by Neil Clarke
For the first time in weeks, he opened the guestroom blinds. The apartment was on the fourth floor, and the window looked across the alley at a near-identical brick building. He tried to imagine birds flying in the alley, landing on the concrete below to hunt for bugs or seeds, but thoughts of flying set his mind to thinking about soaring out through the window and falling into oblivion.
He closed the blinds.
Two days later Oskar had only one sheet of good paper left, and he had not yet managed a picture of a bird. He ate when Jessica forced him to, and he slept until Jessica made him get out of bed. There was no point to pictures of birds. There was no point to anything, not anymore.
Jessica came in with half an avocado. Did he really have to eat, again? But no, she started eating it herself, spooning the mushy green into her mouth and smiling as though it actually tasted good to eat a plain avocado, again. “This is the last one from the bag, and food rations have been short at the community center, so we can’t count on that. We need to decide what to do next. There’s a caravan going north, right through Portland.”
He didn’t want to go back. What if Marybeth had abandoned Ellie, despite all her promises? He couldn’t face the chance. “I’m staying here.”
Jessica shook her head. “You’re not. I’m trading the apartment for passage on the caravan and food for the trip. If you want to stay in L.A., you’re on your own.”
She left him to consider his options, and his gaze drifted to the window. It would be so easy, so quick. If he never went back to Ellie, he could believe that she was okay, maybe even happy. He wouldn’t have to face a world that could never possibly be right again.
He opened the blinds. An alien was walking in the alley, smiling the same damn frog-smile that the aliens always smiled. It saw him in the window, and thinned into a cloud. When it came back together, it was a flock of birds. Not the stellar jays he’d been trying to draw, but pigeons, plump and gray. They fluttered up and landed on windowsills and power lines outside the window. They weren’t real, but they were enough to evoke a clear memory in his mind.
Oskar could soar out the window, or he could draw this memory of birds for Jessica and go with her back to Portland.
He calmed his shaking hands and sketched the birds.
Acceptance
Marybeth walked with Ellie to the clinic. Ellie insisted on bringing ‘Lexi,’ a bundle of filthy blankets that she refused to believe wasn’t actually her dead baby. Marybeth hoped the new treatment would help. Ellie was an amazing woman, able to find joy in all the smallest things. Even now, as they walked along abandoned streets with Eridani foodplants, Ellie chattered to her blanket-bundle baby about how beautiful the orange blossoms were on the lovely purple trees.
Marybeth couldn’t appreciate the beauty of the ‘blossoms.’ They weren’t flowers at all, but clusters of tiny spheres, each one full of orange spores. The trees would release spores soon, and despite Eridani assurances that there would be no harm to humans this time, she could not put aside her memories of the last sporefall, and all the death it caused. Yolanda’s death.
Very few healthy adults had died in the sporefall, but her wife hadn’t been healthy. She’d had alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency emphysema—a genetic disease that left her with the lungs of a sixty-year-old smoker when she was only thirty-two. Even without the sporefall, her condition had been deteriorating. She’d had a complex daily routine of inhalers and pills to try to keep the coughing fits and wheezing in check, and a tank of supplemental oxygen for her worst days.
Yolanda would have seen the beauty in the alien plants, just as Ellie did. Looking at Ellie was like looking into Yolanda’s past, back to the early days of their relationship, before her illness sapped away her strength.
Was falling in love with a straight woman any better than carrying around a bundle of filthy blankets?
The clinic was an Eridani clinic, one of several that were part of the treaty that had been negotiated with the aliens. They were greeted by a man in a white coat when they entered, and left to wait in a small room with black plastic chairs and battered magazines from before the sporefall.
“Will Oskar meet us here?” Ellie asked. Much as she refused to accept the death of her baby, she continued to believe that Oskar would return.
“He’s not here, El. We’re going to see one of the Eridani,” Marybeth explained. “They have a treatment that might help you.”
