by Andy Cox
Maybe rather when I knew. You said you knew weeks (months? You would never confess such) before on the flight, because you watched the way I slept, the way I went boneless there and nowhere else. You said you wanted to follow me into that abyss, wanted to see all the things I saw (because my eyes, you said, they never stopped moving even in sleep). Your hand moved around mine and I could only stare, picturing canyons fitting inside canyons, all rocks and hard edges, and yet not. Reveling in scrape and landslide.
Inside, where you kissed me, your lips missed my whole mouth, taking only the bottom lip between your own. Scrape and landslide.
•••
How does a person sleep with that gaping canyon outside the door? It grows even now, constantly pulled apart by a still-restless planet, eventually deepened by erosional forces. They all wondered – everyone we had left behind on Earth. Wasn’t it like a monstrous, gaping mouth ready to swallow us, they asked. Yes, we said. They were vexed by our lack of elaboration. They wanted to know what it looked like in moonslight, in sunlight, in eclipse – and the moons did eclipse, beautifully so, swallowed by shadows in space as they circled, spat out when the shadow had its fill. What did Valles Marineris look like in complete blackness? It looked black, we said. Wasn’t that terrifying? they demanded to know.
We supposed it should have been, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t that Ray had mapped it so well, or that Earth’s own spacecraft had; it wasn’t that we knew every centimeter of every rock, every turn of every offshoot. That yawning trench was familiar to us. It wasn’t like being one hundred and forty million miles from home; we were finally home here, on the edge of this canyon, ready to set down proper roots the way we hadn’t on Earth.
Some people are like that. You can’t explain it. It’s why we went; it’s why they knew we were perfect. They can’t explain the people who go into deep space; once upon a time, they couldn’t explain the people who left England to cross the ocean. Wherever we were didn’t satisfy; there was always new land to leave footprints on. Ray would have understood, you told the people back on Earth; he would have known what Valles Marineris looked like without explanation.
It looked, often, like your mouth.
•••
I come back to this: the moons were melting.
Your eyes widen a little when I tell you that, because you remember that piece. Melting is inexact, you say, because that word still pricks you.
They surely looked like they were melting, I say, and your fingers enfold mine again. There is a slant to your smile.
Sodium atoms, you say, a trail thousands of miles long, so faint we cannot see them with ordinary means, though Ray probably knew they were there. Earth’s moon does this, too—
Melting, I say.
—solar radiation pressure accelerating the faint particles into a long tail that might look like a comet, so if you insist on being poetic—
I insist.
—it could be likened to…glitter.
You flinch even at that word, pricked deep down, but there’s that slant to your mouth again.
For a long while, there is no talking, only my papery lips moving against that slant. You remember this, too, still. You melt, though this is also inexact.
•••
There comes a day in a month – months used to have names? – when I don’t know you.
I am startled to see you in the kitchen with my daughter. Your hand fits perfectly against the curve of her skull, as though it has been there countless times, and her eyes are your eyes, but I still don’t know you. This day, you remember the way I take my coffee, and you remember I don’t like eggs even as I touch the cold oval of one. They aren’t actually eggs is my problem with them. I don’t know what they are.
This feels like the longest day of my life, even though there was one longer. This day, I can’t even remember that one, but it comes back. Eventually.
•••
I shouldn’t have gone, but I couldn’t stay away. You understood even as you screamed at me. (You never screamed, it wasn’t your way, but here in the depths of Valles Marineris, you did. I heard that silent agony ripping from your body the way it did mine.)
(We were not in our bedroom – I tell myself this, and so tell you too, so you will remember it the way it must be remembered – so we were not in the room that sheltered us from the fatal nights outside, the room where we created such beautiful things inside each other.)
There were no hard suits that day, no soft suits, but ice clouds drifted high above which meant aphelion, you whispered, the farthest point away, even as your hands slid over the rounded mound of my belly, perihelion. There was life for a little while yet, and I watched the clouds, thin and ephemeral, so fast across the dome of that sepia sky even though they were frozen. How did they move? What wind pushed them?
Blood smells different here. Painfully hot across my thighs and over your hands, and—
Brief life, small, so small. Two bundles, swaddled tight, carried up and up, closer to those ice clouds, but never quite there. Two bundles, but of the sudden four of us, one silent and still. There is a square in the yard still, marked in hard sepia clay, that not even the winds can blow away. They might if I let them, but I finger the drifted sand from these small borders so the farthest point away is not so far at all.
