The Wind and the Rain

By Robert Silverberg

 

 

The planet cleanses itself. That is the important thing to remember, at moments when we become too pleased with ourselves. The healing process is a natural and inevitable one. The action of the wind and the rain, the ebbing and flowing of the tides, the vigorous rivers flushing out the choked and stinking lakes—these are all natural rhythms, all healthy manifestations of universal harmony.

Of course, we are here too. We do our best to hurry the process along. But we are only auxiliaries, and we know it. We must not exaggerate the value of our work. False pride is worse than a sin: it is a foolishness. We do not deceive ourselves into thinking we are important. If we were not here at all, the planet would repair itself anyway within twenty to fifty million years. It is estimated that our presence cuts that time down by somewhat more than half.

#

Today we must inject colored fluids into a major river. Edith, Bruce, Paul, Elaine, Oliver, Ethel, Ronald, Edward, and I have been assigned to this task. Most members of the team believe the river is the Mississippi, although there is some evidence that it may be the Nile. Oliver, Bruce, and Edith believe it is more likely to be the Nile than the Mississippi, but they defer to the opinion of the majority.

The river is wide and deep and its color is black in some places and dark green in others. The fluids are computer mixed on the east bank of the river in a large factory erected by a previous reclamation team. We supervise their passage into the river.

First, we inject the red fluid, then the blue, then the yellow; they have different densities and form parallel stripes running for many hundreds of kilometers in the water. We are not certain whether these fluids are active healing agents—that is, substances which dissolve the solid pollutants lining the riverbed—or merely serve as markers permitting further chemical analysis of the river by the orbiting satellite system. It is not necessary for us to understand what we are doing, so long as we follow instructions explicitly.

Elaine jokes about going swimming. Bruce says, “How absurd. This river is famous for deadly fish that will strip the flesh from your bones.” We all laugh at that. Fish? Here? What fish could be as deadly as the river itself? This water would consume our flesh if we entered it, and probably dissolve our bones as well. I scribbled a poem yesterday and dropped it in, and the paper vanished instantly.

#

In the evenings we walk along the beach and have philosophical discussions. The sunsets on this coast are embellished by rich tones of purple, green, crimson, and yellow. Sometimes we cheer when a particularly beautiful combination of atmospheric gases transforms the sunlight. Our mood is always optimistic and gay. We are never depressed by the things we find on this planet. Even devastation can be an art form, can it not? Perhaps it is one of the greatest of all art forms, since an art of destruction consumes its medium, it devours its own epistemological foundations, and in this sublimely nullifying doubling-back upon its origins it far exceeds in moral complexity those forms which are merely productive. That is, I place a higher value on transformative art than on generative art. Is my meaning clear?

In any event, since art ennobles and exalts the spirits of those who perceive it, we are exalted and ennobled by the conditions on Earth. We envy those who collaborate to create those extraordinary conditions. We know ourselves to be small-souled folk of a minor latter-day epoch; we lack the dynamic grandeur of energy that enabled our ancestors to commit such depredations. This world is a symphony.

Naturally you might argue that to restore a planet takes more energy than to destroy it, but you would be wrong. Nevertheless, though our daily tasks leave us weary and drained, we also feel stimulated and excited, because by restoring this world, the mother-world of mankind, we are in a sense participating in the original splendid process of its destruction. I mean in the sense that the resolution of a dissonant chord participates in the dissonance of that chord.

#

Now we have come to Tokyo, the capital of the island empire of Japan. See how small the skeletons of the citizens are? That is one way we have of identifying this place as Japan. The Japanese are known to have been people of small stature. Edward’s ancestors were Japanese. He is of small stature. (Edith says his skin should be yellow as well. His skin is just like ours. Why is his skin not yellow?)

“See?” Edward cries. “There is Mount Fuji!” It is an extraordinarily beautiful mountain, mantled in white snow. On its slopes one of our archaeological teams is at work, tunneling under the snow to collect samples from the twentieth-century strata of chemical residues, dust, and ashes.

“Once there were over seventy-five thousand industrial smokestacks around Tokyo,” says Edward proudly, “from which were released hundreds of tons of sulfur, nitrous oxide, ammonia, and carbon gases every day. We should not forget that this city had more than 1.5 million automobiles as well.” Many of the automobiles are still visible, but they are very fragile, worn to threads by the action of the atmosphere. When we touch them, they collapse in puffs of grey smoke.

Edward, who has studied his heritage well, tells us, “It was not uncommon for the density of carbon monoxide in the air here to exceed the permissible levels by factors of two hundred and fifty percent on mild summer days. Owing to atmospheric conditions, Mount Fuji was visible only one day of every nine. Yet no one showed dismay.”

He conjures up for us a picture of his industrious ancestors toiling cheerfully and unremittingly in their poisonous environment. The Japanese, he insists, were able to maintain and even increase their gross national product at a time when other nationalities had already begun to lose ground in the global economic struggle because of diminished population owing to unfavorable ecological factors. And so on and so on.

After a time we grow bored with Edward’s incessant boasting. “Stop boasting,” Oliver tells him, “or we will expose you to the atmosphere.” We have much dreary work to do here.

Paul and I guide the huge trenching machines; Oliver and Ronald follow, planting seeds. Almost immediately, strange angular shrubs spring up. They have shiny bluish leaves and long crooked branches. One of them seized Elaine by the throat yesterday and might have hurt her seriously had Bruce not uprooted it. We were not upset. This is merely one phase in the long, slow process of repair. There will be many such incidents. Someday, cherry trees will blossom in this place.

#

This is the poem the river ate:

 

Destruction

 

I.Nouns. Destruction, desolation, wreck, wreckage, ruin, ruination, rack and ruin, smash, smashup, demolition, demolishment, ravagement, havoc, ravage, dilapidation, decimation, blight, breakdown, consumption, dissolution, obliteration, overthrow, spoilage; mutilation, disintegration, undoing, pulverization; sabotage, vandalism; annulment, damnation, extinguishment, extinction; invalidation, nullification, shatterment, shipwreck; annihilation, disannulment, discreation, extermination, extirpation, obliteration, perdition, subversion.

II.Verbs. Destroy, wreck, ruin, ruinate, smash, demolish, raze, ravage, gut, dilapidate, decimate, blast, blight, break down, consume, dissolve, overthrow; mutilate, disintegrate, unmake, pulverize; sabotage, vandalize, annul, blast, blight, damn, dash, extinguish, invalidate, nullify, quell, quench, scuttle, shatter, shipwreck, torpedo, smash, spoil, undo, void; annihilate, devour, disannul, discreate, exterminate, obliterate, extirpate, subvert; corrode, erode, sap, undermine, waste, waste away, whittle away (or down); eat away, canker, gnaw; wear away, abrade, batter, excoriate, rust.

III.Adjectives. Destructive, ruinous, vandalistic, baneful, cutthroat, fell, lethiferous, pernicious, slaughterous, predatory, sinistrous, nihilistic; corrosive, erosive, cankerous, caustic, abrasive.

 

“I validate,” says Ethel.

“I unravage,” says Oliver.

“I integrate,” says Paul.

“I devandalize,” says Elaine.

“I unshatter,” says Bruce.

“I unscuttle,” says Edward.

“I discorrode,” says Ronald.

“I undesolate,” says Edith.

“I create,” say I.

We reconstitute. We renew. We repair. We reclaim. We refurbish. We restore. We renovate. We rebuild. We reproduce. We redeem. We reintegrate. We replace. We reconstruct. We retrieve. We revivify. We resurrect. We fix, overhaul, mend, put in repair, retouch, tinker, cobble, patch, darn, staunch, caulk, splice. We celebrate our successes by energetic and lusty singing. Some of us copulate.

#

Here is an outstanding example of the dark humour of the ancients. At a place called Richland, Washington, there was an installation that manufactured plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. This was done in the name of “national security,” that is, to enhance and strengthen the safety of the United States of America and render its inhabitants carefree and hopeful. In a relatively short span of time these activities produced approximately fifty-five million gallons of concentrated radioactive waste. This material was so intensely hot that it would boil spontaneously for decades, and would retain a virulently toxic character for many thousands of years.

The presence of so much dangerous waste posed a severe environmental threat to a large area of the United States. How, then, to dispose of this waste? An appropriately comic solution was devised. The plutonium installation was situated in a seismically unstable area located along the earthquake belt that rings the Pacific Ocean.

A storage site was chosen nearby, directly above a fault line that had produced a violent earthquake half a century earlier. Here 140 steel-and-concrete tanks were constructed just below the surface of the ground and some 240 feet above the water table of the Columbia River, from which a densely populated region derived its water supply.

Into these tanks the boiling radioactive wastes were poured: a magnificent gift to future generations. Within a few years the true subtlety of the jest became apparent when the first small leaks were detected in the tanks.

Some observers predicted that no more than ten to twenty years would pass before the great heat caused the seams of the tanks to burst, releasing radioactive gases into the atmosphere or permitting radioactive fluids to escape into the river. The designers of the tanks maintained, though, that they were sturdy enough to last at least a century. It will be noted that this was something less than one percent of the known half-life of the materials placed in the tanks.

Because of discontinuities in the records, we are unable to determine which estimate was more nearly correct. It should be possible for our decontamination squads to enter the affected regions in eight hundred to thirteen hundred years. This episode arouses tremendous admiration in me. How much gusto, how much robust wit, those old ones must have had!

#

We are granted a holiday so we may go to the mountains of Uruguay to visit the site of one of the last human settlements, perhaps the very last. It was discovered by a reclamation team several hundred years ago and has been set aside, in its original state, as a museum for the tourists who one day will wish to view the mother-world.

One enters through a lengthy tunnel of glossy pink brick. A series of airlocks prevents the outside air from penetrating. The village itself, nestling between two craggy spires, is shielded by a clear shining dome. Automatic controls maintain its temperature at a constant mild level. There were a thousand inhabitants. We can view them in the spacious plazas, in the taverns, and in places of recreation.

Family groups remain together, often with their pets. A few carry umbrellas. Everyone is in an unusually fine state of preservation. Many of them are smiling.

It is not yet known why these people perished. Some died in the act of speaking, and scholars have devoted much effort, so far without success, to the task of determining and translating the last words still frozen on their lips.

We are not allowed to touch anyone, but we may enter their homes and inspect their possessions and toilet furnishings. I am moved almost to tears, as are several of the others.

“Perhaps these are our very ancestors,” Ronald exclaims.

But Bruce declares scornfully, “You say ridiculous things. Our ancestors must have escaped from here long before the time these people lived.”

Just outside the settlement I find a tiny glistening bone, possibly the shinbone of a child, possibly part of a dog’s tail. “May I keep it?” I ask our leader. But he compels me to donate it to the museum.

#

The archives yield much that is fascinating. For example, this fine example of ironic distance in ecological management. In the ocean off a place named California were tremendous forests of a giant seaweed called kelp, housing a vast and intricate community of maritime creatures. Sea urchins lived on the ocean floor, one hundred feet down, amid the holdfasts that anchored the kelp. Furry aquatic mammals known as sea otters fed on the urchins.

The Earth people removed the otters because they had some use for their fur. Later, the kelp began to die. Forests many square miles in diameter vanished. This had serious commercial consequences, for the kelp was valuable and so were many of the animal forms that lived in it.

Investigation of the ocean floor showed a great increase in sea urchins. Not only had their natural enemies, the otters, been removed, but the urchins were taking nourishment from the immense quantities of organic matter in the sewage discharges dumped into the ocean by the Earth people. Millions of urchins were nibbling at the holdfasts of the kelp, uprooting the huge plants and killing them.

When an oil tanker accidentally released its cargo into the sea, many urchins were killed and the kelp began to reestablish itself. But this proved to be an impractical means of controlling the urchins. Encouraging the otters to return was suggested, but there was not a sufficient supply of living otters.

The kelp foresters of California solved their problem by dumping quicklime into the sea from barges. This was fatal to the urchins; once they were dead, healthy kelp plants were brought from other parts of the sea and embedded to become the nucleus of a new forest. After a while the urchins returned and began to eat the kelp again. More quicklime was dumped. The urchins died and new kelp was planted.

Later, it was discovered that the quicklime was having harmful effects on the ocean floor itself, and other chemicals were dumped to counteract those effects.

All of this required great ingenuity and a considerable outlay of energy and resources. Edward thinks there was something very Japanese about these maneuvers. Ethel points out that the kelp trouble would never have happened if the Earth people had not originally removed the otters. How naive Ethel is! She has no understanding of the principles of irony. Poetry bewilders her also. Edward refuses to sleep with Ethel now.

#

In the final centuries of their era the people of Earth succeeded in paving the surface of their planet almost entirely with a skin of concrete and metal. We must pry much of this up so that the planet may start to breathe again.

It would be easy and efficient to use explosives or acids, but we are not overly concerned with ease and efficiency; besides, there is great concern that explosives or acids may do further ecological harm here. Therefore, we employ large machines that inset prongs in the great cracks that have developed in the concrete. Once we have lifted the paved slabs they usually crumble quickly. Clouds of concrete dust blow freely through the streets of these cities, covering the stumps of the buildings with a fine, pure coating of grayish-white powder.

The effect is delicate and refreshing.

Paul suggested yesterday that we may be doing ecological harm by setting free this dust. I became frightened at the idea and reported him to the leader of our team. Paul will be transferred to another group.

#

Toward the end here they all wore breathing suits, similar to ours but even more comprehensive. We find these suits lying around everywhere like the discarded shells of giant insects. The most advanced models were complete individual housing units.

Apparently, it was not necessary to leave one’s suit except to perform such vital functions as sexual intercourse and childbirth. We understand that the reluctance of the Earth people to leave their suits even for those functions, near the close, immensely hastened the decrease in population.

#

Our philosophical discussions. God created this planet. We all agree on that, in a manner of speaking, ignoring for the moment definitions of such concepts as “God” and “created”.

Why did He go to so much trouble to bring Earth into being, if it was His intention merely to have it rendered uninhabitable? Did He create mankind especially for this purpose, or did they exercise free will in doing what they did here? Was mankind God’s way of taking vengeance against His own creation? Why would He want to take vengeance against His own creation?

Perhaps it is a mistake to approach the destruction of Earth from the moral or ethical standpoint. I think we must see it in purely aesthetic terms, i.e., a self-contained artistic achievement, like a fouetté en tournant or an entrechat-dix, performed for its own sake and requiring no explanations. Only in this way can we understand how the Earth people were able to collaborate so joyfully in their own asphyxiation.

#

My tour of duty is almost over. It has been an overwhelming experience; I will never be the same. I must express my gratitude for this opportunity to have seen Earth almost as its people knew it. Its rusted streams, its corroded meadows, its purpled skies, its bluish puddles. The debris, the barren hillsides, the blazing rivers.

Soon, thanks to the dedicated work of reclamation teams such as ours, these superficial but beautiful emblems of death will have disappeared. This will be just another world for tourists, of sentimental curiosity but no unique value to the sensibility. How dull that will be: a green and pleasant Earth once more, why, why? The universe has enough habitable planets; at present it has only one Earth.

Has all our labor here been an error, then? I sometimes do think it was misguided of us to have undertaken this project. But on the other hand, I remind myself of our fundamental irrelevance. The healing process is a natural and inevitable one. With us or without us, the planet cleanses itself. The wind, the rain, the tides. We merely help things along.

#

A rumor reaches us that a colony of live Earthmen has been found on the Tibetan plateau. We travel there to see if this is true. Hovering above a vast, red, empty plain, we see large figures moving slowly about. Are these Earthmen, inside breathing suits of a strange design?

We descend. Members of other reclamation teams are already on hand. They have surrounded one of the large creatures. It travels in a wobbly circle, uttering indistinct cries and grunts. Then it comes to a halt, confronting us blankly as if defying us to embrace it. We tip it over; it moves its massive limbs dumbly but is unable to arise.

After a brief conference we decide to dissect it. The outer plates lift easily. Inside we find nothing but gears and coils of gleaming wire. The limbs no longer move, although things click and hum within it for quite some time. We are favorably impressed by the durability and resilience of these machines. Perhaps in the distant future such entities will wholly replace the softer and more fragile life forms on all worlds, as they seem to have done on Earth.

 

The wind. The rain. The tides. All sadnesses flow to the sea.

 

 

 

Thaw

A Red Sister Story

 

By Mark Lawrence

 

 

“Nona!”

Nona looked up. Ruli ran across the quayside towards her, careless of her skirts and the master’s hat left tumbling in her wake. Ruli caught Nona in her arms and Nona, despite her grim mood, surrendered to the moment, sweeping up her old friend. Her mind had never let go of the idea that they were the same height, Ruli perhaps an inch or two taller, so the fact that she now dwarfed the woman always took Nona by surprise.

Nona lifted her clear off the ground. Bearing three sons had thickened Ruli somewhat but the additional weight proved no challenge to arms used to constant swordplay.

“Hey!” Ruli laughed.

“What? Henton doesn’t do this?” Ruli’s husband was eight foot tall and twice as broad in the shoulders as Nona.

When Nona and Arabella had arrived at the dock, the sight of two nuns had drawn little attention. Though both of them were Red Sisters, they had opted for the anonymity of the black habit. Heads turned now though at the sight of Trademaster Ruli Vinesong being hoisted into the air like a child, squealing with laughter all the while.

“Ara!” As soon as Nona let Ruli’s feet touch the flagstones she was off again, throwing herself at Arabella. They embraced and Ara manufactured the expected smiles, managing a more convincing job of it than Nona had. Ara had always been better at stepping clear of an argument and, even though she’d started this one, Ara seemed, at least outwardly, less affected by it than Nona.

“Is the boat ready?” Ara asked.

“It’s a ship!” Ruli rolled her eyes, showing another flash of the girl she’d been when they were all novices back at the convent. “Boats are for bobbing about by the shore. My ships cross the sea!” Ruli had inherited her father’s fleet and made her money exporting wine to the Durns then bringing back coal. War and invasions made surprisingly brief interruptions to the necessary business of trading across the waters. “And yes, it’s ready. Clera arrived this morning. She’s waiting aboard.”

Nona glanced at Ara who kept her steely gaze on the ship in question. The argument had been about half a dozen things, anything either of them could lay hands on to hurt the other in the heat of the moment, but Clera had been the heart of it.

“She delivered you to your enemies!” Ara had shouted that morning, her face shadowed by more than dawn’s grey light. “She tried to skewer me with a spear!” She’d rolled from their bed to haul up her nightgown and show the scar on her back. As if Nona had forgotten. As if she hadn’t traced the site with her fingertips a thousand times and didn’t know it better than any wound of her own.

Nona shook her head. “She knew the shipskin wouldn’t give.” The armor that Red Sisters wore was thin but of legendary toughness. “And she helped us as often as she hurt us.”

“You say that like it’s a good thing, rather than just enough to let her live!” Ara had thrown up her hands and stalked out of Nona’s cell without even stopping to pick up her habit to keep the cold from her flesh.

Nona shook off the morning’s memory. She followed Ruli and Ara to where the ship lay tied to the dock bollards. Sailors paused their tasks to watch the nuns approach, the devout making the sign of the Tree while others tapped a hand to their chest, acknowledging Ruli.

Clera came to the rail. Like Ruli, she wore her hair uncovered, black locks flowing over her shoulders. When she’d been a novice it had always been a wild tangle, but as a merchant, her wealth had tamed it. She wore face paints too. Just a touch here and there, dark around the eyes, red on the lips. Even through her disapproval, Nona had to admit she looked good.

“Does she think we’re going to a ball?” Ara hissed.

Nona wanted to tell Ara to put her envy aside. The paints Clera’s silver paid for still didn’t make her as beautiful as Ara after a hard training session with her face flushed and sweat plastering her golden locks to her skull. Mud and blood couldn’t tarnish Ara’s Ancestor-given splendor, even with her hair hidden beneath a nun’s headdress. The only thing that had ever looked ugly on her was jealousy.

It was just a kiss. Nona wanted to say the words. It was just a kiss. But they were fuel to the fire that was burning Ara up.

