by J L Forrest
I think of Imka. I think of Ruby. I remember the epidemiological reports from San Francisco and Mr. Avidità’s every word about sexually transmitted diseases.
XXIV. A Sending
2131.4.14.7:12 PST
58°15’52.8”N 134°28’24.3”W
Alt 632m
The Faen
New Juneau
Hall of the Queens
I awake in Ruby’s bed, and she is sitting, as conscious of her nakedness as a bird might be of its plumage. Outside the Hall of the Queens, angry male voices grunt, shout, growl, yell. The raven known as Evermore caws. All this noise rings throughout the square.
“What’s going on?” I ask Ruby.
Her voice trembles. “A Sending.”
“What is that?”
“Death to our enemies, that’s what. You should see it.”
I slide from her bed and dress. Two Horned Lords stand by the thrones, a few residents remain in their bowers, but everyone else has departed. The massive doors stand ajar, and I head out onto the steps.
A thousand citizens of New Juneau pack the outer edges of the square but leave open a wide area at its middle. The market which filled this space yesterday is gone. The Queens stand amidst sixteen Horned Lords, and I have arrived during Cailín’s speech:
“—odens lend you His wisdom and guide you, you beloved brothers, lovers, teachers, guardians. Our loves. Our saviors—”
Bettina walks among the sixteen. They stand tall, grasping their spears, their focus soft.
“—and keepers. Our husbands. Your every wit, your every clever cut. Your best blades, you truest words, your conniving. Take every tool you have, every weapon, every trick, and bring the Gods—”
Bettina kisses the Horned Lords, kisses each as a bride would kiss her groom.
“—to Our enemies. This journey will be difficult, and the New Gods’ magics are many and deceitful. Yet the Old Gods are with you, Our Gods of the millennia, who’ve seen everything before and will see everything again. They’ll walk and battle and die beside you, Our brothers, and when all is done We’ll join you in their Summer Country.”
The Horned Lords rattle their spears and thump the cobbled ground with them. They grunt and howl. Purple froth spills from their mouths and dribbles through their beards. They convulse. One drops to his knees and vomits, the bile dark. They shout in the tongue I do not understand, the words packed with rage.
“Go,” Cailín tells them, “honor the Gods, for Gods you are.”
It’s a biological weapon, I’m sure, whatever infects these people. Probably infects the land too, something altering the expression of proteins in plants and animals. The kind of shit Nesteler would do.
Maybe I can collect more samples, find a way to transport them to San Francisco, get them to the Bioengineering Division—
The Horned Lords growl and howl and crow. They shake as if trying to throw off their own skins. En masse the onlookers chant, though I cannot distinguish the mantra.
“Gods you are,” says Cailín, lifting her hands toward the Horned Lords, “now fly!”
Quietly, tranquilly, softly the sixteen Lords explode. Not in fire but in feathers, blackbirds erupt where men had stood, their wings flapping madly into the sky. I try to count, but in the chaos their number defies me—hundreds—and no men remain. Not their bodies, their clothes, nor their spears appear to have survived this old-fashioned metamorphosis. Like the Goddesses Circe and Callisto, the Queens stand at the heart of the square, surrounded by a thousand witnesses.
Not a biological weapon. Not only, and whatever technology this is, well—
“Sufficiently advanced,” I say.
Cailín waves to the crowds, then strolls back toward the hall. Passing me, she lays her hand on my shoulder.
“Keep looking for your rational explanations, spaceman.”
She goes inside and the crowds disperse.
Before following her wife, Bettina winks at me. “Prepare for a journey, Aur. Enjoy a meal, relax, but we’ll be sailing before one o’clock. We have a celebration to attend.”
She leaves me alone in the afternoon sun. A few of the men-turned-blackbirds are still visible, high in the sky, heading south. Soon, however, the last disappears from view.
XXIV. Attachments
Recollected
Imka’s death shook me. I often imagine that, if I’d been there, I could have saved her.
