Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

PALISADE by Cat Sparks

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.

“We are safe,” I say, explaining how the buildings nestle amidst a hundred acres of jungle clearing, protected from regrowth and any number of other hostile incursions by an electronic palisade. The only creatures permitted within its barrier field are those whose biological signatures have been programmed into its recognition software.

I have been warned never to stray beyond the palisade’s protective field by my father himself and the succession of servants who raised me to adulthood. The jungle, I am told, took my mother’s life when I was young. An unfortunate accident. She wandered beyond the palisade’s blue-green tint and lost her bearings. The jungle claimed her as its own. My mother’s name was Ann Elisabeth. The stints are all that remain of her now, but I will never recognise her gentle face in those abominations, even if, as my father claims, they were cultured from her living cells.

In any case, I cannot walk far, and I am frightened of the crawling horrors my father traps and breeds for export: bugs as big as my two fists, with glittering carapaces and stinging tails; things with as many heads as legs or jaws that can pierce metal. Collectors of such things pay high prices for them, specimens both living and preserved.

I keep well away from the sturdy holding tanks, terrariums and taxidermy studios where my father’s slaves toil.

Safe within the palisade, I watch the jungle pulse and bloom on screens, lying in the soft grass knowing nothing flying in the air, nor crawling through the soil can harm me. The palisade keeps the storms at bay, and I lie beneath the sky at night, protected from all danger, dreaming of Harmon as the lightning tears apart the clouds.

My beloved Harmon lives on a small moon circling Bellady; the farthermost planet in our solar system. So far away from AmberJade that the signal relay takes a full twelve minutes to deliver its message via the Link and receive one in return. Thus, our conversations are stilted and paused. This fact makes me choose my words more carefully than I might were our communications instantaneous. I strongly suspect it is this very constraint that caused our love to grow. The words we share are precise and considered. We do not waste our words on frivolous things.

Like me, Harmon suffers certain imperfections of form—dangerous imperfections that cause him to shun physical society. I determined early on in our confidences never to ask him why he could not walk, nor why he rejects prosthesis, even though there are worlds which permit their use. I sensed there was more than discomfort involved. Harmon would have told me had he wanted his reasons understood.

We have grown so very close, my Harmon and I. We met in a Linklounge three years ago, and over time I have come to trust him like no other. I treasure his communications more than anything else in my world.

My father knows nothing of Harmon, or my secret desires. He will never grant me a dowry. But I know where my father keeps his gold. There is nothing I would not do to be with Harmon, nothing I would not give him were the power in my hands.

My swallowtails flutter around me as we speak on the Link, arranging themselves in patterns to suit my mood. I do not show Harmon the private sensorium I have fashioned from his words: the close-ups of his gallant features; snippets of his laughter, firm, yet comforting.

“I love you, Luisa Alice, as I have loved no other. One day we shall run away together.”

One day indeed. When the Link is down, I walk the length of my sensorium with eyes closed, enveloping myself in the sound of his voice, immersing myself in his presence, wishing his arms around me. I fantasise about stealing a ship and flying it all the way to Bellady’s moon to embrace my love. The Link is the key. It holds all the information I need. With it, I could teach myself to pilot. With my father’s gold I could buy a silver ship.

When the second course arrives—Jester beetles in their shells served with comb grass and raspberry jus—I push my plate aside. Such pretty shells, named for the red and blue diamond criss-cross patterns on their backs. The Jester beetle feeds on the flesh of other beasts. They prefer the meat of the living to carrion, which is why my father has such a lucrative trade agreement with the Vazquenadas family, who have been in the bioweapons industry for at least a century. I do not want to know what the beetles are used for.

My father laughs loudly with the Vazquenadas elders. I have watched him grow grotesque and wealthy off this planet’s vicious spoils. In my tenth year he purchased a consignment of prisoners from a judicial contractor in receivership. Those poor unfortunates were sent out into the jungles of AmberJade to hunt for the peculiar bugs that fetch such high prices on other worlds. A task previously assigned to automatons, but they performed uneconomically in the humid, sticky air or in the wet, often breaking down, or rough-handling the delicate specimens to the point of rendering them useless. Human hands are so much more gentle, human skin more resilient to the rigours of jungle climate.