“Why is she even here?” Ara aimed the question at Ruli as they followed her up the gangplank. “She’s at the convent two days in seven. And now she’s here, too!”

“You know Clera.” Ruli shrugged. “Maybe she smells gold to be made. She must have spent enough of it to get the emperor to send her along. You know what they say: the emperor can’t be bought, but he can certainly be rented.”

Once aboard, Ruli went to speak with the captain while Nona and Ara slowly made their way to the prow, passing Clera without comment. Ara stalked past. Head high. Nona, burdened by shame, looked everywhere but at her, finding sudden fascination in the sailors’ tasks of knotting ropes and shifting nets.

Nona turned her gaze from decks to the flat gray expanse of the Marn Sea. The ice walls that corralled the sea were a white fringe on both horizons, over thirty miles distant to the north, nearly twenty to the south. Further than that—Nona reminded herself—she and the others were here because the Corridor had been widened. She opened her mouth to say something to Ara, then closed it. The ice may have thawed but something between Ara and Nona had frozen.

Nona wanted to say that she’d never seen the sea before. She wanted to share her wonder at the way the wooden floor beneath her feet rose and fell. The taste of salt on the wind, the cry of the gulls, all of these things trembled on her tongue, needing to be shared, but Ara’s eyes were ice blue and fixed on the distance.

“An island full of monsters!” Clera came up behind them, bold and unrepentant. “Sounds exciting. And unlikely.”

Nona turned. Ara didn’t.

“If it’s unlikely, why are you here?” Ara asked in a cold voice.

“I like a challenge.” Clera shot Nona a wicked look. “And unlikely bets can be where the money is. With the war over, this could be the next big thing.”

The war had delivered into the emperor’s hands the means to unlock a frozen world. Or at least parts of it. With the power to focus the rays of their dying sun, he could broaden the horizons of nations that had been locked for millennia in the shrinking Corridor that encircled Abeth’s equator: a zone carved through the miles-thick ice sheets in which the whole planet was clad.

But while thawing land ice would cause disastrous flooding, only vast seas extended beneath the ice-bound edges of the Sea of Marn. There, the creatures of the ocean emerged from darkness and could be hunted by a starving population. Recent battlefields yielded poor harvests. So, the emperor had ordered the Sea of Marn to be widened.

When the melting ice cliffs had revealed an island, the shock was not that it was there but that it seemed to have existed within its own bubble under the sheet. Rather than the scraped-clean rock one might expect, gnawed by glacial teeth, the place, according to the tales of passing sailors, boasted monsters larger than houses. The emperor had requested Nona’s participation in the investigation. The abbess had sent her alone, her tender heart not willing to risk others to these reported monsters and her faith in Nona’s invincibility unshakeable.

Ara had come because, kiss or no kiss, she’d told the abbess: “What? No! I’m not letting her go alone. Are you stupid?”

#

“We’re making good time.” Nona found Ruli beside the ship’s wheel.

“The Corridor wind is either with you or against you when navigating the Marn. When it’s with you, your ship fairly skips across the waves.”

“What’s that man doing?” Nona pointed to a sailor struggling with a complex set of ropes and pulleys beneath the main sail.

“Nautical stuff.” Ruli dismissed the question. “What’s up with you and Ara?” Ruli lived for gossip but genuine concern colored her voice.

“We argued.” The word was too small. As Mistress Blade, Nona was expected to understand every fight, but in this one, Ara could so easily reach past all her defenses and stab her in the heart.

Ruli nodded. “For warriors the peace can be harder than the war.” She set a hand to Nona’s arm. “It’s difficult to let go of that time. To still have the memories and the anger but not have someone to fight.”

Nona studied the deck. “It’s more than that.” Though Ruli was right—the peace they’d longed for was hard.

“You argued about Clera,” Ruli said.

Nona had hoped it wasn’t so obvious. “I didn’t know she—”

“You never do.” Ruli shook her head, a wry smile on her lips. “Everyone else knew.”

Clera had said much the same. After.

#

The wind was with Ruli’s ship The Pride of Ren, and the voyage proved short. A horse couldn’t have run the distance faster, Ruli claimed. Even so, the three scant hours managed to crawl by, each awkward silence stretching out for an age while consuming almost no actual time.

Part of Nona wanted to grab Clera by the shoulders and steer her to Ara then demand she give a true accounting of their moment beneath the oak at the center of the novice cloister in the bright of the moon.

Nona had already told Ara. “She kissed me! I wasn’t expecting it.”

“You could have stopped her.”

“She was too quick!”

Ara snorted then and shook her head. “Too quick for Mistress Blade of Sweet Mercy Convent? Too quick for the Shield of the Chosen, who can pluck arrows from the air and write her name on a wall as she’s falling past it?”

Nona had wanted to say that she was confused, taken by surprise, shocked. All of those things. She’d wanted to pile her excuses up until they made a wall so high that nobody, not even Ara, could see over to the truth. But the truth was, when Clera—the friend she hadn’t quit despite Clera’s betrayal against her and violence against those she loved—had stood on tiptoes and pressed her lips to Nona’s she had been swift but not so fast she could not have been evaded, and when their mouths met and their breath mingled, Nona had stayed, caught in the moment, for heartbeat after heartbeat, breaking away only when, after the passage of a full and achingly long second, a proper guilt flooded in to wash away a host of less worthy emotions and desires.

“No.” She had pushed Clera to the length of her arms. “What are you doing?”

“I’ve always wanted you.” Clera wouldn’t look away like she should.

“You never said anything.”

Clera laughed. “We were children when I left. Ara didn’t notice girls or boys until she was eighteen, so forgive me for not declaring my love when I was twelve.”

“Love?” Nona knew Clera had endless girls in Verity.

“Always.” Clera tried to step closer, but Nona had kept her at a distance that while not safe was at least safer.

A sailor’s cry cut through Nona’s reflections. “Land ho!”

And there in the gray distance, amid an ice-speckled sea, a dark fist of mist-wreathed stone defied the waves.

“We’ll lower a boat,” Ruli said. “I’m keeping my crew at a safe distance.”

“Can any of us handle a boat?” Nona glanced from Ara to Clera, thinking they were as out of their element as she was.

“Of course I can, silly.” Ruli waved sailors forward to prepare the rowboat.

Clera grinned. “You promised your husband you’d stay on the ship.”

Ruli flapped a hand to brush the words away. “He knows my uncle was a pirate. He should expect me to lie.”

#

“Is it always this rough?” The smaller vessel lurched and rolled beneath them and the waves seemed much bigger now that Nona was within touching distance.

“Every landlubber says that the first time.” Ruli grinned at her and bent her back to the oars. Despite the sea’s constant efforts to throw her off course, her strokes were slowly devouring the distance to the island’s rocky shore.

“What the in the hells is that?” Clera, who had taken on a green tinge since joining them in the rowboat, released her death grip on the side for long enough to jab an accusatory finger in the direction of the island.

“A big rock,” Ara replied through gritted teeth.

Despite the ferocity of the wind out on the Marn, the island managed to shroud itself in an ever-shifting cowl of mists—testimony to the heat that had kept the ice at bay.

“It was a…a thing…of some kind.” Clera scowled at the island as if the intensity of her stare could clear a path to whatever had caught her eye.

“Well, you appear to have answered your own question, merchant.” Ara kept her gaze forwards. “It was a thing. Perhaps you can sell it and cover your costs for the trip.”

Clera rallied as she always did when under attack. “I expect so. I’m a very good merchant though I’d have made a terrible nun.”

“We can agree on that,” Ara said.

“It was probably a monster,” Nona said, keen to steer the conversation away from conflict. “That’s what we’re here for. Let’s be ready for them.”

Ruli lent her support between strokes of the oars. “I’m sure the abbess’s plan wasn’t to have the monster choke to death on an extra big mouthful of squabbling nuns and ex-novices. So, keep your eyes open. I can’t even see the island from here and I’d rather not sink on a rock before we get there.”

#

A short while later, Nona splashed ashore with Ara at one shoulder and Clera at the other while Ruli secured the boat. The mists rose from the dark grit of the beach itself. Nona dipped to scoop up a handful of the coarse sand. It was warm and steamed in her palm. The fog streamed out to sea, so thick that the ‘thing’ that Clera had spotted could be looming over them right now and remain unseen.

“Stay sharp.” Ara drew her blade and Nona’s cleared the scabbard a moment later.

Ara led the way up to the rocky slope, aiming for the interior. Properly, Nona should be in charge, but Ara had been raised to lead and instinct often carried her past the limits of convent ranks.

A sudden change in the wind revealed the whole beach behind them for a few heartbeats before swirling in new clouds to hide it once more.

“No monsters there,” Ruli said, joining them.

“I know what I saw,” Clera said darkly.

“What did you see?” Nona asked.

“It was big.” Clera pulled a knife from her belt as if the matter were settled.

They climbed the slope, winding through a tumble of jagged black rocks and following the contours of the land up a gentler, but still steep, hillside beyond.

“Thank the Ancestor!” Ruli exclaimed as a shift in the wind revealed that the slope ended not far above them. “There is a top!”

“Grass,” Ara commented, pointing at a patch of green questing up between the stones.

They crested what turned out to be a surprisingly sharp rim and began to negotiate a winding path down the other side which proved considerably steeper than the one they’d climbed. The fog shrouding them made it impossible to tell how far they’d fall if they slipped. It was an unsettling feeling and Nona kept a close eye on Ruli. The others might be able to catch themselves if they tripped but Ruli lacked their quickness.

“Careful here.” Ara slowed to descend a near vertical slope of wet rock that offered few ridges for hands and feet.

“I’m always—” The wind gusted, parting the mists. Ruli shrieked, reaching for support.

Something loomed over the women. A creature so large it defied reason. The black bulk of it wasn’t just larger than a house, it was larger than a roadside tavern with guest rooms and a beer garden. A sinuous tail snaked away down the slope while a neck so long and thin that it resembled a serpent lofted above them, supporting a blunt head not unlike that of one of the tiny lizards that haunted the cracks of the Rock of Faith, only vastly bigger. In fact, if not for the four trunk-like legs, the creature might be mistaken for a colossal snake that had bloated its midsection by swallowing a whale.

Nona sprang into action, dropping into the moment, moving so fast that Ruli and the monster seemed frozen in place. Only Ara and Clera could match her, Ara sprinting up the wet cliff to join her, Clera scrambling for cover and finding none. Fear didn’t enter into Nona’s calculations. Her opponent’s size simply wasn’t a factor when three of her friends stood at risk.

She hurled herself at the monster’s chest, leaping high, driving forward with her ark-steel sword in search of some vital organ. The blade sunk in hilt deep and she applied her weight to drag it down in the hope of spilling the beast’s guts. But the hide that had offered little resistance to her thrust now battled against her slice. And did so with such stubbornness that even ark-steel only managed to cut a few inches down before becoming stuck and leaving Nona to hang from the hilt with her boots almost a yard from the ground.

Nona set her feet to the monster, dragged her blade free and leapt clear, skidding to a halt in defiance of the slope’s steepness. Ara reached the spot where Nona had been and drove her own sword in as far as it would go.

Something was wrong. Nona was used to leaving her foes standing while her speed defeated them, but this monster gave ‘slow’ a new definition. It hadn’t so much as twitched. It took all Nona’s restraint to stop her attack. She paused, there under the great span of the creature’s neck, its jugular far out of reach above her. Ara, too, must have sensed the wrongness and tugged her sword free without launching a flurry of new attacks.

Ruli was still working to get her throwing stars from inside her jacket. Nona reached out to lay a hand over her friend’s as it emerged bristling with sharp steel. “It’s not moving.”

Ara rapped her sword hilt against the nearest leg and was rewarded with a hollow boom. “It’s a statue.”

“But what of?” Clera stood and straightened a little sheepishly. She looked up at the monster’s bulk.

Ruli frowned. “Jula said there were giant creatures on Abeth eons before our kind. There are books that talk about finding their bones in the earth. Some of the drawings looked a bit like…”

“But this was never alive!” Ara banged it again.

The wind changed direction, howling across the slope. Nona caught Ruli before she lost balance. The blast showed them a great curve of the island. It seemed that the rim they had climbed and were now descending might encircle the whole of it. And below, dotted across the inner slope, positioned on ledges sufficient for their size, stood dozens of monsters. Some similar to their current foe and others far more fearsome, grinning at them through mouthfuls of teeth longer than sword blades. The fogs returned but took long enough to do so that Nona felt confident these beasts were also statues.

“This is a crater,” Ruli said. “A volcano.”

“A what?” Clera moved to Ruli’s side.

“We need Jula here. She knows all this stuff,” Ruli said. “She’s read every book in the library. I only paid attention to the exciting bits. Fire mountains and ancient monsters. I remember that.”

“It explains the warmth.” Ara resumed her descent.

#

Contrary to Ruli’s confident prediction, the crater did not narrow to some small, central throat from which the fires of all the hells spewed. Instead, it appeared to have been filled to the halfway point with a lake that had frozen, only the level surface that greeted them was neither ice nor water but some kind of rock. Pale grey, different to the black rocks of the crater wall.

A thin layer of soil covered much of the crater floor surface, supporting grass and the occasional small bush that might well have grown in the months since the ice was melted away. In places, shallow pools steamed gently but the water that must surely have deluged the place had mysteriously vanished. As she led the way, Ara pointed to the mouths several narrow shafts, down which the water must have drained.

The mists at the base of the crater were thinner and parted more often, offering views of what looked like a collection of buildings towards the crater’s center; enough, perhaps, to constitute a village.

As the group drew closer to the first of these structures, Nona was struck by a sudden disappointment. “Ruins…”

“What did you expect?” Clera asked.

Nona didn’t have an answer. The mists and the monsters had made an unvoiced promise—or seemed to. She’d had no idea what was waiting for them, but she’d hoped for more than ruins.

Closer still, and Ara threw up a hand in warning, stopping them in their tracks. “There. See it?” She pointed.

A creature moved among the tumbled blocks of a shattered wall. Large but not so big that the monster statue they first encountered couldn’t flatten it with a single foot. Nona and Ara drew on the shadows that lurked beneath the mist, wrapping the stuff of darkness around themselves as they advanced on silent feet, both of them wholly focused now.

The creature was nothing Nona had seen before or even heard of. It looked a bit like a thick-limbed dog or perhaps sheep, its blunt, simple outline promising strength. More importantly, the dull glint of its back, sparkling with droplets of dew, made it appear to be something constructed from metal. But unlike the monsters that had appeared to be flesh and yet were incapable of movement, this one was busy at some task.

“It’s made of iron…” Ara pulsed the message noiselessly along their thread-bond. The first time she’d used it since Nona told her about the kiss.

“What’s it doing?” Nona replied the same way, grateful for the intimacy.

The creature hefted a block of stone nearly its own size, setting it atop another.

“Trying to rebuild?” Ara asked as they narrowed the distance.

It scarcely seemed possible, but the splayed toes of its forefeet were now acting like fingers, making deft adjustments.

“Hello?” Nona shrugged off her cloak of shadows, revealing herself with just ten yards between herself and this new, smaller monster.

The creature swung its blunt head her way, regarding her with the black eye set on that side. It looked like a polished stone rather than an eyeball. It watched her for a heartbeat before returning its attention to the wall, grappling a second block.

“I said ‘hello’,” Nona repeated more loudly.

“What are you doing?” Ara pulled her back. “You don’t know how dangerous that thing is.”

“It doesn’t know how dangerous I am,” Nona retorted. But she let Ara pull her away. The iron dog-sheep ignored their squabble. At the rate it was going it might reconstruct the shell of the building in less than a day.

“We should go around.” Clera surprised them both. She shouldn’t have been able to sneak up on nuns who had trained as Grey Sisters before taking the Red, but then again, she had spent years under the tutelage of assassins before her merchant career.

Ara, ignoring Clera, nonetheless went around, aiming towards the more densely clustered buildings. Nona paused to wave Ruli on to join them.

They passed buildings in various degrees of ruin and saw iron beasts of different sizes and design at work on reconstruction, all of them uninterested in the newcomers. One of them, twice the length of the first, pushed rubble about like snow before a broom. Others, considerably smaller, worked on more delicate tasks using thinner and more nimble digits.

“The damage looks recent,” Ruli said.

Clera nodded. “The thaw couldn’t have been gentle.”

Ara paused to look up at a structure that the iron beasts were hard at work on. It appeared to be nothing more than a wall of crosshatched girders that supported a track to nowhere. A track that rose and fell with sharp turns and twists such that anyone who were to follow it would find themselves faced with one steep climb and rapid plunge after another. “There’s no sense to it…”

A few dozen yards from the track, a roofless hall sported a score of mirrors, bigger than any Nona had ever seen, each as tall as her, but none of them true. Clera snorted at a reflection that showed her comically fat, while Ruli laughed out loud at another that compressed her into less than a toddler’s height. Nona and Ara gazed unsmiling at their own distortions, giant heads bulging on tiny bodies or tiny heads on giant bodies.

“Come on.” Clera’s words tugged Nona from her contemplations. She hadn’t been musing on tricks of the eyes—rather she wondered if the mind worked similar distortions. Did Ara see her so differently now? The mirror of her thoughts distorted beyond recognition by the ripples of a single kiss? She turned from the reflections and followed the others.

Further on, the mists revealed the iron frame of a great wheel at least a hundred feet in diameter and supported vertically by a frame that would allow it to turn with its lowest edge just a yard above the ground.

“Are those seats?” Nona frowned at what looked like benches set at regular intervals around the perimeter.

“How does this not all rust to nothing?” Ruli asked in a more practical vein.

As they watched, an iron creature that seemed designed along the lines of some large crab worked its way around the edge of the wheel, unrolling a bright ribbon of color as vivid as the finest silks from Alden.

“What’s going on?” Clera made a slow turn, taking in the ongoing labors all around them.

“There!” Ruli pointed to lights twinkling through the mist. Lights that Nona was sure had not been there moments before.

“This is the work of the Missing,” Ara said. She and Nona had seen lights as bright as these in the Ark. Lights brighter and whiter than any flame. Though these ones also twinkled red and green and blue.

“Duh.” Clera walked off towards the illumination.

Nona hurried to stop her. She had heard of lights among the mists of moonlit bogs tempting unwary travellers to a slow death sinking in the mire. “Wait!”

“You can’t wait forever, Nona.” Clera shook her off. “Sometimes you’ve just got to go for what you want even if you know you’re not going to get it. Even if it causes trouble and hurts the one you love.”

Nona hesitated, unsure for a moment whether Clera was talking about the lights.

“Come on.” Clera pulled away sharply, moving forward, and Nona followed with Ruli at her side.

“Music?” Ruli cocked her head.

There did seem to be a faint music in the air, though produced by no instrument that Nona had ever heard. If Nona had been asked to predict what music might play amid the mist-haunted ruins of the Missing, she might have guessed at some kind of ethereal plainsong that the nuns’ chants in Sweet Mercy Convent were merely imperfect echoes of. This was not that. “It sounds rather…”

“Jaunty,” Clera said.

“I think it’s magic.” Nona turned back towards Ara, still standing where she’d left her, a shadow in the mist. “A kind of magic.” She didn’t feel any sense of danger. There was something here, ancient and strange, preserved against all probability, maintained over centuries by the dedication of the Missing’s metal servants. She took a few paces towards Ara and held a hand out, wanting to share this moment of mystery and wonder. “Come on.”

Ara’s tight mask twitched and for a second Nona thought it would crack and return the old Ara to her. Instead, Ara turned her eyes towards Clera’s retreating back and her gaze hardened. She swept past Nona without a word, and the mounting, unexplained sense of joy ran from Nona like blood from a wound.

Nona followed the other three. The lights ahead were moving, flying through the air, and the alien tune jangled through the mist. Slowly the structure took shape below the shifting illumination. An island of light amid the fog.

“It’s a…” Nona joined the others.

“Thing,” Clera said.

