Deep magic second coll.., p.44
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 44
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
“I wonder what Dad is telling everyone,” said Ly. Instead of terror, she felt awe and beauty.
For the first time in millennia, the Terrans on this planet saw the stars.
— Originally published in Dark Expanse: Surviving the Collapse (2014) —
ABOUT KEN LIU
Ken Liu is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), and a forthcoming third volume) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016), a collection. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017).
In addition to his original fiction, Ken also translated numerous works from Chinese to English, including The Three-Body Problem (2014), by Liu Cixin, and “Folding Beijing,” by Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners.
Website: http://kenliu.name
Facebook: authorkenliu
Twitter: @kyliu99
Public Email: ken@kenliu.name
SUMMER 2018
THE TIME PIECE AND THE PERFECT DAUGHTER
By Aimee Ogden | 6,000 Words
AYLE CORBEPH NEARLY missed seeing her first airship thanks to the distraction of an unfinished history essay and a lingering blemish just under her chin. The blue lapis clock on the mantel struck Sixth, and drowsy midafternoon light poured in through the shop windows. The fading daylight afforded enough visibility for Corbeph to pretend to pore over her essay, “The Role of the Proud Nation of Camdira in the Greater Hemisphere Throughout History,” while she probed the raised spot just under her jawbone and wondered what role it would play in the much-less-great hemisphere of her face. Her older sister Sydive, in the meantime, was making her first balance spring. Sydive had taken to her clock-making apprenticeship with a zeal she had rarely shown before she donned the gray smock—as if she had been saving her passion throughout the first sixteen years of her life to pour it all out into the cup passed to her by their mother.
Ayle Marinauld was at that moment lecturing Sydive on the nature of springs, raising her voice in anticipation of the wave of chimes about to sweep the mastershop. And though Corbeph was only Marinauld’s daughter and not her apprentice, by now even she could recite the ideal properties of these springs by rote. “A gradual overcoil,” Marinauld told Sydive. She stood just behind her eldest child’s shoulder, a pair of spectacles perched on her nose in a mirror image of the set Sydive wore. Corbeph wondered how much that second set of spectacles had cost. “A dogleg is easier, certainly, and it’ll keep time after a fashion. But between windings, the watch will speed up. And a clockmaster who sells fast clocks will do slow business.”
Corbeph mouthed the last words along with her mother ... and groaned as she realized she’d left an inkblot midsentence in her essay: Camdira has enjoyed a unique development in contrast to the rest of the hemisphere. As an island nation, the Confederated Camdiran States have largely been left to their own devices during the wars that have consumed the nations of the continent, and the gradual rise to power of the Javene Army has not touched Camdiran—and then a blotch the size of Corbeph’s smallest fingernail.
She reached for her scratch nib to repair the error, or at least to make it look as if she’d tried hard enough to fix it to keep the history master from raking her over the coals. But the light on her paper flickered, and she looked back up at the window, just in time to see the airships go by.
There was a sourceship, half airship and half flying fortress, surrounded by its squadron of cavalrymen and women. The half-dozen smaller, nimbler ships danced around the sourceship’s wings and darted beneath that dark iron belly. From her mother’s shop window, Corbeph imagined she could see the gleaming smiles on the faces of the cavalry, the glint of light on their amber lenses. She could almost feel the cool metal of the fuselage between her own knees, feel the wind in her face. When she finally lost sight of the ships, she found her mouth had gone quite dry, and she was standing up, out of her seat. She had put both hands down on the workbench in front of her, and when she lifted her palms, she found them stained inky black. She’d have to rewrite her entire essay now, but how could that matter at all, when there were such things as sourceships in the world?
