by James Welsh
“I’m just saying – it sounds like you already know a bit about quicksand…”
“Quiet, the both of you!” One of their female comrades snapped. She pointed at the mountains that loomed over them like empires. “The longer we’re out there, the more time you’re giving them a good shot. Come on, let’s get back into the van – we’ll radio Acheron for assistance. It’s going to take more than a couple of us pushing – a lot more.”
The men grunted in agreement and followed her back into the van. At first, as they clambered into the van, they didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. It wasn’t until the young man sat down and realized that he suddenly had a lot more legroom that he realized that something was terribly wrong. He leapt up, cracking his head on the low ceiling of the van.
“They took it!”
“What? Who?”
“The food, they took the whole crate of food that was right here!”
The young man pushed past the dumbfounded guards and rushed back outside. He spun around wildly like a drunken top, ready to fall down hard. But everywhere the guard looked was silence. The crate had dissolved away, as if by magic. But every once in a while, what is real is actually more inspired than what is magic.
***
In the shadow of the sunshine, Cathedral Mountain stood like a gravestone over the River Sedna, a sanctuary for the dead. The mountainside was too twisted, the stone too hot – it was a Renaissance painting that should have died centuries ago, its paint crackling off the canvas like snow.
But just a few hours later – when the sun fell but the temperatures did not – the mountain gasped alive. There was a worn parking lot at the foot of the mountain, with a harvest of hard weeds sprouting from the split concrete. Only when the weeds were cleared could someone appreciate how overwhelming the past was. The lot was much larger than it needed to be, once enough to hold hundreds of cars. Now, all that was left was a pack of motorhomes tucked into the corner of the parking lot. The decades were not kind – they looked less like motorhomes and more like a rockslide from the mountain. Each of the vehicles was crumbling, their engines picked for parts, the windows shattered, and the sides rusting.
But, a civilization was born from the ruins, like the first bacteria swimming in the hot springs of an ancient Earth. Dozens of children were running around the motorhomes, laughing and carrying on. As they ran, their mothers shouted through the broken windows of the motorhomes, urging their children to be quiet – if the charter found out where they were hiding, all was lost.
But the children refused, because shouts were life and silence was death. The elderly man – and patriarch to the entire tribe – seemed to agree. He sat on a box just outside one of the motorhomes, playing a violin even older than him. He didn’t care if the violin was missing half of its strings or that it went out-of-tune a century before. He just played an endless symphony to the feet rustling through the weeds like wind.
At the other end of the playground, there was a little boy standing where the concrete jumped off the edge and into the canyon. The other children were frightened of the edge – to them, it represented where their world ended. But the boy liked to throw loose stones across the canyon, trying to hit the wall on the other side. The canyon was narrow, but his throwing arm was weak. The little boy knew that he would hear a rock bounce off the other wall one day, though.
A moment before he threw a rock with a good weight to it, the boy heard a sudden voice behind him. “Wolfmouth!”
The distracted Wolfmouth Moser threw a bad pitch, the rock limping across the gap before plunging to the riverbed far below. He turned and saw his twin sister, Stormrunner, glowing in the chalk of the moonlight.
Wolfmouth turned back to the canyon and continued throwing stones. “What do you want?”
Stormrunner sat down a folded cloth on the ground between them. She opened it, revealing just a bit of the food that she had stolen from the convoy earlier in the day. “I brought you dinner.”
Wolfmouth scoffed. “I don’t need dinner.”
“If you get any skinnier, you’ll turn into a ghost,” Stormrunner said, not joking. While they were twins, it was obvious that she was the only one of the pair who liked food. She was by no means hefty, but she was at least a healthy weight, with life burning in her face. But Wolfmouth was a kite of bones – if he lost another pound, he’d turn jellyfish.
