Tyger Burning Read online

  Plasma flashed overhead and Lev thought about the funhouse outside Zaporozhye, in the summertime, where the gypsies strung colored lights and kept wolves in steel cages. He believed in cages. Cages kept bad things in, trapped, but they also kept bad things out if you crawled inside. Lev’s thoughts spiraled down into his memories as if they were a feathered cage, soft and warm to keep him free from plasma and snow, a Gypsy charm against the wolves that waited for him out there, robotic wolves which hid amongst an alien forest of ice and boulders on the far banks. When he passed onto the frozen river, solid ammonia and water, he didn’t notice. The artillery barrage had heated it to create puddles, over which he slid, not even recognizing that the dots representing his body and destination had almost merged. Lev smiled when the old Gypsy woman tried to distract him (so her son could pick his pocket) because he had come forewarned—no money except the bills he kept in a secret belt. Her wolves growled. But caged wolves, Lev knew, were fine, their fur a mixture of gray and black that swirled with each movement, the creatures barely alive on a diet of squirrel, anything found dead on the road. His memories faded then as if a switch had flipped. Lev rested in the middle of the river, a tiny beige figure just a shade off from the surrounding white of ice and snow, terrified now that he realized what the problem was.

  There was no outpost. They had lied to him, but the Sommen never lied. He imagined Michael then, somewhere nearby, a ghost that refused to materialize but who stared along with the ghosts of everyone else, all the humans who had come into space to die alone.

  “I am not of you yet,” Lev said to them, “and it doesn’t matter that there is no outpost; these are the coordinates and there is a delivery to be made.” He pulled out the package and unwrapped it.

  Nanos. Lev rested a box on the ice and watched it open so that a wave of dark material spilled out to form a puddle, its edges spreading in a perfect circle, quickly enough that Lev had trouble scrambling out of its way. His spine went rigid. Nanos would attract attention, would call the robotic wolves, and he stumbled to his feet oblivious to the new plasma barrage that had begun, sending massive chunks of the river skyward like car-sized shards of glass. The wolves howled as he fled. Lev had never seen one of the enemies; resupply meant going to the front but never staying there, never actually observing what the Sommen fought, what could be so important to them that it formed the focal point of Sommen consciousness. And besides, the wolves changed. Each system held something different so that even if he had seen a Sommen enemy before, it mattered for nothing, didn’t apply to whatever chased him now.

  He reached the bank and turned. What the nanos had attracted had nothing to do with flesh and Lev cried at the sight of metal creatures, mechanical and lifeless at the same time their sensors glowed with at least a hint of consciousness. One of them clicked its legs over the river directly toward him and fired, a pulsing cannon that caused puffs of snow to erupt but the shifting ice must have prevented the thing from getting a good lock, must have made its targeting system lapse because it kept missing. Lev closed his eyes. He embraced Michael now, smiled at the memory of the man’s face and lost all sense of time, floating in conversations that had taken place only the day before or two years prior, the words clear and fresh regardless of their age so that minutes congealed into an hour.

  “And still it lives,” said Michael.

  But it wasn’t Michael and Lev opened his eyes to find the Sommen in front of him, the same one who had given him the package to deliver. Hundreds of robots smoldered on the ice, burning and melting through. Already forgotten.

  “You lied,” said Lev. He saw the Sommen tense and half-expected the thing to reach out and crush his helmet, but this time Lev wasn’t afraid and stood his ground. “There was no outpost.”

  “I lied. It is part of the ritual, a last test to determine if the Gods want you to live in combat, and we are permitted to lie for it. Now you must choose.”

  Behind the thing Lev noticed hundreds more Sommen gather, a plasma burst occasionally sending one or ten into the air, charred. Even so, the rest watched and listened—ignoring the danger.

  “Choose what?”

  “Your name. You may stay with us, a full Merchant with title rights, the right to live on any of our worlds and to hire your own no-names. Or you may go home. Back to Earth.”