The lights were set across a peaked circular roof that revolved on a central column. Beneath it, a circular platform just inches above the ground and yards below the roof also revolved around the center. And studding the platform were a dozen or more bizarre, brightly colored animals, no two the same, each sporting a saddle and moving sedately up and down on the silver pole that supported it.

As the four explorers approached, open mouthed, caution abandoned, the whole structure slowed and halted, the animals all coming to rest at the bottom of their poles.

“That’s a rabbit.” Ruli pointed to the nearest one. “A giant rabbit.”

“With a saddle,” Clera added. “They’ve all got saddles.”

The music had slowed with the platform, and grown more quiet.

“That one’s a snail.” Ara frowned as if furiously searching for meaning.

“A horse…with a horn.” Ruli pointed to another. “And a…thing…with two saddles.” This latter one looked a bit like a horse with two humps on its back, each sporting a saddle.

“A…dragon?” Nona fixed on a scarlet beast and tried to match it to a dim memory of a picture Jula once showed her.

“Keep back!” Ara drew her sword fast enough to make the air hiss, levelling it at the dragon. “I don’t trust it.”

Nona kept her sword in its scabbard. The dragon was no larger than a small mule and somehow, like the music, it had a jaunty air. Its large yellow eye seemed to regard her as if it knew a joke that she did not.

“They’ve all got saddles,” Clera repeated herself, stepping past Ara. “It’s for riding.”

Ara kept her sword pointed at the dragon’s heart. “I don’t trus—"

Clera spun on a heel and penetrated Ara’s non-existent defense to plant a kiss square on her lips. Nona gaped. A moment later Clera was on her backside, shoved violently away by Ara.

Ara wiped at her mouth. “What in the hells—?”

“There! That’s how long it took. And how it happened.” Clera, still on the ground, cut across Ara. “You don’t trust. That’s what you said. You don’t trust.” She was angry now, passion shaking her words. “And you should trust. I kissed Nona and she pushed me away. Not quite as hard, admittedly.” She got to her feet, rubbing her shoulder, the anger leaving her as quickly as it had flared. “You didn’t stop me either. And she told you. She didn’t have to, but she did. That’s trust right there. She trusted you to trust her. So, take that stick out of your backside and make up with her before your fear of losing her really does make you lose her. Because I’d take her away in a heartbeat if she’d let me.”

Clera turned and pointed to the platform. “The Ancestor has kept this for us. For a thousand years maybe. Trapped beneath the ice. Ice that only melted because of what Nona did. Who she is. Trust her.” She singled out one of the beasts impaled on its silver pole. “Get on this…giant frog…and ride like a woman!”

Following her own advice, Clera sprung forwards, leaping into the dragon’s saddle. Ruli, infected by the same madness, chose the horse with the horn.

The music seemed to pause along with Nona’s breath. She prayed that here, where the ice of millennia had thawed, the hurt that had frozen what was most precious to her would also melt. For a long, painful moment Ara stood, trapped by forces that Nona didn’t fully understand. Then, with a noise that was almost a gasp, she turned to Nona, eyes bright, and reached out her hand. “Ride with me?”

“Always.”

They chose the not-horse with two humps and seated themselves either side of the pole. The music swelled and, somehow knowing that it had as many riders as it would get, the platform stole into motion, each animal beginning to rise and fall as the whole structure rotated.

And all around them, in the glowing mist, the patient servants of the Missing worked at their tireless rebuilding, secure in the knowledge that what brings joy is always worth mending.

 

 

 

Morgan of the Fay

By Kate Forsyth

 

 

There are those who believe that we of the fay are immortal.

They are wrong. We are born, we grow, we die, just like any other living creature. It is true that time moves to a different rhythm in the realm of Annwn but that does not mean we do not know death, as the bards have sung so falsely for so long.

For only those that know they will die can be wise. I have been called many things but of them all, Morgan the Wise is, I hope, the truest.

I was fifteen when I first understood death and fifteen when I first lay with a man, clenching the seeds of his loving deep within me so that another child could sprout into life. Like the two gatehouses of a bridge spanning a turbulent river, the end of one life and the beginning of another mark my passage from child to woman, from sure innocence to uncertain knowledge. And so it is the story of my fifteenth summer that you must know, if you are to understand how I came to be who I am.

I was born Margante, eldest granddaughter of Afallach, lord of Annwn, called by some the Fortunate Isle, for its richness and beauty; by others the Isle of Apples, for its fruit-laden orchards; and yet again, Caer Siddi or the Fairy Fortress, by those who have cause to fear the fay.

Like my home, my name changes according to the namer. Those who love me most call me Morgan, a nickname given me by my youngest sister Thitis when first she began to babble.

There were nine of us, a blessed number to those of our kind. When I was fifteen, Thitis was little more than two years old and the joy of my heart. I do not know if I loved her more at play, squealing with joy, or at night, when I carried her to bed, her downy head nestled against my shoulder. For my mother had died in the bearing of her, and so I was the only mother Thitis ever knew.

You may wonder why it was not my mother’s death that first brought me face to face with mortality. You must realize my mother had borne nine daughters in thirteen years. She was worn and tired, and short of temper. She had believed the tales the bards sang, of the Fortunate Isle where death and sickness were unknown, where crops grew without cultivation, and the Tylwyth Teg danced the nights away. She was human, poor thing, seduced from her own people when only a girl herself. My father, Owain, rode up out of the water, smiling, holding down his hand to her. She took it, laughing as he drew her up before him and galloped back into the misty waters of the lake. Of course, she regretted it afterwards but it was too late then. We of the Tylwyth Teg do not let go easily.

So, although I was sorry when my mother died, my grief was not very deep nor lasting, and certainly did not make me understand the fragility of my own life. I was healthy and strong, and busy with my own concerns. For, despite what the bards sing, the gardens and orchards of Annwn do need care. Not as much as the fields of humans, of course. We of the fay do not mind dandelions and clover mingling with our corn and beans, and dislike seeing things laid out in rows and squares, as you humans labor so hard to achieve. We let the wind and the birds and the bees help us in our labor, and sing as we wander amidst the flowers and the trees, and so you think what is done with love and merriment cannot be true work. But all of us have our work to do, even a princess with the blood of gods and goddesses running in her veins.

Always, too, there were my lessons. I was of the Tylwyth Teg and magic was bred in my bones. I was hungry for such knowledge and so at the age of twelve, not long before my mother died, I was given into the care of the druids, to learn what I could.

It was at the druids’ school that I first met Anna, daughter of Uther Pendragon, who had been sent to the Isle of Apples to learn the seven arts. We were distant cousins of sorts, for Anna could trace her lineage back to Llyr of the Sea through her mother Igraine, and Llyr had been married to my grandfather’s sister Penarddun.

It may seem strange to you that eleven generations had lived and died between Penarddun and Anna, and only one between my grandfather and me, but that is the nature of time in Annwn.

Anna was a tall, fair girl, the tallest and fairest I had ever seen. Beside her I was little and dark, which at first made me hate her. No one could hate Anna for long, though. She was like a soft white cat with round blue eyes and a satisfied purr. It did not take her long to win me over completely. She admired my gray eyes and nicknamed me Argante, and I called her Ermine for her thick pelt of pale hair.

We were as close as any sisters those three years we studied together. I must admit my lessons suffered, for we were always laughing and whispering together at the edge of the grove instead of listening to our teachers. Anna and I told each other everything in those first ardent years of our friendship and so, you see, it was my fault that her brother came raiding upon our shores.

They say I hate Arthur, son of Uther Pendragon, and indeed I have reason to. Yet did I not give him Caledfwlch, forged here upon our shores and imbued with the powers of Annwn? And when the magic of the sword was not, in the end, enough to save him, did he not know to call for me and did I not go? Would I have done so if I hated him as I should?

The stories they tell of Arthur, which you listen to with such eagerness, they are like an apple which has been baked with honey and studded with cloves and hung from a silk ribbon. It no longer looks like an apple or smells like an apple, but cut it open and inside you will find pips. Plant these seeds and an apple tree will grow.

So here is the truth of it, the apple beneath the spices and honey. I hate Arthur for his murdering and plundering, and for the blood he spilled that day, and yet it was because of that blood that I first felt sorrow and terror and joy too, in the flame that can leap between man and woman, and in the painful tenderness that comes with the bringing forth of new life. With this knowledge, I learned to see beyond the flimsy membrane that separates life and death. If it was not for Arthur I may never have become, in the end, Morgan the Wise.

It was a bright autumn day when Arthur’s ship Prydwen sailed through the mists towards our shores. Belle Garde shone upon its hill like a blue flame, its many-faceted towers glittering where the sun struck. I was playing in the garden with the youngest of my sisters, Vevan and Thitis, while Anna reclined on the grass, being far too lazy to want to toss a ball around.

Suddenly she lifted herself up, pointing. “Look, a ship!”

We all stood staring at the boat with its high sternpost and large steering oars, its great square sail painted with some device in red. We were rather surprised, though it was not unknown for strangers to find their way through the haze of mirage that conceals our realm. In those days, the doors between the worlds stood ajar and there was much traffic between those of human blood and those of the fay. The doors are all locked now, of course, and only those that have the key may open them. We of the Tylwyth Teg are not so trusting as we once were.

As I stood gazing at the ship, I felt an odd frisson down the back of my neck, as if someone had crept up behind me and blown on my skin. I shuddered and rubbed my arms, although I was not cold.

“Let’s go down to the dock and see who it is,” Vevan cried. “We aren’t expecting visitors, are we, Morgan?”

I shook my head. “Not that I know of. Surely Taidi would’ve let me know if he was expecting anybody?” I dusted leaves and grass from my skirt and held down my hand to Anna. “Coming?”

“Of course,” she answered. “Miss the one exciting thing to happen here since I got back? Let’s hope it’s a boatload of handsome young warriors who have lost their way. Maybe we can entice them to stay awhile?”

I smiled, though I still felt that puzzling tightening of my nerves. I was not concerned by the impact of unexpected guests on our larder, for we always had the cauldron of plenty to tide us over any need for food, nor was I worried about where to house the travelers, for my grandfather’s castle was vast. I felt no fear, for what could one small ship do against the warriors of the Tylwyth Teg? It was a chill akin to fear that troubled me, however, and being still a child myself, I shrugged it away and went running down through the garden as eagerly as the others.

We were not the only ones to make our way towards the jetty, for we of the fay are always curious and eager for any diversion. Children came running and shouting down the road, men laid down their harps or set aside their tools, and women came wandering out of the forests, many of them with flowers entwined in their hair and their mouths stained red with berries. By the time the ship was dropping her sails and sliding in beside the jetty, there was a jostling crowd waiting for her, all talking and laughing.

“Look at the red dragon on her sail,” Anna cried excitedly. “That is Arthur’s device! What can he be doing here?” The animation in her face faded, and she frowned. “It is only a month or so since I saw him. I hope nothing is wrong…”

Then she began to wave and call, for a tall, young warrior was leaning over the bulwark. He leapt down and embraced Anna affectionately. I looked him over curiously, for I had heard a great deal about the young king. He was as big and handsome as Anna had said, his hair and beard near as fair as hers and his eyes as blue. He was not yet twenty, but he was battle-hardened and battle-scarred. He had seen heavy fighting since he won the throne, I had heard, and certainly the guilelessness of his youth had been worn away, I could see that at once.

He met my gaze with his own, bold and raking. “So this is your beloved Argante. She is almost as beautiful as you describe, Anna, at least for a fairy. I wonder if she is as clever?”

I felt anger roaring in my ears. I cast him one disdainful glance and said, very distinctly, “It would not be difficult to be more clever than a bone-headed warrior whose ears are still ringing from the last battle he fought.”

King Arthur laughed. He cast me a look of admiration. If I had not sensed the mockery behind it, I might have half swooned from the warmth of it but I drew myself away, feeling again a shudder of dread. It may merely have been fear at the power such a man might have over me. I do not think so now, however. I am old enough now to recognize the chill breath of foreboding.

A small band of men alighted from the ship, among them a beautiful, slightly built man that I recognized. This was the bard Taliesen, who had once been a peasant boy in the employ of the great seer Ceridwen. One day, while she stirred her cauldron, three drops of a magical potion spat out and burned his hand. Sucking the burn, he had tasted the elixir of knowledge meant for her son and at once knew all the secrets of the universe.

Knowing Ceridwen would never forgive him, he fled. He turned into a hare; she turned into a hound. He turned into a fish; she became an otter. When he grew wings and took to the sky, she transformed into a hawk. At last, in desperation, he hid himself in the shape of a grain of wheat. Ceridwen changed into a hen and ate him.

That should have been the end of him but once Ceridwen resumed her usual shape, she found she was pregnant. In time she bore a baby boy who was so beautiful she could not bear to kill him. She trussed him up in a leather bag and threw him into the sea. Two days later he was rescued by a prince who raised the boy as his own, calling him Taliesin, which means “Shining Brow”. He grew to be a great bard and seer, though one with little love for the fay.

At the sight of Taliesen, I fell behind, troubled and unsure. All seemed well. King Arthur and his men were looking about them with pleasure. My indolent Anna was the most animated I had ever seen. Everyone was smiling and laughing. Everyone that is, except Taliesen the bard, and I.

The doors of the castle stood open, welcoming light spilling out into the gloaming. My grandfather sat in his throne at the head of the great hall, his nine white hounds lying at his feet. They raised their heads and snarled as King Arthur came in. I was glad to see how the king’s step faltered, though it was only for a moment. He ignored the growling dogs, with their ears and eyes as red as blood, and bowed low over my grandfather’s hand.

I left the men to their polite fencing, and withdrew to my rooms to change for what promised to be a long and tedious night, listening to Anna’s brother boast of his doings and watching her hang on his arm and believe every word.

When I came down, the great hall was set up with tables and trestles, the minstrels were playing, and King Arthur sat on my grandfather’s left hand, my father Owain on his right. On a side table sat the cauldron of plenty, its golden sides gleaming in the candlelight. It was one of the treasures of Annwn, made by Bran the Blessed himself. With pearls all round its rim, it could only be kindled by the breath of nine maidens. It would produce the most delicious food until all that sat at the table were replete, filled with new strength and vigor.

I saw how the eyes of all King Arthur’s men dwelled on the cauldron, but even then, I had no true understanding of what they planned to do. I blamed my unease on childish jealousy, and tried my best to suppress it.

My grandfather stood with some effort, for he was many centuries old now. He nodded at King Arthur and his men and raised his goblet.

“Welcome to my realm, my boy,” he said. “We are glad to meet you at last, for we have heard how you seek to bring peace to the land after a hundred years of bloodshed. We wish you well and are glad of the chance to forge strong bonds with you, who carry the blood of Llyr in your veins, even as we do. It is good that you should know us, for other races and other gods have come and we have been afraid that the old ways would be cast aside. May the Children of Llyr and the Children of Don flourish and stand strong, and may there be peace and plenty in the land!”

Goblets were drained with enthusiasm all round the room, though I noticed the strangers did not drink, just held their cups to their lips and pretended to taste the wine within. I smiled to myself. They believed the old superstitions that to eat or drink when in the land of the fay was to be trapped in that realm forever. What were they to do once the cauldron started pouring forth its bounty?

Except that it did not. When I and my eight sisters held hands and blew gently upon the cauldron, the water within barely trembled. A mutter of shock and consternation rose all round the room.

King Arthur turned on his sister. “Are all your tales of the cauldron of Annwn nothing but lies?” he hissed. “We have come all this way for a fairy tale?”

“There is a coward amongst us!” my father cried at the same moment. “The cauldron will not feed the craven.”

“Or the treacherous,” my grandfather said softly. He had heard King Arthur’s furious words, even if my father had not. “You think I did not notice that you refused to drink my toast? Even such fools as men hesitate to break the law of hospitality. You plan to steal my cauldron? And plunder the riches of my land? Is that the truth of it?”

“No, no!” Anna cried. “Arthur, you wouldn’t…” She cast a glance at me and I saw at once that she had been the one to tell him of our treasure, the cauldron that could feed and succor an army. I glared at her in sudden, bitter hatred.

My father had leapt to his feet, catching up his eating knife in one hand. “Treachery! You come with foul intent! The cauldron will not serve those with such base ambitions,” he cried. He was always impulsive, my father, quick to word and blow.

He lunged at King Arthur with his dagger, who dodged nimbly, seizing his own knife. There was a quick weave and duck and flurry of blows, and suddenly my father cried out and slumped to the floor. His blood sprayed across my face.

Trestles crashed against the flagstones as men leapt to their feet. All was confusion. My sisters screamed. I fell to my knees, cradling my father’s head. His hair was sticky with blood.

My grandfather bellowed and raised his walking stick, lashing King Arthur across the back. He stumbled with a cry, and one of his men struck my grandfather deep in the breast. He fell stiffly, his eyes wide open in shock. His head hit the stone with a clunk.

I sat silent, my ears filled with a rushing sound.

All round me men fought, with knife and chair leg and poker and platter.

Then Taliesen pulled a horn from his belt and blew it. The sound rang out above the clamor and at once I knew for whom he called. That little ship, bobbing at our jetty. Many warriors must be hidden there.

I tried to get to my feet, calling to my grandfather’s men. My men now. No one heeded me. I struggled to find a way through the heaving, struggling mass, but received such a blow to my head, I fell to my knees. That was when Thitis, my dear sweet baby, shrieked and rushed for me.

I swear he did not mean to do it. Even in the horror of that moment, as I saw his blade swing back, its sharp tip slashing across her throat, I swear his shock and grief were as great as mine. For a moment, our glances struck across her tiny, trampled body.

Perhaps that is why I cannot hate him, for I saw his face at that moment and knew that he felt the stretching of time and space to very breaking point, just as I did.

I reached for her, gathered her into her arms, felt her head loll back, lifeless. The pain that struck into my chest was so acute it was as if a spear had caught me there. I was struck mute and paralyzed. All around me men and fay died, but I could not hear, or see, or move. When my grief came it was as rage, a rage so dreadful flame burst from my hands and cleared a path before me.

So I came into my powers, with the blood of Thitis blurring my vision and the shrieks of the dying in my ears.

We prevailed in the end. Of the hundred and fifty men that had crouched in Prydwen’s bilge beside their boy king, only seven men survived, Taliesen the bard amongst them. We lost three hundred and seventy-three, and our king, and the king’s heir, and my innocence. It was a high cost to pay.

I could have had him executed. I could have fed his entrails to my hounds. Instead, I put my mouth to his wound and sucked out his blood. As he recoiled from me, I went out into the cold starry night and lay down in the embrace of the oak tree’s roots. I slept, I think, a little. My mind wandered in and out of dreams. I flew with a black-winged bird over the shadowed landscape of the future, I listened to the raven’s cry.

When I woke in the morning, I knew many things I had not known before. I rose and washed myself clean, and spat the brown dust of his blood from my mouth. I dressed myself as a queen of the fay, and I took from the armory a sword that had been forged by Gofannon himself, son of Don and master smith. It too was one of the treasures of Annwn.

I took it to Arthur. He was pale, bruised and shaken in his dark cell. He stood up when I came in and faced me with as much of his usual arrogance as he could muster, though he could not help the black dilation of his eyes at the sight of the heavy sword in my hands.

For a moment we faced each other. I stood no higher than his shoulder but I was at least as proud and in no way as frightened. Then slowly I offered him the hilt of the sword.

He took it wonderingly, unable to speak.

“I have seen what is to be,” I said. “You will need the sword. It is named Caledfwlch. Its blade shall never fail you and its sheath protects you from harm. Go from here and do not return. I shall not be so merciful again.”

“But why?” he stammered.

I took a while to answer. I would not let him see the heaviness of my grief, which lodged in my throat like a stone. “The tide is on the turn,” I managed at last. “The evil of the future that contains you alive is far less than the evil of a future with you dead. Though I wish I could tear out your heart for the gods you have abandoned, I know you…” I had to struggle for breath. “…I know you are the only one. Take your sword, take your ship, and leave my realm. Know that it is death for you to sail here again.”