* * *
The mantel clock was striking ten past Ninth when Corbeph slipped into the shop through the front door. It was past her curfew. She’d been keeping time by the great clock in her friend Bridgerly’s parlor, but she’d forgotten, not for the first time, that Bridgerly’s mother did a poor job of keeping the clock in good winding. She was a good twenty minutes late by the mantel clock’s reckoning, and Ayle Marinauld did not approve of time slippage of a few seconds, let alone such a great chunk of the day. But Bridgerly’s elder brother was home from the front in Perleste, and he had such stories to tell! Corbeph had only been disappointed he did not bring his mount home with him. Instead he had simply taken the rail ferry over the bridge from the Twenty Nations, the same as any tourist would have done before the war reached as far north as the Peninsula and stopped the ferries running.
Still, he had pictures for Corbeph and Bridgerly to exclaim over: images of his cavalry corps, the dock slips, and even of his airship herself. He said her name was Keety-Bell, and Corbeph had been unable to keep shocked reprobation out of her voice—Keety-Bell was a name for a cow, not a sleek and lovely airship.
“Well, little bird,” Bridgerly’s brother had said, “when you have your own airship, you can name it to your satisfaction!” And he’d plopped his cap down on her head, so that the big amber lenses slipped over her eyes, and after that, the time of night had not been a pressing matter to Corbeph.
But despite the hour, her mother and Sydive were still in the workshop, laughing over cups of strong-smelling moonberry tea. It was nearly midnight, a fact punctuated by the remainder of the clocks in the shop adding their voices to the chiming of the day’s end. Drinking moonberry tea at this time of night meant they didn’t expect to sleep much either. “What’s happened?” she asked, looking between their wan faces. “What’s wrong?” And Sydive gestured down at the table.
The clock sitting there was a fine enough piece. Not one of Marinauld’s great masterworks, no, but certainly it would fetch a fair price. The face was pure white, with glossy black numerals to mark each of the Ten Hours, and thin black fleur-de-lis hands. The wood exterior was cheap pine: hard to get better wood from the Twenty Nations these days. It really wasn’t Marinauld’s style at all ... Corbeph’s eyes darted to her sister’s face. “You finished it?”
Sydive’s mastery clock, crafted by her own hands and without Marinauld’s guidance. She had cut every tooth in the escapement, set each spring and wire, done everything but cut down the tree that formed the wooden coffin that gave the clock’s innards their privacy. Corbeph hadn’t even realized her sister was ready to test for mastery—she’d been busy with homework, with applications for each of the colleges she hoped might offer her a Finishing Year so that she’d be able to apply for cavalry service after that. Surely the war would still be going on in two years’ time? The Javene certainly showed no signs of slowing their progress across the Twenty Nations.
Corbeph came back to herself with a jolt, under the bright glow of Sydive and Marinauld’s expectant faces. “Congratulations,” she told her sister. “You’ll make a fine clockmaster.”
* * *
Three weeks later, they almost missed the soft knock at the door over the noise of the clocks striking Sixth and a half. But the knocker repeated himself, more insistently this time, and could not be dismissed as a trick of hearing. Corbeph looked up from her Rhetoric notes, where she had doodled a sourceship flanked by a squadron of cavalry. But Sydive was already striding across the shop, reaching for the doorknob. Marinauld didn’t answer the door of her own mastershop, after all.
The young man at the door was in full dress uniform. Corbeph leaned out from her desk to gawk at him over Sydive’s shoulder. Gold buttons gleamed against navy wool, and his cuffs were hemmed with embroidered red ribbon. Only an ensign, then, but still. “Auld Sydive,” he said, and extended to her a brass medallion the size of her thumb-tip. “You are called.”
Sydive took the medallion and clenched it in her fist. The mastershop had fallen silent but for the steady tapping from the dozen-odd clocks all around. Corbeph realized that Marinauld had come to her feet, as if she might leap across the shop and strike the medallion from Sydive’s hand.
But Sydive pulled her fist in to her heart, and her open hand came up to lie flat against her forehead. “I hear the call,” she responded, as was tradition, and the ensign returned her salute.