  Lev had trouble concentrating and laughed at the irony: It had ended but the prize was decrepitude. Age and ammonia, he thought, and a little methane, the smell of the Sommen, the legacy of having lived with them a road map of scar tissue on his lungs, a map he’d never see but followed with each inhalation. Oxygen was expensive and N2 a waste of good nitrogen potential, and so no-names made do with what they could afford, the cheap gases, impure, the same ones he used for his mules’ engines. These had robbed him of youth. And he’d been gone too long. The memories that had kept him alive or at least provided a refuge for the moments in which the main part of his mind melted and rebuilt itself, screamed at him now—that they were tired. They wanted rest too. If Lev dusted off the thought of vushka one more time it might crumble into nothing. Real vushka, in Zaporozhye, that was the thing.

  “I want to go home. To Earth,” he said.

  Lev stepped back. The Sommen shouted, a war cry that he had heard only in the distance from the rear, and never directed at him so that he almost turned and ran until he understood they had knelt. All except the one, who grinned to reveal the black fangs of the Sommen, a sharp horror.

  “You honor us. To be a Merchant is to accept a life of shame, but to refuse is something else. When we found you Earth was not ready for war; we had to test it.”

  Lev let his mind slip further into haze, the day’s events having hit harder than he realized so that he wondered if he’d pass out. “I don’t understand.”

  “This race, the mechanical one dying here today, is unworthy of being even Merchant filth because they exchanged flesh for metal. So we destroy them. Most of Earth has so far retained its flesh and you, among all the Merchants from Earth, have proven that your kind has worth; you delivered the final supply. And now, because of your decision to reject Merchant, your race will be given time to prepare and when ready we will war against each other. Eternal in glory and honor for all.”

  “Eternal in glory and honor for all,” the rest of them chanted.

  Lev dropped where he stood. Before passing out he noticed that the air mix had gone out of whack and he wondered why the alarms hadn’t warned him, until he glanced down and saw that portions of his suit had been blackened by plasma. He smiled. With a flick of a finger, he corrected the mix and began to fade, knowing that he’d wake up with a headache. It was OK. The Sommen lifted him, throwing his body over its shoulder to begin the trek to the rear, when the rest of them rose and screamed again, the noise of their shouts fading as the one carrying him rammed through snow drifts at the same time inhaling the ammonia atmosphere with a deep hiss.

  His suit translated the fading Sommen screams. “Honor for all!”

  Lev woke some time later in the snow. The Sommen knelt beside him, one of the thing’s hands on his shoulders, pressing him into a deep drift as it used the other to work on his chest plate, and he waited for the thing to say something but words never came and both speakers only crackled in his ears. The Sommen finished whatever it had been doing, and must have seen that Lev was awake because it pulled him to his feet.

  “Keep your head up,” the Sommen said. “Your back straight. If we pass my kind, look them in the eye and do not turn away, no matter what happens.”

  “What?”

  “Raise your head. You are not a Merchant, not a no-name; you are a thing with promise. I fixed your suit and uploaded into it all of our plans, weapons data, and thought. In this way, your people can prepare for our coming. Tell them. Tell them that we will allow space outside your system to gather resources and they have only a short time to become our equal, a century before war finds all of you and my killers come to collect.”

/>   “That’s what you were saying at the river. I’m going home, to Earth?”

  “Home. And keep your head raised, no matter what.”

  “What if I had chosen to stay—picked the Merchant path?”

  The Sommen spat, the stuff freezing before it hit the snow. “We would have harvested more of your people for our supply ranks, destroyed Earth because it had no value, and moved on. Not much farther now, to the port.”

