CHRYSALISES

BENJANUN SRIDUANGKAEW

 

 

Most of us will be familiar with the analogy of war as a game, but Benjanun takes this trope and puts her own fascinating twist on it. I’d say there’s body horror here, but that’s perhaps too simple an assessment, because there is actually a great deal of beauty to be found too; the ambiguity and fantastical imagery in Benjanun’s stories ensure I come back to them time and again, finding fresh treasures on each occasion.

 

 

AS THE CITY of cities burns down, its queen is offered a choice.

She sits in a throne of quantum questions and nascent narratives, contemplating a skyline of flame and nuclear smears. For centuries she has ruled and built; a thousand nations pay her tribute. Her domain fell in a matter of weeks.

Before her an entity of uncertain appearance kneels, shreds of noon and scraps of dusk sutured together by tendons of smog. The creature holds forth a game board, a set of pawns.

“Tell me the rules,” she says. Her palace is mortared in syncretic logic and armored in singularity paradoxes. For the moment she is safe, though that will not last.

“A battle game,” the entity says. “To a point it reflects the players and your circumstances will heavily weigh the game against you. Your units will be weaker – growth rate, recovery, numbers. Victory conditions are impossible and winning is not the objective.”

“Then what is?” If she listens the queen may hear the sound of houses and temples shattering, of conundrum shields sundering beneath ballistic blasts. She will not flee; escape is beside the point and beneath contempt.

“The game has a lateral relationship with reality. I have activated its causal bridge. The troops you generate as you play may translate and cross over, if you choose, to act at your behest.”

“Nothing comes of nothing. What will give them embodiment and power?”

The entity’s mouth curves, a parted parabola. Its teeth gleam jagged in the dark. “At this juncture, does it matter?

“No.” She engages the board and begins.

 

 

MONSOON SEASON AND everything is budding fast: mangoes and rose apples heavy on the branch, cocoons ripe and brilliant on forearms and wrists. Janthira, surgeon by trade and entomologist by hobby, heads the collection that harvest.

The extraction process is individual and arbitrary, and no one has a knack for it quite as Janthira does. At an orphanage she coaxes a chrysalis from a boy by wrapping it in glittering foil, persuades another to detach by clicking red-hot scissors at a teenage girl’s jaw. It is not a threat she means to carry out, but the cocoons have been known to show unexpected sympathy for their hosts. Those newly unburdened would shiver in relief, rid at last of a weight that has been gravid upon them for a year. A few sigh, wistful, already impatient for the next turn.

In the hothouse, they sort the harvest like fresh fruits. Janthira enjoys the variety, though the entomologist in her is slightly offended: no two chrysalises split alike. The first to hatch has the abdomen of a blue-banded bee, the complicated wings of a swallowtail butterfly, a pair of antennae dusted with gold. The second is mostly an orchid mantis, graceful petal-limbs and toothed forelegs, a proboscis like viscous brass.

Collection is done within the first week of monsoons, cultivation within the second. They have to work fast, but Janthira takes time to admire the insect-forms when she can.

They grow on a specific, exclusive nutrient. Most feeders are from the nursing home, a wealth of decades to spend and spare. Janthira is the second youngest at thirty-eight, Prae the youngest at twenty: neither offers much to nourish the pupae. Still Prae gives up her memory as though she possesses an octogenarian’s worth, pouring minutes and weeks and years; monarch butterflies grow marvelous on Prae, scarabs sleek and bees brilliant. Of all the insectoids hers are matchless in speed and strength.

Janthira hears that, in a distant country, Prae fought in a war. At ten, twelve. Their town used to be so quiet and remote that the idea one of their own might’ve been a child soldier seems risible. Yet Janthira is inclined to believe: Prae’s gaze is quick, sharp, feral. She admits to no parent or sibling, barely a surname. Janthira has seen Prae with a knife, has glimpsed the scars.

At the end of the day Janthira’s hands are raw, her vision a kaleidoscope. Alien senses seep into hers, a view of the world through compound lenses. They slice away a moment of five-year-old Janthira in a kindergarten playground, sip from a bright day sticky with candied tamarinds.

It’s not so high a price, she thinks as the colors and sweetness of that noon leach away. One hosts or feeds. Everyone has a duty to keep the town alive.

 

 

THE BOARD IS cut from the hide of unsleeping giants and the husk of ruined engines. The pawns are whittled from black light, dead trilobites, and packed ashes collected from the sites of genocide. The queen handles them with care.

