by Clarke, Neil
I felt exhausted. “I have to go now,” I said.
“Come again,” he invited me, showing me to the door. “
“I will,” I said. I knew I would not.
Instead, I visited the ship, Alanis.
She was retired, and lived in a special place, down at the docks. She was the most important ship on Celadon, after all. Every week, technicians came in and lovingly checked her ports, inspected her chips. The dock-boys polished her hull and shined her floors. Children left flowers beneath her. Sometimes, her keepers gave tours, which she didn’t enjoy very much. She did enjoy my visits, though. But they’ve been rare, mostly alongside my mother.
This time, I went alone, and with a mission.
“Alanis,” I said, standing on her main deck, watching the dark lights that I liked to think of as her eyes.
“Yes,” she answered.
“I need help. For my mother. I need logs, recordings. I need to know all the details about the weeks before they landed on Celadon. I want to know how the decisions were made. Do you have that? Do you still have the logs?”
“Of course,” she said, sounding amused. “I haven’t forgotten.” I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me or not.
“Can I have them?”
“Of course.”
She painted a disk for me and gave it to me with a cup of hot chocolate. “Thank you,” I said.
She couldn’t make real hot chocolate anymore; her domestics were corrupted and her keepers had stopped replenishing the stores a long time ago. I didn’t tell her that, just took the disk and the cup with me as I left. Why did everyone but me seem so old?
I walked through the city, clutching my disk and looking for somewhere to discard the mug of chocolate sludge.
The city alone was young, the same age as me.
You could tell. Maybe it was the effect of construction by nanites, but everything seemed youthful and energetic. The streets glowed. The stoplights inspected the traffic beneath. Houses vibrated, ever so slightly, like a picture with weak transmission.
I’d noticed that Ravin’s furniture seemed solid and inert. Because it was old, or because it was built by hand?
The more I thought about it, the more his home seemed like its own kind of prison.
After visiting Alanis, I was ready. This was what I’d been waiting to do for years, and I was finally old enough. By the time the journey ended, I was even older.
I traveled to Tenne, to go before the panel. It wasn’t the same panel of anthropologists who’d sentenced my mother, although I recognized a few familiar faces—if they could be called faces. I doubt they recognized me. It had been thirty-some years, and I was no longer the same pale and awkward girl. Slowly, falteringly, I grew into my mother’s strength.
The anthropologists were clipped and impatient, glaring at me over snouts and beaks and masks. I’d traveled light-years to get here — they would have to be patient.
“I am here to speak on behalf of my mother,” I said.
“State her name for the record, please.”
It was a long name: new syllables garnered for every century, every experience that had marked her.
“Go on,” the moderator intoned. She was a cyborg, with long synthetic limbs, metallic purple hair, and a sleek silicone shine to her skin. I couldn’t interpret her inflection, nor her expression. It was a specific kind of loneliness that I’d learned to live with.
“My mother was unfairly sentenced for the crime of many. She gave the order, yes. But the whole group voted.” I produced my logs from the ship. They showed my mother giving the final order; they also showed unanimous agreement.
I presented the panel with everything I had. “She should not bear the weight of this decision alone. It was a group decision. Everyone who lives on Celadon should share the responsibility, together.”
The panel was brisk and disinterested. “I’m sorry,” the cyborg said, “but we rarely reverse the decision of a previous court, except in notable extenuating circumstances. All this information was available at the time of the previous hearing.”
“Yes. But my mother didn’t bring it up. Because she wasn’t like that. She was the only one who was willing to take responsibility for the actions.”
“Then the responsibility clearly rests with her,” the cyborg said, and I couldn’t tell if she was being unkind or not. “If you’d like to appeal this to a higher court, you are within your rights as a galactic citizen to go before the High Court of Cultural Differences.”
“But that’s on the other side of the galaxy.” It would take me longer to reach the High Court than all the years I’d been alive so far.
“Precisely,” she said crisply. “Your mother has already lived for centuries. If you want to give your first years for her last, then go ahead. The next ship leaves for the High Court in a few months.”
I pleaded as long as they’d allow, but their decision was final. At some level, I’d expected it all along. Only longing had made me hope for the unforeseen. After all, communication from world to world had always been hazy, and rules changed faster than space travel. I’d hoped there was a chance.
I declined their offer of transportation to the High Court. “I’ll find my own ship.”
I’d already decided: if I was going to the High Court, then Ravin was going with me. He would not have been my first choice of companions, but I felt he had a responsibility. I wasn’t ready to make my way into the galaxy alone. And my mother had chosen him first.
Besides, what was a couple years of preparation for a fifty-year journey?
I found passage to Celadon.
Now, in transit between Tenne and Celadon, I’ve spent my spare hours writing this account. I’ve reviewed what has passed. I’m prepared for what is to come.
When I arrive on Celadon, there is a letter.
My mother has died. Peacefully, in her sleep. Perhaps she was already gone, even as I pled her case before the panel. It’s so hard to calculate time.
