by Neil Clarke
(John is my problem child. The one who won’t mind, who sits down and cries in the road, who gets up at night to crawl into my bed, the one with the unnatural terror of cats. “It’s nothing,” I’m always telling him, “nothing, get up, quit crying, don’t.” Mother says he’s a character. I think of Dr. Stoll. I think of his talk of characters, the ones you love, the ones you kill. The ones you wipe out. I think of the flood. I think of God.)
Dr. Stoll was jabbing a finger at the little object in his hand, and the men with guns were strolling toward him with casually questioning looks, and the bishop was growling, and our men were shouting, and Esther let go of me and knelt to pray, Barb stumbling and falling to her knees almost on top of her, and the sky was clear and crisp except in the east where the fumes of the quarry blurred the tops of the trees with a vapor like blue fur, and the heavens turned a sickly, blank no-color, the color of the world when your eyes are shut, above the dark halls of the Profane Industries. And Mary was motionless, silent. The doctor got tired of pushing buttons on whatever instrument of Satan was in his hand. “You didn’t do this!” he roared. “You couldn’t have done this.”
“You better back off with those guns,” Mim told him, “or you’ll never find out.”
He sat and looked at her. He snapped the one side of his glasses down and looked at her through two lenses. Then he gave a cough. It turned into a bunch of coughs, which I realized was a laugh, but he wasn’t smiling. His mouth was iron-hard.
The laughter made a lot of spit, which he wiped off with his hand. All his white-coated people stood staring at Mim. A couple of the gunmen were smoking cigarettes. “Get up, you ninnies,” I said, pulling Esther and Barb by the backs of their collars. “Mim’s about to beat this heathen.”
They stood up blinking in the light as Dr. Stoll told Mim: “You’d better come with me.”
“No,” said Mim. “You can’t take me. I’m not part of your outfit. I haven’t signed anything for you and you’ve never copied my ID card and if you shoot me it’s murder in the first degree. You can have some of your people there come over and haul Mary away but she’ll never talk to you or do your bidding and you’ll never know why. You can take her apart or melt her down I guess but it would be a sorry waste. As one architect to another.”
He stared at her a moment longer. Then he smiled. “Well. There we are.”
“Looks that way to me,” said Mim.
He cleared his throat. “Judy,” he said, “come up here and take a seat. I want you to announce to these good people that they can go home.”
He climbed sideways from his chair into the van, seating himself beside the girl with the boil on the side of her nose, who immediately started talking, but he shushed her and peered out the window to see what was happening. The “Judy” he’d been talking to, I saw, was the girl with the shaved head and the sling. She tried to climb up into the chair but she kept on slipping and finally the boy with the metal teeth came over and helped her. She sat in the chair and picked up the metal cone but she didn’t say anything.
“Tell them to go home,” called the doctor from inside the van. “Tell them it’s over now.”
The girl said something into the cone. It was loud, but you couldn’t make out what it was. It was like “Umpf, eempf.” Like her mouth was stuck together. Me and Kat were gazing at each other in bewilderment when somebody behind us cried out, “Judy!”
Jonathan came hobbling across the field. “Judy!” he shouted.
“Jonathan, no!” said Mim. To the men standing around her she said desperately, “Stop him, catch him!” But nobody was going to go after the tall, lurching foreigner with the knapsack who’d hurtled out from among our very homes. As he passed Mim, she tried to grab him, and Dr. Stoll called from the van, “Now, now, my dear! Jonathan is under my jurisdiction. He is registered as my intern. I do possess copies of his identification papers. You will have to let him go.”
Jonathan turned to Mim. “Sorry,” he said.
She was just tall enough to come up to his ribs. He could have leaned on her as a man leans on a rake.
“You idiot,” she said.
“It’s Judy,” he stammered. “Something’s—he’s—I have to help her.”
“You’re gonna tell him everything, aren’t you,” Mim said dully.
“I’ll try not to.”
He limped toward the vans. Two gunmen came to guard him on either side. The boy with metal teeth helped Judy down from the chair. They all got into the vans and turned off their flashing lights and drove away. They didn’t let Jonathan sit with Judy. They put him in a different car.