An alien appeared in the doorway, wearing what looked like a down comforter tied like a toga. It studied them with beady black eyes, then beckoned to Ellie, recognizing that she was the one more in need of treatment.
“I’d like to come too.” Marybeth said.
The Eridani doctor nodded its assent.
The treatment was painful to watch. The alien thinned itself into a gray fog, then reformed into images drawn from Ellie’s mind—not mindreading, exactly. If Ellie said nothing, the alien could not hear her thoughts. It was only when Ellie spoke about her daughter that the memories came through. Then it was like watching a moving slideshow all in shades of gray:
Oskar holding Lexi in the hospital, the day she was born.
Ellie’s struggles with breastfeeding when Lexi wouldn’t latch.
Bottles of formula, carefully mixed and warmed at all hours of the night.
So many things that Marybeth had never seen, memories that haunted poor Ellie and made her break from reality. Then came the worst, the sporefall.
Ellie going out to find formula for Lexi, and coming back covered in fine orange dust.
Lexi’s pitiful coughing and weak cries.
The days on end where she only slept upright, leaning on Ellie’s chest.
Finally, the end, the moment when there were no more breaths, and Oskar took Lexi away. Marybeth cried as the baby disappeared from the three-dimensional scene the Eridani recreated from the particles of its own body. She glanced at her friend, hopeful that the therapy had helped. Ellie was crying, but she continued talking. Her baby was dead, but Ellie wasn’t finished.
More images appeared, of a Lexi that never was, in a world that no longer existed. Lexi toddling across the living room, Lexi putting on a ridiculously big backpack and going off to kindergarten, Lexi at the park feeding ducks. There were no ducks, and Lexi would never be six, but the Eridani doctor showed the impossible futures right along with the horrifying past.
Lexi’s senior prom, her wedding, the birth of Ellie’s first grandchild. The scenes skimmed through time and Marybeth could no longer watch, no longer listen to Ellie’s words. She simply watched Ellie stare into the images that poured out, and held Ellie’s hand as she cried. Since she had turned away from the doctor, it took her a moment to realize that the Eridani had resumed its default frogform. Ellie was no longer speaking, only sobbing softly.
She met Marybeth’s eyes, and there was a depth to her gaze that was missing before.
“My Lexi,” Ellie said. “My Lexi is gone.”
After the treatment, Ellie didn’t need a caretaker, but Marybeth had long since abandoned her apartment and they enjoyed each other’s company. Ellie often wore the same grim smile that so often graced Yolanda’s face when she was sick, and it tugged at Marybeth’s heart. She tried to remind herself that Ellie was a different woman, a straight woman, but she could not help but hope that somehow, if enough time passed, things could be different.
Ellie made good progress in embracing reality. Together they dismantled Lexi’s crib and set it out on the curb in front of the apartment. It wasn’t long before a woman who looked like she might be expecting came and carried it away.
Oskar came back from L.A. Marybeth greeted him at the door, and had no choice but to let him in, for all that he abandoned Ellie when she needed him most.
“I’m so glad you’re both okay,” he said. Marybeth shrugged. He could say what he wanted, it wouldn’t change wh
at he had done. She only hoped that she wouldn’t lose Ellie, now that he was back.
“Hi, Oskar,” Ellie said. The sight of him brought her to tears, but Marybeth couldn’t tell whether they were tears of joy or pain or anger.
“I’m so sorry,” Oskar said. “I didn’t want to leave you, but I couldn’t stay. I was hurting too.”
“I forgive you,” Ellie said. “I know it must have been hard.”
He smiled and went to embrace her, but she stepped back. “I forgive you, but we can’t go back to how things were. I saw what might have been, if the Eridani had never come, and Lexi had lived, and it was beautiful. We could have had an amazing life. But those are impossible futures, and I have to let them go and come back to what is real.”
“Is it another man?” Oskar asked, then realized that Marybeth was standing there. “Or another woman?”
Ellie shook her head. “There’s no one else. Certainly not Marybeth, though she’s a dear friend.”