When we first got to know each other I was barely a teenager, and we enjoyed each other’s company only another dozen times, mostly on Africa IV. She was thirty years my senior, though the first time I saw her I guessed the difference more like ten. Despite the chasm in our ages, I’d crafted my own fantasy about us falling in love, about us having children, about Mr. Avidità releasing me to live the life she and I wanted. To this day I’m not sure whether as a Harque I can have children or not, but with her I’d have happily tried.
After our third or fourth encounter, Imka would always greet me with “Hey, rabbit-keeper.”
“Hey, lion-keeper,” I’d reply.
I suspect she thought of me like an enthusiastic younger brother, but I took what I could get.
She died five years ago, on a run between the Asteroid Belt and High Earth Orbit. A Nesteler Warhawk destroyed her shuttle, the Teetotaler, though Imka probably never knew she was in danger, would have passed from existence to nonexistence in a millisecond.
On occasion I still find myself fantasizing.
What if?
What if we’d grown close in some other universe?
This is all telling, of course, and no showing. There’s little substance in these recollections. Terrible for a Harque, who must live his narratives over and over until death, to assign such personally important events to exposition. But so it is. I wasn’t there for Imka’s death but, if I had been, I would’ve died with her.
There’s not a damn thing I could’ve done to save anyone on the Teetotaler.
Flapjacks died earlier, of course, when I was eighteen. An old rabbit, almost twelve. I wasn’t there for that moment either.
He faded peacefully in his hutch, surrounded by his food and his toys, one of the happiest rabbits to have ever lived.
My namesake once wrote, Accept humbly, let go easily.
Great advice, hellishly difficult in practice.
XXV. Giants & Unicorns
2131.4.14.17:04 PST
57°13’29.2”N 133°45’46.7”W
Alt Sea Level
The Faen
The Queens assembled a company of dozens—men, women, children—and ordered the preparation of six boats. The flurry of tasks, the chaos and excitement they created, allowed no time for reflection, to either refute or accept the impossibilities I’ve seen.
“You,” said an old sailor, his skin like loose canvas, his beard wild as sea foam, “you look like you’re in need of usefulness.”
“I guess I am,” I replied.
I accompanied him to the docks. I’m not ignorant of sailing, but I know it in theory more than in practice. Not unkindly, the man barked his commands at me—
“Draw the pintles from the gudgeons!”
“Secure the tiller!”
“Organize the tack!”
—and I did as well as I could. Together we bent on the sail, tied the halyard to the jib, and ran the sheet. Yesterday I figured myself a dead man; the day before, an assassin; the day before that, a man who understood his place in the cosmos, one with a clear purpose and clearer loyalties.
Today is frictionless. I can’t hold it, can’t delineate my own identity. We know who we are, don’t we? But when reality goes tits up, well—
I followed the sailor’s directions until he declared the vessel seaworthy. It was a small single-sailed cutter, not more than a few years old but also from another time, crafted by hand from oakwood. Other teams prepared other boats, including a grander longship for the Queens and a high-tech yacht, a hydrofoil christened the Potestatem, the same which Bett
ina and Cailín once commandeered from San Francisco.
Now four hours later we’re kilometers south, sailing under a steady wind. I ride at the starboard of the longship, near its impressive mast. Its sails billow, tugging us askew to the prevailing winds, and we bounce and chop against the waves. Bettina and Cailín perch nearer the prow. Nothing motorized on this vessel—men work the rigging and two stout women manage the rudder.
The hydrofoil plays outrider, clipping at our periphery, running circles around us. It had once belonged to the CEO of Strickland Industries, one of Avidità’s subsidiaries. The boat carries quasi-military armaments, the kind capable of transforming coastlines into firestorms.
The Queens and their Horned Lords have had years to scavenge naval ports, to collect whatever the pre-Blight militaries had left behind.