We cross the sea of glass and disembark on the other side. Here is the city. “Which city?” you ask, and I tell you, “It is The Object City.” The Object City is broad and high. Its wall is an hundred and forty and four cubits, according to the measure of the angels. The wall has twelve foundations. The first foundation is jasper, the second, sapphire, the third, a chalcedony, the fourth, an emerald. I can feel you receding. You ask me very slowly, “Why are the edges moving?” and then, with an effort, “Why is it so tangled?” The fifth, sardonyx; the sixth, sardius; the seventh, chrysolyte. The Object City looks like a cloud of black and white specks. It looks like an opera cloak. It looks like a flock of swans in flight. It looks like stars. It looks like an horror of great darkness. The eighth, beryl; the ninth, a topaz; the tenth, a chrysoprasus. Because you are sinking fast, I don’t tell you the true name of The Object City, which is The Object World. Instead, I tell you, “This is Jericho, your own Jericho. In the night you are awakened by a wildcat’s cry.” I say, “In the morning you will find the prints of the deer that come down from the mountains. They have pawed up the snow to eat the grass in the orchard.”
Now you will have a little sleep. When you wake, we will try again to enter the city.
The eleventh, a jacinth. The twelfth, an amethyst.
IF SHE STRAYS, SHE CAN COME BACK
(Sometimes the early summer is so happy it calls to me. I have to go out. I go outside after supper, I stay outside for hours. How thick the rhubarb grows out back and oh how sweet the beans. I lie in the flowers, drenched with their perfume, and feel the dew come down. It touches my eyelids like a cold hand. When I open my eyes the heavens are filling like a bowl with glowing summer dark. A night so blue you can feel it in your lungs. My little boys know this mood. They charge outside, play around me, wild as goats. These will be their best memories, for this is their favorite mother. She allows everything. She is flopped down in the beans. They run around, chasing fireflies. Baby Levi’s diaper sags and his brothers pull it off him, laughing, and chuck it over the fence. Levi runs half-naked, shrieking for joy. I know if I sit up I’ll see Sam’s shadow at the kitchen window, pacing back and forth with increasing energy until he works up enough frustration to come out and call us in. How, he will demand, can I let the boys act like this? Don’t I know how it looks? I don’t sit up. I am struck down by the sky. I think of Sam, his long hot days of toil spent in a noble pursuit, scattering seed to make the land flourish. And what of the land? Does it feel that its work is noble? What of the horses plodding up and down beneath the glinting whip? The boys are roughhousing close to me. They kick me in the ribs. Levi treads on my breastbone. Is this a noble pursuit? Now the moon comes out from behind the clouds, filling the branches of the old crabapple tree with mellow light. “Noom!” crows Levi, pointing. “Noom!” I clutch his pretty leg. He giggles and bends to plant his fat palms on my neck. And gives me a kiss smelling of dirty milk, wobbling, losing his balance, hitting my face too hard, our foreheads knocking. Oh, you—the one I write to in the flicker of the lamp—what do you want from me, or for me? What is your desire?)
I woke up to a rattle at the window. My heart lifted. I thought, It’s Sam! But then I realized he was in the bed beside me. We were no longer courting; we were married. I went downstairs, pulled Sam’s big coat on, and opened the door, and there was Mim.
“Hello Lydd
ie,” she said; and “Hi Lyddie!” said Mary.
Mim sat in a cart. Her head was bare. Her hair hung loose and tangled as the bracken. The cart was attached to Mary, who still wore her neat black cap. Fresh, cold moonlight glimmered on her face.
“What is this contraption?” I asked, shivering.
“Well,” said Mim, “it’s a kind of carriage. Like the one you saw the other night, for Jonathan. This one’s a little bigger, though.”
I noticed several dark bundles around her, and Hochmut poking his nose over the slats.
“You’re going away, then?”
She nodded. “I came to say goodbye.”
“With no cap?” I asked, my eyes filling with tears.
“That’s my disguise.”
I laughed, blinking. “A fine disguise. You won’t get far. Not in this—half-carriage, half-woman. You’ll stick out like a rash.”
“I don’t have to get far. Just to the Profane Industries.”