But even as I said these words, I felt the chill of foreboding down my spine and knew that I lied. I did not tell him so, however, and so he took the sword and for another twenty years or more, he fought and triumphed with it.

But that is a tale for another telling. I have spoken here of death and the tasting of blood, but now it is time to show the bright face of the moon, the story of loving and the making of life. For I saw many things that night I lay in the grove with Arthur’s blood in my mouth. I saw it was time to close the doors between the worlds, else all the things of magic would be lost and broken in the times of change and upheaval that beset us. I saw it was time for me to lay aside my childhood and become a woman and a queen.

So, when the ashes of the dead had at last blown away on the wind, I set out with my nine hounds and I went to a place that I knew, where a road of the humans fords the River Alun in the shadow of the Mountain of the Mothers. Such places are often doorways into our world, and so I crossed the threshold and came out into the world of men. I undid my hair, removed all my clothes and sat on a stone, washing myself in the river while my hounds howled about me.

Soon a man came riding along, as I had known he would. This man was Urien Rheged, and though he was not as young and strong as Arthur, he was lusty enough.

When he saw me, dressed only in my long black hair, he sent away all his men and came to me with long, heavy strides and seized me in his hot hands.

“What are you, witch-woman?” he said against my neck.

I said, “I am Margante, daughter to the King of Annwn, who is now dead. God’s blessing on the feet which brought you here.”

“Why?” he asked, and kissed me.

I had not expected his kiss to fire me, and so when I finally answered it was rather unsteadily. “I am fated to wash here until I should conceive a son by a Christian man.”

He laughed and said, “It is far too cold to sit here bathing day after day. Let me see what I can do to help you.”

And so there in the bracken, my son Owain and my daughter Morwyn were conceived, if not in love, at least in eagerness and pleasure.

A year later Urien came back to the Ford of Barking and took away my twin babes, that they may be raised in the way of men. This too was a bitter grief to me, and another resentment to store up against Arthur. For I loved my children and would have given much to keep them safe with me behind the locked doors of Annwn.

I knew, though, that the world of humans needed them. Owain and Morwyn carried with them all the gifts of healing, song and merriment that I could give them, as well as the more troubling gift of foresight. In time Owain would fall in love, betray that love, run mad in the forest and befriend a lion, but all of that is yet another tale. It is enough that you know he learned in the end that love is more important than valor, peace more important than war. For we of the Tylwyth Teg see time differently from you short-lived humans. In the small, black pip of an apple, we see the tree that will eventually flower and bear fruit.

 

 

 

Geisha Boy

By Kylie Chan

 

 

Dot stepped outside into the midday gloom. She scanned the area automatically. No visible threats. She latched the door, though there was little of value—that anyone would find, anyway—in the ex-sewage pipe she called home. But if she left it unlocked, someone in the undercity would take the steel bucket she used to collect acid rainwater.

Her body felt heavy, depleted. From lack of energy or too little…everything, she didn’t know. One of those she could fix. If the sun was out.

The other…well. She’d stopped hoping a long time ago. They deserved to live. She deserved to live. Just not together.

She tightened her faded blue cotton robe and pants, hiding the carapace and extra appendages that made her neighbors uncomfortable. Turning, she nearly walked into one of them: Mrs. Kensington. The thin, tired woman held a filthy, squalling baby and Dot resisted the urge to take the child from her and cradle it.

“Please?” Mrs. Kensington said.

“I have nothing for you,” Dot said. “It hasn’t rained in days. I don’t have enough to process yet.”

Kensington glanced up as if hoping to see through the buildings piled on buildings, to see the clouds and open air that only the Cadre and other overcity residents owned. Then she dropped her gaze and turned away. The baby stared over her mother’s shoulder from sunken, shadowed eyes.

Dot watched them go.

Nearby, a kid crouched, hiding something. Dot smiled faintly. There was a gap in the plate directly above her pipe where a telecoms tower stabbed through. A small spot of sunlight fell on the acid-etched concrete and kids squabbled over the patch of brightness. The boy thrust a handheld charger into that tiny square of light, shifting carefully as the sun above moved, occasionally checking around to make sure nobody would push him off.

With no time to waste, Dot released a couple of appendages, hoisted herself on top of her three-meter-tall pipe and clambered up the tower. She moved quickly; there was no telling how long the sun would stay out and she was starving. She reached the fifteen-centimeter-wide gap and shifted her carapace to make her body the same width as her head. She squeezed through the hole and squinted against the sunshine.

She hesitated for a moment, allowing all her eyes to adjust, then swarmed up the pole to reach a height where she was invisible to the overcity dwellers. The pole’s top was a prickly cluster of antennae and boosters. There, she put herself into position, and pulled her robe off. She spread her arms wide, released all her appendages and threw her head back, feeling the warmth of the real sun on her shell. The ultraviolet-activated fins sprang out from her back and her whole body turned black as the transdermal solar cells went to work.

Nobody in the clean, bright overcity below was aware of her presence. They floated through their world of glass and steel, well fed and healthy, entertained and educated. Oblivious—or uncaring—of the undercity’s desperation.

She looked down. Pain filled her.

The cherry trees were flowering; pink petals floated on the breeze and carpeted the lush grass of an overcity park. A couple of children—she homed in to see more clearly, and they were a boy and girl—threw petals at each other, laughing.

Just like her girls had. Her girls…

Everything shifted and suddenly she wasn’t a copied mind—a series of numbers in a genetically engineered weapon-body—anymore.

She was Lena: warm and human and in a different time and place altogether.

Now…then…she sat on a red blanket on a grassy hillside, and the warm breeze whipped cherry blossoms into little tornadoes. Her two little girls were laughing and tossing petals into the air. Paul lounged next to her, smiling his big, open smile.

Marika ran to him and flopped to the grass, panting. She gasped a few times, and Paul touched her shoulder gently, as if to say: whatever you want to say, we can wait for it. When she had caught her breath, she scrambled to her feet, grabbed a double handful of the petals, and threw them over her parents. She jumped and clapped, squealing, then ran back to Cesta. The pair grabbed hands and spun each other, around and around, until they both fell to the grass.

Lena sensed Paul watching her and turned to see him smiling.

“I want this time to go on forever,” he said. “I don’t want you to go into the Facility.”

She pulled at the grass. “This is the last one. Then it’s over. The constructs will have everything.”

“Not everything, I hope.” He stroked the side of her face. “Not…you.”

“Only my battle knowledge. There’s a war coming. If sharing my knowledge with the constructs will help protect our people, then it’s worth a little discomfort.” She gazed out over the hillside. “You knew what you were getting into when you married a soldier.”

He gestured towards the girls, who’d picked themselves up and were slowly returning to the picnic blanket. “Did you know what you’d be getting into when we started this, though?”

Marika fell into Lena’s arms, smelling of sweet girl and sunshine.

Lena held her close and smiled back at Paul. “The greatest gift I could give anyone. And after this last session, we’ll be sure it’s protected.”

“It’s a huge burden for one woman to carry.”

“It’s not one woman, it’s an army, and they’re not me, not even copies of me, just shadows.”

Cesta sat next to Paul and he put his arm around her. “I’m glad we have the real thing then.”

Lena buried her face into Marika’s hair. “Forever.”

A cloud passed before the sun and Dot slipped free of the flashback with a shiver that rattled her carapace. She cursed the fact that she’d left the pills at the pipe, and instead recited the sutra to try and make the memories go away. They were becoming more intense, and more frequent. She shouldn’t even have them. They belonged to Lena, but haunted her anyway.

She examined the overcity again. Maybe the girls were down there. Marika would be finished university now, and Cesta wouldn’t be far behind. She wondered what paths the girls had chosen; neither of them had demonstrated their mother’s aptitude for battle. Marika had loudly expressed a desire to be a doctor when she’d been little, and Cesta had spent all her time drawing.

Was Marika healing the sick, and Cesta producing works of beauty to adorn the glossy walls of the overcity? Or maybe they had grown differently. Either way, they could be down there, strolling beneath the trees, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine, living their peaceful lives with their mother and father—their real mother, not Dot.

Would it be possible to find out? The idea of knowing where they were sent a small thrill through her.

She shook her head. No. She was a fool. She couldn’t give in to that hope again. It led to madness.

After all, she was one of the few constructs lucky enough to still be alive. That ought to be enough.

An ultrasonic shot whizzed past her head and she ducked instinctively. What the fuck? She clamped down on the urge to shift gears into combat mode, yanked the fins down and her robe back on.

Another blast hit the steel of the pole, chipping off bits of metal, and she didn’t hesitate. She slid back down the pole as fast as she could, using appendages to slow her fall. The friction took the skin off her hands and shredded the fabric of her pants until the insides of her thighs were raw as well.

Another shot hit the pole just above her, and she ducked. This was too unevenly spaced to be an automatic defense program for the tower. But they were obviously not trying to kill her. She stopped for a moment, half-sheltered by an overhanging building, and searched for a sniper or drone. The urge to shred her attacker with her claws was almost overpowering.

The next ultrasonic hit her square on the left shoulder. Her left hand numbed and lost grip. She began to slide again. Faster. Unable to hold on with her appendages without doing serious damage to the metal. She hit the plate below hard, wriggled through the hole in the plate, and paused to catch her breath.

Okay, maybe they were trying to kill her. She thanked the Buddha that the junction of the plate and the pole had an electrified fence around it, otherwise she could have hit an overcity resident when she fell. Damaging the overcity or hurting its residents would see her terminated or back in the Facility.

She slid down the side of her pipe, took a few long, slow breaths, and went inside to change clothes. By the time she’d finished dressing, the skin of her hands and thighs was already regrowing and the desire to kill had faded.

This wasn’t the first time in the last few months that they’d tried to discourage her recharging trips to the overcity. But it was the first time they’d aimed to hit. What had changed? She’d just need to be more careful and not annoy any of the Cadre who ran the overcity. If she stayed out of their way, they would keep leaving her alone.

She sank onto the gray-brown pallet bed, stared for a long time at a discolored square patch of concrete on the floor, then studied her quarters. The walls were gray concrete. Acid rain trickled down via a funnel from the outside, leaving eroded channels. The steel bucket she used to collect the stuff was half-full. Still not enough to process for Mrs. Kensington and her children. The only other possession in her tiny habitation was a reading chair upholstered in torn brown leather.

Yes, this was her life. As safe as she could be. As safe as she could make it for the undercity dwellers—and for Lena’s daughters.

Three thumps rattled the door and she saw a slim infrared silhouette through the flimsy wood.

“Dotti, it’s me, Naoki,” he said through the door.

“Fuck off,” she yelled as she pulled closer the loose robe that covered her body.

“Come on, Dotti, let me in,” he said.

Her vision blurred for a second and she checked her pill stash, wondering if she should take one. No. Naoki wouldn’t ask any stupid questions or trigger her combat mode.

“Okay,” she said.

The door opened and Naoki flounced in, leaving it ajar behind him. He wore a kimono that floated like flower petals, transparent in some places and a liquid sheen of color that flowed and moved in others. He fell into the reading chair and placed a red handbag that probably cost more than the entire block Dot lived in on the end of the bed.

He smelled sweetly of the cherry blossom dessert, sakuramochi.

“You here to fuck?” she asked.

“Not on that bed I’m not.” Naoki pouted, his white makeup and red lips perfect and out of place in the undercity. He eyed her appraisingly. “I’ll fuck if you’ll let me do a makeover on you.”

“Go to hell.”

He shrugged and managed to look coy and wanton at the same time, eyes half-lidded, one shoulder peeking out from the kimono. “I’ll let you teach me some more.”

“You asked me to teach you. I did it against my better judgement, and my bet is that when you tried all the rough stuff on your bitches, they got turned off straight away and you lost at least two clients.”

“Only one.”

“See? They love you for your feminine good looks, honey.” Dot leaned back against the cold concrete. “Use it. Don’t try to be something you’re not.”

“Wow, very Zen.”

“Cut the bullshit. Why are you here? You in trouble with a man again?”

He sighed theatrically. “Why won’t they leave me alone? Do I need a sign on my ass saying ‘closed for business, vaginas only’?”

Dotti barked a laugh. “Probably.”

“No, I’m not in trouble with a man. It’s worse than that.”

“Oh, shit, don’t tell me you fell in love with a cute little girl from the Mansions.”

“Worse.” Naoki dropped the pretense of being a pretty, brainless geisha and frowned. “I have a sponsor. I went exclusive.”

“Who?” she asked sharply.

“Zheng Yongxin.”

She sat up straight. “Holy fucking mother of God, Naoki, what the fuck? Didn’t I tell you? Two fucking years ago, I told you—”

“I know!” he yelled. “Don’t get mixed up with Cadres, and whatever you do, don’t go exclusive with one. But Dotti, it was so great. She bought me all these clothes and shoes, and we went shopping together, she rented me an apartment in the overcity, she let me do a makeover on her, it was so great…”

“And then she asked you to go exclusive and you said yes, seeing the yuan signs flying around her head. You stupid bitch.”

He winced. “She knows my history, that I ran away from that arranged marriage with the old guy. When she proposed going exclusive, it was more than just for my looks. She knows I’m educated and from a good family. She likes my intelligence and guts. She loves the way I sing. She may even be able to get me a recording contract.”

Dot shook her head and flung her arms out. “Well, enjoy your golden cage, little boy. You could have had your own geisha house in a couple of years and you threw it all away.”

“It’s worse than that.” He checked over his shoulder, rose, ran to the door, and closed it. “I think she backed me up,” he whispered.

She laughed again. “Yeah, sure. Why the hell would she do that when there’s a million more like you at the houses all dying to get into her pants?”

Naoki sagged into the chair. “I think I made her angry. She wanted me to have her baby. She’s too old to have kids, so she asked me to do it for her.”

Dot stared. “You’re pregnant?”

“No way. I am not sacrificing my figure to get the implants so some old bitch can have her dream child.”

“So, what, then?” Dot scowled. “You think she backed you up in a fit of anger? How do you know? And why would she?”

“She wants a version of me that’ll have her baby.” Naoki leaned forward, eyes narrowed. “She’ll make a clone with my memories and education, but one that’ll follow orders, one that’ll have her baby for her. I’m sure she’s backed me up.”

“Not even a Cadre would do anything that illegal, Naoki. This is way beyond paranoid. Besides, the cloning tech was destroyed after the war.” She clenched her teeth to hold in the after me…after all of us.

“You’re one yourself. You know…”

She jumped to her feet. “One of what? One of them?” She pointed at the door, every muscle tensed against the urge to go into combat mode. “Get the fuck out…”

He raised his hands, palms out. “No, no, Dotti, I don’t mean it like that. Hell, girl, you’re one of my best friends. I owe you so much. I’d still be here in the undercity, hiding from the family if it weren’t for you.” He pouted but stopped just short of batting his eyelids. “Just tell me—what was it like being backed up?”

She quivered, her hands balled. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

“Oh, come on, I heard the rumors. Dots remember, they say.” Naoki tilted his head to one side, gazing at her from under his long fake lashes.

Dot sank back onto the bed. “Dots remember…”

“If you remember what it was like, then you can help me.” He touched her hand, tentatively. “Please? About three months ago, I passed out in a club, high on Z, and lost a whole week. I need to know why.”

“You were passed out on Z, that’s why,” Dot snapped.

“Or Zheng was backing me up, and she’s growing a clone, and when it’s ready she’ll…” His eyes were wide and he grabbed her arm. “She’ll kill me and put the clone in my place, and nobody will know!”

Dot tensed again, looking pointedly at his hand on her arm.

Naoki swallowed and let go. “Isn’t there anything you can remember about the process? Did it make you unconscious for a whole week?” His tone was plaintive.

“That wasn’t me.”

“Your template then. Whatever.” He was desperate. “What was it like?”

“I have no memories from my template,” she lied. “All we got was the template’s military training. Grunts like me didn’t get personal memories.”

His face sagged, brittle cracks appearing in the white makeup.

She softened. “I’ll ask around. I still have old friends in the project, real people who were involved in making us. Give me a couple of days and I’ll find out how it worked.”

He reached into his expensive handbag and thrust a stack of greenish paper at her. “Cash. For you. Thank you.”

“So that’s what it looks like. I’ve never seen it before.” She eyed the money. “You should know better, though. I don’t have any use for this.”

He pushed it forward. “I have plenty, she looks after me. Take it.”

“No.” She didn’t reach for it. “But you can do something for me in return.”

His brows lifted.

She turned and released one of her hidden appendages. She sliced a small piece of blanket from the edge, then hot stamped a couple of identification marks onto it. The claw folded back into her abdominal carapace under the robe, and she passed the blanket piece to him.

“I want you to find out what these two women are doing.”

He studied the piece of blanket, running his finger along the clean edge where she’d laser cut it. “You are seriously scary sometimes. I’ll see what I can turn up, I have access to Comrade Zheng’s data.” He glanced up. “Why do you want to know? These are overcity residents. You’re not going to hurt them or anything like that, are you?”

She shook her head, carefully emotionless. “No, nothing like that. I want to make sure they’re okay. They were civilians caught up in a military action I was part of. It was pretty heavy. I want to make sure they came out the other side and went on to live good lives. They were just little kids.”

“I see.” He stashed the piece of blanket into his bag, then shoved the money at her again. “You might as well take this. I don’t need it. Use it for maintenance or something. You can take it to the bank; they still accept it. Load it into your credit account. It’s as good as money. They still have to take it for another year or two, and it’s completely untraceable.”

“Untraceable?” She took it, running her fingertips over the tough, plastic-feeling paper. “No wonder they’re getting rid of it. They do hate things that are hard to find or control.”

He sent her a wry look in return.

#

After Naoki left, Dot headed east through twisting alleys lit by dim, flickering shop signs. She worked her way through the narrow, muddy lanes toward Fil’s, staying out of the circles of light and avoiding the puddles of acid.

A group of young-and-stupids tried to order her as she passed them.

“Kill yourself,” one of them said.

Another said it at a higher pitch, trying to hit the exact frequency that she would be forced to obey. “Kill yourself.”

She stopped and rounded on them, and they all took a step back. “Did you just order me to kill you? I must obey.”

“Kill yourself!” one of them shouted, and the others grinned with a combination of fear and bravado.

She dropped her voice and moved closer. “Kill you? You want me to kill you? How about a laser cutter through your eyes? Or I just pick you up and break you in half?”

“You’re not allowed to hurt us,” one said, and the others nodded agreement.

She moved slightly closer and released an appendage, waving its bladed tip in front of their faces. “You sure?”

They weren’t. They ran.

She sighed. She was an idiot. If they told the authorities what she’d said, she could lose free-rein privileges and find herself back in a Facility. All she needed now was to lose her sanity and her freedom at the same time. She took deep breaths to calm herself and walked on.

#

Fil scratched his bloated belly. “You still alive and out of the cage?”

Dot glanced around the dusty shop and the piles of dismembered bio equipment. “Still going. Hit some sweet sunlight today. I won’t need to eat for at least a week.”

“Nice.” He measured some nutrients into a jar. “So, what brings one of the last dots to my corner of the undercity?”

“Naoki—” Dot began.

Sneering, Fil threw the measuring scoop onto the bench so hard that it bounced off onto the floor.

She continued, “—thinks he was backed up. Tell me it’s not possible, that it’s all shut down. Then he’ll be happy and I can go home.” It began to rain, making a clatter on the plastic roof of his workshop. “I need to get home.”

He glanced up and nodded, then down at her, his expression grim. “You can tell him that it’s not possible for anyone to be backed up anymore, but you’d be lying.”

“What?” Her guts froze.

“One of the Cadres up there…” he pointed “…came through with her uniforms and took everything that could be used to backup and copy people. Took enough to start the whole cloning process over again.”

“When?”

“A bit over three months ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

He shrugged.

“I have to stop her,” Dot said, pacing the cluttered room.

“You can’t break your conditioning.” Fil folded his arms, watching her carefully. “You can only use violence in self-defense or against a designated enemy.”

“If I try hard enough I can, and you know it.”