She’s been absent from my world for so long, yet death makes me feel her absence more sharply. Even worlds away, she was the force that kept my world revolving.
Heartbroken, I wander aimlessly through the city. I wish I could go to Ravin, but I can’t. Too much has come between us. He will never be family.
The city feels changed, too. The change is indefinable. But the lights glare brighter; the noises are louder, more unnatural.
I sit in my apartment. I drink fragrant green tea and wait, letting my eyes drift half-closed as I watch the silver play of light in lace curtains.
Until the curtains crumble black and turn to dust, the walls are streaked with moist darkness, and the moss squelches beneath my bare feet.
I want to find my mother, but time works differently here; seeking does not always lead to finding. Instead, I wander, patient as a dream. Whole sections of the city have been reclaimed by the moss. There are few people. I glimpse them in dark corners, pale like worms, locked in tangles of arms and legs. I long to join them, but I keep walking.
Butterflies land in droves on my shoulders, sprinkling me with the sugar that dulls the sting.
In this world, all life is the same. At first, I believed there were only three life-forms here. Now I understand there is only one. The worms, the moss, the butterflies… all are merely manifestations of its being: spanning this world from the ground to the sky, seeing all, knowing all, devouring all.
I find my mother at the edge of a dripping forest. She sits with her back against a sturdy tree, her white hair intertwined with its roots. Her emerald-green eyes consider me, comfortably. She smiles in welcome. She opens her mouth to speak, but all that emerges is a small white butterfly, which alights gracefully on my shoulder.
I fight the urge to sleep, and struggle to speak.
“Mother,” I stammer, my tongue sticky-dry. “Mother. Are you happy here?”
Her lips don’t move, but I feel her voice, echoing through me. “Of course. Always.”
/> I lie beside her, and the tree’s roots shift to accommodate me. The moss drifts over my face and blinds my eyes. The butterflies weave patterns in my hair. The ghostworms caress my fingers. Finally, I understand.
This is life, eternal, everlasting. It is not good, it is not evil. It simply is. It desires to be always more. And I too desire, to be part of everything, to feel it all.
“You’re here,” the moss whispers into my ears as it penetrates, and it greets me with a vision: the moment on which all else depends. A moment which changes history; yet there are many histories on Celadon, and enough consciousness to hold them all.
I am a woman, strong and eager, standing on the foremost deck of a smart and gentle ship. The fans blow breezes through my hair. The leaves of trees rustle above me. Inside me, a heart beats, beautiful and unfaltering. I stroke my stomach, the swelling expanse that waits beneath my crimson dress. I stand before a window; below stretches a green and glowing planet. I’ve already named it, but nobody knows yet. Celadon. This pulsating green world and the heartbeat inside me have become the two lovers I live for.
Resolute, I turn from the window, summing up the energy to create and destroy worlds. I speak, one word:
“Now.”
About the Author
Desirina Boskovich graduated from Emory University in 2005, with a degree in creative writing. In 2007, she attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. Her work is forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, as well as Last Drink Bird Head and The Leonardo Variations, edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer. Currently, she lives in Atlanta, in the light-filled attic of an old brick building. She works as a freelance copywriter and drinks too much tea.
“Teaching Bigfoot to Read”
by Geoffrey W. Cole
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: hi big guy
Sent: Saturday, October 10, 2122 11:09 AM LST
Dear Bigfoot,
Life on the moon sucks. Dad got home early from the air factory today and I wasn’t done cleaning the dishes from breakfast so he broke my breakfast bowl over my head. Guess I’ll have to eat out of his bowl tomorrow.
Dad says he’s gonna have to get a new job. Not that he told me. He told Melinda, the girl he’s been bringing home lately. They drank the last of his screech — that’s this nasty rum like they used to make back on Earth — then started poking each other on the bottom bunk while I sat on the top. Dad caught me peaking and near took my eye out when he threw his boot. Melinda calmed him down at least, and they got back to poking at each other.
Dad saw me writing to you when Melinda left. He said What the f–k was I doing writing to a bigfoot. See one day I asked him why he didn’t pray to Jesus like Mario’s mother, and he said he may as well pray to Santa Claus or bigfoot for all the good it would do. Well I got to thinking praying might not do any good, but an email should get to you.
Not sure what good you can do anyway, seeing as you’re down there on Earth, but writing to you is better than nothing. I should probably get to bed. Dad’s snoring and that makes me tired. I’ll finish this in the morning.
Morning. Dad got up late and complained when his breakfast was cold but he ate it all anyway and I had to wait forever until I could use his bowl and to tell you the truth I don’t care for cold powdered eggs. Dad kept saying we wouldn’t be able to afford things like powdered eggs, and said there was other things we wouldn’t be able to afford too, like air and water, but they never shut off the air, just the water, and I can always get some from the neighbours anyway.
What’s it like to have water fall for free from the sky, and air you never have to worry about going sour? And trees. I’d sure like to see one. Mario’s shown me some with his VR deck, but you know they’re not real, just like the ladies he shows me aren’t real, but boy are they pretty. Prettier than Melinda, anyhow.