She assesses the strength of her real-world troops, counts the evacuating ships. Too few remain; fewer will escape. “How do you perceive the board?” When she speaks diaphanous wings unfurl, wet, and shudder into brittle glass.

“An odd question to ask.” The entity’s outline distorts. Its limbs may be chainsaws sheathed in black exhaust, its fingers long rivets dripping rust. “I may see it in raw data and unorthodox geometries. Most likely I see it as you do, a simple physical object.”

Since the game began the queen has been seeing the board as a canvas of butterfly blots and dragonfly smudges, but this she does not say. “In the crevices of abandoned moons began a race of itinerant gamblers who cross the stars as I would a doorstep. They derive endless life from the probability backlash of reversed fortune. To imperiled species they give indelible ink-roads with which to escape dying planets. In conflicts of perpetuity they arm the beleaguered with negation storms and obliteration shrikes. The turning of tides, the transformation of defeat to victory or otherwise – this is their passion and purpose.”

“Such beings may exist. I concede the possibility.” Its fingers graze over the board’s edge. The metal ripples with percussive echoes. “But more immediately, Majesty, it’s in your best interest to give the board your undivided attention.”

 

 

SOME NIGHTS JANTHIRA dreams of lamplight eyes and smoke hands. Each time this happened – like a warning – she would steal away from the shelters, find a spot where she could observe the fighting.

A lighthouse, for the town bordered a sea once. What happened to the shore and the waves and the fish no one knows: relocated elsewhere, gobbled up by the swarm, never there in the first place. Janthira climbs the steps quick and quiet, tracing marks and stains that might have hosted her girl-self playing hide and seek, playing at being an explorer in the dark. No telling – she gave up those years long ago. She’s never believed childhood more precious than any other part of life, if anything thinks it less: the hazy repetitive days where she had no say over herself and did not know what she wanted.

She parts gray cobwebs and sepia dust, reveals a window under harsh flashlight. On her knees she waits; she doesn’t whisper monk-taught mantras, having fed those to the chrysalises too.

When the swarm comes the world stops, listens, strains taut.

They are factory parts and assembly noises, pipes and razors coated in oil, turbine-guts and pistons coiled in rust. Janthira imagines gasoline heat for eyes, rotating saw-fangs for ears, but the swarm perceives and hunts by other senses.

The insect-forms make their own answer. Flesh-hatched and memory-fed, they move too quickly to see, proboscides and stingers and formic acid vivisecting the swarm.

It is over fast, always it is – the swarm slows, ripples. Its constituents fall in geometric patterns, fluorescent circuits and schematics for impossible machines.

Janthira leans forward, clutches the windowsill. Her breath momentarily bruises the glass.

The insectoids circle the lighthouse, thinking hive thoughts, sampling human memories, or perhaps nothing at all. By dawn they will spin into the horizon, to find their next life-phase or better climate like migrating birds – everyone theorizes; no one knows. The insectoids protect the town for one year and not a day more. The next batch replaces them and the cycle lurches on; without the chrysalises there is no defense against the swarm.

A flashlight beam strobes between haloes of slag, rectangles of shrapnel. Pauses. Moves again, settles on shredded wings that glint like bottle shards.

Distance and night make it difficult to be sure but Janthira tracks the figure with her eyes, becomes certain. On knees gone numb and trembling, she watches Prae collect the broken bodies of moth-ants and gather antennae as long as arms, holding them close.

 

 

ON THE BOARD, the queen makes an illegal move, testing the boundaries of play and daring the algorithms of rules.

The entity cocks its head; its chuckle is a hard, motorized stutter. “I approve. I always like it when someone tries to break the game itself rather than contend within its criteria. What you did won’t work, I regret to say, but may have gone a little way to sway the odds in your favor.”

“These brokers of fortune,” she says and judges how long it will be until the protections of her hall give. “At the end they exact payment, the forms and measures of which – so it is said – can be quite particular.”

“Possibly,” it concedes. “But it’s fair to pay for goods received, don’t you think?”

“Others still speculate that, though these brokers may slip from one end of the universe to another as I stride the length of my palace, they do not always find catastrophes of a scale suitable for their needs – eternity can be expensive; a little earthquake here or supernova there simply won’t do. And so they engineer unwinnable sieges, incurable plagues, extinction events. It’s a neat strategy; they create demand for services which they alone can supply, and thereby reap immortality in the bargain.”

“Now that, I am sure, is pure fantasy.”