Our route takes us through Stephens Passage, between the wooded hillsides of a dozen major islands. After Pulse Three and the drowning of the world’s coasts, many a shoreline underwent radical alterations: the Inland Central Sea, east of San Francisco; the Eyre Australian Sea; Indonesia, and so many other low-lying geographies. Include in this accounting the Pacific Northwest and the Alaskan Panhandle, whose eroded valleys met the rising waters, erasing a hundred islands while creating a thousand more. These new isles dot the waters through which we glide, but I doubt most have a name. Mysterious, each one, imbued with romances, as if on them I might meet Oberon and Titania.
The lithe, skinnier, agile cutters ride lower in the water. They’d be fearsome weapons of war—in the ninth century—and the majority of their passengers aren’t warriors anyway. Artisans or farmers, not killers.
They don’t carry many personal weapons either.
Axes. Spears. A few hunting rifles.
I’ve been wondering where the machine guns are? The rocket launchers? The killbots?
Why is it that Avidità or Nesteler or the UPRC hasn’t wiped the Faen from existence? One tactical nuke would do it.
The Gods bring us everything but the nuclear warheads, Bettina had said. I saw the graveyard of technology.
On the nearest cutter sits Alastar’s new nurse, and she tucks the baby against her breast. Another child is with her, a brown-skinned, wiry-haired toddler. Near her is a third child, a pale sticklike girl of about seven, her dark hair long and straight. Of all things, she cradles a fluffy white puppy to her chest, and a darker pup plays at her feet.
We navigate from the Passage into Frederick Sound. Fog rolls in from the Pacific, wreathing the Baranof Islands, Kuiu Islands, and Kupreanof Islands in cream-white clouds, muting shades of evergreen into one hue undercut by inexplicable violets.
For seven glorious minutes the dusk transforms the sky, clouds shot through by kaleidoscopic rays like the trumpets of Valkyries riding home to Sessrúmnir.
Yet in the moments after dusk deepens into twilight, these metaphors lose meaning. No romances. No Oberon or Titania. No Norse Goddesses astride winged horses.
These fantasies shed their power, crushed by a giant who lumbers at the darkening horizon.
A giant.
THIS IS NOT A METAPHOR.
I stand and the ship’s rocking threatens to toss me overboard. Clutching my chest, I squint, convincing myself that what I see is what I see.
Both there and not there, the giant towers with its globulous head amongst the cloud-faded moonlight. Its colossal mass defies reason, a tentacled under-the-bed nightmare grown to Godhood. Winglike forms stretch from its back, translucent, tricking my eye—I cannot say where they end and the sky begins.
A WADING GIANT.
It sloshes northward through the ocean the way a man might shuffle through a kiddie pool. The islands and clouds and coming nighttime obscure my view, but I guess the giant must be following the continental shelf, past the drowned city of Sitka, one hundred klicks away.
“Sit,” says Cailín, sliding onto the bench beside me.
“What the fuck is that?” I ask, unable to look away from the mountainous, fleshy shoggoth.
“Sit.”
I button my fleece and join her. As Sol disappears, its warmth does too. Along much of the equator, April will see many days hotter than forty-five Celsius, but at this latitude that’s hard to imagine. Cailín’s cloak wraps her and in it she resembles some as-yet-uncategorized arctic mammal.
Waves smack the hull, a lulling rhythm, and I glance back over my shoulder to find the giant shoggoth gone. Veiled by fog? Submerged? A figment of my imagination?
“You’re questioning your sanity,” says Cailín.
I am but I say, “No—”
“To survive you’ll need a touch of madness.”
“Giants do not wander the oceans,” I say. “Men don’t turn into birds. Monsters don’t eat sacrificial victims.”
Her look is incredulous. “Monsters have always eaten sacrificial victims.”
“The Minotaur or Cetus or Scylla, they’re not real—”
“Any large corporation, any war, any drug epidemic—”
“Not the same.”
“Isn’t it?”
She sets her hand on my thigh, so overfamiliar I startle. I’d retreat, if I could, but nothing except the gunwale intervenes between me and the Sound’s near-freezing waters. Could I make it to shore before succumbing to the cold?
“What is a unicorn?” Cailín asks me.
