“I am fortunate to resemble your serpent,” she says. Perhaps all your eating isn’t so bad.
It’s my turn to laugh. I have much better eyesight than Amphisbaina, but she has seen straight into the heart of the story. She really ought to be teaching at a university instead of laboring with a refugee. If nothing else, humans have been a boon to the Nagas’ schools. We share our technology freely. Manna from heaven.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “Neither Eve nor the serpent end up being the hero of the story.”
“We shall see,” Amphisbaina says. Shan’t we?
5.
“Prepare,” Amphisbaina told me before she went below. For a shock.
The storm crashes over the dunes like a tsunami. A boiling wall of dust extends the width of the horizon and crashes toward us like a wave that could drown heaven.
“Amphisbaina!”
She’s still underneath the array, in the lattice that holds the panels, cinching our shelter down. I cannot speak with her clarity, but my voice carries the fear every mammal has for storms.
The Naga whips herself up the trunk and through the hatch just as the storm hits us. The wind slams her back into the hatch cover, bending her in two. It would have crippled me. It just pins her.
My family tree is populated with dancers and soldiers. I know how to count both time and cost, how to decide what life is worth. Fear and courage are the same thing. I bolt through the flap and crawl along the panels to her.
The gale is a horizontal hammer. I scale sideways like a spider, my pair of legs for once making life easier. Our hands clasp and I pull Amphisbaina free. We tumble back to the shelter, roll over each other like wrestlers practicing their holds.
The electroactive struts snap rigid as the storm batters the shelter and I drag Amphisbaina in with me. We struggle to close the flap against the scything sand. After days of baking stillness, the sudden howling cold is almost unbelievable. Our careful little emergency space is dusted with sand. I reach for her.
“Your back,” I say. Amphisbaina takes my hand to steady herself and flexes her spine.
“Just bruised,” she says, but doesn’t let go immediately. Thank you.
We take stock. Amphisbaina’s suit heater has given its life to save her vertebrae. Twisting out of her gear, we check everything she carried. The heater, radio, her unitool: everything is scrap. The wind bellows and makes the layered carbon fiber canvas strain like muscle under tension.
“Trouble,” she says, and her tone grades it perfectly. Serious, verging on life-threatening, it implies, adding, though I am not afraid. I hear her clearly.
What she’s driving at is obvious. Her suit heater is dead, and the storm is going to get worse before it gets better. We can leech residual power from the solar array itself, but it won’t amount to much. The polymer struts need electricity to stay rigid enough to fend off the storm. With the energy we have we can power them or the shelter’s built-in heater, but not both. Without stability we die, and without heat we freeze. All we can do is pray that the storm will not last.
It does. After a while, Amphisbaina speaks.
“What are you doing?” she says. It takes a moment for me to realize what she means.
“Shivering,” I say. My breath frosts a little; Amphisbaina’s doesn’t.
At first I try to make her laugh. I describe riding a bicycle, my two ungraceful flippers flailing around on a cogwheel. I want her to move, burn calories, make heat. She laughs softly, a kind of sweet hiss, but her lids, first one set then the other, droop. She is not made for this. We are going to run out of time.
More accurately, she will. I won’t. I make my own heat, even without a summer sun.
A thought. I was hedging, trying to imagine how I would save myself in the tundra. There is a method, particularly if you’re two. The idea makes me blush, then blush again for prudishly discounting it. I am a colonist, a traveler, and an apprentice, but first I am a Russian.
Step one, drink emergency vodka. I am not joking. Amphisbaina watches with languor I recognize as dangerous. This is something our species share. The spirit moves me. Step two.
“Make a pile out of all the fabrics.” I say, “No, all of them. Take off your clothes. In Siberia we have a way to survive this.”
I prepare quickly. It only feels slow; cold stretches time. I have to help Amphisbaina slide out of her sheath. I pile everything we have on top of her; the emergency blanket, the spare shelter canvas, her clothing, mine. Shivering, I wolf down the rest of the gel. I need calories. Tiny hairs rise on my arms and in the small of my back. I wish there were more vodka, and then burrow into the nest.