  Lev looked up and recognized the path. They stepped from the empty plains and onto a road, the same one he and Misha had traveled earlier and the outpost was close now, beyond that the Sommen transit area, their beachhead onto this world. Did they know of Brodyaga—the song or any of Siberia’s rivers? Did Lev anymore? It took a moment for the words to come, much longer than it had ever taken for vushka, and he sang so the melody echoed in his helmet, and he had to pause at the end of each line to breathe, to force more air into damaged lungs, lungs that just wanted it to stop, screamed that they’d had enough. But he sang anyway and at the end the Sommen growled; Lev’s translator changed the sound into artificial laughter.

  “This is a song about convicts. Prisoners.”

  “Yes,” said Lev.

  “You are no convict. Ten times our enemies aimed for your breath, for your exhaust, and you stood on the ice, never moving and showing no sign of fear. You are no convict.” The thing pointed then, down the road toward the transit port but stopped Lev so it could use a device to mark the front of his suit, draw a symbol that he had seen many times on Sommen armor and ships. “A warrior’s symbol,” the thing continued. “They should not touch you as long as you bear the mark, and by now word will have spread so all will expect your arrival and meet you as a hero. Act like a hero; keep your head raised no matter how tired or wounded you are.”

  Lev thought of something to say but nothing came, and so he walked away, shuffling through the snow and not even noticing when more fell from the sky, not even recognizing that, out of habit, he had shifted his attention to the navigation screens because now the snow came so heavily that the road disappeared.

  His head pounded. It pounded like a hangover, and made him thirsty for vodka, the sensation that Earth was so close bringing a wave of exhaustion when it should have kept the energy up, the energy that he had gathered just moments ago. But it was OK. Even if he woke up every day with a headache it was more than OK, because he’d already decided on the first thing he’d do when he got back, the thing that scared him the most and almost made him choose a name.

  Lev lost all interest in the Sommen. Others could take the information he’d been given, decide if man would go to war someday. To him there were more important things, the kinds of things that mattered only to old men like the fact that Misha had been young. His parents might still be alive. Lev would have to find them, to explain why the mules hadn’t saved their son and he missed his mules but he’d miss Misha even more, and just before arriving at the spaceport he laughed, finally seeing their mistake: The Sommen thought men had spirit—that Lev had chosen to go home because he wanted to fight.

  But the Sommen had never kissed Marina Boroshenko.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Maung reminded himself: He was a Dream Warrior, and when it was his turn at the desk he stepped up like a soldier, with his back straight.

  “First name?”

  The man was an American and asked it without looking at Maung, without noticing that this one was different from the ones who came before or who were still in line behind him. Americans cared about nothing. And why should they? They won.

  “Maung.”

  “Let’s see . . .” The man asked Maung to spell his first name and nodded while tapping on the green plastic. “And your last name.”

  “I don’t have one. My full name is Maung Kyarr, but where I come from we don’t name our children the same way Americans do. Kyarr means tiger.”

  “You’re Burmese.”

  When Maung nodded, the man showed him the scars on his hand and Maung’s heart sank. Of all the people manning the jobs desk, he got a veteran, an ex-soldier who—from the pattern on his right hand—had spent time in a Myanmar prison camp. The guards often used razor blades to carve identifiers into their captives. That way, the cuts were so deep that infections failed to heal and jungle disease would infest them with rot; the prisoner would often decompose before reaching the grave.

  “I am from Myanmar,” said Maung. “From Yangon. But I was no prison guard.”

  The man deleted Maung’s name from his plastic pad and waved him off. “We don’t need you today. Or tomorrow. Next.”

  Maung moved away. He had been through this so many times that he questioned why he bothered with the Jobs Bureau at all, why he didn’t just stick with the labor lines down at the port where work was cheap but plentiful. People stared at him as he left. They all heard the conversation and a Korean man spat on him as he passed, then lunged, but his companions held him back.

