touched it cautiously, as though afraid he might leave finger marks. “It’s closer to my own now,” he said.

“We soften and we come together, and merge,” she said. “It is a very intimate and secret thing.”

“And you harden again, together.” His breath quickened as his fingers dragged across her skin.

“When the moment of the most pleasure comes and peaks, we harden,” she said. “We become a single thing, melding where our skin touches.”

“And you stay that way for hours?”

“Till the state gives way, and we can separate,” she said. “Hours, yes.”

“And you think I can bring you to the point where you come like that?” he asked.

Everyone made their own experiments in self-delight as a child. It was not the same, but it was similar, and hard to hide, although the motionless state was shorter. He could do that for her, at least.

She reached for him.

He entered her arms without hesitation.

He played with her as he would have a human woman, licking, spreading, opening. He did not penetrate her””they had both agreed it was too dangerous.

This was the only time most people could touch without fear of chipping, of breaking each other. Was that the draw he’d had for her all along, that she could touch him like that and know there was no danger of breaking him?

Her breath filled her, energy rushed along her like swallows fluttering in the wind, trying to break free of its grasp. Pleasure drowned her and she succumbed, feeling her flesh shudder and stiffen, frozen in the moment.

Where a Porcelain lover would have stayed with her, he drew away. She was aware of him circling her, his fingers straying over and over her surface.

Touching.

Testing.

He began with a toe. Pain surged through her as he broke it off. If she had been able to move, she would have screamed. As it was, all she could do was let it shine in her eyes. What sort of mistake was this? An accident, surely.

But then he began to detach the joints in her knee. He intended to take her foot. Anger and pain and agony surged through her and she fell unconscious, carrying with her the vision of him sitting on the side of the bed, examining the foot in his lap with an expression she’d never seen before on his face.

***

Tikka had never seen him again. She had never been able to guess if the moment had been there in his head all along or if the desire had seized him somewhere along the way, perhaps when she showed him the Dedicatorium.

In time, she did learn that the perversion was not new. In some channels, the severed limbs sold very well, particularly those unmarred in any other way.

She padded the stump with soft plastics, a cap that fit over the protrusion, the jagged bits of joint that had not fallen away. She limped, but not much, grown accustomed to the way she moved.

She paused to watch the sky. Clusters of limentia, like jellyfish floating on the wind, translucent tendrils tinting the light. They filled the air with their mating dance, drifted around her till she stood in the center of a candy-colored cloud. Love surrounded her in a web of tendrils, unthinking action and reaction that drove life, all life, even hers.

She made a mental note of their presence, of the way they shone in the sunlight, of the acrid smell of their lovemaking, filing details away with clinical precision.

They were only another sign of spring on Planet Porcelain.

...

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