by Proehl, Bob
“They’ll keep him alive,” Fahima says.
“How long?”
A week, thinks Fahima. Tops.
“As long as he needs them to.”
* * *
—
They’re out of Connecticut when Bishop pings her from the Hive. Communicating there is easier for him than speaking, at least without a recent dose. The tiny sexy genius machines amplify Bishop’s Resonance, but they burn out after a few hours, like lightbulb filaments running too hot.
“I’m going to space out for a minute,” Fahima tells Alyssa.
“Where are we on the map?” Alyssa asks.
“We stay on 84 another half hour,” says Fahima.
“Go talk to him.”
Fahima rests her head against the window and goes into the Hive. Bishop is waiting for her, sitting full lotus in a field peppered with black flowers. In the real world, he couldn’t contort his legs this way without screaming pain. His Hivebody is younger, fully fleshed. Seeing him like this highlights how thin he looks, tossed in the back seat like a bag of sticks. His fingers trace the petals of one of the flowers.
“These shouldn’t be here,” he says. “They’re like needles poking through the skin of the world.” He looks up at her, face cherubic with subcutaneous fat and an acceptance of oncoming death. “Have these always been here?”
Fahima bends over and tries to pluck one by her feet. It’s rooted to the ground. It’s so cold her fingertips stick to it and pull away hard. There are tiny circles on her fingers where she touched the thing, angry mouths on index, middle, and thumb.
“I never liked it here,” she says. “I only come here to talk to you.”
“We worked very hard on it, you know,” he says. “Like God separating the land and the water. Poor Raymond and I spent years creating this place between the actual and potential. I used to love it here.”
The way he skirts around the edges of his biography grates on Fahima no end. But this isn’t the time to dig deeper. That time isn’t ever coming.
“We should be in Revere in an hour or two,” Fahima says. “Alyssa’s a good driver.”
“She’s nice,” says Bishop. “Listening to the two of you reminds me I should have found someone. Then I realize the fact it’s an afterthought for me, like I should have tried the salmon, is the reason I never did. I had everyone.” He taps his forehead. “I never felt the need.” When Bishop talks about his abilities in interviews or public speeches, he tells people he’s telepathic and telekinetic. One night, after an ill-advised third martini, he told Fahima it would be closer to the truth to say he was omnipathic. “Everyone all the time,” he said. Fahima wonders what it’s like for him to be without his abilities. It must be like losing one of your five senses and access to the Internet at the same time.
“Do you need another shot?” she asks.
“Not till we get there,” Bishop says, flicking the flower with his fingernail. It makes a sound like a crystal goblet.
“You know I don’t think this is a good idea,” Fahima says. “I’m not sure your being there is going to make any difference.”
“I’m sure that it won’t,” he says. “Not to them. But it will make all the difference in the world to me. Going out on my feet. You get near the end, and everything takes on impossible weight. Mistakes. Miscalculations. As it approaches, the manner of death becomes important. I’ve known this moment was coming. Not my moment. Ours. I imagined it would be at the academy. I saw them coming to our doorstep. I saw myself standing arms akimbo, all of you behind me. Bold and strong. I saw the people of New York rising up against the forces of oppression, crying out in support of us. Until those forces grew so small, they were pressed down like coal into diamond. They would collapse, burst, and shine. The birth of a new world and me there to midwife it.
“And now we’re off to Revere, Massachusetts, the new world already stirring in its crib. The moment is a tricky fucker.”
The town of Revere changed as much as it was willing to before the residents—which is to say white people who grumbled as the blocks between Furness and Dedham became Koreatown and the neighborhood along Mountain Avenue became Little Tripoli—had enough. When Ji Yeon Kim, whose parents had bought the ranch-style on Dedham last summer, decided to flaunt her special powers, producing bright glowing needles as long as baseball bats from her hands and dancing them across the Revere High cafeteria, the town board met with the sheriff. The Kims weren’t invited to the meeting. All present agreed it would be best for the Kims to move on, and the sheriff was sent to relay the message.
