Gravity is Heartless

by Sarah Lahey

  She nods, wary; how does he know?

  He shakes his head. “Pretty stupid thing to do. Don’t you think?”

  Yes, it is stupid. Because I’m an idiot, a stupid idiot. Her chest tightens and tears well in her eyes.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes,” she says, nodding. “I’m okay. I’m fine. I’m just fine.” She swallows hard, then takes a deep breath and holds back her tears.

  He raises an eyebrow. He seems unconvinced.

  “Except for the fact the everyone died,” she continues. “All of those poor people, washed away. Can you imagine? It must have been awful. I can’t even begin to understand what they went through.” Her tears return, and she pats her eyes with the corner of the bed cover. “And I don’t know what I’m doing here or what’s going on. I’ve been alone for weeks, and—shouldn’t you be dead?”

  He stares at her, curled up crying on the bed, and she feels for him. Surely he doesn’t want to be here, trapped in this poky shipping container with a crying crazy woman. But he stays; he doesn’t leave. So she sits up and gets her breathing under control.

  “Sorry, a bit overwhelmed. I haven’t seen another person for weeks. I’m fine, really I’m absolutely fine. You can go. We can talk tomorrow, or the day after. I’m sure I’ll still be here. Not here in bed, but around—I’ll be around, on the beach, if you want to talk about anything. Or not, of course, that’s fine. I mean, we don’t have to talk. It would be good if we did, but I understand if you don’t want to. We could just be silent. Silence is . . .”

  She can’t, for the life of her, remember what silence is.

  “Deafening,” he says.

  “Yes, yes it is.”

  “You should rest. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I’m tired. I should rest. But where will you go? Are you staying here? Are you a prisoner, like me?”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  ***

  Quinn wakes the following morning and wonders if she dreamt Tig up. He wasn’t really here last night, leaning by the door in the darkness; it was an illusion, a mirage. She’s losing her mind and can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality. She thinks this is not the worst thing to happen, considering she’s stuck on a deserted atoll; at least she can fantasize about a man to keep her company. Nocturnal apparition might just keep her sane, and she could do a lot worse than Tig. He looked quite fetching in the warm glow of the kinetic light inside the shipping container last night. His self-assuredness also gives him a certain charisma. Maybe she’ll conjure him up again tonight. Maybe she’ll even bring him into bed with her. She wonders if he’s single, then realizes it’s only a dream, so it probably doesn’t matter.

  Then she spies the green drink sitting on the chair beside her bed. She scans the room but doesn’t see her clothes, so she wraps the blanket around herself and heads outside.

  Here he is, sitting on the edge of the stone landing. Jane the dodo is next to him, and he’s scratching her under the neck, like they’re old friends. Makes Quinn wonder if he ever left.

  “Hey,” he says. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Good. Seen my dress?”

  “Drying, round the side.” He points to the corner of the shipping container. “Rinsed it out last night.”

  He rinsed out my dress.

  “Come here. You’re too thin. You need to eat more.” He unties a bag of leaking seafood; small fish, oysters, crabs, green herbs, and white roots, and lays the contents out over a cloth.

  She’s grateful for the food; it looks fresh and she’s hungry—she’s always hungry. She retrieves her dress, slips it on, and joins him, sitting between him and Jane.

  “Your feet, they’re a mess,” he says, considering the wretched state of her toes and heels.

  “Yeah. No shoes.” She shrugged. “I keep cutting them on the rocks. They hurt like hell.”

  He opens an oyster, and when he passes her the shell, their fingers graze; there it is again, the buzz, a flicker of kinetic energy between them—small but electrifying. As she registers this, he fillets the fish into slivers, hands her the first piece, and gives the second to Jane.

  “Who are you?” she asks.

  “Me? I’m a smuggler.”

  “What do you smuggle?”

  “People, refugees, all over the world.”

  “Dangerous job.”

  “My life’s work.”

  “And what are you doing here?”