 

 

IN THE MORNING the lighthouse grounds are empty, soot on the pavement and oil slick in the rain puddles. Prae stands over them like a general surveying a battlefield. “We’ve got fewer every year, you know,” she says without turning. “Their numbers are probably constant. The way they disappear, maybe they reincarnate right away. Recycle. Whatever. We’re never going to win and there’s only one way for this to end.”

Prae has a high, young voice. Twenty: she should be in university, fresh-faced and uniformed, navigating her first romances and sophomore classes. Janthira wonders if it is condescending to pity her. Probably it is. “What makes you think that?”

“I keep count. Old folks die and babies can’t host. You can do a lot with lesser numbers but when you’re fighting attrition… what do you think moves the bugs? They’re good, intelligent even, but it can’t be the memories of cooks and shopkeepers and schoolteachers that give them tactical sense. And what makes them fly away after the year is up?”

“Instinct?” Janthira says. This is the most she’s ever heard Prae say at a time.

“It bothers me. Weapons you can’t understand; that should appall anyone. But it’s all we have.”

“Last night,” Janthira begins.

Prae turns around, abruptly. The moment of tension passes and her arms fall slack at her sides, her stance loose. “I eat them. They don’t taste the best but if you season and cook them right, it’s tolerable. Wings and torsos mostly, you don’t want to risk the stingers. They are always some casualties on our side, I might as well put them to use.”

“What?”

“Recycling. You only have so much to feed them with, so I thought it’d be worth a try. I know where you went to school at ten, if you care. Krungthep, wasn’t it? Dealing with someone else’s memories isn’t too pleasant but –” Prae shrugs, a foreign little gesture. “No worse than anything else.”

“That’s what you feed them?”

“Even I run out of bad shit to flush out. This way I can make up for a lot of people – I’ve got excess, if there were more cocoons hatching right now I could fill them up. Maybe if we preserve the bugs. Dry them. Make chili paste.”

Janthira grimaces, looking down at the fragments of carapace. She imagines Prae must’ve cooked and flavored them quickly, or perhaps bitten into them on the spot, crunching, swallowing. Dry legs down her throat and caught between her teeth. “What does that do to you?”

“Do?” Prae’s expression defocuses. “Nothing. I’m not going to get any worse off knowing who cheated on their spouses. You’ll be doing the grafts, right?”

“Right.”

The young woman doesn’t ask for permission; she attaches herself to Janthira the rest of the day, a second shadow.

Janthira collects seeds from the hothouse, checks the registrar for this year’s hosts. Her next stop is the hospital, an ancient leaning building of three storeys and a disappointing lack of ghosts and dark history. Sometimes she still needs those, spindly-limbed terror in bathroom mirrors and rotting women in antique clothes. In the face of the real thing, fictional horror is strangely comforting.

Janthira joins a team of nurses while Prae stands against the wall, watching, gaze intent on the gleaming equipment. There are three doctors present counting Janthira; among them hers is the most prestigious PhD, obtained in Singapore. She used to be privately snobbish about that.

Children line up. An eight-year-old stares unblinking as Janthira rubs her arm down with alcohol, hardly flinches as Janthira presses the syringe in. Boys are more difficult, louder, frighten easily. Absent other obligations in life Janthira has always thought having a daughter might be nice, one she could train to music or art and forbid from ever trying for med school.

One of the nurses relieves her. Janthira thanks the man, goes in search of fresh air. The first lot of hosts is in the playground shared between the hospital and the school, elementary students entering their next semester with a cocoon in their arm.

She flicks a lighter on, ignites a cigarette. A low hum of air-conditioning someone has turned on at full blast against the humid heat. Electricity works, even though all their power lines connect to nowhere. The things one can get used to, learn not to question. She opens the window, wisps of tobacco streaming out to join the smell of sunshine and cut grass. Prae leans nearly halfway out, careless that they are on the second floor.

“Look,” she says softly.

By the rose apple tree, its roots strewn with overripe fruits, a boy seizes up like a doll winding down.

There is no cry of pain as he falls, no sound of bones breaking as he bursts into butterflies.

 

 

ON HER WALLS the queen hangs feeds like pennants. Through them she may monitor the breaking of her soldiers, the shattering of her domain, composite enemies in soft focus as they blaze across the sky. Their edges bleed to stain the clouds; their bellies open to birth explosive shells. Beneath them towers unmake to graveyard-dust, humans to marrow-ghosts.