Only they didn’t move on. Ji Yeon Kim kept coming to school as if nothing had happened, intent on finishing her senior year. Tae Sung and Min Jin Kim both showed up at their jobs and smiled like they weren’t the parents of a freak. After a week of this, the sheriff got a couple guys together in their off hours and headed over to Dedham Avenue to restate the town’s position.
They didn’t make it to the ranch-style on Dedham. Little Korea had barricaded itself off. Two blocks from the Kims’ house, Furness Street was obstructed with couches and picnic benches and dinghies that hadn’t been seaworthy for summers. The residents of Little Korea, along with those of Little Aleppo and Little Tripoli and others of Revere’s ethnic microenclaves, stood by the ramshackle barricade and said no. They are with us, and you will not take them.
Soon they were joined by strangers. Strangers who glowed and flew. Out-of-towners with feathers and scales. The future landed in the middle of Revere, Massachusetts.
The resolution was easy to see. When the past and future run up against each other, the past is supposed to back down. If it doesn’t, things get bloody. But the past is stubborn and stupid. The town board called the governor for assistance. While a flurry of ACLU lawyers, with Kay Washington in the lead, rushed to the courthouse in Boston, the governor called in the Guard. To de-escalate the situation, he said.
Because nothing de-escalates a situation like sending in tanks.
Alyssa drives around the perimeter of the National Guard cordon, and they get to see what the town’s become. No one on the sidewalks. Shops shuttered. Most of the vehicles on the streets are army jeeps or news vans. Trying to run the Kims out of town, the citizens of Revere evicted themselves from their own homes, displaced by national attention and the forces they summoned for protection.
They pull into the parking lot of a motel in Saugus, twenty miles north of Revere. Fahima gently shakes Bishop awake. “We’re here.”
His rheumy eyes take in the pastel-painted stucco of the buildings, the cracked gray asphalt of the parking lot.
“Looks as good as anywhere else,” he says.
Fahima gives him another shot, then she and Alyssa help him out of the car. Sexy genius machines take a while to kick in. Thankfully, they’re only headed to the first floor. Their connection, a teleporter who doesn’t look old enough to shave, is playing video games among fast-food wrappers and discarded balls of Kleenex Fahima wills herself not to think about. The shades are drawn, and the room has a thick fug that reminds her of where they found Owen Curry holed up. The boy, in a Sox tee shirt and oversized shorts, gives a nod, then stands bolt upright when he recognizes Bishop. Fahima half expects him to bow.
“No one told me you were coming,” the boy says.
“We didn’t want to make a fuss,” Bishop says. The boy is already making frenzied attempts to tidy the room. Fahima feels Bishop reach out to the boy’s mind to calm it, and she’s angry with him for expending any of his ability. He has nothing to spare.
“How does this work?” Alyssa asks.
“Take my hand,” says the boy. “Clench your stomach like you’re about to take a punch. There’s a good chance you’ll puke.”
“Super,” Alyssa says.
“You go first,” Fahima tells her. It’s so she’ll be there to catch Bishop when h
e comes through. Alyssa holds the boy’s hand, then blips out, gone. “Okay, old man,” says Fahima. “You’re next.”
Bishop passes Fahima his cane and takes the boy’s hand in both of his.
“Were you one of my students?” he asks.
“No, sir,” says the boy. “My parents said no. I wanted to.”
“There’s still time,” Bishop says. He smiles at the boy and disappears.
Fahima tucks the cane under her arm, and the boy extends his hand. “You want to tell me what that hand’s been up to?” she says. The boy blushes and looks at his bare feet. “Hey,” Fahima says, knocking him on the shoulder. “You need anything here?”
“They keep me fed and shit,” he says. “It’s lonely. All my friends are on the other side, and I’ve got to stay here.”