  The street smelled like chemicals. A stretch of houses along North Charleston’s Burton Lane all looked the same, stacked next to each other in a tight grid, tiny huts in blue fiberboard one after another. Children played in the street. When Maung first arrived he had enjoyed Charleston; the heat and the poverty reminded him of his old neighborhood in Yangon but here there were no metals or concrete or wood; cheap synthetic panels formed the walls, creating a sagging mess. Now he missed Yangon and the pagodas with their gold-leaf domes, and the jungle summers when everyone wore thanaka even though getting the wood was more difficult each year. Maung remembered the sound of stone scraping on stone at night. It always made him smile; his mother ground thanaka wood in the mortar and pestle that her mother had given her fifty years before, and the smell filled the hut in seconds with a fragrance that meant safety.

  Today the lack of these things seemed almost normal because after a year of living in America, Maung recognized that all materials were precious, and anything with even a trace amount of metal or calcium or cellulose was recycled and sent to one of a thousand postwar reclamation sites. Americans stripped all they could from Myanmar; nothing went to waste. They even recycled Maung and his people, pardoning them for war crimes and relocating them to what Maung’s friends called Ngway Myoh, “Money City”; when the fiberboard got wet it smelled like the old paper currency—money that older Burmese people stored with mothballs to prevent bugs from eating it. Maung held his nose and opened a door.

  His six-year-old son, Win, tackled him. “Daddy!”

  “What?” Maung pretended to be angry. “Why are you not in school? Did you burn it down?”

  “No!” Win rubbed his hand across his nose. “I’m sick.”

  Maung’s mother stood in the kitchen, which was also the living room, and frowned. “Nothing today? No work?”

  “The man at the desk was a veteran. From the Myanmar campaign, an ex-prisoner.”

  “What now?”

  Before he could answer, his son asked “What’s a Dream Warrior?”

  Maung stepped back. It was an instinctive move, born from terror that they’d at last been discovered and he glanced out the front window to make certain nobody was nearby.

  “Who told you that name, Win?” Maung’s mother asked.

  “Tun Ba Kaung.”

  She looked at Maung, furious. “One of your friends. He can’t keep his mouth shut, not even in front of his children!”

  “I will tell him to be quiet,” said Maung, relieved to find that it wasn’t so bad, that it came from one of their own. “But he is a general, and still thinks he’s at war. I cannot tell him what to do.”

  “Was a general. Now we are all nothing and he will get you killed.”

  She turned back to the kitchen and cooked, throwing pans to demonstrate she was angry. The boy wasn’t smiling anymore. He looked at his father and shrugged, and the child’s perfect English amazed Maung. The accent was American.

  “So what is it?”

  Maung squatted and pulled the bo
y in. “It is something very special, very secret. And if I tell you, you must never speak of it. Agreed?”

  “Maung,” his mother said from the kitchen, her tone disapproving. But Maung had already made up his mind.

  “OK,” said Win. “I promise.”

  “What do they teach you of super-awares in school? Anything?”

  His son shrugged again. “That they killed a lot of people—that they’re bad.”

  “That’s right,” said Maung. The grandmother was quiet now, watching, and a warmth grew as if his ancestors enveloped him with a blanket of calmness. “They were very bad, but they weren’t made that way originally. Smart men, scientists like you’ll be someday, twisted good artificial intelligence, semi-awares, into a tool of war by combining them with men like me; when you combine a semi-aware with a person’s brain, you make a super-aware. We fought a war against America, and were friends with another country, one called China. The Chinese are very powerful warriors but aren’t like you and me—not anymore. They are vicious, and many are super-awares.”

  “Are you Chinese?” the boy asked.

  “No. I am from Myanmar, like you. The Chinese took the most talented university students and changed us. They put things into my body and replaced some of my bones with metal and . . . things. In order to fight we had to lie down and plug into computers—to concentrate on our jobs. So if you were to see me in battle, it would look to you like I was asleep. Dreaming. That’s why they called us Dream Warriors and there were entire dormitories of us at one time. Hundreds. Dream Warriors are super-awares; but I’m a good one, not bad.”

  Maung’s mother shook her finger. “So if Tun Ba Kaung ever speaks of it again, call him a liar. And you must not say anything about this, Win. Ever.”