But Wolfmouth didn’t share her concern, or at least he wasn’t listening. He threw another rock, satisfied by the toss, although it only reached halfway across the canyon. He listened to the rock clatter against the walls on the way down to the riverbed. In the echo of the fall, Wolfmouth said quietly, his back still turned to Stormrunner, “Grandfather Seth said that we shouldn’t love the food we steal. He said that it would leave our stomachs emptier than they were before. We’re supposed to save it, to have it only when we need to, not when we want to.”
Stormrunner frowned. “He’s not our grandfather, Wolfmouth.”
“Yes, he is!” Wolfmouth said sharply, turning to face his sister. His throwing arm was shaking, and Stormrunner noticed that he had a stone clenched in his hand. But Wolfmouth was the only of the two that was afraid. He and the other gypsies were afraid of the elderly Seth and his iron words that rang when he hammered them. They thought they loved Seth, but it’s so easy to mistake fear for love.
But when Stormrunner looked into Seth’s eyes, she only saw a stranger looking back at her. And if loving food only made the thief hungrier, than Seth was the hungriest of them all – Stormrunner regularly saw him sneaking in the blind of night to take food out of the crates. It was understandably hard for her to fear Seth, let alone respect him.
Stormrunner sighed as she picked up the food and trudged back through the jungle of night, towards her tattered sleeping bag. The world around them was hot – almost to the point of melting – but it wasn’t warm like the sleeping bag was. That fabric was the closest thing she had to a family in her life. She could almost see it glow through the darkness, lighting her way home.
***
2196 AD
“And what is it that we’ll be having today, Mr. Dart?”
Alaois Dart hovered over the trough of parcels, examining each of the packages by their labels. As he looked, he twisted a pinch of his scarlet beard between his fingertips, a familiar tic of his. Dart tapped his foot nervously, knowing full well that there were people in line behind him. He needed to make a choice and quick.
Stormrunner Moser, meanwhile, was as calm and gentle as the colonists had come to know her. With bronze skin and long, chestnut hair, Stormrunner looked like a nymph carved out of a tree. But her smile cracked her bark, as Stormrunner said gently, “Take your time. There are so many good choices.”
“Good choices?” One of the colonists in line grumbled. “We must not be eating the same food.”
Stormrunner immediately picked up on the voice. She peered around Dart and asked, “That can’t possibly be our Arturo Solis? The man who lives well so that the rest of us don’t have to?”
The line rippled with chuckles as a hesitant Solis stepped out. A man in the afternoon of his life, with his wavy hair still rich and coal, Solis said, “At least tell us that you got some spices in the shipment coming this afternoon.”
“We will, but the last time we got spices, they didn’t impress you.”
“That is because the only true spice is a farm of long peppers I visited long ago, on the shore of the Mediterranean. The pepper our machines back home grind out is just not the same.”
“Well, food can be bland as the person eating it,” Stormrunner said curtly before turning back to Dart with a smile. “Don’t mind Arturo – he has no idea what he’s talking about, just like the rest of us. Choose what you want.”
Most weeks there were only a few types of rations. There was a meat ration, which consisted of the in vitro steaks that were artificially grown in the granary. While it was packed with nutrition for the carnivore, the meat
was translucent, had no taste, and had the consistency of jelly even when cooked. There was a vegetarian ration, grown from the hanging gardens in the granary as well – while it was crunchy and juicy, the vegetables had an unpleasant metallic aftertaste, courtesy of the granary’s aging structure. And then there was the baker’s ration, which was a sourdough baked from the field of rye at the granary.
But this week there was a new addition to the menu: seafood. Along with spice, the charter had exported a fisherman’s catch of tilapia, which was cryogenically frozen to survive the years-long trip to the Volans colony. Like all of the other colonial food, the fish was starved of taste and unappealing to look at. But the freedom that came with a new choice was all the colonists were asking for.