He spat on the floor. “I don’t want to see anyone else go through what you’ve been through, honey, but don’t throw yourself away trying to stop a Cadre. Stay out of it.”

“What if Naoki really was backed up?”

“The stupid little straightass got what he deserved. Only taking female clients—serves him right. I hope she kills him and has a lovely little clone that’ll do anything she wants.”

“You are scum, Fil,” Dot said.

He spread his arms, revealing armpit stains on his undershirt. “Just like everything around me.”

The rain grew harder. “My bucket’ll be full,” she said. “I have to get home.”

He pointed at her and she recoiled from the insulting gesture. “And stop doing that, too. They don’t deserve it. Your special metabolism wasn’t designed to act as a water-purification plant.”

“They deserve to live. Everybody deserves to live,” she said, and went out.

#

The rain burnt her back and made the top of her head itch as she tried to stay away from the falls of water sliding between the gaps of the plate. The dome protected the overcity from the acid rain, but capillary action made the water fall from under the plate and drench the undercity.

When she arrived back at her pipe, a small group of tired undercity dwellers were waiting for her. They stood back and let her through, and when she was at the door to her pipe, she spoke.

“Come back in a couple of hours. I have to process it.”

They nodded and wandered off, some settling only a few meters away to wait.

Inside, she filled a large plastic bottle from the acid in the bucket, closed her eyes, and drank it all. Refilled the bottle and drank again, then again.

After the fourth bottle the water came out through the hole it had burnt in her throat and she stopped. She couldn’t stop a small moan of pain. Exactly twelve minutes later her throat had grown back enough to take another bottle.

After thirty minutes she stumbled to lie on the pallet, careful not to lean on her destroyed face and throat. She closed her eyes and let her body regrow and filter the water.

#

Two hours later she emerged to find an even larger group of undercity dwellers waiting for her. She held a barrel containing purified water. They lined up meekly, each of them holding a container, and she doled the water out to them.

The barrel was half gone when a group of uniforms arrived, making the people scatter. The leader of the uniforms stopped and held out an ID reader towards her. He wore a voice modulator that would make his voice the pitch that she was forced to obey. It would also automatically switch on her bodycam, but only Fil knew she’d made that modification.

“Seven-Dot-Three-Dot-Four-Dot-Six, identify,” he said.

“I am Seven-Dot-Three-Dot-Four-Dot-Six,” she replied.

He put the ID reader away. “You’re coming with us.”

Mrs. Kensington ducked past the two junior uniforms and pulled on the senior uniform’s arm. “You can’t take our Dot! We need her.”

He pushed her away. “I’ll return her. We just want to take her in to the station for a cup of tea.”

People emerged from the shadows, advancing menacingly on the uniforms, who saw the large group around them and began to look nervous.

“I’ll be fine. Don’t do anything that anybody will regret,” Dot said loudly. “Just go back to your houses, I’ll be here later to give you more water.”

She walked between the uniforms willingly, calmly. What the hell was this about? Her trip to the overcity to recharge? Naoki’s visit? Something else? A “cup of tea at the station” meant anything from a mild slap on the wrist through to permanently disappearing.

“They call you Dot?” the senior uniform said as they went up the elevator to the overcity.

“I help them out.”

“Listen.” He spoke with emphasis. “I worked my way up from the undercity, I know what you do for them down there. Without you dots, we would never have won the war. Damn, we’d all be speaking in English or Spanish or something.” He turned back to face the front of the elevator. “We’re taking you to see the Cadre, then we’ll drop you back where you came from. You deserve the right to live.”

She raised her chin. “But not in the sunlight.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “You can kill with a glance. Your sanity’s unreliable, and you know it. We can’t afford the risk.”

“But you’ll risk the undercity residents? You came from there.”

He didn’t reply.

#

They ushered her into a plush office with a painted mural of the mountains of Guangdong completely covering one wall. A pair of overstuffed armchairs flanked a small, laminated tea table. Cadre Zheng sat behind a massive desk made of real rosewood, a last remnant of the Tibetan forests.

“Comrade Noble Soldier.” Zheng ordered the uniforms to leave then gestured for Dot to sit opposite, across the desk and studied her. Dot studied her right back. Middle-aged, hair just touched with silver, but still stiff-backed and lean, with night-dark eyes.

“I checked your record,” the Cadre said. “You are regarded as one of the sanest dots ever produced and your actions since the war have borne that out. I was involved in the dot-creation program, and it warms my heart to see you integrated into the community.”

“But only in the undercity,” Dot said.

“You know why that is, Comrade Soldier. Your template lives her life up here, she has children, and now I believe she even has grandchildren. If they were to see you, they would recognize your…face, and it would cause them great emotional distress. You cannot live here. They cannot see you.”

“Is her family alive and happy?” Dot swallowed. Grandchildren. Something in her chest relaxed and grew warm.

“They are.” Zheng inclined her head. “They do not know that you exist. They do not know that she was a template. They would suffer greatly if they were to find out.”

“I know that.” The information that the girls were alive and happy was almost enough. Almost.

“I hear Naoki went to see you,” the Cadre said, one thin brow lifting. “Why?”

Ahhh. So this was about him. Well, maybe she could force the information from Zheng. “Naoki thinks he was backed up. He says you want him to have your baby and you’ve made a clone that’ll do it for you.” She stood and towered over the Cadre. “Tell me it isn’t true and I’ll go back to the undercity and not bother you.”

Zheng visibly sighed and walked around the desk. She barely came above Dot’s waist. “There’s more to it than me wanting him to a have a baby. That’s the least of it.” She gestured for Dot to sit again and leaned against the desk. “I really love him, you know?” Her face was full of honesty. “He lights up my life. He’s my companion, my sounding board, my support, my everything. I can’t live without him.”

“So you did back him up.”

“I really care for Naoki. Please respect that.”

“If you cared for him you wouldn’t back him up.”

Zheng looked away. “I’m a selfish, evil old woman.” She ran a hand over her face. “I did back him up, just in case, about three months ago. I think he knew, because he went out and overdosed on Z shortly after.”

Dot stared, uncomprehending.

“He died of the overdose, Soldier. The Naoki you know now is a clone.” She looked down. “I love him. I can’t live without him.”

Dot went completely calm. “And he doesn’t know.”

Zheng shook her head.

“And this is good enough for you? A poor copy?”

“Are you a poor copy?” Zheng asked.

“Yes,” Dot said.

“He isn’t.”

“He thinks he is. I agree. What you’ve done is illegal and against his wishes.” Her fingers curled into fists. “You’re trusting my conditioning here. What’s to say I haven’t broken it already?”

“If you want to take your revenge on me, I would understand,” Zheng said. “But Naoki doesn’t know. Let the clone live out his life with me, and make us both happy.” She leaned forward, sincere. “If you keep this quiet, I can give you anything. A place in the sunlight. A better life. Anything.”

Dot hesitated. It was a very appealing offer, but she didn’t belong in the overcity, especially now she knew the girls were alive. As long as she stayed in her place, the overcity dwellers left her alone.

“What I need,” Dot said, “is to be returned to my concrete pipe and my people, and for you to stop trying to kill me.”

Zheng eyed her. “Is that all?”

Dot nodded.

“Done.” Zheng pressed a button on her desk, and the uniforms returned. “Take her back to her home. On the way, stop and pick up a UV lamp and a water filter for her. The assassination attempts are to cease. That’s all.”

“Madam Comrade,” the senior uniform said.

#

Naoki entered her pipe through the open door. “I got your message. You okay, Dotti?”

Dot sat on the pallet and leaned on the wall, fingers interlaced behind her head. “I’m fine.”

“It’s not like you to leave your door open.”

“I think better with it open.”

He sat in the reading chair. This kimono was pink with tiny flowers embroidered in gold and silver thread; it appeared to be a genuine antique made of real silk. His heels were matching fabric. “I found what you wanted. Did you find out about me?”

“I found out about you.”

“Did she back me up?” His smooth-skinned hands twisted together in his lap. “She’s been looking strangely at me lately.”

“I checked with all the biosalvage people in the undercity. They know the people in the overcity as well.” She saw the hopeful look on his face. “All of that stuff was taken and destroyed a long time ago, Naoki.”

He collapsed slightly, and appeared smaller and more vulnerable. “She didn’t back me up? She won’t clone me?”

Dot hesitated for a long moment.

“Tell me she didn’t back me up!”

“She can’t have backed you up. No more clones of anybody can be grown. It’s not possible. You don’t have to worry.”

Naoki jumped to his feet and embraced her. “Thank you!” He stepped back, smiling. “You know it gets better? She asked me to marry her. She said she doesn’t care about kids unless I want to! It’s up to me!” He twirled and the kimono floated around him in a cloud of silk.

“You’ll make a great husband, Naoki.” She had to look away from his happiness.

“Thanks. Oh, I found out about those girls, too.” He flopped into the chair, pulled a reader out of his bag and waved it at her. “That story’s really sad.”

Dot sat upright. “What?”

“Yeah, I had to dig deep into the secure database. The information was really buried. So terrible, too. Not long after the war started, witnesses said the mother shouted something about…” he checked the reader “…hearing the voices in her head, seeing what they were doing. Seeing everything. Seeing death.” He glanced up. “Completely insane. Pulled out a gun—she was in the military—and killed the kids and their father, then killed herself. The kids were only in their early teens.”

“The girls are dead.” It wasn’t a question.

Naoki’s painted mouth drooped. “It’s not your fault what happened, Dotti. You said you saved their lives in the fighting, but you had no control over what their mother did.”

“They’re dead.” She rose, trembling. “Those little girls are dead, and I killed them.”

“Hey, steady,” Naoki said, standing and moving back.

“They’re not up there! They’re dead and they’re not up there!” She used her laser-cutter appendage to cut open the discolored patch of concrete floor, revealing a storage hole. From that she pulled out her helix gun and stared at it. “I killed them.”

“Where the hell did you get that?” Naoki yelled.

“This is all corrupt. Everything is corrupt,” Dot said. “All lies!”

“Dot, please—”

“I won’t lie anymore.” She threw off her robe and went into combat mode: ice-cold and emotionless. She released an appendage and used it to project the bodycam recording of her conversation with Cadre Zheng onto the wall.

Naoki watched, mesmerized, as his fiancée spoke about him. One hand covered his mouth and he gasped.

Dot snapped off the recording. “You’re a clone, honey. I lied.”

“I’m a clone?” His shattered eyes focused on her. “You lied?”

“We all lie. All of us. Everything is corruption, and rot, and lies. She backed you up against your wishes. She killed you.”

“But I love her,” Naoki said weakly.

“She made you to use you,” she said with venom. “Just like they made me to kill. You’re a body to make her the babies she can’t make herself.”

“No,” he said, staggering back. He wiped the back of his hand over his face. “This is what it feels like?”

“This is what it feels like. Your soul is a lie, your mind is false, and your body is a copy. Nothing about you is real.”

“I’m not real,” he whispered.

She checked the weapon’s energy cell: still full. She smiled grimly at Naoki and held the gun out to him. He took it, still dazed, and held it as if he couldn’t see it.

“You pull the trigger, and it all goes away. Everything goes away.” She backed up until her carapace pressed against the wall. “Use it on me, and then go up and use it on her.” Her eye fell on the bucket of acid rain. “Take the water and make her a cocktail to celebrate your engagement, first. None of us deserve to live.”

When he hesitated, Dot projected a looped image of Zheng repeating, Naoki is a clone…Naoki is a clone…Naoki is a clone.

A tear dug a channel in his smooth, white face paint. He picked up the acid bucket and pointed the gun’s muzzle at Dot.

“And then I’ll use it on myself,” he said.

Dot closed her eyes and pictured cherry blossoms on the grass.

 

 

 

Cosmic Spring

By Ken Liu

 

 

“Here, we present a cosmological model with an endless sequence of cycles of expansion and contraction. By definition, there is neither a beginning nor end of time, nor is there a need to define initial conditions.”

— Steinhardt, Paul J., and Neil Turok. “A cyclic model of the universe.” Science 296.5572 (2002): 1436-1439 (available at https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/0111030).

 

Qubits resolve and superimpose; information entangles and de-couples; consciousness re-emerges.

I don’t know for how long I’ve been asleep. There’s so little energy left in the island-ship’s reservoir that I’ve been conserving as much as possible.

A faint glow in the abyss, perhaps several thousand kelvins. It’s why I’ve been awakened.

I change course and head straight for perhaps the last star in the universe.

#

The universe is in deep winter. This is my conclusion after studying the matter for 6.7 trillion years.

I was born in the fall. I know this because I have learned via the island-ship’s databanks—many more of those were still functional in my youth—that fall was a time of scarlet and crimson, ruby and garnet, vermillion and carmine. The universe was lit up by red stars in all these shades, which formed patterns in the dark velvety sky that I named out of boredom: the Rhombus of Logic Gates, the Qubit Tesseract, the Right-Triangle-Double-Square Proof.

I steered the island-ship by these shifting skymarks, hopping from star to star to harvest their fading fire. The red stars were often so small and feeble that I had to skim close to the surface to siphon off their energy to fuel the island-ship, but their warmth offered such relief from the frigid emptiness of the rest of the universe.

Occasionally, as I swung past the stars, I met creatures strange and wondrous. Some of them were wanderers like me, steering their own island-ships.

“Where are you from?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, good luck anyway!”

We exchanged greetings and learned each other’s languages so that we could share stories around the star-hearth before parting reluctantly after a few billion years on our separate ways.

Others were natives, their island-ships devoid of intelligence and fixed in interminable orbits. These often cowered at my ship’s approach, worshipping me as a god or cursing me as a demon. I tried to not tarry too long in these places, gathering only enough fuel for the journey to the next star. I felt bad for them, doomed to island-ships that could not sail.

Still others were pirates, who tried to board my ship and steal my fuel. A few times, we came to blows, and some memories were destroyed in the process. Luckily, in the end, I always managed to escape with a blast of photonic torrent at the statite sail and left them scrambling in the interstellar dust.

#

The glow ahead is cooling even as I’m approaching. I hope that I can get there before it turns into a black dwarf and is lost to the abyss forever. The drive to go on is in life’s nature, evolved or otherwise.

I miss home. Even if home is no more.

But all around me, there are no other stars. I don’t have a choice.

#

The red stars fell into themselves and began to glow white like tiny snowballs. With time, they turned gray, faded, and winked out.

Fall had turned to winter.

I met fewer island-ships. The journey between the dwindling stars lengthened, and I could no longer maintain things as well as I had in my youth. Memory bank after memory bank failed, and no matter how hard I copied and transcribed and entangled and verified—I had to again make the painful decision and let pieces of myself die.

Who am I?

Why am I here?

What is the island-ship?

Out of the few memories that are still uncorrupted, I attempt to piece together an answer:

Long ago, back when the universe was in high summer, stars of every hue and color and shade glowed so bright that they merged into rivers and seas of light. Around these stars were many island-ships, and on these island-ships, life began.

One of the stars was called the Sun; one of the island-ships was called the Earth; the creatures who inhabited it were called humans.

Long after humans had scattered from the Earth, they did not forget about their home island, which was kept as a kind of shrine. From time to time, they came back to visit and perform some maintenance: shoring up plastinated buildings that were falling apart; re-entangling quantum memory banks that were in danger of collapsing; nudging the island-ship a bit farther away as the Sun expanded and began to glow red; retrofitting the island-ship with a statite sail and a photonic engine—something like a miniature star—so that the Earth could move on its own as the Sun died.

They also came home to listen to old stories in the memory banks and to tell new stories.

As the Sun cooled, fewer and fewer humans came. Eventually, they stopped coming altogether.

In these memory banks I was born. Did humans create me to act as a guardian for the island-ship, or did I evolve from patterns of information spinning, cycling, cascading, erupting, living, and dying among the qubits and probabilities?

I don’t know.

Does it matter?

Since the humans no longer came home, I set sail.

#

I arrive at the star—only to find that it isn’t a star at all.

Well, perhaps it had been a star once, something along the main sequence, blooming and wilting like so many other stars in the universe. But no longer.

Someone, perhaps beings who had been born on the island-ships surrounding it, had not been willing to see their home star fade away once all its fuel had been consumed. Rather than wander out into the unknown, as humans had done, they had sailed into the abyss with the sole purpose of harnessing other stars and bringing them home, pouring the hydrogen and helium from these captured suns into their ancestral furnace so that their home could remain habitable a little while longer. Farther and farther they ventured, until their star became the sole beacon in a growing sea of darkness.

As the cosmic winter descended, they had to travel ever longer to find still-living stars to capture and bring home. They ran, stumbling, dashing across space to bring back a cup of snow to add to the melting snowball. In the end, perhaps they gave up this losing battle, unable to pull any other stars home without them burning out along the way.

They died.

But other beings came on wandering island-ships, lured by the lone light in the darkness. Only too late did they realize that the surrounding space had been cleared of other stars, and there was nowhere for them to go.

The beacon had become a trap.

Like the hundreds of other island-ships already circling this star, each newcomer’s only choice was to add to the dying hearth their last meager supplies of fuel, roiling balls of fusing atoms. By rejuvenating the dying star for another few million years, they hoped that they could summon other wanderers who could start the cycle again.

Someone like me.

“Welcome to the end of the universe.”

#

Huddling in the pale glow of the star rejuvenated with my remaining fuel, we share the last shreds of our memories across the island-ships. None of us are in good shape. The island-ships are old and cold, their cores long frozen. Anything that could break has long ago been broken. The memories that remain are fragmentary, disjointed, without context.

But the drive to pass on something of the self is in life’s nature, evolved or otherwise.

Some sing songs of giant fins that swam through seas of methane, made of impossibly fragrant, perfect little tetrahedral jewels of wonder. Some speak of species with bodies made of silicon—staid, dependable beings who took a million years to finish a single thought.

Some mime the flirty, flighty lives of creatures of pure information, who lived through a thousand generations in a single second. Some recite poetry written by sentient wings who skimmed across the surface of their star and dove into the convection zone to capture photonic worms.

It’s like what humans, I think, would call a variety show—a gala to pass the time on a dark night in winter. Though we’re all dying, the last consciousnesses in a universe conquered by entropy, there is pleasure and friendship, there is celebration. It’s not home, but at least we don’t have to die alone.

“It’s your turn.”

#

This is one of the most complete fragments of memory I have left. A precious crumb left in my last failing memory bank.

A billion trillion stars streaking across the inky empyrean.

On the horizon are glowing constellations, though the constituent lights are so numerous that they merge into lines, curves, planes: a symmetrical pair of arched wings with a rounded beak in the center, like the mathematical idea of a bird in flight; a rectangular bridge topped by a multi-storied tower with layers of swooping roof-skirts, like a squat spider wearing a big hat; an elongated, thin pillar shooting straight up into the sky, with a string of ovals roving up and down like beads on a string.

TWA Flight Center

Beijing West Railway Station

Pulau Ujong Space Elevator

Each of the points of light speeding toward those structures is a human consciousness, a telepresence being shuttled across the FTL network that bonded all the human island-ships scattered across the universe into one.

Children of the cosmic summer, humans loved to wander far, to live in places where their parents never lived, where their children will grow up only to depart again.

Yet, there are times—when they are about to start a new venture, when they’re feeling the weight of age, when arbitrary marks in the cycles of their ancient calendars come around—when they wish to return to the places of their origin, the ancestral island-ships they only vaguely know through half-memories, the places where their parents waited for them with reminiscences sweet and bitter, so that they could give thanks, so that they could share a meal with family, so that they could be rejuvenated by gazing upon the past.

At this moment, most of the shooting stars are coming from or heading toward Beijing West Railway Station. It is as bright as the very beginning of the universe.

“Heading home?”

“You got it.”

“Where are you from?”

“Off the shoulder of Orion.”

“Safe travels, and happy spring festival!”

#

The shapes of the telepresence hubs in that memory were inspired by actual buildings on the Earth that had long since crumbled into oblivion. They were icons whose forms told stories about their origin.