•••
We talk about the loss without saying anything. There is a voice in the way your body moves with and against my own. I think I should be broken, but I’m not; my body heals the way it should, becomes a whole and strong voice again. I think that my voice should lean away from yours, but it is drawn hard into that gravity well, knowing there is solace to be found in the shadow of all of you have to say.
You draw tentative words down the length of my spine and back up. These words sound the same, but never are. Fingers slide questions over my ribs and whispering breath remarks over my shoulder, and yes it’s all right and it will never be all right again, but we want what we want, and this— Always this. The blood of you buried inside me to erase this awful thing. The hard suckle of her mouth against me to blot from the clouded sky his pale eyes.
•••
They told us things no other could know. They were so tall, drawn in the colors of old photographs, grown in this gravity and not that which had harbored us – not grown in pods or incubators, but bodies of flesh and bone. Mothers, they had mothers, but there were no families – they did not stay together the way we did. They roamed, needing to stay in constant motion. They found their own kind in time, whether old or young (these things did not matter, because they did not exist), and mated as they do. It was beautiful – they showed us, two bodies becoming one, one swallowed by the other and back again; we knew that dance, could say oh yes, we know.
They walked us from one end of Valles Marineris to the other (they did not, but I’m telling you this happened, so it happened), and told us how they named each branch of stone and sand. Noctis Labyrinthus was nothing so grand in their language – they didn’t have Latin (they would not have, I reason). They called it The Quake. They showed us the fractured stones, how they had been split yet found home at the bottom of this nook. The quake was a terrible thing for them. We are made to understand how it felt as if the entire planet would cleave into pieces unrepairable. One body split into two separate bodies – and you would tell me that is not a word, better you say the world was melting, but no – unrepairable.
They showed us all the places the world had slid, one side into another, where it bulged, where it shot from its core in black tentacled spirals. They showed us every single way this place had been broken and how it lived on. How the world continued in its orbit – they showed us how they marked such, how they used our own world as a guide to where their own stood among the stars. They told us all the names of those stars – the closest word in English for Earth for them was probably “folly,” because so many of them didn’t believe it existed at all. It was a blue glimmer and then gone. Gone. How could su
ch a thing hold anything as wondrous as them?
The canals were in shambles when they showed us. They took us on some still standing, showing us how water would run again when the rains came. When was the rainy season, you asked them, and the sound they made could have been laughter or tears or maybe it was equal parts of both. This world was the color of a rusted oil can that had never held oil. They never knew water. Some of them said they remembered. You still wished for rain.
•••
They – scientists and doctors and countless astrobiologists – said this might happen. That our kind (humankind) were not made for the depths of space or the rigors of traveling through it. Rigors is what they called them. Said we were best suited for our own blue sphere, because even when we spent time in its orbit, we decayed. Deep inside, our bodies ate our bones away and turned us into bird-like creatures if we stayed long enough. What would radiation do to our minds, our memories? What would this iron planet do to us when we returned? We didn’t plan on a return, so this was never an issue for us. Why would you go to such a place only to leave it?
We spent a lot of time walking. We could have driven our rovers but we preferred the walks, liking the ache in our hips after a long day of going from here to there. This was often before our daughter – our daughter, not only mine. Part of you and part of me, wedged into an entity all her own. Once she came, there was less walking and more running.
She loves to run, especially in this light air (the only air she has known), long brown hair streaming out behind her, small bare feet never knowing the lick of cool grass, but only the crunch of coppery sand. She loves to mound the sand over your feet until you wriggle them free. Toe by toe, pop pop pop, but this only lasts so long.
Her eyes (they are yours, fragmented blue and hazel) watch the sepia figures capering against the horizon and she says they dream of taking her away. (It’s the easiest explanation. Why would she want to leave? Hush, hush.)
•••
We could lock her in a closet, but this isn’t that story, or planet. She grows up too fast even though years are longer here. She grows tall and thin, so straight against the red sky, and that brown hair deepens to something red-gold.
She longs for others of her kind – we are not them, she tells us every night as we curl her into bed. Not them – those who know this world inside and out because it is their own. We fashion this world in Latin and they do not have Latin, she insists.
Your long fingers plait her hair into braids, each end tied with a ribbon the color of Earth skies; come morning, these ribbons spool undone on her pillow, on her floor. One morning, there are only ribbons.