The prisoners adapted quickly to their new life. Some strayed into the jungle. Father let them go. They soon learned that there was little palatable food beneath the alien canopy—but plenty of creatures willing to feast on them. The ones that crawled back to the palisade in the following weeks were butchered before the others as a warning. I remember the blood stains on the grass.

I am not supposed to think about such things. I am supposed to smile at my father’s guests and be grateful for the protection of the palisade. I spend most of my time on the Link ensconced in debates with my university friends, discussing the poems of Chartres and Dessiqa; the plays of Modine, the sculpture of Poussen-Yang and Rudiliere. I speak to them through a platinum blonde avatar, with bronzed skin and elegant limbs. Harmon is the only one who has seen my true face.

The thought of leaving my home fills me with apprehension. Despite the enlightened, intellectual circles in which I move, there is always the possibility of exposure. AmberJade, ungovernable as it is, harbours all manner of practises and beliefs not permitted on other worlds. On Sheredon, Ellah and non-secular Carnis Major, the malformed are not allowed to live.

I am never lonely. I have my friends, my swallowtails, my dreams and my secret love. My life is illuminated with the love of Harmon, the man I hope to name as my husband, despite the relentless cruelty of my father.

As the third course is served, I hear whispering amongst the waiters. They do not seem to care that I am listening. Over time I have become invisible to their eyes. It is only my father they fear. They say that Daria is missing. Baby Ann Elisabeth’s nanny; a skittish girl, forever flirting with the pilots. Her bed has not been slept in these past two nights.

Daria is the prettiest of all the nannies. I suspect my father molests her but I have never caught him at it. Her predecessor lasted a year before hitching a lift back to Sheredon on an export trader’s barge. Who could blame her? Pretty girls should be out there travelling among the worlds, not trapped in the perpetual pink-and-blossom twilight of a stinted baby’s nursery.

The two fourteen-year-old Ann Elisabeths do not require nannies. They inhabit my father’s offices in the Summer and Winter wings. He keeps one girl handy to each suite where they perform embroidery and cross-stitch. Sometimes they swap places. He can never tell the difference between them.

Father visits the nursery once a week. He never sees the baby in the same outfit twice. Daria is skilled at her work. She manages to teach the baby a new trick for each visit: picking up the kewpie rattle and shaking it for daddy; smiling at daddy when he walks into the room; crawling towards the sound of daddy’s voice; stumbling a few clumsy steps.

But each old trick is forgotten by daddy’s next visit. Baby Ann Elisabeth has never even mastered walking. Father hoped for more, but the growth retardant process is not precise. When it comes to stinted babies, a few months can make such a difference.

Stint nannies know they don’t have to try too hard; visiting day is all that matters. Nannying is a good appointment for a working girl, but being fondled by my ugly old father can’t be pleasant.

But Daria is missing! Suddenly I realise my chance has finally come! Pretty Daria must be planning to run away. No ship has departed Amberjade in the past few weeks. The girl must still be here somewhere. There’s no need for me to learn to fly a ship. She knows all the offworld pilots by name. Daria and I will escape together and flee to Bellady’s moon.

I must act immediately. Harmon must know of my plans. Keen to avoid the tedious ritual of the six-year-old stint’s singing, I slip from the table unobtrusively. No one bothers me as I leave. The men are drunk, the women screeching over small holographic amusements. My swallowtails are forgotten.

As I make my way back through the autumn wing, my mind floods with possibilities. I will steal some of my father’s gold. He will not miss a little of it—it will be several days before he sobers up and notices I am missing.

I climb the staircase and hurry through the house as fast as I am able, all the way through my Autumn rooms to my Link portal. It activates as I enter, pulsing warm and red, the colour of my heart. The air fills with the scent of rose and jasmine, an olfactory hallucination. Such plants cannot thrive in this planet’s bitter soils.

A message awaits, as I knew it would. I am bursting with excitement. I nod for it to play, stand back and hold my breath. No, I will not wait another moment. Words will tumble from my lips in a delicious garble. He will not have to hear them to know what I intend because my manner will tell it all.