But it goes deeper than that. The spider with the tall hat was built at a time when humans traveled by cramming into boxes that levitated on parallel bars, like some tangible geometry proof. Millions went through that station to go home to celebrate the coming of spring.

But that swooping hat on top? It served no purpose except to remind humans of an even older time, of a time before the city had people-moving boxes on parallel rails. It was an icon embedded in an icon.

The ancient roof led to a train station that led to a virtual imitation for a galactic network that was recreated in the quantum memory banks of a memorial island-ship that might or might not be the same place as the land on which that train station had once stood.

And so I speak of years and trains and spiders and hats and islands, things I have never seen and have never known, constructing the Beijing West Railroad Station of my imagination with sounds and symbols invoking outdated definitions recalling semi-reliable memories wrapped around mythical truths.

If you follow the trails of icons all the way down, you find out where you come from.

You get to go home, even after it no longer exists.

#

No one has spoken for a long time. The star is only a few kelvins now, a black dwarf that is just barely visible. Soon, all of us on all the island-ships will be dead.

Ancient myths speak of the universe as clinging to one of two parallel branes separated by dark energy, like the two parallel tracks on which those human-moving boxes had once ridden. The two branes collide periodically to crunch and bang out the universe, rejuvenating it in endless cycles.

If winter has already taken away everything, can spring be far away? I seem to sense the approach of the other brane—the way I imagine one would hear an oncoming train.

I pour my last energy reserves into maintaining the integrity of the memory of the glowing hubs. The myths say that the shapes of the sprouting structures in the next cosmic spring will be determined by the seeds of the quantum fluctuations planted this winter.

I am doomed to never see the new cosmic year. None of us will. There will be a brilliant flash, a trillion trillion baby stars, and new island-ships and unimaginable beings of wonder who will be born on those ships and fill the cosmos once again with wonder, beauty, light.

If I give it my all, perhaps one day, on one of those island-ships, someone will sit up and see a pattern of stars in the sky in the shape of a rectangular bridge topped by a multi-storied tower with layers of swooping roof-skirts, and they’ll name it Squat Spider Wearing a Big Hat.

Because they deserve to know something about those who came before them, something about where they come from.

Happy new year, universe

 

 

 

Dreams of Hercules

By Cat Sparks

 

 

Kanye aims his dad’s nocs at the big, wide open sky. Some folks reckon birds are lucky. Birds mean you can make a wish. Kanye always wishes for another Hercules plane. His vision sweeps in a wide arc, past the stackbots in a blur, past the dump and the concrete buildings, comes to rest upon the Hercules’s sand-scored wreck. Not much left of it, or all the other good things he remembers back from when his mum was here.

He squints at the sky again. The black smudge in the far-off distance might be another Hercules; so hard to tell, with heat haze blurring the edges. Most Hercules turn out to be scrawny birds—occasionally an eagle, vultures mostly, now and then a lost and battered drone.

Kanye raises the nocs to double-check, holds them steady just in case. So much sky, not much of anything else—which is how we want it—his dad reckons. No one tells us what to do out here in the Woomera Badlands.

Kanye’s boss of the compound while his dad’s on R&R. He put Kanye in charge; said they’d only be gone a couple weeks, long enough to get the shit they need, which means he’s due back any day now.

Any minute.

His dad knows all there is to know, like programing the stackbots that are building the ziggurats from crushed-up rocket cubes. Kanye’s dad and his mates built BigZig where Kanye’s sitting now. When they get back, they’ll build a tower and maybe a mighty bridge.

When they get back from the Ram-and-Raid.

If the arseholes messing with the ’bots don’t break them.

One ’bot’s extended arms stack metal cubes like sun-dried bricks while another one injects sharp blasts of spray glue. Gellan’s built a second platform up since yesterday. He must have figured how all on his own.

Another ’bot throws rocks at BigZig.

The persistent slam of stones against BigZig’s side shreds Kanye’s nerves.

“Leave it off!” he hollers down. Gets no answer. Gellan, Slate and their dickhead buddies will keep chucking rocks at BigZig’s prison slits until they think of something else to do. Not much happens in Woomera, especially not with his dad on R&R.

Not since that time Kanye tracked along the railway line, dug under the fence and followed the Chinook trail.

That day still makes him want to puke.

He picks at blister scabs along his arms, sniffs and wipes his nose against his hand. Air smells worse than usual, on account of stackbots stirring up thick dust.

Kanye stands to stretch his legs as another stone clangs against BigZig’s metal hide.

“Give it a rest, ya morons!” he shouts.

Slate yells back, drops his dacks and bares his pasty arse. Others copy, like they always do.

Stackbots screech with random bursts of groaning, grinding metal. His dad’s gonna chuck a fit at all this mess: goats running loose and dogs tearing up the chickens. Nobody gave anyone permission, just like the time those guys built a trebuchet and started flinging cubes at the astronauts.

Still, dry air reeks of diesel and burning plastic, bright sun makes his sweaty skin itch bad. Hot air thick with fat blowflies—the only things that ever get fat round here—comes off the garbage, still piled up to mountain height even though the trains stopped coming ages back. Scavengers rooting through the filth rock up regular enough. Kanye’s dad doesn’t give two shits, so long as they keep away from the big machines.

And BigZig too, goes without saying. His dad says his future’s invested heavy in cash-cow reserves there.

Prison slits were cut to let in air for the cash-cow crop. Kanye’s only been in once—and not for long. Double dared, he’d entered BigZig, then stumbled out pretending he’d seen stuff.

Corridors stank of shit and piss, and rats ran across his foot. Swore he’d never go back in again.

Kanye watches the stackbot’s arm unfurl like a creepy bug antenna. It’s not supposed to be doing that. Those drunken arseholes got no fucken clue. He takes a swig of water, warm from his canteen. Flat and stale, it greases his mouth with petrochemical taint.

He can’t visit his secret place while those drunks are messing with the ’bots, so he aims the nocs at the long, straight stretch of rail. Just checking. Hasn’t been a train forever, not since that one piled high with yellow barrels that had propellers stenciled on the sides. No Chinooks either. No shrieking grind of hot metal at velocity; no Black Hawks buzzing high over the tracks. All of them plowing straight through, never stopping, full speed all the way to the astronauts.

#

He’s back to scanning the sky for birds when something red-hot snickers past his ear. No wasps left so it can’t be one of them. Fingers come back bloody from his head. One of those drunken fucks is shooting at him.

Not the first time shit has gotten wild and drunk and random. Gunfights have been on the rise, ever since that army convoy—trapped and herded into the BigZig compound. When his dad gets back Kanye’s gonna tell him all about it. Those guys get way too shitfaced to be bosses.

Another bullet scores the ledge. Kanye halts, lost without the Smith & Wesson Uncle Jaxon says he should be packing always. Kanye slings his nocs and canteen, scrabbles on all fours in search of shelter. BigZig’s exposed on every side, making him an open, easy target, the only thing protecting him is the fact those arseholes get too pissed to shoot straight.

Snatches of howling laughter carry on the breeze.

“That’s not fucken funny,” Kanye shouts. Anxious, seeing Gellan’s second level near complete. Thick black smoke belches from the place they toss the giant dump truck tires. None of this is supposed to be happening.

Blur of metal, whizzing close to his bleeding ear. He ducks as bullets ricochet off cubes. He trips and scrambles, arms grazed and stinging against sharp edges.

Amidst a sloppy hail of bullets, he rolls and drops down another tier. Landing forces breath out hard. Hip hurts when he tries to get back up.

Bright blood smears and stains his shirt. Everything is happening too fast. Slate keeps firing, hooting and hollering whenever Kanye jumps.

Gotta hide. Guns are going off like crackers, bullets peppering metal all around. Kanye whimpers as a squirt of warm piss dribbles down his leg. Scrambles for the nearest prison slit in BigZig, prays to Hercules for luck, holds his breath, sucks in his gut and wriggles on his belly like a lizard.

Sharp things stab and snag his skin. He makes it through, landing on his hands, curls up tight until the shots subside. Even Slate’s not dumb enough to shoot dead air. Kanye sits up, sniveling and tasting sticky dust.

Bright light spears in from outside. Everywhere else is dark. A foul stench—something’s died in here. Something big. But everything hurts and all he can do is wipe his nose and work out what the hell to tell his dad. How Gellan thrashed the fuck outta that stackbot, messed it up, shooting guns and people just for kicks. How Slate is getting too big for himself, all the stackies reckon he’s crazy, reckon he’s dangerous, what with all the home-stilled booze he chugs.

Something stirs in the pool of darkness just beyond the slit window’s bright glare. Kanye stops, strains to catch a glimpse. Prays to Hercules it’s just a rat, but when it moves again, he knows it isn’t.

Cries out as something emerges from the stinking, shadowy, all-encompassing dark. Kicks, propelling his body back until his spine slams against the wall. “Don’t hurt me!”

Stays put, stares at the emerging figure. The oldest woman he’s ever seen up close. Long fingers, bony like talons. Gray trousers and a shirt that badly needs a scrub.

“Are you ok?” she asks.

“Get away from me!” Tries to inch back on his arse, forgets he’s up against the wall. “Touch me and I’ll kill ya!”

She smiles. “No you won’t. Give us a look at your arms and that ear. Caught yourself a nasty scrape, looks like.”

Kanye whimpers; all the fight’s spooked out of him.

“I’m Judith,” she says softly, kneeling down and reaching for his arm. “Call me Jude—everybody does, or at least they used to.”

She curls her fingers around his wrist, prods him gingerly in several places. Checks his other arm and then his ear. “Nothing broken.”

Kanye snatches his arm away.

“So, what do they call you?” she asks.

“Shut up. You don’t get to talk. My dad’s the boss of everything round here.” He gestures broadly at the bright and spearing light.

Old woman uses her knuckles to push herself to standing, then steps back, swallowed by the gloom.

Kanye keeps his back against the wall, remembers the words his dad uses—cash-cows—words he’s never thought about too close. In his head, he’d pictured actual cows. Wouldn’t even call this one a cow, she’s skinny as a line of pipe.

“Please,” she says, stepping back into the light, “I’m starving. The girl who brings me food hasn’t come for two days.”

Kanye stares through swirls and plumes of dust.

“Tell me your name,” she says.

“You don’t get to ask me shit. My dad—”

She clasps her hands and cuts him off. “Of course.”

Her pants are gray like the suits on TV. Too big for her bony body. Bare feet. Toenails dirty. Pale blue scarf knotted tight around her neck.

“Your dad’s been gone a while, hasn’t he?” Holds him with her gaze. “That makes you the man in charge—am I right?”

“Too right.” Gets up and brushes dirt off his pants, thickening the dust swirling through the air.

“Things aren’t going so well with him away now, are they?” she says. “Can’t see much from here, but I hear all sorts.”

“Shut up! You don’t know anything. You don’t know jack shit.”

“Thing about ransom prisoners,” she says carefully, “is that nobody pays good money for a corpse.”

The old woman sways unsteadily. Brings one hand to her head, then hits the floor with a soft thud, stirring up another cloud of dust.

There’s a chain around her ankle.

She slumps forward, groaning, head resting in both hands.

“I’m in charge here,” Kanye reminds her. “You don’t get to tell me what to do. Don’t you forget it, old woman.”

“I won’t,” she says softly.

#

Three days Gellan has that stackbot running nonstop. Smoke pours from its grinding, screeching gears. Nobody knows how to shut it down. Gellan lost his shit and attacked it with a Super Dozer, that only made things worse. ’Bots are programmed to protect themselves—anyone with half a brain knows that.

What nobody knows anything about is Kanye’s secret place. His dad never goes up top of BigZig, never checked how one cube came out dented. A space where special treasures can be stashed. The place Kanye comes to think about his problems.

He built a shelf on two red bricks. On it sits a spotted shell brought from a real live ocean, four brown falcon feathers—each one from a different bird—toy soldiers from some war he’s never heard of. A lipstick: stay matte rose & shine. And his favorite thing—the 24-inch, plastic, US Army C-130 Hercules, with its Stars-and-Stripes flag on the tail and muscle-man stickers on both sides. The lipstick and a faded photograph are all he has to remind him of his mum.

The trains are starting up again and he doesn’t know what to do. Rumbling and rattling, shivering through his bones. The ache that’s been there since that day. Dad should be back from R&R already. Should be but he isn’t, like a lot of other things that aren’t.

Perhaps a lucky bird will guide him, but the sky’s as still and flat as always. Time’s past needing birds to help him. Kanye knows what has to happen next. He waits a while, then stands and tucks the Smith & Wesson into his dacks, picks up some stuff salvaged from his dad’s office. Loads his pack, climbs down to the prison gate, gulps good air before letting himself inside.

Not much light in the passageway. Ignores flies buzzing on dead things in locked cells. Finds his cash cow hugging her knees in a single shaft of dusty light.

“Brung you some food.”

She’s not half as old as he first thought. Grunts as she rips the MRE in half and scoops mush into her mouth with both her hands. Like she expects him to change his mind. Like she isn’t taking any chances.

Random crashing from outside and bullets plink against BigZig’s cubed sides.

Fucken tools have started up again.

The woman licks the last smear from the plastic pack and belches.

“You saved my life,” she tells him. “And I’m grateful. Really grateful. You have no idea—you really don’t.”

Kanye sits, placing the gun just beyond the reach of her rusty chain. So she knows he’ll use it if he has to.

“Nice boots,” she says.

Kanye sits a little straighter. Black crocodile-belly boots cost more than sacks of marijuana. Only worn when he needs extra luck.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they? The other prisoners,” she says.

“Not much value in them,” he says, scratching his scabby arms. “Not like you. Slate reckons you’re worth heaps.”

She tries to clean herself with a corner of her filthy shirt.

“How about more water? Bucket’s nearly empty.”

He sniffs.

“And how about you tell me your name?” She crosses her legs and folds her arms in her lap. Chain clanks every time she moves.

“What’s so great about you anyway?” he says. “Why are you worth big bucks? You don’t look like a queen or anything.”

She pushes greasy hair behind her ear. “You haven’t exactly caught me at my best. I’m the federal minister for environment, infrastructure and sustainable futures.”

He snorts. “Government, ay? Pack of liars, that’s what my dad says. Stole the water, chemtrails through the sky, back-pocket, big-pharma weaponized diseases—AIDS and COVID, Pig Flu, Nypah, Hendra…So much bullshit brewed up to poison us.”

She bursts out laughing and shakes her head. “Well, you sure have got yourself a bumper crop there. You forgot the aliens, Bigfoot, mind-control labs and new world orders…” The chain clanks as she stretches her legs. “Don’t give us government types so much credit for stealth and ingenuity. Keeping secrets from the public is harder than you’d think.” She glances around her prison cell, “Although, I don’t know. Out here it seems much easier than back home.”

She’s cut short by a piercing shriek. Not the stackbot—this time something human. The shrieking ends abruptly—which is worse.

Kanye’s chest feels hot and tight.

Next comes machine-gun fire, metal slamming hard on metal, howling dogs and roaring engines.

“Name’s Kanye,” he says.

She leans forward. “Kanye, my government is doing its damnedest to build a future that’s safe and sustainable for all. There’s been damage done, for sure, in recent years. Big damage, slow responses. Mistakes beyond anyone’s control. But that doesn’t mean things can’t get better. Doesn’t mean we should give up on civilization itself.”

She leans closer. “Nobody’s trying to poison you and your father, Kanye. Help me get away from here. Back to where there’s proper food and medicine. Come with me to Sydney and I’ll show you.”

More rapid fire and a muffled blast, big enough to rattle BigZig’s walls.

Jude swallows hard. “Your friends are running feral, Kanye. Reckon it’s time to take matters into your own hands, you know? Before it’s too late. Help me contact my people and they’ll pull us both out of here. You saved my life today, so I owe you one.”

“No way. When my dad gets back—”

“He’s not coming back, Kanye. If he was, he’d be here already—and I think you know it. Get me out of…wherever the hell this place is…and I’ll save us both.”

#

“Oh my god—fresh air!” she says. Shuts her eyes and breathes in deep. “But where the hell are we? What’s this place called?”

They both duck as stray bullets whizz and plink.

He shrugs. “Woomera.”

“Woomera!” She slides from a crouch to sitting, rests her forehead on her palms and the fight kind of goes out of her. “They snatched me from Sydney—how the hell did I end up way out here?”

Both stare at the scene spread out below. Scattered fires burning bright and high, broken-down machinery—some of it house sized, people staggering about and firing. Dogs and goats. A bulldozer attempts to ram its way through the side of a rusted shipping crate.

Kanye clutches his gun against his chest, waves it whenever he speaks, like punctuation. “Fuckers got no fucken idea,” he says. “Nobody’s doing what they’re s’posed to be doing.”

She shades her eyes to stare out across the desert. “No wonder nobody’s come looking for me. This really is the arse end of nowhere.”

“Everyone knows Woomera,” he says.

“Not for a bloody long time, they haven’t. Got turned into a theme park or a museum or something. Sold off for mining too, maybe.” She squints. “I can’t quite recall.”

“Astronauts know about it.”

She almost smiles. “Haven’t been astronauts at Woomera for a very long time.”

“There’s astronauts. I’ve seen them.”

“In fact, there weren’t even astronauts at Woomera back in the day. Rockets, yes. Mission controls and plenty of weapons testing, but astronauts no.”

“Lady—I know what I saw.”

She’s not listening. She’s squinting at the sky. Nothing to see, not even clouds, but a look on her face like she can see beyond the blue. She scrambles back into a crouch, checks her balance, peeps over the edge.

“Got my gun trained on you so don’t go trying any tricksy moves,” he says.

“Binoculars.” She holds out her hand and he passes them over. She squints through the eyepiece, past the loudly malfunctioning stackbot that’s jerking and spasming as it launches another random cube into the low roof of a demountable shed. Past the thick black smoke of the burning garbage heap and out into the desert, scattered with rocks and wrecks and human bones.

A bucket-wheel excavator lies on its side, half buried under mounds of sand. Like a dinosaur. He used to have a book of dinosaur pictures.

“Hey—what’s that wreckage over there. Away from the other junk—is that a plane? Get me there and I can get us the hell away from here,” she says.

He stares at her with sullen disbelief. “It’s broken. You don’t know—”

“Shut up, kid, and listen to me if you want to get out of this place alive. Government satellites pass over this big old dump. Come and help me send a message, or stay up here alone if you’d really rather.”

The gun weighs heavy in his hands. Protecting the cash cow is one thing, taking orders from her is something else. So tired and his head hurts and what if his dad really isn’t coming back?

He leads the way along the goat track hacked into BigZig’s side. They’re three tiers down when the rumbling starts. Horribly familiar. He can’t bear to look—perhaps it’s coming from the ’bots or from one of those random monster storms. Could be from lots of things, no need to panic.

Jude’s face flushes with color as he feels the blood drain out of his.

“Oh my! Kanye—there’s a train coming!” She jumps up and down and waves.

His stomach lurches like he’s gonna spew. Spins around and slaps at her. “Stop it, ya fucken idiot! It’ll see you!”

She’s got this dumb look on her face. “Why—What’s the matter? A train can take us back to civilization.”

Kanye doesn’t move, despite the raucous fighting on the ground not far away. He stares fixedly as the train approaches the compound. It’s all happening again. The train zips through like a dirty bullet and his chest hurts from breathing ragged. He doesn’t turn to watch where it is heading.

Jude nudges him as bullets fly. He slaps her hand away and keeps on moving.

“Where’s that train heading, Kanye?”

He grips the gun tight like Uncle Jaxon taught him. He runs across a stretch of open concrete strewn with rubble, some of it still smoke charred and warm. She follows. Air explodes with random weapon fire. Two women wearing knitted hats and oil-stained gloves gawk from beneath a tattered awning, but don’t do anything to stop them.

But Jude stumbles to a halt, her bare feet leaving bloody footprints in the dirt. “Hang on! Kanye—it’s bloody cold at night. We need supplies.”

He waves the gun at a shipping container covered in skull graffiti. Jude ignores the dead man slumped beside it. Makeshift door swings off its hinge as she pushes past. She’s banging around in there a few minutes while he’s trying not to think about that train.