Amphisbaina is coiled. Fetal, is how I imagine it, with her back to me. There is a shock when I touch her, but it doesn’t last. I can feel the drugged vestige of surprise as she hunches her shoulders backward, toward me. Toward warmth.
We lie together. I tense muscles in the order dancers do. Try to focus on generating heat. More and more of her eases into contact with me, until we touch along our entire length. Her tail moves between my calves.
What Amphisbaina does then, if I were lying with a human, you’d call rolling over. What it involves is a kind of gentle, rippling twist that shifts her body through two compass points without any sense of distinct motion. I shiver when her belly comes into contact with mine and she lets out a hiss that can only be satisfaction.
We stay that way. I wrap my arms around her and, as if basking in a glow, she lets hers encircle me. The feeling is one of infinite cool smoothness. Metaphor fails me; if I said ophidian I would only be describing the experience as it is. What’s really happening to us is the intimacy of shared heat, of survival; giving and receiving not in the moment of crisis but gently, over time, with no distance between us at all.
“You are so warm,” she says, the same way mammals talk about miracles. Almost unbelievable.
She is right. That’s what I am. Potential energy. Waste heat. Humans radiate it whether we want to or not. It’s why we’re explorers. The long night passes, and we wait for the light.
6.
“Nadezhda,” Amphisbaina says. She pronounces my name perfectly, with the precise sibilance of native Russian.
“The storm is ending,” she says. Dawn has come.
The tempest breaks the same way a fever does: all at once. The mad fluttering of canvas slows, then stops. Rising unselfconsciously from the nest, Amphisbaina carefully unzips the shelter door.
Sunlight pours in. She basks. Flicks out her tongue to taste the warmth. I don’t know how I smell, but she doesn’t seem to mind. Light courses around her and sets our world spinning again. Close heat, a summer breeze, and sand. We’re going to have to dust the array again.
Amphisbaina glances back at me over one smooth shoulder, arms loose by her sides. I blink, and dig around for something to eat.
***
Blake Jessop is a Canadian writer, lecturer, and poet. You can read more of his science fiction in the 2018 Young Explorer’s Adventurer’s Guide from Dreaming Robot Press, or follow him on Twitter @everydayjisei
Grover: Case #C09 920, “The Most Dangerous Blend”
by Edward Edmonds
Detective Ishani Grover walked into the room at 3:15 AM, wiping rain off of her forehead, and stopped short when she saw the carnage. The remains of Ash Snort were splattered across the weather manipulator’s gravity generator, across its consoles, across the walls. She hadn’t seen this kind of carnage since the Terra War. Blood, entrails, cartilage, and other pieces of Snort clung to everything like dust. Her eyes went from slightly blurry to wide awake when the smell hit her; she felt sick but pushed it away, breathing carefully until she steadied herself. She was a professional. She had over a hundred cases under her belt and she had solved all but one. This was a test for her. It was important, political in more than one sense. There was no room for sickness in moments like these.
She took out a metal thermos that was attached to her side, and opened it. Insi
de was a strong tea, brewed using some plants from local greenhouses. She wished it were coffee, even as she felt guilty for the thought. She couldn’t remember a time when coffee wasn’t a rare commodity—global warming had made it nearly impossible—but the solar greenhouses were just starting to get enough room to produce it with the other foodstuffs that sustained the population. It was still rationed; the tickets gave enough coffee grounds for two cups a week. She had both yesterday.
Yesterday was glorious.
Today she could have used it more.
There was movement across the room; a man finished a conversation with another officer, and then walked towards her. He was average height, but otherwise, he was attractive. He had brown hair and a broad build, indicating some power beneath his suit and tie, but its pressed edges suggested he wasn’t security. No, he was definitely a ministry man; only government types wore suit and ties to murder scenes. Impracticality was virtually a symbol of government, right next to the flag. Perhaps he was a well-dressed meathead—wasn’t anything possible?—but the way his eyes searched hers out as he got closer made Ishani doubt that. He was a thinker, this one. Probably just here to deliver some documents; maybe he knew one of the deceased?
