The man follows the woman to her suite, which is on one of Blackwheel’s tidier levels. “I don’t want to speak of it here, but will you hear me out?”Ĭovered by her palm, engraved silver-bright in a language nobody else reads or writes, is the word ancestor. You haven’t convinced me not to kill you.” It’s half a bluff: she wouldn’t use the Flower, not for this. The woman says, “You’ve convinced me that you know. The gun’s muzzle moves precisely, horizontally: now the right eye. I could name programmers all the way back to the first people who scratched a tally of birds or rocks.” “Yes,” the man says, outwardly unshaken, “you could damage my lineage badly. The others, seeing the gun, gawk for only a moment before hastening out of the bar. The musician continues plucking plangent notes from the instrument. If she pulled the trigger, she would pierce him through the false pupil. She is aiming it not at his absent heart, but at his left eye. In no hurry, the woman draws the Flower and points it at the man. The sole exception is the tattooed traveler dozing in the corner, dreaming of distant moons. “You should be more afraid of me,” she says, “if you really know what you claim to know.”īy now, the other people in the bar, none of them human, are paying attention: a musician whose instrument is made of fossilized wood and silk strings, a magister with a seawrack mane, engineers with their sketches hanging in the air and a single doodled starship at the boundary. The man waits a little longer, then says, “Will you hear me out?” Blackwheel is notorious for keeping promises. One of the things she likes about Blackwheel is that the administrators promised that they would dispose of any corpses she produced. The woman was a duelist and a killer before she tangled her life up with the Flower, though, and the Flower comes with its own defenses, including the woman’s inability to die while she wields it. There was a time when more of them tried to force the gun away from her. Ordinarily she ignores them through one glass, two, three, four, like a child learning the hard way that you can’t outcount infinity. Ordinarily she doesn’t talk to her petitioners at all. The reputation of Arighan’s Flower is quite specific, if mostly wrong. People, in all the broad and narrow senses of the term. They want chancellors dead or generals, discarded lovers or rival reincarnates, bodhisattvas or bosses-all the old, tawdry stories. She is certain he does, which is potentially inconvenient. “It’s not that.” Do computers like him have souls? she wonders. The man says, “I can hardly be the first constructed sentience to come to you.” His mind may be housed in a superficial fortress of flesh, but the busy computations that define him are inscribed in a vast otherspace. Small courtesies matter to him because he is not human. The man smiles politely, and doesn’t take a seat uninvited. Her people’s historians called Arighan’s Flower the ancestral gun. Her hand-on a glass of water two degrees from freezing- stops, slides to her side, where the holster is. “And I know that you come from people who worship their ancestors.” “Everyone knows what I guard,” the woman says to the mirror-eyed man. The woman will not tell it to you, and the gunsmith Arighan is generations gone. The character’s meaning is the gun’s secret. At the blossom’s heart is a character that itself resembles a flower with knotted roots. In all cases, it bears its maker’s mark on the stock: a blossom with three petals falling away and a fourth about to follow. Sometimes the gun is long and sleek, sometimes heavy and blunt. The gun takes different shapes, but at this end of time, origami multiplicity of form surprises more by its absence than its presence. The stranger has taken on a human face to talk to her, and he is almost certainly interested in the gun. He is the first human she has seen in a long time. Today, it’s a man with mirror-colored eyes. That doesn’t stop people from seeking her out. You may buy her a drink, bring her candied petals or chaotic metals, but it’s all the same. They say her true name means things like gray and ash and grave. Her native language is not spoken by anyone here or elsewhere. She is human, and her straight black hair and brown-black eyes suggest an ancestral inheritance tangled up with tigers and shapeshifting foxes. The woman has haunted Blackwheel Station for as long as anyone remembers, although she was not born there. Series: The Tales of Gorlen Vizenfirthe.Series: From the Lost Travelers’ Tour Guide.People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction!.
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