It was nothing that Marybeth did not already know. She had always known that Ellie was straight; there had never been any sign that she was interested. Ellie would never be Yolanda.
Marybeth grabbed her coat and made polite excuses. Ellie and Oskar had a lot to talk about, and Marybeth didn’t want to hear it. She went outside and started walking, not caring where she went.
The wind picked up, and an orange cloud blew down from the Eridani foodtrees. The second sporefall had begun, a new cycle of alien life. According to the translators, the initial sporefall had been a different strain, modified to be more aggressive for terraforming, so that the Eridani would be sure to have foodplants when they arrived at their new home. This second sporefall should be as harmless to humans as ordinary pollen.
Marybeth sneezed at the orange air, but she refused to go back inside.
She would not hide from this new world.
A.M. Dellamonica’s first novel, Indigo Springs, won the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. Her fourth, A Daughter of No Nation, has won the 2016 Prix Aurora. She has published over forty short stories in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and numerous print magazines and anthologies. She was the co-editor of Heiresses of Russ 2016. She teaches writing at two universities and is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at a third.
Alyx is married to fellow Aurora winner Kelly Robson; the two made their outlaw wedding of 1989 legal in 2003, when the Canadian Supreme Court conferred equality on same-sex couples.
Time of the Snake
A.M. Dellamonica
My offworlder allies don’t trust me.
Squid, we call them, though their home planet is named Kabuva. They’re twelve feet in length from top to tip, see, with bullet-shaped caps that pull tight over a spaghetti of tentacles. When they bell out these caps, they look less like calamari and more like giant umbrellas. The Brits used to call them “brollies,” as a matter of fact, back before England was annihilated.
All the players in this game have nicknames. The other human army wrangling for control of Earth calls itself the Friends of Liberation. Pompous, right? We’ve shortened it to Fiends.
As for us, the squid-sponsored Democratic Army, we’re the Dems. “It’s either Dems or us,” the Fiends say. Bad pun; they end up taking over the world, they’ll probably outlaw laughing.
It’s just after dawn on a sunny July morning and I’m humping through East Los Angeles with a squad of ten heavily armed and overtired squid fry. Squid-squad, get it? Hence the song. How many Fiends can a squid-squad squash?
It doesn’t help that squid armor is silly looking—essentially an upside-down mussel shell that hooks to their bullet-shaped caps. When the going gets hot, they yank in their tentacles and seal the carapace tight, firing weapons from inside the all-but-impregnable canister. Once sealed in, though, they can barely move.
The newest fry teedle along on the tips of their tentacles, shell all but shut. Vets tend to leave it half open, on the grounds that the carapace sensors don’t work for shit.
We’re here today because Intelligence has designated this neighborhood so thoroughly infiltrated by Fiends that there’s no way to tell the bad guys from noncombatants. An evac order’s gone out, and now we’re one of the squads going block to block ensuring each house, shop, and low-rise is empty. Behind us floats a demolition ship, hanging just over the rooftops like a big blimpy starfish. Every time we give the all-clear on a building, the ship glides in and starts dusting the structure to nothingness.
Once this whole area is flattened, the squid will compile a few dozen skyscrapers for the humans who lived here. These buildings will be wired, so that any Fiendish conversations go straight to Kabuva Intelligence. The general idea is neighborhood Fiends will have to move elsewhere . . . those that do will be tagged as probable hostiles and rounded up for interrogation.
Bluto, on point, goes rigid and the squad snaps to alertness. He rips an apartment door off its hinges.
“Cantil?” The unit commander, Loot, caresses the back of my neck; this is his idea of a nudge.
“Anyone in there?” I call, first in American and then in Spanish. The amplifier built into my face mask makes my voice come out officious and strident, anything but reassuring. “It’s okay. Come out and you won’t be harmed.”
The response is a pepper of bullets from antique machine guns, and the squad barges in happily. I wait in the hall. Loot’s a good guy, as squid go; he doesn’t expect me to pitch in when they’re beating on probable civilians.