“This a trick question? A horse or goat with a single horn, growing from its forehead.”
She rolls her eyes. “Assume they don’t exist.”
“Do they?” Would it be such a surprise?
“Assume they don’t. What is a unicorn?”
“An allegory,” I say.
“Excellent!” Her Irish inflections sparkle with delight. “For what?”
I shrug. “Purity, innocence, enchantment. Unicorns only visit virgins,” I say, “so the moral is to remain pure if you want magic in your life.”
“Lovely child’s fable, isn’t it? What is a corporation?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Corporations do exist.”
Sitting back in mock surprise, she blinks at me. “Could we hunt one tomorrow, shoot it through the heart, roast it, slice it up, serve it on a plate, and eat it?”
“Uh—”
“I’ve never eaten a corporation before! Marvelous! I can’t wait to taste one.”
“You’re razzing me.”
“Such an American word, ‘razzing.’ Listen, a unicorn could be more real than a corporation. Everyone on this ship could say, ‘I don’t believe in unicorns,’ but if a unicorn met us ashore, we’d have to change our minds, wouldn’t we?”
“I suppose.”
“What of corporations? If everyone who believes in them decided there was no such thing—” She snaps her fingers.
“Not sure that follows.”
Even the UPRC uses corporations, owned in majority by the state, and corporations outlive their founders—Avidità excepted. As near as I can tell, corporations are more real than some humans.
Cailín tucks a wisp of her hair behind her ear, but the wind insists on freeing it. “Monsters exist,” she says.
“Your wife said something about you making pacts with them. How do you enforce such agreements? How do you make a deal with Charybdis?”
“By serving something just as powerful.”
“Nodens,” I say.
“The Elder Gods!” She claps her hands, delighted. “You’re a spy, spaceman, in a world which won’t suffer lies, and you haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing.”
I have an ego, but I brush aside her words. “When did you know what I was?”
“We had you made—that is the correct word, ‘made,’ isn’t it?—shortly after you crossed into the Faen.”
“How?”
She touches her thumb to my forehead in the same way the Horned Lord did, that night at Threshold. No pain this time, her touch almost sensual.
“In the Faen,” she says, “lies are difficult to tell.”
<
br /> “Does that mean you see the truth?”
“We know what Nodens wishes us to know, and there is no fooling Him.”
I lean against the gunwale, considering the leap over it, into the water. Portside behind Cailín sits a Horned Lord, not looking my way, but making his presence felt. I’m as much a prisoner as I would be with shackles around my wrists.
“What do you know about me?” I ask her.
“You arrived in an Avidità-made escape pod—”
I correct her. “A re-entry lozenge.”
“You’re a terrible assassin but a good errand boy. The infant, Alastar, came down with you, though we found the farm and all the corpses, as you described them. Staged?”
It’s too dark to discern details across the water. Whether Alastar and his new caretaker still sit in the open or have gone beneath their vessel’s canvas covers, I don’t know.
“I’m confused,” I say.
“Why?” says Cailín, laying her hand on mine.
I’m beginning to understand, though. Cailín is a mother to this community, she embodies it, while her wife embodies some darker instinct for sheer survival. Yet Cailín, too, exudes a darkness, deep and as lightless as the Taku Inlet, as the sea floor, as the Mariana Trench. I’m reminded—Water seeks the dark places, where no one wishes to go. In the deep places it is closest to the true way.
Not my namesake’s words, but I’ve always found a complementary tension between the Tao Te Ching and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
“Why am I still alive?” I ask.
“The Old One rejected you—”
“I’m a spy,” I say. “You knew I was.”
“What would Thomas Avidità do with an enemy spy?”
“A spy wouldn’t suffer, much. Mr. Avidità has ways of interrogating that don’t cause much pain.”
She laughs. “Avidità, the lesser of evils.”
The Lesser of Evils.
A new Avidità corporate tagline?
“Compared to the UPRC? Nesteler?” I say. “Sure. But the two of you, you’re as evil.”