The feeds shudder and crease, folding in on themselves. When they straighten again the battlefield has changed.

Mandibles clack shut over muzzles. Insect limbs find purchase on plating and scythe through joints. Machine-parts twist and tremble under the pressure of their own fuel, bursting into fragments of circuitry and null space.

“You look surprised that they came through,” the entity says.

The queen turns her gaze to the creature, her face expressionless. The strands of her hair rustle, briefly appear like antennae, but that may simply be faulty lighting. “I didn’t imagine they would achieve embodiment this soon.”

“You strike me as an individual who prefers fast results.” Under the roiling haze it laughs, genteel amusement wreathed in smoke. Sunlight pierces its eye sockets. “And speaking of fast, would you like to negotiate the settlement of your account?”

They might have been haggling over an asteroid, a trade concession; the queen has always known this for a transaction. “I think,” she says, “I know what you want.”

“Then by implication you agree to it?”

“At this juncture, do I have a choice?”

 

 

NOTHING OF THE boy remains behind, after, except a pair of spectacles. Myopia, perhaps. By evening nobody has picked them up so Janthira does, turning the frame in her hands. The butterflies were small and uniform, stained-glass wings in primary colors spiraling toward the clouds. Absurdly she wishes she could’ve captured it on film, that exquisite, brief vision.

“We’re going to die,” Prae says, indifferently. “We were going to anyway, but if what happened to that kid is contagious it’ll be that much sooner.”

Janthira grips the spectacles harder. “Can’t you say anything constructive?”

“Saying nice things isn’t very useful. Doing would be something else.” Prae’s smile is hard. “Though I’ll be fair, nobody could fault you for not having done enough, doctor.”

Janthira doesn’t answer.

The next day some hosts try to tear their cocoons out. One woman did it with a box cutter, struck an artery, wasn’t found in time. Not the worst way to go; being vivisected by the swarm is an agony of days upon nights, blood frozen like pearls, skin flayed petal-thin. Everyone has seen the bodies, spread and bared in the streets as though the swarm means to map human anatomy. But dead is dead and the pupa doesn’t outlive its host.

Before nightfall, a teacher dissolves into a roar of gnats.

Janthira finds a room to herself in the dormitories. Safety in numbers is an illusion; since the change she has come to prefer her own company to the near-exclusion of any other. The sheets are worn and gray, the mattress tattered. She lies down and the bed creaks. Everything falls apart.

A stab of light jolts her. “Doctor,” Prae murmurs. “I know you’re awake.”

Janthira gropes for a switch. The light bulb flickers; shadows twitch and flutter like scorched moths. “The door was locked.”

“What are you afraid of? A lock won’t keep out the swarm, and anyway it was dead easy to pick.” Prae wipes at her mouth, brushing away flecks that might have been cicada shell. She takes hold of Janthira’s hand. “Let’s talk.”

Janthira tries to pull away, but the young woman doesn’t give. “About what?”

“There was a time when things were normal. It’s funny how no one can remember when or how this started, don’t you think?” Prae cranes her head back, shutting her eyes, though her grip doesn’t relax. “Not that they’d listen to me; everyone thinks I’m crazy and you thoroughly sane. You’re the one they rely on because you just know all about the bugs, how to grow them, what to feed them. You counted on that, didn’t you, doctor?”

“What do you –”

“Memories of how all this happened and what you did, that’s what the bugs must have eaten first... There were people there when you made the bargain, you know. Can’t say I have a complete set – I’ve been collecting them in bits, piecing them together. The bugs were supposed to beat the swarm and everything would go back to normal.” Prae leans close. “Only you didn’t pay up.”

Janthira eyes the door. Prae has relocked it. “How much did you see?”

“Enough.” A snick of switchblade, the metal frigid against Janthira’s arm. “I’m good with a knife, doctor, and you can bleed for a long time without dying. Being a surgeon I’m sure you know that.” With her free hand she digs a syringe from her back pocket. “Administer it yourself, will you? And don’t try to get away. Small room. I’m fast.”

“You asked before what moves the bugs.” Janthira licks her lips. “I do. I’m the one who guides them to fight, keep them here for a year.”

“I’ll take that risk. If you explode into termites maybe they’ll call it a day, send the town back. If not we all die and you get to pass spectacularly. Butterflies. Bees. Think about it, that’s much nicer than a corpse. Tidy. Very pretty.”