For as long as anyone could remember, Dart chose the baker’s ration, its sour taste pinching his cheeks but the bread giving him the illusion of a full stomach. But the seafood ration caught him off-guard. He never had fish before – part of him wanted to try it, but the other part of him was afraid to try something new. In the end, Dart walked away with the parcel of sourdough, his choice of food just as predictable as he was.
The spice that had arrived from Earth was dirigo spice – this was dried strips of a newfound type of kelp, just discovered off the shores of former Maine. The spice had a strange taste to it, confusing taste buds to the point where they weren’t sure if it was salty or bitter or sour or sweet. It was said that the taste varied from person to person, depending on what their subconscious hungered for. Some people longed for the taste of salt once more, and so the spice became salt. Some people dreamt of chocolate that they hadn’t tasted in years since the last shipment of candy arrived, and the spice became sweet. The spice had just arrived in the colony for the first time, and already the colonists were demanding it with every meal. Even a picky soul like Arturo Solis was curious about it. No one knew that the charter back home was experimenting on them, testing to see if there were any health drawbacks with long-term consumption of dirigo spice.
Once she had handed out all of the food parcels for the day, Stormrunner closed her food store. It was a simple building, a square of rock that was situated on the bank of Canal White Clay, just where the canal’s water dumped into the Dives. According to poetry, that large well was the heart of the colony – it was where the colony’s canals poured into, refreshing and recirculating the water back into the colony. The Dives was the center of the colony in more ways than one. After all, it was where the granary was located. If the Dives fell, it would not be long before the colony jumped after it.
As she closed down the food store, drawing the window’s metal shutters closed and locking them, Stormrunner smiled in the gurgle of the nearby waterfalls. It soothed her spirit, like the lullabies of a mother that she couldn’t remember. Checking the locks twice and satisfied that it was all closed down, Stormrunner then began walking along the rocky shore of Canal White Clay. The break between shifts had just ended, and she found herself alone by her river, with the rest of the colony behind doors, working. She had always loved walking against the rush of the water, although her walks were becoming more diamond by the day. She wasn’t meant to be the working the food stores, already busy enough with her working of farming the granary. But none of her other workers were eager to take the job, and not just because it was tedious and repetitive. It was because it was associated with bad luck and superstition – when it came to people who previously worked the food store, it was a long history of suicide and accident and murder. One worker had choked to death on a slice of bread he had stolen from one of the parcels. Another worker jumped to his death in the Dives. And the last of the fated workers was none other than Anzhela Khunrath, who had died from an allergic reaction just after arriving at the colony. After that, everyone was reluctant to take the job, and so Stormrunner took on the duty. She could have abused her authority and forced one of her workers to do it, but she didn’t have the heart for that.
The longhouse for both the farm and medical personnel was just ahead. Their sleeping quarters looked just the same as all of the other longhouses in the colony, creating a vertigo that was hard to shake. The only thing that set their home apart from the others was a seemingly normal boulder, just next to the longhouse. The boulder had a wide, steel door running the width of the stone – the door was broken into three panels like a triptych painting. On one of the panels was a touchpad. Stormrunner extended one finger and wrote out a word – “commons” – on the touchpad. A microchip embedded in her finger interacted with the electronics, and the panels slid open, revealing a dark tunnel like a mouth, opened. Stormrunner entered the tunnel and began walking briskly, her pace naturally quickening as the tunnel dove sharply into the ground. As she walked into the tunnel, the door slid shut behind her.
Across history, most people would be frightened to walk down a tunnel that wormed towards the center of the world. To them, it meant a descent into the underworld, from which there can be no return. But Stormrunner wasn’t frightened at all – technology had given her the strength to walk into the darkness and not look back. With every step, her weight tripped the pressure tiles built into the tunnel’s floor. This sparked an overhead light just a few feet ahead to illuminate the tunnel. With another step, she triggered the next pressure plate, turning on the next light while turning off the last one. The tunnel was long, and it would be waste of energy to light the entire tunnel for the whole time someone was walking through.
