Then Will the Sun Rise Alabaster

By Benjanun Sriduangkaew

On a remote planet, a convent harbors a deadly secret buried beneath quiet violence--a secret that the woman known only as the Alabaster Admiral will obtain at any cost. Set in the same universe of And Shall Machines Surrender.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prime Books
• Release date: Nov 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781607015376

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Benjanun Sriduangkaew writes fantasy mythic and contemporary, science fiction space operatic and military, and has a strong appreciation for beautiful bugs. Her short fiction can be found in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Solaris Rising 3, various Mammoth Books and best of the year collections.She is a finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

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Then Will the Sun Rise Alabaster

Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Copyright © 2019 by Benjanun Sriduangkaew.

Cover art by Tithi Luadthong.

ISBN: 978-1-60701-537-6

Prime Books

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Then Will the Sun Rise Alabaster

Morning begins in apocalypse: by accident of location, sunrise on this star comes in like a herald of the great finale, that severance of time, a sky flushing to red and shivering with fire. The Church, the fall, the final armageddon that awaits them all. For the last eighteen years of her life, this is what Panthida recognizes as dawn.

She is older than eighteen. She may be twenty-five or twenty-seven. But the years before these eighteen have been pulped up between the Church’s jaw, swallowed like communion wine down its long throat. The Bible is teeth and each time she touches it, it is as though she’s handling bare razors. Sometimes she imagines the pages gleam like them too, redder than anything. Red, she is fixated on it, the color and the sound even though in English it sounds nothing like what she used to speak—a language now forgotten, burned up along with everything else, a language of vowels like a feast and tonal variation like music. Reeducation is a blunt process. She has kept her name and that is more than most of the women raised here can say.

She imagines what her habit would look like in crimson. She envies the priests’ stoles, which come in all shades, breaking the monopoly of black and white upon the body. They visit here but rarely and she perceives them as black wraiths brightened up by those slashes of vibrancy, scarlet or green or purple, threaded with gold. A species apart from hers.

Sometimes she dreams of the ship that carried her family, still drifting in the dark, slowly sawed in half. A vast numinous fruit and when it finally breaks, it vents an avalanche of the viscera and the wet humors that reside beneath human skin. All evaporates instantly. Nothing remains that is recognizable: no face, no body. Afterimages seared into memory—anonymous flashes—but that is all.

Red, red. The color of her dreams. The color of memory. She is obsessed with it, consumed by it. In her sleep, she hears its voice calling to her in that dissipated tongue, the tongue of her childhood.

After morning prayer, they are summoned to greet the new intake. Orphan girls, some younger than Panthida was when she came here, some older. Twelve at most. She wonders where the older ones go or if, over that age, a child is judged heathen and too impure for redemption. She searches their faces—her own is blank and remote, as is every other nun’s—and remembers her own baptism like drowning; she was submerged a long time, the better to erase what she once was, to erase the years that existed before the convent. These children: they could be from anywhere, fair- and dark-skinned, eyes like hers or like no one’s at all. Perhaps a station failed, perhaps like