When the Link connects my darling Harmon stands before me.

He stands.

I pause, sensing the wrongness, not understanding what I’m seeing even as I’m seeing it.

He stands.

There is no blanket shielding Harmon’s supposedly damaged lower body. He smiles, and an undercurrent of unfamiliarity taints his voice. My Autumn suite grows deathly cold, rose and jasmine draining from the air.

This man is not my Harmon. This man has his face, but nothing else of him is the same.

His hair is coiffed, his clothing finer and his mannerisms much more aggressive than those of the man I know.

“Arna Maria, my dearest love,” he says. “I ache for you. If only we could be together. I would take you to see the grand touring exhibition of Rudiliere’s sculptures on Ellah, and then to the library on Gizienne. Why must we live so far apart? When will this torment end?”

Arna Maria? Who is she? A friend from the university Linklounge, perhaps?

“I love you, Arna Maria, as I have loved no other,” says Harmon. “Will your father not agree to our marriage? Soon I will have gold. Plenty of it. We can go anywhere we want.”

My breath catches sharply in my throat. “I love you, Arna Maria, as I have loved no other.” I know this line by heart. The very same words he has used on me. The exact words, as if taken from a script. A script he no doubt reiterates as many times as amusement dictates.

I fall to the floor, clutching at my chest. He has sent the wrong message to the wrong woman—how many of us has he accumulated in his Link harem? Is his error accidental, or an intentional act of cruelty? Harmon, my lovely Harmon, is a fraud.

“Say it to my face,” I whisper, all my dreams in ruins. Say it to my true face, not this cold, projected likeness. I will steal a ship from the Vazquenadas. I will fly to Bellady’s moon and discover the truth for myself.

I feel my heart burn and shrivel. I am no longer in control. I find myself limping through my father’s mansion, eyes blurred with tears, my mind consumed with the hideous image of my darling Harmon smiling at another woman with love that was supposed to be all mine.

Daria. Where is Daria? She will know which of the pilots can be trusted. I will make her take me with her. We shall escape from my father as he drinks himself to senselessness downstairs.

My uneven footsteps echo loudly on the polished marble floors. Room after useless room, yet I feel invigorated through my tears. Driven forward by my pain and confusion. Surely my Harmon does not mean those words? I have misheard him. Misinterpreted what he said, that is all.

Above the sound of my own anguished cries I hear another little voice. Instinctively, I head towards it, pushing through double gilded doors. A sickly stench assails my nostrils. Something putrid. Horrible. The wailing is much louder now, and I recognise it suddenly; the crying of a baby.

I find the infant through another doorway in the spring suite nursery. Baby Ann Elisabeth lies screaming in her crib in a mess of her own excrement, a drip feeder taped crudely to her arm. She looks to have been in this condition for some time. Where is nanny Daria? And then it strikes me that this is Fourthday—three whole days away from my father’s scheduled visit. Daria could be anywhere on AmberJade. My father would never know. So long as the baby is healthy for daddy’s visit, no one cares what happens on the other days.

I lift the squalling bundle from the crib, detach her from the apparatus, wipe her as clean as I can manage with the corner of the sheet. I pull a fresh towel from the linen closet and wrap her tightly.

The stench is indescribable. Covering my nose, I run from that awful place. My father will have to be informed. Daria shall be found and banished in disgrace.

I must find my father and present him with the filthy, squalling stint. I will demand he pay proper attention to his house and change his self-indulgent ways. I shall demand a ship of my own, and a pilot to fly me far away from this horror and decadence.

Baby Ann Elizabeth continues to howl as I carry her through my father’s house, through room after empty, pointless room till we reach the grand dining chamber. I will display the dirty stint before his precious dinner guests. Let them all smell its neglect. Interrupt the recital or the pretty song, or whatever he has the six-year-old performing for that troop of drunken Vazquenadas baboons.

I push open the double lacquered doors with my shoulder. The dining room is empty, the table still laid but the dishes abandoned. A butler whose name I do not know steps up to greet me, a crisp white linen draped over one arm.

