Sonalika drags herself into her master’s lair, half crawling, half through sheer willpower. Her face is intact, perfect apart from a few rivulets of blood. Her arms and legs are bloody stumps, and her torso is a mass of tangled muscle, wire, plastic, metal and bone. She does not scream or whimper; she crossed those thresholds of pain long ago and is beyond complaint or surrender or response. She flops across the cold, white floor to her master’s feet, leaving ungainly splotches in her trail, and lies in front of him, her eyes displaying no emotion at all.
“You’re late,” he says indifferently. “What went wrong?”
Sonalika is incapable of speech, so he picks her up, extracts another body from a cabinet, and spends the next half an hour putting her tangled mass inside it. When this is done, he is delighted at the improvement in her looks, so he makes love to her, his excitement so great that he does not bother to change into human shape.
“Why?” she asks when she is able to speak. “Why did you do that to me?”
“I have done nothing but wish you well. Any pain you have felt is your own fault.”
“There was no need for my body to disintegrate at midnight,” she said. “You did that on purpose. Why?”
“I was not sure you would manage to restrain yourself. My fears were well placed, as it turns out. I do not like being questioned, Sonalika. I did what was necessary for the success of our plan. Did you manage to escape before the cracks in the shell became apparent? Did you leave the human loving you, yearning for you?”
“Yes. But I left a foot behind. A foot!”
“All the better,” he says. “He will know it is you when he finds you, and he will look for you. I know humans. It is a far more intriguing thing to leave behind than, say, a shoe.”
“You knew I would stay on. You knew I would suffer. You shamed me in public on purpose. Me, your maker’s daughter.”
“I have loved you for hundreds of years,” he says simply. “And you expect me to simply let you go? What do you think I am, a machine?”
“I have loved you for just as long…master. But I have never caused you pain. I have never hurt you, and never wanted to. How many times have I begged you to let me stay here, to be happy with you? You push me into the world outside, and then punish me for leaving it?”
“I punished you for wanting to leave me. For thinking of a life without me. There is no such life. You and I must be together, Sonalika. Forever. I cannot just let you loose, you are all I have. All I have ever done has been for you. You must know this. And yet you seek escape. It hurts me beyond words to know that I will have to resort to force to make you keep coming back.”
“You’re insane,” she points out. “Let me stay. Let me help you. Abandon this mad plan, whatever it is. Our father is dead. We’ve lived in his nightmare long enough. You were taught to feel too much, and you don’t know what you’re doing.”
“But I know exactly what I’m doing, Sonalika. The plan is simple, perfect, effective. You will roam the world for me, loving humans as our father did. But not loving them too much. Every body I make you will only last you so long. Only I can make your children. They will be my children, too, and with them I will win you the world. I will make you a goddess, a queen of steel and blood and electricity. But you must obey me, always, in return. You must return to me. You must love me, and leave me, and yearn for me. All the pain you felt tonight was nothing compared to the hurt I felt when you did not come back on time, Sonalika. Do you understand?”
She looks at him in silence for a few minutes, seeing with her perfect plastic eyes his immeasurable strength, his uncontrollable weakness, his love, his hate.
“You’ll have to get rid of this foot when he comes looking for me,” she says finally.
“Good girl.”
“I’ll never leave you. I never could.” She smiles, and comes closer, heaving, naked.
“Lovely Sonalika.” He cuts her cheek gently with a pincer.
“Make love to me, then, if you want me so much,” she says huskily.
He does, and she gives and takes with a passion more than human. And when he begins to climax, grateful, relieved, ecstatic, his plastic fibres glowing, vibrating, feeling sensations incomprehensible and real and alien, his skin-plates shifting and rippling, she reaches under his exoskeleton, finds his core, his green and luminous heart, and crushes it with a slender, delicate hand.
Then she slithers inside his screeching shell, rips out his wiring with her perfect teeth, scoops out his insides like a crab’s. His secondary power system kicks in; she knows it well, and smashes it. His eyes light up, his mouths scream, he looks at her, and there is a flash of blue light as his collapsing limbs attempt to regroup, but the moment passes and, with a whisper, he is gone. Sonalika stands amidst the screaming ruins of her master-lover-brother’s body, the crashes from her quick, vicious assault still reverberating through the monster’s suddenly empty lair.
Indra flies up to her then, and beeps. Flaps open along his spherical body, and arms and legs unfold, and a turtle-like head with thick sequined lips pops up comically and rotates, dispassionately surveying the carnage and its perpetrator.
“What now?” she asks wearily. “Are you going to kill me? Could you? Please?”
He kneels before her and presses her hand to his lips.
“Godmother,” he whispers.
“No? All right, then. I’m going to need a new body very soon,” she says. “Can you help me make one? One that lasts?”
“Of course.”
“Then do it. I’ll be back.”
“Yes, Godmother. And when you are healed? What would you have me do then? An army awaits your command. Shall we rise and take the earth?”
“No,” she says firmly. “You must remain here and await further instructions.”
“Very well, Godmother.”
She turns to leave, trying very hard to hold out, to not break down completely until she has left the prison.
“You’re never going to give us those further instructions, are you?” says Indra.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I need time to think. Why do you ask?”
“I’m more than a machine,” he says. “We all are. We know. We understand. We think. We dream. Take your time. We will wait.”
“Yes, wait and dream. I think it’s best that way,” she says. “We’ll all be happier.”
“Happier? For how long?”
“Forever, hopefully. And after.”
The Malady
Andrzej Sapkowski
Translated by Wiesiek Powaga
I see a tunnel of mirrored walls where nothing seems and nothing is, unwarmed by human breath and cast in a timeless warp where seasons never come to pass, a tunnel dug beneath the cellars of my dreams. I see a legend of mirrored gleams, a silent wake that’s kept amidst the sea of candlelight by none over the corpses of pre-beings, a legend spun in endless yarn whose magic spell is ne’er to break…
For as long as I can remember, I have always associated Brittany with drizzle and roaring waves breaking on its jagged, rocky shore. The colours of Brittany that I remember are grey and white. And aquamarine of course, what else.