Sydive closed the door behind him and leaned against it while she turned the medallion over in her hand. “I’m to report in a week,” she said, her voice as dull as the tarnished brass.
“Which unit?” The words tumbled out of Corbeph before she could stop them. Sydive didn’t answer, but flipped her the medallion as she moved past, out of the workshop and into the house.
Corbeph caught the medallion. Sydive’s orders were engraved on the front. She flipped it over to the back, where a line drawing of an arrowbird flying across the face of the moons awaited her greedy eyes. “Cavalry,” she said, and squeezed the medallion tightly.
“Corbeph,” said Marinauld. Her voice was tight, like the groan of springs in an overwound clock. “Finish your work.” She sat back down at her workbench, hard enough to make all the air go out from the understuffed cushion beneath her.
Marinauld’s eyes were on her still. Corbeph slid back into her chair so carefully that the legs didn’t even squeal on the wood floor. She bent her neck, revising furiously for Thirdday’s exam, and her pen scratched the paper deep as it flew.
But the fingers of her free hand pressed the medallion against the surface of her desk, as if enough pressure would turn Sydive’s name into Corbeph’s. As if she could make it part of her own hand.
* * *
A year and four months later found the blue mantel clock striking Sixth and a half once more, but now it gave the time a solid twenty minutes behind the timepiece at town center with its great brass chimes. Not for want of repairs, but for want of a good winding: not even Marinauld had cared for the off-beat patter of ticking gears and swinging pendulums, not lately. Not when Sydive was due home at last. Corbeph had even skipped her afternoon finishing classes thanks to a forged note from her mother. She’d make up the extra practice in three-dimensional algebra another time.
They heard the turn of the knob before they saw the face in the window—and what a wan face, what dark circles pooled beneath her gray eyes. Corbeph shot to her feet, and Marinauld stopped her pacing in the doorway between the shop and the house. No breath passed in or out of either.
There was a dull thump of the door against Sydive’s shoulder, as if she’d pulled it awkwardly into herself across her body while struggling with luggage. Corbeph shot forward to help with the door and to relieve her sister of baggage, but Sydive squeezed through the barely open door first. No luggage in sight, Corbeph realized, and then realized one thing more: the empty sleeve pinned to Sydive’s shoulder. Her other hand trembled at her side; the fingers were bent in ugly angles, broken and never properly healed.
“We heard your ship went down,” Corbeph began, and stopped. There were no words that could dress those wounds.
“My bag is outside,” Sydive said, her eyes on the ground. No embrace for her mother or her younger sister. “If someone could ...” And she fled through the workshop, past her mother, away into the house.
Corbeph froze. Her eyes fastened themselves to her mother’s back. Marinauld had turned to follow Sydive into the parlor but stopped herself with both hands braced in the doorframe. The stiff line of her shoulders, the cast of her head, they traced the lines of an equation Corbeph could not calculate, not with all the advanced algebra in the world. She settled back into her desk at the window and waited to be told what to do.
“No.” Marinauld’s voice cracked out against the walls of the shop. Louder than she usually spoke, louder than she’d intended, most likely. When she turned to Corbeph, her face was dry. “Put your schoolwork away.”
Corbeph’s long-ago lunch jumped in her belly. “But—”
“Don’t interrupt.” Marinauld’s voice was as brittle as overworked tin. “Fetch an apron from the wall and come to the workbench.”
“I’m not—” I’m not your perfect little clockmaster. “I’m not Sydive.”
Marinauld kicked the side of the workbench, sending tools and parts clattering. Corbeph cried in shock. “For gods’ sake, Corbeph, do as you’re told without questioning me for once in your life!”
Corbeph bowed her head, biting her cheek hard to stop herself from arguing back. She shoved her school things off the desk all in a jumble, a mess of nibs and papers and tools that she would have no further use for. She thought she heard her compass break when it hit the floor, the delicate metal arms protesting their treatment. But she did not look back. Marinauld could take care of that mess herself. As for Corbeph, she pulled an apron down and threw it over her neck and flung herself to a slouch at the workbench.