Either way, he didn’t belong. She didn’t mind for the moment; a bit of eye candy never hurt anyone, especially when less-appealing things were slithering down the wall.
“Detective Ishani Grover?” He offered his hand and she took it. She gripped it and he gripped it back. Good man. Nothing pissed her off more when one of them gave her a limp handshake.
“Yes?”
“My name is Ali Gayth. I’ll be your ministry contact for this investigation.”
“My what?”
“Because of the impending storm,” he explained. “The ministry wants me to help you with the investigation.”
“Ah.” Government oversight. Great.
The engineer’s death came at a poor moment. This weather generator was built on an island near the Florida coastline, and it was hurricane season. In fact, a hurricane was projected to hit the coastline within a matter of hours. Since the generators were perfected some forty years ago there hadn’t been major destructive damage caused by the weather—the engineers who ran them used them to manipulate gravity to divert the storms into largely uninhabited regions, of which there were plenty now after the Terra War—but if the engineers couldn’t operate the system, the hurricane could move into one of the new settlements along the river. It could risk the lives of hundreds of people, and there weren’t a lot of those left nowadays. Ash wasn’t the only one who could operate the device—three more engineers were on duty, and could pick up the slack—but the death of an engineer now made the settlers nervous.
And, as she was reminded by her CO, settlers still had votes.
“Look,” she started to say, but he held up his hand.
“I’m not here to get in your way. I’m just here to help.”
“Then, piss off.” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could restrain them. The man looked shocked for a moment, but then smiled, probably taking it as a joke. She smiled back at him. Better that way, probably. Smooth, Ishani. Smooth.
Ishani broke off from the conversation to look across the room. The locals had already cordoned off the scene, and the solar fence lit up the whole area outside the windows and the entrance she had already come through. Aside from the carnage, the control room looked like it was well maintained; there wasn’t any sign of a fight, nothing obviously broken, no chairs kicked over. She knew the gravity generator could rip biological matter apart. Her superiors wanted answers, and it would be an easy one to give. Mistake. Engineer blown apart. No danger, huzzah. Another notch on her belt.
“Ma’am?” Ali asked.
“Detective, you mean.” She looked over. “All right, if you’re here to help, I’d love some coffee. I’m going to interview the other engineers, ask what they think happened, and when.”
“Way ahead of you,” Ali said. He pulled a notebook out of the inside pocket of his jacket. “The second engineer, fellow named Gregg Melqart, said that the gravity manipulator was turned on while Ash was inside. Tore him to shreds. Said he felt it go on around midnight but since Ash was on duty nobody checked it until Engineer Sheila Porter came on duty at one. Then, she started screaming, and everyone came running. Also, I’m out of coffee rations, so you’re out of luck there.”
“Aren’t there failsafes?” Ishani tried to ignore the twinge of annoyance she felt. The information was good. It was still her goddamn crime scene. She licked her lips, dry and unsatisfied; she had really hoped he had coffee.
“Apparently, not working. They’ve been waiting on parts from the maintenance crew, but since the maintenance crew is on strike…”
“So he died because of a government workers strike. Which is why the ministry sent someone to come here. PR and damage control.”
“I’m here to help,” he interjected. “PR is incidental to the investigation.”
“You ministry types don’t get involved for that.” She shook her head slowly. She was starting to get angry, and had to contain herself. “You’re here for politics, Mr. Gayth.”
“I just gave you information. Doesn’t that mean something?”
“It means you started an investigation without the lead detective because you wanted political leverage.” Her lips were pursed; she took a step back. “Excuse me.”
She walked away, intent on leaving, but heard footsteps behind her. She looked over her shoulder. He was following her a couple of steps behind.