Don’t know when Dad will be back today. He said he’s going to go to the pharma factory to see if he can get work there, but Mario’s dad works there, and his dad’s got his highschool, so I’m not so sure about my Dad’s chances. The breakfast bowl is still in the sink; I should clean it while I still got water running.
Ace
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: stupid prairie dogs
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2122 10:46 PM LST
Dear Bigfoot,
At school they asked us to do presentations, and I did mine on you. I didn’t tell them I emailed you, but I told them everything else. Mrs. Drissold said that I was supposed to do a presentation on a real wild creature, and I told her you were real enough. The other kids did gazelles and lions and stupid prairie dogs, and she said I should of done something like that. Well I told her, none of them kids has ever seen a gazelle or a lion or a stupid prairie dog, and I ain’t seen a bigfoot, so what’s the difference. I guess I got too excited, cause I ripped up the poster with the stupid prairie dog on it, but you know what’s it like sometimes when you get too excited, don’t you?
Dad was home when I got back from school, and he was none too pleased that I ripped up the other kid’s stupid prairie dog poster. Mrs. Drissold must of called Dad and tattled on me, which don’t seem right. I don’t tattle on her when she forgets my name. Dad warned me against messing with other people’s stuff, but when I told him about the kid who’d talked on and on about the stupid prairie dogs, he laughed and said yeah, they are f–king stupid.
The pharma factory didn’t take him, and neither did the shit factory. Sorry, shouldn’t have cussed, but Dad always says it, and heck, you’re bigfoot. You must shit all over the place. He’s gonna try the port tomorrow. I told him not to, Graham’s dad got killed at the port, and so did the dad of that kid who always stinks like piss, but he said there was shit else to do, with the mines all closed and everyone shipping out of Avalon to other parts of the moon.
Do bigfoots write? I don’t even know, but if you can read this, you can probably write. Don’t know why you’d have an email address if you can’t write, so you must be able to.
Ace
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: chicken heads
Sent: Monday, November 9, 2122 11:58 PM LST
Dear Bigfoot,
They shut off the water. Jerks. Dad’s only missed three payments. I’ve been round asking for whatever the neighbours can spare, but they don’t have much, and a few of them have been cut off too.
I got a boot in the arm for breakfast. I told Dad we didn’t have anything but yeast-meal, but he hollered that he hated the stuff. He apologized after he dumped it on the floor, and told me he’d buy me real eggs one day. He always goes on about em, real eggs. He says I even tried eggs once when I was a baby before Mom died, but I don’t remember. They seem gross anyhow. Something like chicken in a blender? Nasty. Not that I know what chicken tastes like either, just the fake stuff they grow up here, though Dad tells me everything tastes like chicken but the fake chicken.
I’d like to see a real chicken. A kid did a presentation on chickens last week, which was better than the stupid prairie dogs, but I must of fallen asleep halfway through cause Mrs. Drissold whacked me on the head. One thing I do remember is that chickens run around when their heads get cut off. Can you do that? I bet you’d run around until you found your head then you’d stick it back on your neck and run off into the forest.
By the way, I still haven’t heard back from you. I know it’s only been two emails, but I’m waiting, all right?
I got an idea. Why don’t you send me a photo of you? Your computer can probably take it. Then I can sell your photo, get the water back on, and get Dad and me a better place to live. Could you do that? You don’t even have to write anything (its okay, I didn’t learn how to write until two years ago when I was seven).
Ace
To: [email protected]
rra
From: [email protected]
Subject: can you read this?
Sent: Tuesday, November 17, 2122 1:33 AM LST
Dear Bigfoot,
Dad got a job at the port. You’d think good news, but he spent the first pay cheque on two bottles of screech and Melinda. She hasn’t been around in so long, I kinda forgot how bad she smells. Anyway, when they were poking each other and shaking my bed something fierce, I got to thinking I should come see you. Maybe you need someone to read these notes to you. Don’t know how I can get there. Dad said once that I can’t leave the moon, cause I grew up too tall and skinny for Earth gravity, but I think that’s nuts. People are coming and going from Earth all the time. And I heard that if you sit in a pool of water it feels like there’s no gravity at all. Well, I never seen a pool of water, but I was thinking I could just sit in a big creek or river or something and read you my emails. Maybe I could even teach you how to read em yourself. It’s not that hard. Well, it’s kinda hard. Dad actually helped me learn it. He said, if you can’t read, you ain’t shit. No son a mine’s gonna grow up a literate. Course he didn’t have books or anything, just old magazines with lots of naked ladies and the hockey newspapers. I learned enough about reading to teach a bigfoot.
Course maybe you got one of those voice-reader programs on your computer. Still, I’m a good teacher. I taught Mario how to steal pastries from the baker without getting caught. Well, I didn’t get caught, and he didn’t get in much trouble, just the black eye the baker gave him. His mom ragged Dad out something furious!
Ace