“They also serve who stand and wait,” says Fahima, quoting from something she barely remembers. She grabs the boy’s hand, and the motel room blinks out. She’s in a living room indistinguishable from the one in the house where she grew up. The acquisitional clutter, the protective accumulation of random objects as ballast, marks the home of an immigrant family desperate to anchor itself to its new country with the weight of things. Alyssa supports Bishop, although she looks shaky herself.
“Clenching your stomach does nothing,” she says.
“That’s why we got the bucket,” says a young woman in the doorway to the kitchen. She’s tiny, her dark hair cut with a dull razor, wearing a faded Aladdin Sane tour shirt long enough to function as a dress. Her arms are sleeved in blue and green ink, and she chews on a toothpick that glows like a purple ember. A trio of teenagers stand in wait behind her, eyeing them warily. They look like a band prepped to shoot their album cover. This is what the revolution looks like, Fahima thinks only half ironically.
“You’re the ones from the school?” says the razor cut.
Bishop steps forward like he’s greeting alien life on behalf of Planet Earth. “I’m Kevin Bishop,” he says, taking his cane from Fahima and extending his hand. “From the Bishop Academy. And this is—”
“Ji Yeon Kim. From Dedham Street,” she says, ignoring the proffered hand. “I’m the one all the fuss is about.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Miss Kim,” Bishop says. “Are your parents here?”
Ji Yeon throws back her head and laughs in quick, bright barks. The glowing toothpick hangs precariously from her bottom lip. “No, officer, my parents are not here,” she says when she recovers. “I sent them to Boston to stay with my aunt and uncle. They’re safe.” She cocks her head toward the couple to her left. “This is Adnan and Yana, they live on Furness. Hassan just got here. He found us through the Hive.”
“Hey,” says Hassan.
“I don’t know what they told you or what you read,” says Ji Yeon, “but we’re not looking for Martin Luther King. The time for speeches passed when the tanks pulled up.”
“I’m not here to take the lead,” Bishop says. “I’m here to help. What do you need?”
Ji Yeon sizes him up, then shrugs. “National Guard gummed up the sewers, and it’s been raining the past four days,” she says. “Can you dig a drainage ditch?”
Fahima shakes her head at him.
“If you have shovels,” says Bishop.
“I’m a doctor,” Alyssa says. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Know anything about Resonant biology?” asks Ji Yeon.
“She knows a thing or two,” Fahima says, smirking. Alyssa swats her on the arm.
“We’ve got triage over on Mountain Avenue,” Ji Yeon says. “There’s a boy came down from the Commune to help out and got some kind of infection. But he’s basically a lizard person, and no one knows what to give him.”
“I’ll take a look,” Alyssa says.
“Adnan, you want to take her over there?” Ji Yeon says. The oldest boy in the group steps forward and offers his arm like he’s taking Alyssa to the prom. She wiggles her eyebrows at Fahima as they leave.
Fahima could invent them a rain collector that would produce potable water or a way to shunt runoff into the ocean. She could walk around their camp and find a hundred problems to solve. Or she could grab a shovel.
“Come on,” she says to Bishop. “Let’s get digging.”
* * *
—
Fahima never gave much thought to the phrase in the trenches until she spent her first day digging one. Hours ankle deep in mud and clay make her think the entire world is nothing but mud and clay. She feels like she’ll never be clean again. Mud forms a subdermal layer; dirt that appears on the skin hasn’t accumulated from outside but seeped out like sweat.
Bishop is having a ball. The tiny sexy genius machines amplify his Resonance enough that he can hold back the cancer with telekinesis left over to help his frail body hoist a shovel. They’re teamed with Hassan, a geopath who sweeps dirt up the embankments with waves of his hand.
“Home I would wander off,” Hassan says. “You’re from Lebanon?” he asks Fahima.
“Buffalo,” Fahima says.
Hassan nods. He taps his chest.
“Morocco,” he says. He’s bright and chatty. His cheer shines through the layers of mud like a jewel half buried in earth. “Fez is massive, but we lived on the outskirts. You can walk a mile into Moulay Yacoub prefecture and you’re in a desert, like a movie. I would shape turrets three stories high. I would conduct whirlwinds of dirt and sand. Hidden and alone, I was a god.”