The look in Prae’s eyes and Janthira thinks, Something’s wrong with this girl but something is wrong with all of them. When she takes the syringe her hand doesn’t shake, steadied by the weight of inevitability. “I’m not going to apologize.” She primes the needle, conscientious to the last. “The offer they made was never fair.”

“Probably. But you did put your life ahead of the rest of us.” The blade turns, pushes harder into Janthira’s skin. “Revenge is better than nothing.”

Janthira sets the syringe down, lets it roll away. The pain is a bite, the cocoon-seed entering her blood a throb. A second life inside her begins.

 

 

BY MID-ROUND HALF the enemy force has been scourged to patches of light and imaginary numbers, equations cleaved apart by warped variables. Through the feeds the queen scents their defeat.

She checks her pawns. They have been dwindling as her combat units grew. She does not spare a moment to question and imagine; what flesh is carved to serve her city’s survival is a matter best postponed for when she again has the luxury of philosophy and remorse. “I’ll discuss the terms of compensation now.”

“Very good. Our preferred currency is in troops.”

“My armed forces will take a long time to recover, let alone be combat-ready again.”

“Not those,” the entity chides. “I’m hardly asking to enlist your infantry as mercenaries for distant conflicts having nothing to do with you. That would be inappropriate.” Its hand opens, a revelation of wasps and locusts cast in platinum and gold. “These are metaphors that, through correct nourishment, can be actualized. I have a use for their mature forms. Cultivate them and I’ll take five years’ worth of results. The rest, as a courtesy, you can do with as you like.”

The queen takes one of the icons. It is warm, viciously alive – a jab and her blood beads. “You must have a projected quantity.”

The entity waves a hand of vapor and crackling charge. “That’ll sort itself out. I’m not so discourteous as to burden my clients with logistical minutiae.”

“Indeed no.” She advances the round to a close.

 

 

THE CHRYSALISES TAKE a year to gestate, but as Janthira drifts in and out of fevered sleep she knows she won’t have that long. The ache of an alien heat, the burn of a parasite pulse: a hundred heartbeats drumming inexorably toward birth. A low buzz in the back of her skull like flies waging war. She imagines proboscides tickling her from the inside, sipping at lymph and suckling at fat. Larvae wriggling through her bloodstream, galvanized by serotonin.

She thinks the end will be pus and gore, epidermis rupturing to release a cloud of insectoids. Or it may be neater, bodies exiting through mouth and ears, leaving her a husk. Mostly she hopes she won’t feel it.

When she opens her eyes to morning, she knows it will be the last time.

The window is a halo of sunshine burning at the edges, as though in eclipse. She tastes rose apples gone to near-rot and thinks of an afterlife behind hive nerves and faceted sight. What she will be summoned to fight, if anything. How long it will last, if it ever ends.

Prae is a shadow, a sound of switchblade clicking in binary. Open or shut. One or zero.

Janthira tries to speak, finds her throat too dry or else her mouth already transformed, tongueless, to a shape meant for pollen and nectar. When she holds up her hands she can see the ceiling through them, skin stretched that thin, flesh to membrane.

The moment strikes and she knows. And maybe Prae is right that it is less messy than human death, human birth – she expected it would be like labor, the push and pull, contractions and blood and screams. This is painless pressure.

One breath in, another out, and she opens –

 

 

THE CITY OF cities no longer burns. Its enemies are dead, leaving imprints of their shadows and the outlines of their ruin.

In her throne the queen gazes out at nothing in particular. She has summoned her commanders and ministers, and in her lap is gathered such wealth that might have been selected from her treasury: icons of jeweled mantises and gilded cicadas, topaz scarabs and citrine flies. Each is finely made, their details captivating. Her courtiers and soldiers find that they cannot look away.

“These are seeds,” she says, turning over the tokens. “For their fertilization and growth you will require no instruction. See that they are cultivated and we’ll never need fear another war. A thousand nations pay us tribute now; in ten years we will have the riches of five thousand.”

Perhaps as she speaks a phantom of flies passes over the feeds. As her commands pupate into action her face elongates and her irises become compound reflections – but that may be imagination or simply a trick of angles and shadow.

The windows are sealed, the halls meticulously clean. Nevertheless a moth alights on her knuckle as though begging audience. She strokes its wings slowly, through the texture divining a message, a warning: or maybe nothing at all. She tips the moth into her palm and, very precisely, crushes its thorax.

At her feet a game board lies, oxidized russet as though it has weathered centuries, the pawns long crumbled. A curl of smoke lingers over them.

But in time that, too, dissipates.