“Jonathan?” I whispered.
“I can’t leave him, can I? I intend to spring him before he spills my secrets. I might take that bald-headed girl, too. His friend, Judy. She looked like she could use a change of occupation.”
I shook my head. “Mim.” Then, as I noticed one of her bundles looking at me with a pair of large, scared eyes, I gasped: “Mim! Is that your mother?”
“I couldn’t very well leave her behind! Uncle Al worries her. Besides, she might be useful.”
She patted her mother’s shoulder. “Right, Mommy?”
Her mother gave a trembling smile.
“I can’t let you do this. Leave her with me. I’ll keep her.”
“No. She doesn’t like to be parted from me. She’ll shred your sheets, and you won’t like it. And besides, I want her. She’s trusty in a pinch.”
“There’s nothing I can say to make you change your mind?”
“Why would I come out at midnight in this contraption just to change my mind? No, I’m bent on going, so you might as well stop crying.”
“But you—and Mary—you’ll never—I’ll never see you again.”
“That’s for the Good Lord to decide.”
After a moment she said in a softer tone: “Come, now. Don’t take on. You have Sam Esh, for what he’s worth. Soon you’ll have a baby. Don’t begrudge me my poor old mother, or this bag of bones I call a dog. Or Mary. After all, she came to me.”
I wiped my eyes and looked at her.
“It was on the seventh round,” she said in the same low, thoughtful tone. “Do you ever think of that? I found her on the seventh round. When we were all looking for the ones we’d be with forever. I walked right into her.”
“We were supposed to see ghosts or photographs. Not something hard like that.”
“Well.” She smiled. “It’s just a fancy. Tell the girls I said goodbye.”
She gave Mary no instructions, and I couldn’t see that she touched her at all, but Mary started off, pulling the cart eastward.
(The next year, at Old Christmas, I stood at the window holding baby Jim and watched a group of girls go down the road. They crowded together, hurrying over the snow, their breath excited, white and quick. They meant to go around a barn. I thought I heard a burst of laughter floating on the air. Oh, sweet girls, I thought, what do you hope to find? Don’t you know that somebody always has to be sacrificed? Ask the animals—it’s all they talk about. Then, rocking the baby to calm myself, I thought of Mim. I thought of her breaking down the fence around the Profane Industries. I thought of her getting caught, and then I stopped. I didn’t want to think of that, and I still try not to think about it. I still see her, always, always. I make up stories for her in my head, when I’m doing the wash, when I’m scrubbing the porch with silver sand. I see her rescuing Jonathan from a dark hole underground. They have to jump across an invisible wire. They have to scale a wall. I see her traveling the country, her loins girded, her shoes on her feet, and her staff in her hand, eating her bread in haste. Jonathan rides in the cart with Mim’s mother and the dog. They come to the rivers, the floods, the brooks of honey and butter. And Mary, striding alongside Mim, is almost like her sister. She is like a portrait of Mim in metal. She looks the way she did the last time I saw her, in front of my own house in the moonlight: distant, almost as if she doesn’t know me at all. But she does know me. “Hi Lyddie!” Some part of me remains inside her head, just as Hochmut, even now, would recognize my scent. I make stories for her, and I give her noble pursuits, because you wouldn’t—would you?—you wouldn’t create a character and make it a machine.)
Toronto author and editor L.X. Beckett frittered their misbegotten youth working as an actor and theater technician in Southern Alberta before deciding to make a shift into writing science fiction. Their first novella, “Freezing Rain, a Chance of Falling,” appeared in the July/August issue of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 2018, and takes place in the same universe as their upcoming 2019 novel Gamechanger. Lex identifies as feminist, lesbian, genderqueer, married, and Slytherin, and can be found on Twitter at @LXBeckett or at the Lexicon, at lxbeckett.com.
FREEZING RAIN, A CHANCE OF FALLING
L.X. Beckett
The night Woodrow Whiting lost all his social capital, a storm blew into Toronto. Blue-black fists of cloud reached across the lake from the U.S., shaking fat clusters of snowflakes over South Ontario. They piled up in censorious drifts on the windowsills as Drow’s followship foundered, deep-sixing a host of memberships and privileges, including the backstage passes for his next three gigs.