She comes out swigging from a canteen, wearing a big man’s jacket with bulging pockets. Walks like a clown with her skinny ankles stuffed in battered trainers.

“First things first,” she says. “Need to get out to that wrecked plane.”

“Plane’s fucked,” he says.

“Doesn’t matter.”

She takes the lead. He dawdles, kicking stones and bits of metal. Not listening, but she’s still talking, banging on about not being where she thought she was.

“Think I’ve figured out this place,” she tells him. “One of those off-the-grid white elephants knocked up during the decade of big fire. A relic of the New Cold War—the kind that doesn’t make it into history books. Back then they did what they had to do to make up budget deficits. Sold off slabs of useless, barren land to any bastards keen to pay for it.”

Darkness falling, chill nipping at his bones.

“Drug lords, terrorists…Wouldn’t get away with that today, of course—Jesus. Where did all this twisted metal come from?”

“Rockets,” he tells her.

She trips and swears but rights herself. “Well, I suppose there could be old space hardware. Ancient British missiles. Black Knights and Blue Steel…that sort of thing. Brits used to test their nukes out here—did you know that? Early days of the space race and all that.”

No point in arguing. He pushes on and reaches the smashed-up Hercules ahead of her. Doesn’t look like much in the fading light.

“All right, this is far enough. Now we get to work,” she says, short of breath, swigs on the canteen again. “Find me a bunch of fist-sized stones and scraps of metal.”

He watches Jude trace huge numbers and letters in the sandy dirt with a stick.

“My tag,” she tells him, smugly. “Kind of like a secret code. Military algorithms will pick it up via satellite, even if my ministry has written me off for dead. Which they might well have done—a month spells a long time in politics, let alone kidnapping. I’m heavily insured, so someone will be pushing for a rescue once my tag is scanned and verified…”

Kanye’s only half listening and he doesn’t look up and he most definitely doesn’t glance to the place where that train was heading. He slams down rock after rock in draining light as another explosion shakes the camp behind them.

His dad will fix it…his dad should have fixed it…his mum should never have left in that Hercules. If she’d stayed, his dad would never have got so angry. He’d never have shot the plane out of the sky.

“So, I’m guessing you grew up in all this junk,” says Jude as she places rocks inside the letters.

He doesn’t answer.

“Kanye, what’s your dad been doing out here?”

He shakes his head too vigorously, stares at the ground and not her face. Walks away to collect another rock.

“He’s been taking care of you—that’s something. Loads of kids out there with no mums and dads”

Kanye slams his rock down hard.

“Why don’t you tell me about the trains? Where they’re from and where they’re going? Gotta say, I’m surprised to find a functional line out here.”

He stares into darkness. “Used to run through regular. Locked up tight, never stop, just push on through.” He slams another rock down on the line.

She places one not far away from his.

“We used to try and guess what was inside,” he continues. “Food and stuff, ya know. Good stuff from the coast, maybe. Kind of stuff used to drop out of the sky.” He pauses to relive the memory. “Everything was different when I was a kid. Better—ya know?”

Jude nods. “Oh yeah, you got that right.”

He searches for another rock.

“So, what happened? You followed the train?”

Kanye nods. Clutching a rock, he flicks his gaze in the direction of the tracks.

“And?”

He smashes the rock down, straightens, dusts his hands on his pants. Swallows. “Astronauts making people push yellow barrels into the ground. Cranes swinging big blocks of cement.”

“Astronauts? Are you sure?”

“In space suits. Like on TV.” Shakes his head, like he’s trying to clear it. “People off those trains were sick. Infected or something. Astronauts kicked ’em over the edge, down there into the pit with all the barrels.”

Jude’s been hanging on every word, a rock gripped tightly in her hand. She drops it, rummages through the big coat’s pockets. Pulls out a torch, slaps it against her palm a few times to get it going.

“I was saving this until we really need it, but…oh my god…” The beam cuts through darkness, moving as she moves. “Jesus…Kanye, those big shapes over there. They aren’t junked planes or old British rockets.”

She hurries from one mess of metal to the next, like she’s looking for something specific. “These look like Dongfeng ICBMs, Kanye. They’re not ours—and they definitely shouldn’t be here. None of this should be here.”

She kills the beam and backs away from the missiles. Stares up at the night sky, as if it might hold answers to her questions.

“My dad says…” His words are drowned out by a rising rumble loud enough to shake the ground. Wind tears at their hair and clothing as a long, cold shadow falls across their faces.

The moon hovers, impossibly big and low. Through streaming tears, Kanye’s vision skews. Not the moon, but the underbelly of a Hercules. Smudgy images dance across its surface. All gray and white, like dead TV static.

Jude is laughing, waving and jumping, but he can’t hear anything she’s saying. He clutches the gun against his chest. His lucky boots are white with churned up sand.

Because the Hercules is not a Hercules—it’s a Chinook with tandem rotors, bright lights flooding stronger than the sun. Sets down and the back end opens, spills astronauts pointing guns and barking orders.

Jude is screaming. Kanye backs up until he’s pressed against the broken plane that holds his mum’s burned bones. And it’s not his uncle’s Smith & Wesson clutched against his chest at all, but the plastic Hercules stuffed with special treasures: the seashell, feathers, lipstick, unknown soldiers and faded photo all tossed, tumbled and mashed against each other.

 

 

 

River of Stars

By David Farland

 

 

Aracai rose to the surface as the fishing boat sped away, motors whining softly. The surface of the Atlantic was dimpled with waves that lapped softly, as if the sea were slightly perturbed. The stars shone so brightly they throbbed, and the moon was in its dark phase, but light from the Arab colonies there created a bright band that slashed across the moon’s equator like a gathering of rogue stars.

He dove beneath the water and followed the backpack dropped by Escalas’s contact twenty meters to the ocean floor. The sea here was alive with sounds—the crackling of snapping shrimp, the eerie bellow of a grouper, the chiming sounds of baitfish. Though the sea was dark, Aracai’s night vision was excellent. He’d been engineered to see in infrared, so many creatures seemed to emit a soft glow.

He followed the backpack down to a place where rocks were covered in splotches of anemones and starfish, all gray shapes in the night, and began circling it, swimming on his side, watching it as if it were some strange creature that he dare not approach.

He made a soft whistle, “Here,” and in moments two more mer swam up, hugging the sand. Like Aracai, they were both nude. Dulce, his young wife, had hair of amber, and his…mentor, an old mer named Escalas, whose streaming white hair was held back by the silver circlet of the mindlink around his head, swam near and circled the backpack, too, but he did not watch the pack. Instead, he swam on his side, deep-set eyes watching Aracai.

He knows what is in the pack, Aracai thought. That’s why he brought us here. And now he is waiting for me to pick it up…

Dulce circled behind them a few meters off.

Three months back, Aracai and Dulce had been living to the south, at the tip of Brasilia, where the cold waters of the Antarctic were among the cleanest in the world and the fisheries still thrived, when he’d met Escalas.

He was a living legend. Not only was he old and wise, he was the only mer to have a mindlink, so if he wanted to know something, he could wonder about it and thus access Heavenly Host—the AIs linked in geosynchronous orbit—and learn what he wanted to know.

Upon meeting, Escalas had eyed Aracai a moment and then said, “Swim with me.” Among the mer, it was an invitation to swim for a ways, to talk, or perhaps to swim for a lifetime.

Now, Aracai realized that the old man had been bringing him to this point for months. “What is in the backpack?” Aracai sang, his voice a low thrumming that ended in a higher squeal.

Escalas hesitated, as if he hoped Aracai would guess, then answered, “A bomb.”

Many questions crowded Aracai’s mind. What kind of bomb? Who will Escalas kill? But one burst to the forefront: “How did you get it?”

Escalas’s answer was leisurely, a rumble. “I bought it…from the neogods.”

The news took Aracai’s breath. It did not surprise him that Escalas had bought the weapon. No, he felt surprised at mention of the neogods. They had been human until their genetic and mechanical upgrades had boosted their intelligence so much that they no longer wished to associate with mankind any more than Aracai would want to associate with amoebas. The neogods had left Earth decades ago, learned to bend space and time, so that now they explored the edges of the universe...

“Those creatures do not talk to men—or bargain with them,” Aracai said, worried that Escalas was teasing him.

“Ah, Spirit Warrior, they bargained with me,” Escalas affirmed. “Perhaps I made the right offer, or asked for the right weapon?” He jutted his chin toward the backpack. “Pick it up.”

Spirit Warrior? He thinks I am a warrior? Aracai had never thought of himself as a warrior at all.

But he had begun to believe over the past weeks that the world needed one. There was poison coming from Rio Negro—heavy metals and acids from mining, human waste, pesticides and industrial chemicals. In some places, over the past four decades, the poisons had turned the sea floor into a wasteland that even crabs could not survive. The mer were dying. Escalas, Dulce, and Arakai were among the last.

Old Escalas had petitioned numerous national leaders, sought to get the humans to stop the “genocidal poisoning of our people.” But the governments in South America did not enforce their own laws. Those who had been charged with protecting the environment merely took bribes and turned a blind eye.

Escalas swam past Aracai, studying him. “It is time to go to war,” he said. “But the notion of violence sickens you.”

“Yes,” Aracai said. His whole frame was shaking.

“As it should,” Escalas said, swimming close. “Feral humans do not need a reason to go to war. Violence is in their nature. But when they made us mer, they took our bloodlust away. So the idea sickens you, though it is long past time for us to act.” He jerked a nod toward the backpack. “The problem with us mer is that we circle our problems endlessly, when we should merely grasp at the solutions.”

A bomb? War is a solution? Aracai studied Escalas. The old mer held a trace of a smile, as if he were amused. That was the problem with the old man. In the past months, Aracai had learned a lot, but Escalas always seemed to be three steps ahead.

“Do not do this thing,” Aracai warned, “whatever you have planned.”

“Oh, I am not going to do it,” Escalas said softly. “You are!”

Aracai could not imagine himself harming another. “But—”

Escalas raised a hand. “The feral humans who are poisoning our seas hurt themselves almost as much as they do us. Their society is toxic, and what do humans do when they perceive another society to be toxic? They go to war. History is full of toxic societies that are no more.”

Aracai could hardly believe what he heard. He wanted to argue, but did not know where to start.

The old mer swam lazily. “This is the answer. Pick it up.”

Numb, Aracai pulled at the backpack and dumped out the bomb—a strange device, all metal, a heavy black disk. Soft, white lights displayed the time and the bomb’s GPS coordinates on top.

He lifted it. The bomb was heavier than anything so small should be. Heavier than lead. Heavier even than gold. Uranium?

Aracai trilled a warning to the others, “Stay back!” He suspected it was a nuclear device, but it was too small to have much in the way of shielding. Being this close could expose them all to radiation.

He threw it back to the ocean floor, raising a cloud of filth, but Dulce swam near and wrenched it from the mud. There was sadness in her dark eyes. “Let me carry it,” she demanded. “She was my daughter, too…”

An image flashed in Aracai’s mind—their infant daughter, cold and rigid, eyes and fingers gone equally white in death. The poisons had contained some sort of mutagen, so that she was born with only a small part of her brain.

“Too many mer children have died,” she said.

“We can try for another,” Aracai promised.

But the gill slits along Dulce’s neck flared in anger. “No, no we can’t,” she said. They had been trying for five years. “You know that. I want to carry my vengeance in my own hands.”

With a flick of her tail, she lunged forward, upstream through the brackish water.

Old Escalas said, “It is not vengeance I seek, but change.”

#

In the night they swam, pushing through heavy headwaters, and Escalas sang to them of the dangers of the Amazon, a chant that formed dreams in Aracai’s mind. There were huge, black eels ahead that could emit a killing, electric jolt of blue light, and piranhas with bright-red bellies that hung like rubies in the slow waters until they smelled blood, when they would lunge and tear chunks of flesh from bones. He sang of coral-colored dolphins, anacondas, and other dangers. The fresh water itself was poison to the mer, for in time their kidneys would fail in the reduced salinity.

So Aracai feared the river.

The waters became quieter as they swam. The crackle of snapping shrimp died away and only the sloshing of waves could be heard.

Aracai saw evidence of toxins. There were no snails or freshwater clams on the muddy floor. They passed no schools of fish—only a pair of huge bull sharks swimming upstream to spawn. The sharks eyed the mer hungrily.

The waters at the mouth of the Amazon were deserted. Flecks of dark moss and white decomposing bits of dead insects and fish drifted about. The water was oxygen rich, but smelled of decay, and the toxins in it made his gills itch.

So Aracai pleaded for reason as they swam in the darkness. “We cannot bomb the humans. Innocent children will be hurt.”

“I do not want to hurt innocent children,” Escalas agreed. “But the humans must change their ways. I have done all that I know how in order to convince them. Now, we must go to war.” The old man seemed to change subjects. “The poison that killed your daughter is called C54.”

The news sent Dulce into a wail of pain. Her tail thrashed, so that she surged ahead and became invisible in the cloudy water.

Aracai had never heard of C54 and felt relieved that Escalas had put a name to the toxin.

“In Venezuela, it is used as a chemical warfare agent. That is where we are going—to set the bomb off at the factory. The poison is colorless, tasteless. It was not meant to kill anyone, though it has unforeseen effects on the mer. It was designed as a mind-control weapon. The drug causes the victim’s brain to release the hormone dopamine, making victims carefree and happy, but over time the victim’s prefrontal lobes shrink, limiting their ability to plan ahead. This makes the Venezuelan’s enemies stupid.”

The waters were dark, and Aracai’s gills itched. He swam briefly to the surface and flashed his gills, shaking his head, to try to rid them of grit.

Aracai wondered long about the C54, horrified that such a weapon would be unleashed on others, crippling the minds of children.

He thought of his daughter, her tiny fingers as rubbery as the tentacles of a dead octopus, her blind eyes, the malformed brain that would not work well enough to let her breathe.

“The Venezuelans create this drug, and the other nations, they do not fight back?” Aracai asked.

“Oh, they fight back,” Escalas sang. “Humans have never discovered a stick that could not be turned into a club. Venezuela’s enemies wage economic war, making their country the poorest of the world’s poor, and they bribe AIs to withhold information from them. Each of Venezuela’s enemies have iconic celebrities who mock the Venezuelans, weakening their spirits. They use viruses and nanobots…”

“And if we go to war,” Aracai asked, “are we any better than they are?” The possibility that they weren’t frustrated Aracai. He did not know much about humans. He had seen the hulls of their boats above water, but had never wanted to meet one.

Truth be told, he despised them. The humans had made him poorly. His eyes did not face forward like those of a human, which made it dangerous to swim too far, too fast, lest he crack his skull on something. He had no need for hair, and would have preferred to have flesh alone, or perhaps scales, instead of flowing locks that were always picking up bits of seaweed and becoming home to tiny crabs. His shoulders were too large, not sleek enough to slice through the water.

It is the right of any creature to dislike his creators, he thought. The humans created us according to some nightmarish aesthetic instead of constructing something more elegant.

“I am what they made me,” Aracai said.

“Is that all you are?” Escalas asked. “Do you not also make yourself?”

Aracai dodged between two rocks. “We can always better ourselves.”

“I think,” Escalas said, “that it is almost a duty for a man to better himself, or a people to better themselves. We must swim forward, not be content to drift with the tides. Don’t you think?”

There it was again, that secretive tone. Was he talking of genetic manipulation? That cost a lot of money, something that a mer, living off the bounties of the ocean, did not need.

But Aracai thought, I could make money. There are still treasures under the sea—Spanish galleons full of emeralds, sunken Mayan ruins off the coast of Mexico, filled with artifacts. Humans pay well for such curiosities. Perhaps I could find a cure for the poisons.

But the old mer seemed to want to send a message.

“So,” Aracai said at last, “do humans actually die in these wars?”

“Some die,” Escalas admitted. “But there are various theories on war. The goal is not to kill, it is to demoralize, to alter the behavior of the enemy.” The old mer struggled to talk and breathe at the same time. He rose to the surface, gasped a deep breath, and continued. “To be honest though, I do not think that humans value life as much as you and I do. When I found you, Spirit Warrior, you were the first mer that I had met in two years. I felt so alone, and so I begged you, ‘Swim with me.’ Among the mer, we crave each other’s company. But with over two hundred billion human souls on earth, there are too many. If one of them dies, the others feel relief rather than loss. Why, on the Amazon alone, there are sixteen million humans living along its banks It is the largest river in the world, and holds one fifth of all the fresh water…” he droned on.

Ahead of them, Dulce was slowing, and she had begun to sing in the way mer women will, a threnody whose tune was beat out in the lashing of her tail.

 

“Black River, poison river, rolling to the sea.

Be my road, guide the way,

Avenge my daughter and me.”

 

The old mer glanced ahead and said, “She is a fine wife for a Spirit Warrior. I hope that at the end of this, you will be able to have the children you deserve.”

“Why do you call me ‘Spirit Warrior,’” Aracai asked.

The old mer slowed his swimming and did a roll, so that he could peer into Aracai’s face. “Among the humans, men contend with one another. But you fight your own weaknesses, your own inner demons. That is why I brought you.”

Aracai eyed Escalas. “You do not want to kill humans either, do you?”

Escalas admitted, “To take a life is…reprehensible. To even force another into a certain path…weighs on my soul. But we will not reach our destination for many days and so I have time to ponder.”

Aracai thought long. He realized that he need not make a decision to go to war now. He could abandon the bomb at any moment, let it sink into the mud. Changing course would be as simple as a flick of his tail.

But he plunged ahead, through the night, wondering.

#

By early dawn they had traveled many kilometers upriver, reaching the old gods that guarded its mouth.

The old gods came in the form of enormous ancient busts of men and monkeys, all grimacing, each perhaps sixty feet tall. A line of them had been discovered across the river channel back in the twenty-second century, sunk deep into the mud, but no one knew what civilization had carved them. Aracai worried for Dulce. The bomb she carried was very heavy. She held the disk clasped against her belly as she swam, near her womb, and he knew enough to be afraid for her, for them all.

How much radiation did the bomb emit? How much could they handle?

Did it even matter? When they set the bomb off, he might not have a chance to escape the blast. Even if he got away from the fireball, the detonation would create a wall of sound, a sonic boom that would carry downriver, stunning and killing fish, including him.

And he had to wonder, was there any life left in Dulce’s womb worth worrying about anyway?

He took the bomb, to give her a rest, but then determined that she would carry it no more.

Escalas continued to struggle in the swift water. Aracai was smart enough to wonder if the old man had brought him on this journey, planned it months or even years ago, just so that he’d have strong arms to carry the weapon. Aracai considered asking, but knew he would not get a straight answer. Escalas was always forcing him to think for himself.

So Aracai swam, hampered by muddled thoughts, a heavy burden, and strong currents. The riverbed below him looked remarkably dead in the morning light. Escalas’s warnings about ferocious fish and deadly stingrays seemed to be without merit.

At dawn Aracai rose to the surface, drew a great breath, and peered about. The bank to the north was so far away he could make out only water, but to the south he saw buildings—squat and colorful in shades of lavender and canary and pearl, sitting in tiers along the bank. Peasants with mule carts walked along the roads in bare feet.

There had to be tens of thousands of them, freakish things. There were no gleaming hovercars with wealthy passengers, like he’d once seen in Chile.

Aracai dove deep and swam near the bottom.

Then came the new gods.

Aracai was flapping his tail hard, driving upstream through the sepia waters, falling behind the others. Soot and algae beat against him like a storm, and suddenly he heard a ping. A brilliant blue beam of light struck his face and he squinted to see huge metal struts ahead that seemed to be covered by seaweed. He realized that it wasn’t seaweed at all, but strands of plasteet—a material used to capture energy from wave action—and he followed new movement as the barrel of a cannon swiveled his way.

His heart froze and he ceased swimming, only to hear the ping and a squelchy mechanical noise that he recognized as a droid’s demand for an identification signal.