“Would Miss Luisa Alice care to partake of refreshment?” he asks.

I lift baby Ann Elisabeth from my shoulder and present her to the butler.

“Take this to my father,” I say as calmly as I can, but I know my voice is wavering. If the butler thinks my request bizarre, he makes no obvious show of it. He lifts the squalling stint-child from my arms.

I wipe my hand across my face and find it damp with tears. My clothing reeks, and I realise that I am so terribly tired. I sit in the nearest chair, pick a crumpled napkin from the table and use it to mop my brow. Beside the napkin, a full glass of red wine that I drain in one gulp. I do not normally care for wine but I must have fortification if I am to face my father and demand a ship.

The wine spreads warmth through my veins. My thoughts begin to focus. I must have a ship. I will fly to Harmon and demand an explanation of his actions. It is only when I reach for a second glass that I remember his other words. Soon I will have gold. Plenty of it. Surely he could not be referring to my gold; the gold I plan to steal from my father? Where is my father and his revolting guests? Where has everybody gone?

I stand and walk the length of the dining chamber, through the double lacquered doors and through a further identical set. Servants bustle around me cleaning up the detritus of the evening’s festivities. Nobody speaks a word.

I find one of the Vazquenadas on the balcony fucking an underbutler. I turn my face away—I have no quarrel with them. The rest of the family staggers about in the garden below. I only want to speak to my father—what those degenerate foreigners get up to is their own business.

I cannot locate him in any of his regular haunts. I find only the Summer and Winter stints huddled together, whimpering. They will not tell me what is wrong. Has news reached them already of baby Ann Elisabeth’s neglect?

I wander through my father’s house opening door after door until I come at last upon his bed chamber—a room I have been forbidden to enter, a room I have never given any thought to at all, until this moment.

The door is not locked. My father is accustomed to obedience. He never locks any of his rooms.

Through the door, I see my father in his four-poster bed. Alongside him, sprawled across red silk sheets, a fifth Ann Elisabeth—a child somewhere in age between the six-year-old and the Summer and Winter stints. Nine perhaps, maybe ten. She is naked. Her lips and cheeks are rouged, her eyes lined with jet-black kohl. She wears gold bands around her wrists and ankles. She smiles wickedly as I enter my father’s room. Our eyes lock and I see that her heart and mind are devoid of all emotion: no happiness, no light, no love.

There were five Ann Elisabeths in my father’s house but now there are none. There is only me, Luisa Alice, the child he never wanted by the wife who abandoned him and ran into the jungle rather than endure another moment in his presence.

I have cut the power to the palisade. Smashed the generators with an iron bar. The skies above the house, once filled with my precious swallowtails, will soon be humming with the dark wings of other flying creatures. Abominations with stingers, barbs and fangs. Jester beetles and other monsters with a taste for human flesh.

Already the jungle has begun its steady creep towards my father’s house. Liana vines entwine themselves around my father’s butchered corpse. Within a week the marble steps will be cracked and broken, no longer visible from above. Within two, it will be impossible to tell what kind of structure once stood here. The grasses will thicken with tentacles and roots, the soils seethe and churn with carnivorous microbes.

I have freed my father’s slaves. Some of them have ransacked the house and run into the jungle. A few of the hardy ones may survive this time. The others have joined the servants in commandeering the Vazquenadas’ silver ships. I watch their contrails blaze across the sky as soft flames of dawn kiss the horizon.

The hangars are empty, the Ann Elisabeths all dead. I killed them, as I myself should have been killed all those years ago, spared the indignities of this pointless existence rather than mutilated with my father’s machete blade in an effort to spite my faithless mother.

I stand here now before the Link, trying to compose a final message to Harmon. My embroidered dinner gown is soaked with blood. I want to tell him of the pain he has wrought, but in the end I will send no message. I will say nothing. The encroaching jungle will speak for me. It will tear this mansion stone from stone, wiping our human stain from its memory forever. The jungle will have the final word. It will cover my father’s wicked bones, claiming the gold he and my heartless Harmon loved above all else. It will leave no trace of poor Luisa Alice and her beloved swallowtails.