After the usual two minutes of walking, the tunnel suddenly bottomed out and made a dramatic right turn. Stormrunner stumbled a bit as she stepped off the incline and onto flat ground once more – no matter how many times she walked that tunnel, she always tripped right there. As she continued walking, she heard the soft sound of dripping – a good fifty feet above her head, Canal White Clay streamed towards the Dives, which was just ahead. Already, the tunnel was beginning to glow, and it was not just from the overhead lights triggered by her footsteps.
The walls on both sides arced wide and Stormrunner found herself in the granary. The granary and the Dives were a duet of dancers, twisting together to the point where it was impossible to tell one from the other. There were lights everywhere and the deafening sound of falling water, overwhelming Stormrunner’s senses after having just been born out of the dim tunnel.
She adjusted in a moment, though, finding herself in the ringed hallway that surrounded the Dives. This was the granary, where they built the food to feed the entire colony. There was no wall on the inside of the ring, the workers directly exposed to the roaring waterfalls from above. As the water tumbled down, it rinsed the rows of cage-like shelves that were connected to the hallway. Each shelf held the thick stalks of wheat and rye and other crops that the colonists grew, their roots jutting diagonally into the cold rush of the water. The workers inspected each of the cages, to see if the crops had fully matured and were ready for their harvest. One of the workers yanked a rich stalk of wheat out of one of the compartments, the crop bursting with so much color it seemed impossible that it was grown without soil. While some workers sweated through the magic act of turning grains into bread, a few other workers stood at the meat printers along the outside wall of the ring. They guided out the sheets of grown meat, before cutting and rolling them into the shape of cigars.
While the play around Stormrunner was one that chaos wrote, there seemed to be a pattern. All of the granary workers were loading vacuum-sealed packages of food on a nearby cart. Once the cart had been loaded, one of the workers then pushed the cart around the ring, wheezing, their arms trembling as they rolled the heavy load of food. Through the static of the waterfalls in the center of the granary, Stormrunner watched the worker leave the cart at the elevator platform on the other side of the ring before walking away. It was the moment that Stormrunner had been waiting for: her true work for the colony.
Stormrunner walked past her workers, nodding politely and murmuring hellos to each of them. Upon reaching the platform, s
he glanced around first to make sure that no one was looking. Confident that everyone was looking at their work and not at her, she knelt down on the platform, her index finger with the embedded microchip hovering over a touchpad dug into the floor. She looked at the watch clasped around her wrist – it was a strange watch, its face only showing the seconds from one to sixty before recycling. She waited until the watch clicked to the eighteenth second in its rotation. The moment the face said that number, she began scrawling out on the touchpad a word – “chai.” Immediately, there was a whirring as the platform around her sank into the floor.
The platform descended slowly – as it did so, a panel slid across the hole above her, sealing the floor closed. But Stormrunner did not dive into the darkness. Instead, she found herself on the lower level of the granary. It was here where all of the food was kept, safe, away from hungry hands. There were crates of the sealed packages, with thin aisles between the heaps of containers. The strips of overhead lights casted down a shine that played in the support beams and scribbled shadows on the floor. The air was brisk but not cold – if Stormrunner had experienced a cold October night back on Earth, she would have compared the storeroom to that.
There was a soft bump as the elevator platform settled on the floor, and Stormrunner wheeled her cart onto the floor. The sound of the wheels against rock woke up the sleepy room, and Stormrunner immediately heard a voice from one of the aisles call out, “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Wolfmouth – who else?”
Her twin brother stepped out from behind one of the crates, his arms folded in front of him. While Stormrunner was painted with the colors of earth and life, Wolfmouth was everything she was not – his face was diluted and strained, his raven hair only making him look paler. While he was family – the only family that Stormrunner had left, actually – she still felt a shudder whenever she saw him, like a reflex. She felt so short whenever she looked into his eyes and only found sickness, like flowers trying to grow in the moonlight.