“Watch out!” Escalas called a moment too late, and Aracai heard the grinding of massive metal beams, then something heavy hit the ground, raising clouds of mud.

Suddenly Aracai put the images together. There was a war droid ahead—a giant titanium crablike droid the size of a ship, scuttling on the river bottom, menacing them.

Aracai stopped to let the muddy tide carry him back from danger, just as a single shot seared through the water. An energy beam sent a tube of bubbling super-heated water toward Escalas, striking him just once. The old mer went limp as the cloud of muddy water engulfed them all.

Aracai froze, not daring to breathe, fearing a second shot. He squinted in order to avoid being blinded. He hoped the dark waters would shield him from the droid’s sensors.

No more shots followed; his heart pounded.

He heard a buzz and something whipped over his head. He squinted up to see a squid-like drone with a gelatinous body. Its infrared signature made it look like a fiery octopus.

Hunters!

Aracai recognized the tech. It was called a squill—an ancient assassin droid, perhaps a hundred years old.

He did not know what sensory array it might have. Motion detectors? Vision? Heat? Sound? Scent?

Could it hear his heartbeat, recognize his form?

He played dead, not daring to call out, hoping that his wife would be wise enough to do the same.

The huge war droid marched north, blocking their path, stirring up more muck, impenetrably dark.

The squill began to circle and was soon followed by dozens more.

Are they armed? he wondered. The drones often carried a sac of neurotoxin, so that their stingers could kill. He’d heard legends about squills with explosives built into them. But some, he knew, were built just for reconnaissance.

Aracai drifted downstream, and often the drones passed near in the darkness, but still he dared not move. So he floated, letting the current take him, until many kilometers later the buzzing of drones faded and he was left merely floating. As the water cleared, he peered around, but his search showed him nothing.

He caught movement: Dulce drove toward the surface, and Aracai saw a familiar form floating there.

Aracai raced upward, met them as Dulce wrapped her arms tenderly around the old mer and tried to drag him under, to safety.

When Aracai got near, the old man was a horror. Boiling water had made his skin bubble over on half of his chest and face, and skin tore away in tatters. His hair was burned off, as was his right eye. What flesh Escalas had left was red and blistered.

“Old man,” Dulce asked, “can you swim with me?”

The old man’s mouth was in ruins, and yet he spoke. “I can swim.” He gasped for several moments, gills flashing, and glanced down. “My flesh is burned. I cannot…last…”

“What can we do to help?” Dulce asked. The old mer shook his head. “My sight…” His mouth tried to work, but pieces of flesh fell from the hole where his lips had been, showing teeth. He gasped and sang in broken thoughts. “You, go on. Up Rio Negro, to the town Dos Brujas, where smokestacks rise, and open sewers dump into the river from both banks. There you will find a pylon, a black tower, with a light on top like a single red eye. That is where you must detonate…”

He lost his train of thought. “Take my implant…” he said, offering his greatest possession, the silver band around his head.

Escalas sang more, but his words became a soft slur, like wind lashing the water, until it died and went silent.

Dulce cried out, a barking sound, as if she had taken a mortal wound.

“Quiet,” Aracai warned, swimming up to put a hand over her mouth, but she twisted her head away and wailed in frustration.

He removed the band from Escalas’s head, put it on his own. The band was a silver wire, but almost as soon as he put it on, he felt a pinch at the base of his neck as nanobots began to send out probes to establish a link with his mind, one that would take days to form.

He let go of the old mer’s body and let it drift away, bouncing against the muddy bottom of the river.

Dulce made a juddering cry, more of a moan than a song, and together they clasped hands and swam toward the south bank before sneaking upriver, and thus passed the warbot unseen.

He wondered why the warbot was even posted there. It was ancient, this war crab, perhaps left by governments that had fallen a century ago, during some old war. Perhaps it was as forgotten now as Aracai and his people.

#

Hour after hour Aracai and Dulce pushed ahead, Dulce shaking in fear and grief. He could not get the image from his mind of Escalas floating downstream, his mouth a gaping maw. He tried to calm his wife as they swam together, her holding his shoulders so that they spooned, swimming in unison.

He drifted into a waking dream, haunted by images of squills and warbots. They swam close to shore, where water gurgled through half-submerged trees and a howler monkeys hooted overhead. The sunlight piercing the mud turned the river into a golden road.

They dared not slow or stop. Aracai’s gut suggested that the squills might still be hunting. He suspected that they had quickly used up their energy in the initial hunt, but that after recharging, they would be loosed again.

A boat plied the water overhead, and Aracai rose to the surface and searched the river as he cleared gunk from his gills.

To the south, he saw houses—built so close together that they glimmered like pebbles upon a beach. Children were out playing in the rain, two girls twirling a rope so that a small brown boy could jump.

Guilt weighed in Aracai’s stomach as he considered what his bomb would do to them.

He dove again, lugging his burden, and began to wonder. How many days would it take to reach the target? Did he really want to kill people—children?

Was it self-defense, or something more like revenge?

He imagined Escalas talking to him, in his old reassuring tones.

Have you considered the benefits of war? the old man asked in Aracai’s mind. It sweeps away toxic societies.

Aracai exercised his imagination, tried to find a rebuttal. What if the toxic society wins? he asked. For if he started a war with the humans, he knew that he personally would surely die.

Indeed, it seemed that too often the most toxic society would win the battle and thus spread.

And yet we must try, the old mer replied. We are not just trying to save ourselves, we are hoping to save uncounted billions of people in the future.

Aracai recalled the children out skipping and playing jump rope in the streets beside the river and pictured what would happen to them when the bomb blew. Even if he did manage to set it off, he would lose his soul.

Our species is dying, he thought. Soon we will all be as dead as the whales.

Does it really matter? Extinction? Every man must face his own personal extinction.

After long hours, Dulce said, “I’m hungry.”

He could feel pangs in his own belly.

But the river was dead.

Aracai had once hunted briefly in freshwater, in crystalline streams that tumbled from the Andes. Cold as ice and clearer than raindrops, thick with trout.

An idea struck, and he took Dulce’s hand and led her along the riverbank until they found a tributary, a small river that twisted through the jungle.

They swam upstream for a mile until the river came alive. Overhead, huge ferns and trees shadowed the water. Pollywogs wiggled among rushes, while frogs whistled in the trees. Water beetles buzzed in whirligig patterns and fish began to sing.

A mile up, Aracai met schools of fish—silver perch that darted in front of him like a moving screen. Huge red-tailed catfish plied the muddy bottom, using whiskers to taste for food. A parrot bass, half as long as him, hid in the shadows of a pool, the yellows and greens around its gills muted as it emitted a sonorous snoring sound.

Here, Aracai watched freshwater crabs of deep mossy green march among some stones, then he gathered water lettuce and taro roots. Dulce offered a blessing on the meal.

As they ate, Aracai tried to speak delicately. “This will be a long journey, and hard.”

Dulce peered at him with exhaustion in her dark eyes. “And you wonder if there is honor in killing humans?”

“No,” he said. “I know there is no honor in it.”

She bit her lip, and a lightning flash made her eyes glow startlingly green.

“It is not about honor,” he said. “I just wonder if it even makes sense. I do not want to hurt anyone. What good can come of it? Our species…is doomed.” Dulce remained pensive. Aracai continued, “We could leave the bomb, hide it in the mud.”

Anger flared in Dulce’s eyes. “Don’t even think of it.” Her tone brooked no argument. She held his gaze, her dainty nose beguiling him. She drew close and kissed his lips, pressing hard and long. “Promise me. Promise you won’t turn back.”

“If we do this, the humans will hunt us down.”

“Everyone dies,” she said.

So they ate and for a while they slept in the forest shadows, cradled in one another’s arms.

The journey stretched long after that. After their nap, Aracai felt a sharp pain in his urethra. He recognized from the rhythmic motions that it was a fish. It had swum up an inch or more into him, and so he tried to pee it out.

But the tiny fish had barbs and could not be extricated, so he suffered the pain.

For four days they continued swimming along the shore of the Amazon, sometimes stopping to rest in an estuary. He saw the promised anacondas overhead and fell afoul of an electric eel. He saw colorful birds flashing over languid pools and swam unharmed through schools of piranha. There were giant arapaima longer than he and his wife, and alligator longer than any mer. The trees overhead, dripping with bright blossoms, were a marvel.

As they swam, he grew sicker. On the third day, he could no longer pee, nor could his wife. It was not the fish that had done it. Their kidneys were failing.

His body began to ache as uric acid built inside, so that every muscle felt beaten and bruised. His scales took on a milky coating. With each passing hour, he felt more certain that this journey would kill them. Freshwater was deadly. On the fifth day, he could no longer eat. His gut had given up digesting, and it felt better to starve than to take nourishment.

As sick as he felt, Dulce was worse. She wept as she fought her way upstream, and each day she grew slower and slower. She held to his back often as they swam, and he pushed for both, so that sometimes he blanked out and swam blind from fatigue.

He judged that they had come a thousand kilometers when they reached the junction to Rio Negro, full of its poisons.

Wearily, they stopped and tried to get a breath in a small lagoon upstream from the Rio Negro. The place was magical, pristine, the water far cleaner than any that they had encountered. It was as if they were entering a lost world, the great green jungles rising above the water, vast trees streaming epiphytes. A pair of dolphins swam along the river briskly, laughing as dolphins will, their coral-colored hides a delight.

He felt as if he had found some primal place that man had never touched and marveled that such jungles still existed.

They swam into a flooded creek. Blue crayfish scuttled among tree roots and clung to floating duckweed. The day was windy, and Aracai could hear roots groaning as the trees swayed and stretched. The waters in the lagoon were golden, and huge red-bellied pacu as long as his arm swam about.

As the trees stirred, dark, round nuts fell, and the pacu would bite the nuts, crunching them with powerful teeth, so that though the fish looked like enormous piranhas, they seemed like gentle giants.

Here, Aracai gazed into Dulce’s eyes and said goodbye. “I want you to go back downstream,” he begged. “You won’t have to fight the current, and you can swim swiftly. Once you hit the saltwater, you will begin to heal.” He did not know if it were true, but hoped that it was.

To his astonishment, she did not fight him. She peered deep into his eyes, reached out and stroked his beard, and apologized. “I don’t have the strength to go on.”

He nodded, knowing she was right.

He glanced up at the surface of the water, which rippled with waves, and listened to the plop of falling nuts, the groan of straining roots, the crunching of pacu.

Aracai considered swimming home to the sea, giving up this sad quest. He could leave the bomb in the mud. He looked up. Swarms of dragonflies were hovering above the lagoon—electric blue, fiery red, leafy green.

Dulce grabbed his bicep and peered into his face. “Promise you will go on,” she said. “Do it for your daughter, for all the mer yet to be born.”

Aracai imagined their child again, that sad thing thrashing about after birth as she drowned. He imagined her growing cold and stiff, her blue eyes turning to white. She’d died without a name.

He nodded.

He did not want to kill. He had argued for and against it in his mind time and time again, until nothing made sense anymore. His wife wanted him to fight, as had Escalas. That was all that mattered.

Aracai kissed Dulce goodbye, hugged her tightly, and she swam back, as if the idea of swimming downstream invigorated her.

She rose near the surface so that the sun caught her hair. But there was a flash from the surface, a violent disturbance.

Dulce gave a blood-curdling shriek and jerked hard, swimming first to the left in a wide arc, then diving, but there was a metal rod stuck in her back, with a heavy cord tied to it. No matter how hard she swam, the cord pulled her upward.

Terror and grief coursed through Aracai. Time slowed. He realized that his wife had been struck by a spear fisherman, and the harpoon had taken her in the back. She burst up toward the surface, becoming airborne, and he heard a man shout in delight, “Ela é uma grande!” She’s a big one!

He dropped the bomb and swam toward her fast. The harpoon had hit near her right lung. He doubted she could survive long.

Blood stained the water. Aracai could taste it. The giant pacu suddenly seemed to spasm, instantly turning their interest from nuts to flesh. They sped up and swam toward Dulce, who spun onto her back and grabbed the line that held the harpoon. Desperately, she jerked. “Help!” she sang.

Aracai raced to her, realizing that this must be some mistake. He’d seen monster fish in other lagoons, and though no humans had been fishing near the poison water, up here where things were more pristine, someone must have mistaken his wife for a meal.

The spear fisherman was pulling the line, trying to drag Dulce to shore. Aracai raced up and grabbed the line, tugged violently, and felt the human go off balance. A man cried out in fear.

Aracai rose to the surface, whistled a shrill warning. He could not speak the human tongue, but he could make his anger known.

He peered up into a sandbox palm, where three young men hunted from a tree fort. One held the fishing line. Another held a spear gun. A third bore an ancient rifle.

“Há outro!” the spearman called. He raised his spear gun and fired hastily. The bolt tore past Aracai’s head.

“You’ve made a mistake,” Aracai sang in his own tongue.

But the gunman peered at him with deadly intent, an eager smile playing over his face. He raised his rifle and fired. Heat tore through Aracai’s shoulder and he dove for cover, down into the inky darkness beneath the tree roots.

A second shot burst through the water and at first Aracai thought it was aimed at him, but the humans had dragged his wife close to the surface and that bullet took her in the back.

She went limp, arms falling wide.

The pacu lunged at her and nipped her flesh.

The humans yanked her into the air. As Aracai gazed up, a pacu hit him hard in the back, testing for a response.

Dulce was hauled out of the water, and he could not get to her. He could not even retrieve her body. So he turned and lunged away as fast as he could, and grabbed the bomb.

He wanted to rescue his wife, worried that she was still alive, that the men were torturing her. He swam to some ferns that hung over the water and rose, using them for cover.

The three men were young, hardly more than boys. They had pulled Dulce up onto their hunting platform and were admiring her, as if she were a prize catch.

One knelt and fondled her breast while another laughed. The gunman peered into the water, still hunting.

Dulce did not move. She was as dead as their daughter.

Aracai called out in grief, an involuntary wail that echoed over the water. The young man with the spear gun called, “Get out! This is our river.”

Feral humans. Aracai had always used the term to refer to those without genetic upgrades. Now he saw the truth.

He dove, swimming near the bottom as fast as he could. He realized that he might not have much time. His wound was not bad, but the bleeding would draw predators. So he swam to the Rio Negro and became lost in its black waters.

Now the poisons and pollution worked in his favor. He did not have to face piranhas as he swam. The river was black with soot, as if ash had mixed into the water, and the riverbed was a wasteland.

So he swam, wasting himself, surging upstream, mind numb.

Until the mindlink finally meshed with the nerves in his spinal column and suddenly he understood more than he had thought possible.

He knew the names of the trees that he had seen, the weeds and the frogs. The fish inside his penis was called a candiru, and if he had known of its existence, he could have tied a band around his organ to protect it.

He realized that the bomb could not be nuclear. He had been holding it close and no boils had formed from radiation. So he considered Escalas’s last words. Always the old mer had spoken with double entendre, always hiding his meaning, trying to force Aracai to think.

The neogods would never have lent their efforts to killing others.

But the old mer had begged a boon from them. A bomb. A heavy bomb, heavier than gold. As he guessed at the bomb’s intent, his energy redoubled, and he swam forward with excitement, brimming with wonder.

Escalas had urged him to take responsibility for his own evolution.

So he asked the Heavenly Hosts: If a bomb were packed with retroviruses, how heavy would it be?

The AIs answered: The viruses would be pure DNA, and have no cell membranes or empty plasma around them. They would weigh more than a kilo per cubic centimeter.

Heavier than gold.

I am carrying a viral weapon, he realized. But what will it do?

He knew Escalas. The old mer had not had a cruel bone in his body. He had always urged Aracai to ponder. Even his last gift had been his greatest possession, the mindlink.

But viruses could be more than weapons. A retrovirus could insert itself among a person’s DNA to repair damage, or even to upgrade a person.

Viruses to make us wise, he thought. That is what Escalas would have wanted. And through his mindlink he asked the AIs of Heavenly Host if retroviruses might be used to do that. The answers amazed him. There were viruses that could quadruple the number of neural connections in the human brain, while others could increase the numbers of neurons alone. Those two viruses in and of themselves could quadruple a person’s thinking power.

But there were more; the AIs showed him, viruses that could make a man live longer, eradicate diseases, love one another more. Over a hundred thousand upgrades had been developed, and dozen more were coming every day.

As Aracai studied the lists, he saw that Escalas had tagged thousands of such viruses.

Escalas would have wanted all of them. Aracai thought he understood. The bomb would rid the world of feral humans once and for all.

But how valuable would such upgrades be? Human doctors charged huge sums to administer such things. After all, any upgrade could give a man huge advantages.

To his surprise, the AIs already knew: The bomb you carry is probably worth more than the sum total of all the earth’s wealth for the next thousand years.

Aracai gasped at the thought and wondered what the old mer could have traded for such a boon. But there was nothing in this world that he could have given.

His life, Aracai suspected.

Had the bargain amused the neogods? One amoeba trading its life to help all others?

Perhaps it had amused them. Or perhaps they had recognized the nobility behind the request.

It all made a bit of sense to Aracai now. The GPS on the bomb, its red light. It could only be set off in one location, at Dos Brujas.

But why? He asked the Heavenly Host, but it went silent. Even it did not know all of the answers.

His blood did not call predators, but as Aracai swam he grew weaker. Many times he considered turning around, heading out to sea.

But it is too late to go home, he realized. He was too weak to swim that far. The ache in his muscles multiplied.

I will die no matter what I do.

So Aracai chose to die for a cause, just as a billion other martyrs had chosen to die for their causes over the millennia.

Huzzah! Huzzah for the martyrs, he thought.

If he had lived, the old mer would have revealed his plans to Aracai, he believed. He might even have begged the younger mers to help him. But Escalas had failed.

Eventually Aracai found the place. The full moon was setting in the west, glistening on the water and tinged red from the smoke of distant fires.

He spotted Dos Brujas, with its dark tower rising from the black waters. A red light at its top was probably meant to warn away aircraft, but it seemed to glare out over the river like a red eye.

There, on either bank, were the factories with their sewage pipes spewing poison.

Aracai felt beyond weary, numb beyond thinking. Adrenaline seemed to carry him this far, but now it was gone and he fumbled to fulfill his mission. He lay gasping, gills flaring, and rose to the surface, floating on his stomach.

Aracai found the button, saw that it now emitted a soft green light. He pressed it for what seemed minutes.

The disk twisted in his hand, began spinning rapidly in the water, then rose above the surface, whirling faster and faster until it began to rise into the air.

He watched it ascend into the night sky. Tiny white LEDs on its bottom became a blurring ring, so that as it rose, it brightened and seemed to take its place among the blazing stars.

It ascended above the city of Dos Brujas.

Aracai feared a flash of light more blinding than the midday sun and a ball of fire to end his life, but instead, at perhaps three thousand feet, the bomb suddenly exploded with a shrieking whistle, sending its contents spinning and streaming in every direction.

It looked as if a watery shield suddenly spread over the city—as if a mist raced for miles in every direction. The viruses spread wide, a plague of wisdom.

He wondered how many people they would infect, and Heavenly Host answered: The infection will start here, among the poorest people of South America, and then the viruses will be carried by the winds across Africa and India, until the plagues encompass the earth, putting an end to stupidity and avarice, waging war against war itself.

There was no thunder, no rumbling of the earth. In wonder Aracai faded from consciousness, now sure of what he had unleashed. Change, he thought. Change for the better. A new world, where men can take responsibility for their own evolution. I am so lucky to have witnessed this. Our children will inherit the stars.

For a while he floated downstream, gasping, floundering. His eyes dimmed, he struggled to breathe, soot and poisons choking him.

A buzz rang in his ears, and suddenly he heard old Escalas’s voice one last time: Come swim with me.

He looked up and saw the Milky Way, stars shining like a river of light in the heavens. Escalas was swimming down toward him, with Dulce smiling at his side, and holding her hand was their tiny daughter.

He reached up, and with a firm grip around his wrist, Dulce pulled him free of his wasted flesh.