“Your real education begins now,” said Marinauld, and hot tears prickled Corbeph’s eyes. She did not let them fall, lest Sydive come back to the workshop and see her old workspace marred with corrosive salt.
* * *
After that it was quite some time that the mantel timepiece struck nothing at all, for Marinauld decided to use it as Corbeph’s first project. The mantel clock was not for sale, after all, and no clockmaster ever learned her trade but by performing it.
“How old is it?” Corbeph asked once, curious in spite of herself. It was a beautiful piece, real gold inlay over the blue lapis frontispiece, not merely paint lacquer. It had lived on the shop mantel for as long as Corbeph could remember. A very expensive clock even for a clockmaster to keep as a souvenir. Ayle Marinauld had never undertaken a similar construction except as commission.
“I made it in the fourth year of my mastery.” Marinauld studied the clock’s face carefully. Corbeph calculated; that made the clock a year older than Corbeph. “Once your word is sworn, Corbeph, keep it. However many pretty promises are heaped on top, you mustn’t let it break.”
“What?”
Marinauld thrust the clock into Corbeph’s hands. “Take it apart.”
It took months for Corbeph to put the clock together properly. She did not have Sydive’s clever fingers, nor her patience for sitting with cricked neck over a pile of hopelessly jumbled springs and cogs. “Not cogs,” Marinauld would say, voice rusty with exasperation. “The escapement.”
“The escapement,” Corbeph would echo, and eventually, the words came to feel less foreign in her mouth. She had grown up with them in her ears all her life, hadn’t she? It was only a matter of learning to swim in the sea upon which she’d always been able to merely float.
Sydive came to avoid the shop less and less as the years scrolled past. There was no denying the shadow that fell across her face when she passed under the lintel and into the crowd of black and silver and white faces. She still wore the brass medallion, on a ring sewn into the closed-off sleeves of her shirts and coats: a wordless answer to unwanted questions. Marinauld procured for her eldest daughter a position in the civil service. A very different sort of desk to perch behind, a very different set of social honors, though yes, still honorable enough in its own way.
And each time Sydive congratulated Corbeph, on her reconstruction of the timepiece, on her rapid progress toward mastery, and finally on the day when her own masterwork clock took shape under her hands: each time Corbeph swallowed her sister’s kind, quiet words and found the aftertaste bitter. But she smiled and offered what thanks she could manage. She wondered if Sydive hated her, the way she’d hated Sydive, just a little, when she’d answered the call.
There was still war in the Twenty Nations. Corbeph thought perhaps there would always be war there, and then turned guiltily aside from that thought when she realized it felt horribly like hope.
* * *
And the lapis clock was striking twenty past Third when Corbeph hung her very own mastersign in the window. She’d have the window properly painted with her name, in time, after her first commission came through. But for now a hand-lettered shingle, covering up her mother’s name beneath, would have to serve.
She handled a few questions from passersby about how Ayle Marinauld was enjoying her retirement. The true answer was “terribly”, but Corbeph fabricated a story about how her mother enjoyed spending time with her aunts up in the warm north. Easier to discuss with near strangers the fine weather Marinauld was enjoying than the arthritis that had slowly robbed her hands of strength and dexterity. Easier to discuss visits with faraway family than the last fight she and Marinauld had had, about Corbeph’s failure to visit the genealogy masters and choose a man to give her a child. “To give me an apprentice, you mean,” she’d flung at Marinauld, and that barb might have stung her less if Marinauld had tried at all to deny it.
After returning to the shop, Corbeph stood very still in the middle of her new life: the majority of timepieces big and small finished by Marinauld before her departure, with a few of their smaller cousins purely Corbeph’s creation. She breathed in deeply through her nose and slapped the mantel timepiece with an open hand.