  He passes her pale green stems. “Samphire, sea asparagus. Good for you, improves visual clarity.” He pushes the bridge of his bionic glasses back up his nose.

  She laughs. He doesn’t smile. Maybe it wasn’t a joke. She takes the asparagus and pops a piece into her mouth. It’s disgusting, salty and bitter, the same stuff he gave her last night. She spits it straight back out.

  “That’s a very good disgusting face,” he says.

  “My life’s work.”

  He grins.

  Time to get to the point. “Who are you?” she asks. “Why are you here? What were you doing with Lise? How’d you get off the Cloud Ship? And how the hell are you still alive?”

  “Okay if we finish breakfast first?”

  No.

  But he offers her more fish, then oysters and crabmeat. He makes delicious seaweed rolls filled with fish roe and continues to hand her morsels of seafood, and seaweed, and shellfish, and she continues to put them into her mouth.

  When she can’t eat any more, she stands and shows him her balloon-like stomach. “Look, I’m having a baby,” she protests.

  “It’s a good look.” He hands her a morsel of fish. “Last one.”

  She promptly takes it and feeds it to Jane, who flaps her wings in appreciation.

  “How’s the shoulder?”

  My shoulder? She rotates the joint. “You fixed it?”

  “Careful, it’s weak.”

  He wipes his knife, collects the debris of shells, and wraps them in a cloth. As he does all this, she gives him a detailed appraisal. His skin is auburn. He has a craggy, lonesome face with a scruff of a beard and short, dark hair. He wears cargo pants, rolled to his calves, and a loose shirt, rolled to his elbows. There’s a circular tattoo on the back of his neck. She can’t tell his age, but he’s a man, not a boy—older than her. He has a chipped tooth, burns and scars on his arms, part of his left ear is missing, and he’s not quite symmetrical; his left side is slightly skewed. Dull grey titanium pokes through his left ankle and elbow, but there’s been some skin growth since she last saw him. Rapid-Skin membrane envelops most of his electroskeleton. Must be Transhuman.

  Metal bracelets cover his wrists—twenty, maybe thirty, in total. Some are beaded, others are smooth, some are black metal, others are copper-colored or deep green. They appear ancient, made in a time before machine. She’s never met anyone like him before: part machine, part human, with an ethos of ancient culture dangling around his wrists, and no Band in sight. Points to fundamental Humanism, but that doesn’t account for the Tech. She catches a glance of his milky irises while he cleans his glasses.

  “Cataracts, double detached retinas,” he says.

  Easily fixed with a thermal laser and a SelfMed. I give up, he’s unclassifiable. “Is the world a blur?”

  “Yeah, I like it that way. Nicer place. Where you wanna start?”

  “Who are you, where are you from, how’d you survive?”

  “From the beginning: I’m from the Maldives, Butterfly Island.”

  Butterfly Island is part of an archipelago in the Indian Ocean. But technically the Maldives no longer exist; they were covered by seawater in 2029. She’s seen images: The Islanders painted their rooftops and roads white to reflect the sun. They filled pools, rivers, and dams with carbon-eating plankton, and they pumped the carbon below ground, storing it in the empty mine shafts and caves. They even covered the ground with crushed silica to soak up the carbon. Of course, it was pointless, and about fifty years too late.

&nb
sp; This was the first nation to be entirely displaced, and no one wanted them. It took a decade for governments to change the definition of a refugee to include populations affected by global warming and climate change.

  “Must have been hard,” she says. “There were a lot of rich countries back then. Rich countries with rich people. They didn’t give up anything.”

  “Possessions were more important than people.”

  “Where do you live now?”

  “In Unus.”

  “The megacity. They say it’s 55 degrees Celsius; that’s over 130 degree Fahrenheit! Are there really a hundred million people living in that heat?”

  “Yeah, but I live on the harbor, on a boat.”

  “How’d you survive the flood? They told me everyone died.”

