Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [39]
You blink. That doesn’t make sense. But you feel vague stirrings in your memory. The heads…, they look familiar.
“Don’t you recognize me?” the first head says. It’s your father’s. “Now, sonny, what’re ya doing there in my wife?”
He stares, and you lower your eyes, ashamed.
“Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid. We are your sisters!”
“We’re your family,” a woman’s head says, and you recognize your wife. Her sudden death had made you think of immortality. Her eyes leak blood. “We miss you dearly. Don’t be afraid.”
“Come out to play, come out to play!” Dark braids sweep through the dust as the girls’ heads jump up and down.
“Join us.”
“Don’t forget your promise.”
Promise?
“The decapitation game!” Your father’s voice is always young. “Remember? You have cut our heads first. Now it’s your turn.”
“Your turn! Your turn!”
You back away.
“You don’t remember?” Your mother’s co-wife looks so sad.
“Unfair! Unfair!” your half-sisters cry. “We’ve got no arms.”
You don’t remember? Don’t remember? Don’t remember?
Piles of skulls.
“You don’t remember?”
“I can help,” the Washer-at-the-Ford says—and lifts her face.
You run. Back to the burning grounds.
A hymn to the goddess of death Kali, by Ramprasad Sen (1720–1781).
In the marketplace of this world,
the dark mother sits flying her kites.
One or two in a hundred thousand
snap the string and fly away bondless,
and how she laughs, clapping her hands!
He found her, this time as Kali, back at the empty burning grounds, sitting on the ashes. Darker than night, naked but for a garland of skulls and a skirt of severed limbs, with baby fetuses for earrings—flying her kites.
He didn’t run away, he didn’t shake in fear, but he looked Death eye to eye, unflinching. Then and there, bowing his head onto the chopping block, he made her laugh.
THE SKY WAS BURNING IN THE NORTH. A TINY STRIP OF color, but it was enough. The polar night was over.
I would have lost without you, he told the girl.
Brains are harder nuts to crack. She smiled.
Pink noise.
He’d never have admitted it before. He used to think he was the savior, that it was he who selflessly stepped in to fill the broken part of the girl’s mind. He had never thought that she would fill a broken part of himself.
Well, that was tough, she said. You didn’t want to let me in, at first.
Nathi was glad he did. I never thought that I could break my bonds just by accepting death.
Then welcome back into the human fold.
Could his mother have survived? Could she have become posthuman, too? He didn’t know whether to rejoice or to lament. Probably, both.
But if the memories were true, he knew one thing. His mother didn’t choose conversion out of fear. She simply knew she had a hell to pay.
He also knew that, should they meet, he’d help her learn to make her own choices once again. He owed her that much—his life, his memories, ancestors. The pink noise.
But he must also help the others.
Tiny specks of dust were rising from the crater’s floor around them in tendrils—up, on spiral trajectories. A storm was coming. High in the sky, and shining like another sun—the teardrop wings of intense aurora locked into a fast-revolving Yin-Yang symbol.
Time to fly.
They primed their magnetic nano-wings, preparing to ride the storm. Yes, they were late in coming into the protective safety of the dust storm front curtain forming around the Needle. But they had a fighting chance to hide within its “Faraday cage” folds.
Illumined by the sunlight, several shapes appeared above the crater’s rim. They were surrounded on every side. InsectiEye destroyers. Nathi didn’t think they would have their weapons on stun this time.
The girl activated the polaritonic covers of the Dragonclaws. They turned invisible.
It’s my turn. Nathi grinned. We’ ll have to become twice the girl you are to beat these bastards.
The last things he felt before he gave up all of his resources—awareness itself—was the vertiginous acceleration as they spiraled upward from the bowl of the