Journos who drove waifish divas to suicide—and everyone had seen it happen, streaming crimson in 3dHD, live from Drow’s apartment—didn’t get to cover Pinegrove’s Reunion Tour. They didn’t get to compile newsflow on Fusion, alleged lab-grown clone child of Mercury and Bowie.
Mob rule by remote: When you were all strikes, no strokes, you could kiss good-bye to your access to the musical virtuosi.
By dawn, Drow had scrubbed every inch of his apartment, working his way out from the bloody epicenter of the incident. Whenever he had the urge to datadive, his sidekick app intervened with a dry, British-accented, “Bad idea, Master Woodrow.” This got him a clean house while keeping him from brooding or—worse—firing another torpedo into his own fortunes.
By the time he was done, the place smelled of chlorine and broth. The fridge had been nagging him about leftovers, half-eaten meals abandoned by his roommate. Drow responded by throwing the dregs into a smartcooker with a couple chicken bouillon cubes. “Go to town,” he’d told the cooker, and it obligingly blendered the mix into hot, green-gray lava. Allstew, Uncle Jerv had called it: random nutrients, no regard for flavor. Drow drank the brew until his gut was warm, queasy-liquidly full.
Crane, his sidekick app, flailed as it tried to put a calorie count on the binge. Drow returned to his war on filth.
Outside, the snow piled to infarction-inducing levels and the sky lightened.
Drow assembled a kit: wool cap, balaclava, gloves, degradable bags. Base layer, top and bottom, shirt, and ski pants. Last the coat and the boots. He could commit an assassination and nobody would be able to ID him without giving him a whooz first.
Thus swaddled, he closed his door on the smell of angry hospital, shuffled past the snow-weighted fauxflowers piling up on his boulevard, and headed to the corner store to buy a smartshovel and a bag of penitential salt.
The trick to stroke farming was to bottom-feed, staying clear of anyone who had an established snow-clearing gig. Drow volunteered himself to a network of self-driving cars. With twenty centimeters turning to slush on the asphalt, trapped sedans were becalmed all over Toronto. Batteries charged, they bleated alerts about unfilled orders and late appointments, making their sysops too desperate to sneer at his pariah-grade rating.
The network sent Drow to clear an older neighborhood on the edge of Little Italy. Narrow streets with brick houses, barely paid off by the octogenarian Gen X inhabitants moldering
within, accumulated snow on pitched roofs. Icicles formed in jagged clusters to reveal holes in their post-Victorian gutter systems.
“Head down, donkey.” The shovel tracked kilos moved, meters cleared. Crane flagged urgent gigs: oldsters with glass hips and medical appointments, and specialist cars with promises to keep and snow up to their wheel wells.
As he shoveled, strangers threw strokes his way without any thought of whoozing him. They appreciated not having to worry about the granny next door. The fossils stroked him, too, as did their descendants. Drow imagined middle-aged absentee kids, checking in on Ma from Sri Lanka and Nairobi, giving him the old-fashioned thumbs-up.
Sweat ran inside his base layers as his cap stopped hemorrhaging. If he kept his head down, shoveled twenty-four-seven, and the blizzard lasted forty days and forty nights, he might level his way back to respectability in time for the Spring into Music Festival in Stratford.
Or not. Squid ink bloomed on the edge of his goggs. At least one passerby was willing to convert three of their own strokes into sanction.
“U should be using sand on the byways, NOT salt!” They attached a flow about pollution levels in Lake Ontario.
It would be weeks before Drow could afford to ignore these passive-aggressive smackdowns. “Open article, Crane,” he said to his sidekick, before the heckler decided to spend thirty strokes to hit him again.
Crane, ever the perfect virtual assistant, obediently washed newsflow across his goggs. Doleful music swelled in his ears, lead-in to the voice-over. Infographic furled through his line of sight.
Drow listened to the salient points even as he kept lifting and throwing, lifting and throwing the snow. Blah blah: effects of salt on groundwater. Blah blah poisoned lagoon in Pickering—Saints, that was back in 2018, how old was this link? Blah blah struggling fish populations.