Screams, thumps, punches. The firing stops. I inhale a dense reek of gunpowder. Ah, the good old days.
Soon enough they’re hauling out the troublemakers: a mother and son maybe, both netted like trout. The boy is unconscious; livid sucker marks show he’s been throttled. The woman is shrieking.
Loot asks: “What is she saying?”
I tilt up my mask, taking the opportunity to poke a stick of gum into my mouth, and kneel beside her. “Ma’am? Nobody’s going to hurt you. We need to evacuate—”
“We ain’t leaving!” she yells.
I turn to Loot. “She doesn’t want to leave her home. I doubt she’s a Fiend.”
“We’ll see.” A bloom of mildew-pink within his cap betrays irritation. “We are falling behind the other teams.”
The others are probably doing cursory checks. Plenty of squid are fed up with being unable to tell Fiends from allies. If a few stubborn humans get dusted with their houses, they probably figure it’s a bonus. Loot’s more conscientious . . . and his family connections mean he can get away with it.
Now the woman bellows in sudden rage, glaring past my legs at a squid I’ve dubbed Gollum. He’s lingering over the trussed-up son, poking a tentacle into the boy’s mouth, getting a taste of him.
I vault over her, shoving the offworlder’s carapace. “Cut it out.”
Loot kills the fight before it can begin, bringing Gollum to heel. Then he orders Squiggly to haul the prisoners back to the evacuation team, effectively reducing our strength by ten percent. More, really—Squiggly’s worth three of Gollum.
“Your son’ll be okay,” I tell the woman. “I can see he’s breathing.”
Her reply doesn’t require translation; every squid in California knows “Fuck you, traitor,” when they hear it. I let the words glide over my skin, light as the rush of sweat raining down my face.
“Building is empty,” Loot reports. We pull out, and the floater drifts in to demolish the low-rise.
“The strip mall next?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says, and we move out. “Tell me something, Cantil?”
“Sure.”
“This city lies on a major fault line, does it not? Wouldn’t it make sense to take the population inland?”
“You saying your fancy nano-built condos can’t handle the occasional earthquake, Lieutenant?”
Gollum s
macks me, accidentally-on-purpose, for dissing Kabuva architecture. Loot flicks him back into line.
“Of course they can. But if the land’s unstable—”
“You can’t just uproot all of L.A.”
“You could build somewhere tectonically stable—house everyone in a tenth of the land area,” throws in Bluto.
It’s a fight not to sigh. You wouldn’t believe how offworlders can go on and fucking on about urban sprawl. “People like to live near the beach.”
That gets a ripple of amusement from the platoon. As far as these guys are concerned, humans can’t swim. Take a squid to a dive shop, he’d probably laugh himself into a stroke.
Mmmm, interesting thought. I file it away, cracking out a fresh stick of gum before I close up my mask.
At the strip mall we check a liquor store and a magazine shop. Both are empty, eminently dustable. Troops poke into a third, bored. All routine until there’s a flash and a series of whumps—modified car airbags, from the sound. Three squid race out of the shop. A black cloud follows: toner from photocopiers, almost certainly. The stuff gets everywhere, burns their skin, infiltrates their delicate gills.
“Why didn’t you say there was a print shop?” Loot, furious, hitches two tentacles into my armpits and takes a full taste of me.
“I didn’t know!” My pulse goes haywire as he hoists me to my tiptoes. “It says Office Furnishings.”
He runs a tentacle around my forearm, checking blood pressure, suspicious. I wait, chewing my gum furiously and trying to get my breath under control. When they’re calm they’re decent lie detectors, but you never know when a squid might decide you’re stringing him along, not because you are but just because he’s upset.
Calm. Focus on concrete things. I watch the remainder of the squad heading back into the shop. They come out a minute later carrying what’s left of Harpo, webbing up the dead fry in grim silence. My runaway heart slows as the wounded lift him gently and start limping to the rear.