“Didn’t I make my contempt for you obvious, Mr. Gayth?”
“I still have to come with you.”
“According to whom?”
“Your boss.”
He was probably right, and she felt annoyed.
“Fine. Follow, if you need.” She turned around.
“I also interviewed the other two engineers. I have notes, if you’d like.”
She ignored him. She’d talk to all three engineers herself.
She found engineer Sheila Porter in the staff room. The sight of the staff room shocked her; empty cans were strewn across a broken table in the middle of the room. One can oozed a brown liquid that pattered onto the floor. The walls were yellowed from tobacco smoke—which Ishani was pretty sure was not supposed to be smoked inside—and a small hole had been kicked into the northmost section. Ishani eyed the hole, but it was impossible to know when it happened, and judging from the state of the rest of the room, it was hard to say if it was relevant. She filed it away in her mind for later and looked over to the engineer. Sheila was slumped into a recliner off to one side, snoring softly, her legs level with the rest of her body. Ishani walked over to Sheila and looked down at her, wrinkling her nose at the smell of whiskey.
Ishani looked over to Ali. “Glad to know our best and brightest ministry engineers are so thoroughly vetted,” Ishani told him. Ali looked downward, and Ishani grinned with savage glee at his discomfort. “Didn’t you talk to her earlier?”
“I did. I didn’t get much out of her.” Ali looked down at Sheila. “She started drinking almost immediately after Ash Snort died.”
“Did she say anything interesting?”
“She said it was all her fault.”
Ishani cocked an eyebrow at him.
“All her fault?”
Ali shrugged. “She’s pretty drunk. Could just be grief.”
“Or it’s a confession.”
“Or, it’s a confession.”
Ishani looked down at Sheila’s prone form, letting her mind block out the offensive odors that hung in the air around them. Ishani reached down and shook her.
Sheila suddenly groaned, and then startled awake when she saw them. Her arms flailed, tripping the lever at the side so she sat straight upright. Her head lolled sideways, and her mouth opened slightly several times before closing. She looked up at Ishani, her eyes unfocused and glassy.
“Who fuck are yo
u?” Sheila asked. Her words slurred, and she spat as she cursed.
Ishani took out her badge. “Detective Ishani Grover. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
Something stirred in Sheila’s eyes. She held out her hands.
Ishani gave her a questioning look.
“Arrest me,” Sheila said. “I did it. I fucked up.” Sheila’s words slurred even more to a point where Ishani almost couldn’t make the words out. She leaned her head downwards and started to cry, sobs escaping her throat. An awkward silence followed. Ishani considered reaching for her handcuffs but thought better of it.
“What did you do, Sheila?” she asked.
“Fucked up.”
“How?”
Sheila howled, sobbing uncontrollably. Ishani started to get annoyed.
“Sheila, you need to talk to us.”
Sheila continued to sob. Ishani sucked in some air, and her arm twitched. Arresting her would be so easy. Ishani could let her rot in a jail for a while until she got some answers. And in the meantime she could catch up on the sleep she’d lost. Her eyelids dragged down.
There was a special place in hell for early morning crime scenes.
Ali walked over to her, offering Sheila a handkerchief. Who the fuck carries a handkerchief nowadays? Sheila accepted it, blew her nose, and continued to sob. Ali put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed it, and for some reason, Ishani felt even more annoyed than she had before.
“Sheila Porter,” Ishani began, but Ali put up his hand. Maybe it was just the audacity of the gesture that stopped her. She went to speak again, but Sheila’s voice broke in.
“I fucked up.”
“How?” Ali asked. His voice was soft, gentle.
“I didn’t install it properly.”
“Install what?” Ali asked.
“Failsafes,” she said. Ali looked up at Ishani and caught her eye. Ishani swallowed her pride and nodded back to him. He continued to press.
“You mean the broken ones?”
Sheila shook her head furiously. “The new ones,” she said, her voice still shaky but strengthening. “Parts came in yesterday.”
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