  “Everyone got down and went back to the station to wait out the storm—everyone but you. So I took a Pod and searched, but the rain was too heavy. I went back to Kerguelen, arrived just in time to see the glacier wash the village away, like it was a toy.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yeah. Nothing I could do.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “I came here for you.”

  “For me. Why?”

  “Well.” He glances away, then meets her gaze. “I told Lise I’d look after you.”

  “But you were looking after her, weren’t you? Like a bodyguard —why?”

  “Global elections next year—she’s politically active. It’s a dangerous new world.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it is.” The index finger of her left hand scrawls the words “Shun Mantra” into the sandy pavers beside her. “Maybe you should have stayed with her. She needed you.” She knows there’s a hint of accusation in her voice.

  “At the time, you needed me more.”

  She nods. “I suppose that’s true.”

  Her finger writes “Transhuman” directly under “Shun Mantra.” Then it runs a line through the corresponding letters in each word until there are no letters left. “A dangerous new world,” she muses aloud.

  He nods.

  “Okay, so you’re here to rescue me. This is great news. I’m so grateful. Thank you. I’ve been here forty-two days. At least, I think it’s forty-two days. I lost a bit of time between days thirty-one and thirty-four. They sort of merged together. A lot of my time here has been a blur, if you know what I mean.” She hasn’t drawn a breath since she started telling him all this, and she looks at him wide-eyed, seeking confirmation that he understands her predicament.

  He nods.

  “Okay. When do we leave?”

  “We’ll be picked up in a couple of days. Hydro panels in my sub corroded. It’s adrift, no power, but I’ve sent for reinforcements. They’ll be here soon.”

  She turns to him. “Thank you. Thank you for coming to get me. I can’t believe I’m finally going home. And I’m sorry about your sub.”

  “Not your problem.” He produces a tube of ointment from the bag the seafood was in. “Give me your foot.”

  She doesn’t move.

  Opening the ointment, he indicates again, with a wave of his hand, that she should give him her foot. She shakes her head and holds her hand out for the cream; she is perfectly capable of doing this herself.

  “Give me your fucking foot.” It’s an order.

  She concedes. For whatever reason, he’s intent on doing this, and actually, she likes the idea of him touching her. She hasn’t seen or touched another human in weeks, and his presence is comforting; he has come all this way to find her and rescue her. She tells herself this is his job, it’s what he does, but she can’t help but feel that it’s more than just a job; he doesn’t have to rub her feet, or bring her food, or rinse out her clothes. He’s easy to be with, and she can tell he likes her; he hardly knows her, but what he knows he likes.

  She’s warming to him by the minute. Smiling to herself, she places her scab-riddled foot in his lap. He gently massages the cream into the cuts on her toes and the grazes around her heel. He has large, firm hands and strong fingers, and they wander up her leg, massaging her ankle and calf. It’s pure bliss; a tingling sensation travels the length of her body. Reining it in takes all the energy and focus she can manage.

  He frowns. “Relax.”

  She can’t. But she can pretend to relax. When the first foot is done, he starts on the other. Quinn lays back against the wall of her shipping container, closes her eyes, and thinks about math, trying to block out the thrill of his hands—his large, firm hands—on her cold, impassive, ugly foot, but her heart pounds and she’s nervous as hell. Soon, her hands begin to shake. She slides them under her thighs to keep them still.

  When both feet are done, Tig wraps protective sticky soles around them. The Hi-Tech material molds seamlessly to her feet. It feels amazing.

  He leans in toward her. “So, you know about Lise?” he asks, his voice uneasy. “You know she died?”

  Quinn nods. “Yes, yes, I do. What about Ada? Have they recovered her?”

  “No. Strange, they never found her body.”

  That’s because she’s inside the hull of Prismatic, floating around the Indian Ocean, Fuck. What if imminent death counts as an absolute necessity? What if Lise used the time travel portal to escape? What if she’s not dead? But there’s no need to tell Tig the truth about Ada and Lise, not just yet.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Sure.”

  “Years ago, I lost someone. And . . . and I learned that love is wrung from our hearts, until the loved one is the only thing that’s left, until she’s all there is.”