“Did your parents know?” Bishop asks.
“Everyone in the quarter knew,” says Hassan. “It made no difference to them. I was the same boy they’d always known.”
“If only it was always so simple,” Bishop says.
“Americans have not enough things to worry about,” he says. “How do they have time to fear something new? How do they have fear to spare?”
When their crew goes on a break, another takes over, a dozen young people, bending and rising in rhythm like worshippers at a mosque. Fahima catches a bit of melody, a pop song from a couple summers ago broadcast into her head, barely audible. She spots Lynette Helms in the group. Lynette looks like she’s grown a half foot since she left Bishop, most of which is a matter of standing up straight rather than stooping to avoid being seen. None of these people know her brother. She’s flourished outside of his shadow.
Bishop points at a young woman near the barricade. She spits in her hands, silvery goop she molds into balls and uses to plug chinks in the wall.
“She was one of ours, wasn’t she?” he asks. He’s losing days and months as his ever-burning Resonance scorches the neighboring parts of his brain. As it happens, he becomes younger, more childlike, and physically lighter, as if he’s equal parts memory and flesh, both burning away.
“Isidra Gonzalez,” Fahima says. “She did the fountain sculpture in the lobby. The fish things or whatever.”
Bishop nods and starts over to her. “Miss Gonzalez,” he says. Isidra turns around. When she sees Bishop, she stands at attention.
“Headmaster Bishop,” she says.
“Kevin is fine,” he says. “I was hoping you could help me with something.”
“Of course,” says Isidra. “Anything.” Fahima is glad Bishop won’t outlive his students’ reverence for him. He’ll die a saint.
“You’re a shaper, yes? A sculptor?” he asks. “If I gave you a piece of something, a lump, could you turn it into something better? Something beautiful?”
“Beautiful could be tough,” she says with a self-deprecating grin, “but I could try.”
“That’s all I ask,” Bishop says. He hunkers down on a patch of dead grass between sidewalk and street. He lays his hands flat on the ground. The tendons in his neck strain. A trickle of pink liquid runs from his nose, a mix of blood and something else, something unique to him. Fahima has an urge to reach o
ut and wipe it away, a sample to analyze. The ground beneath his hands swells up like a bubble forming. A white milky substance seeps upward in thin tendrils that knit together to form a web, then a solid. It’s the size of a fire hydrant, the color of ivory with a shimmer that reminds Fahima of the Hive.
Bishop steps back and points at it. “Go ahead.”
Isidra puts her hand on the lump and pulls it back, smiling idiotically. “What is that?” she asks. “It feels amazing.”
“It is amazing,” Bishop says. “But unsightly. Make it look as beautiful as it feels.”
Isidra puts her hand back on the lump. She smiles as if a crowd’s applauding for her. The lump shifts, becomes fluid again. It draws upward into two points, like horns. The one on the left is slightly longer and thicker, and the asymmetry has an elegance Fahima likes. She wants to scrape off a piece, put it in a jar along with whatever runs out of Bishop’s nose, and retreat to her lab.
“How’s that?” Isidra asks.
“That’s excellent, Ms. Gonzalez,” Bishop says. “It’s exactly what I wanted.”
She puts her hands in her pockets and smiles. She’s straining not to touch the thing again.
“What is that stuff?” Fahima asks as she and Bishop walk away.
“That’s what the Source looks like when you force it into the real world. It’s a signal booster. It’ll make everyone here stronger. Better.”
“I didn’t know you could do that.”
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” Bishop says. He lowers his little round glasses and winks at her like he’s thirty years younger and not dying. Then he returns to his ditch.
Fahima goes back to the house where they first arrived and finds Ji Yeon filling out requisition orders for more food.
“Hey, can I ask you something that might be insulting?” Fahima says.
“Yeah, shoot,” says Ji Yeon without looking up.
“How much of what’s happened here was intentional? How much of this did you plan for?”