  She gives him a gentle smile and holds his gaze. She can’t have this conversation. She’s not grieving, not yet. Distract him. She stands and nods toward the other end of the beach; the day is disappearing, and she hasn’t made her cairn yet. As she sets out toward the stony headland, she indicates that he should follow, and he does.

  At Rocky Beach, forty-two cairns stand across the foreshore.

  “I build one every day,” she tells him. “It’s good to have a theme; it makes it more challenging, and it takes longer—time goes on forever, don’t you find? Give me a shape.”

  “Cone.” He half smiles.

  Annoying. “Try again.”

  “Butterfly.”

  Good choice. A little obvious, but the relevance is touching.

  She is especially pleased with his choice because gathered at the far end of the beach are the piles of particular shaped rocks—leaves, faces, flowers, moons, stars, and, conveniently, butterflies—she’s collected over the last few weeks. “You look over there,” she says pointing to the side of the beach opposite the one where she has stashed her stone collection for herself.

  A quick count of her pile reveals eleven butterflies. After an hour of foraging, she has eighteen.

  “How many do you have?” she asks, displaying her collection proudly.

  “Six,” he says sourly. He’s genuinely disappointed.

  “It’s not a competition,” she says. Of course, it’s a competition. “I’ve just had more experience. My stone-hunting skills are more advanced than yours. Still, I thought you’d be better, considering butterflies are your significant shape—the shape of your island.”

  He frowns at her; he’s taking this far more seriously than he should.

  Fourteen

  All things experience each other.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, THEY sit outside Quinn’s shipping container home in the arc of the setting sun, their backs against the wall. Jane scrambles over, keen for some company, and Tig rubs her downy chest, the way she likes it. She rests her heavy head on his leg.

  “What happened to you?” Quinn asks. “Your arm, the cyborg modifications . . . they’re pretty . . . significant.”

  “It was war. I was in a bloody war. Got caught by a barrel-bomb. They fucking rip you apart. People without heads, arms, legs, body parts flying all over the place. Got caught in the blast wind. Picked me up and slammed me into a conc
rete wall full of metal reo, shredded my arm, leg. Got taken to the Med, where I was supposed to die. They have rooms—white, red, black. They put you in the white room if you’re gonna live. The red room for immediate surgery. The black room if you need immediate surgery but you’re gonna die anyway and they can’t waste blood, meds, time. They sent me to the black room. Then someone came in, a new doctor. She had me moved. There was another room. I woke up like this. The exoskeleton decodes and translates electrical brain signals. Thoughts control my robotic limbs. I think, and it moves.”

  “Very cool Tech.”

  “Yeah. Listen, I know you and Lise were close; if you wanna talk about—”

  “Are you going to live on Titan, if you get the chance?” Distract him.

  “Nah, I’ll stay, but it’s a better option than Mars. That was a disaster. Now, with the right Tech, we could make Titan work. There’s atmosphere and resources, liquids, methane, and wind for turbine.”

  The Mars settlements failed miserably; it was not the place to raise a family, and the “let’s just get there and figure it out later” philosophy the settlers adopted was naïve. The planet has huge radiation problems; the colony had to live below the surface, in the dark. The weather, too, was shocking. It snowed every night after sunset, the droplets evaporating before they touched the ground. Nothing grew; the soil was thin and dusty, and it lacked microbes and bacteria. The settlers were perpetually hungry, and hungry people get hangry, and hangry people don’t care about each other.

  “What about you?” Tig asks. “If the planet becomes inhabitable and Earth can’t be saved, will you leave?”

  “It can be saved. It’s just a problem, and all problems have solutions. Earth Optimism—it’s growing, and we haven’t exhausted geoengineering.”

  “Didn’t we try that?”

  “I know. I know. But there are other options. Science can still save us; we just have to believe. And science is a sounder discipline than organized religion. Atheists are more peaceful than god believers. It’s a scientific fact.”