She wrote us a letter. (No, she didn’t, but hush and let me tell this before I go back to melting moons and the way your hand fit against the curve of my head the same way it eventually did hers and—)
I can’t. I want to tell you about the rain first.
•••
You don’t remember, but this is where we began.
In the hush of space where there was only the muted rumble of the engines through the walls. I said it was like a cat purring. You tried not to laugh, but I saw the way your mouth moved. That slant. I know all the words it conveys and contains, and tell them each to you so that you might remember.
Laughter, derision, amusement, irritation, contemplation, love, love, love unspoken. That was never a word between us – it simply was, the way Valles Marineris simply is. The way one finds unexplainable comfort in something so overwhelmingly large. Something so overwhelmingly present.
You told me about rain first – you hated it on Earth. It was something to slog through, something that flooded gutters, leaked through roofs, soaked socks and shoes and wrinkled fingertips. You liked it dry, because dry was simple, uncomplicated by anything so random as water. Water went where it would, dry was always dry and didn’t go anywhere.
But slowly on the ship, you came to long for rain. I heard the longing in the slant of your mouth as it moved over the curve of my shoulder in the shower. You tongued the beads of water down the length of my arm, directing them exactly where you wanted them, and you saw something new in water then. Possibility became a word also balanced in the slant of your mouth.
You watched the skies once we settled in. You communicated with the other distant outposts that had been established, asked them every day what they saw in the clouds. They never saw rain. This world was dry, itching for a good downpour. The planet could not stretch to reach the dry ache in its middle.
The day we found her ribbons was the day it rained. (This is both true and not – just listen.)
She wasn’t old enough to go on her own (oh, she was, but will you hush?). We did not walk, we ran to the edge of the canyon, all along that jagged edge. (They don’t call it Valles Marineris – they have no idea what Mariner 9 was and though we tell them, they don’t care. To them, it’s Scar and Cradle and where they first emerged.)
We ran and did not look where we went because it was her we looked for. We saw their tall forms against the sky as we always did, moving in that dance we didn’t understand but enjoyed watching, but there was no smaller figure amid them.
We ran, our feet knowing the way without us having to look – we could have traced these routes in our sleep (I probably often did, but you did not, still wishing I could pull you down inside my own dreams). Dust rose in the heavy air, coating arms, cheeks; my lips curled apart they were so dry and at first I thought I was crying – a thing I had not done since we descended to the bottom of the canyon and lost— No. That did not happen. The square in the yard says otherwise, but it needs to hush, and this—
Hush.
This. It was not tears, for it was not salty, but it tasted almost like metal as it washed down from the clouded sky. It was harder than anything we had known (it wasn’t), washing away every speck of dust and debris (not entirely). Even at a distance, we could hear the canals overflow. Your hands curled into my arms (they did) and you held tight (always tight) – were you keeping me anchored or you?
We watched the canyon fill and flood, and we stared and we should have been terrified – why didn’t you run, they always ask – but there was no need to run, not from the storm we lifted our faces toward. They doubted that the canyon flooded – there is no possible way, they say, that such a large space filled with rain waters. Not on that planet. You would have run. You would have been killed. It did not flood.
But we know it did, and when you lean in to kiss the tears from my cheek now, I can hear in the slant of your mouth that you know it did. You remember.
•••
We found her after the rain. She in her bare feet, walking slow with others of her kind. So impossibly tall, thin like a reed, her hair as red-gold as the sands which gleamed with the storm’s wet. She smiled at us and it was her hands (gone larger than our own) that slid over our rain-damp heads, to cup us the way we had cupped her.
You offered her a ribbon and she let you tie it into her sodden hair. (Years later, we would both find ribbons, one in the garden and one in the canyon’s depths, and we would not know them as hers or ours. Who was here?)
And then she was gone. Running and not walking as she ever had, into the distance with those great tall beings. Ray would have understood, you said. The people this place once held, the ghosts it still did. Ray knew it was only ever ghosts. Things lost, things broken but still littering the landscape. Glittering it, you say.
We look at those large, fractured stones now and don’t understand how they fell. We walk the growing perimeter of our base in bare feet and wonder why we shun shoes. When the winter rains come they wash the yard clean – scrape and landslide – and reveal a square notched into the dirt and we wonder who was here before.
Ray would know, you say.
•••••
E. Catherine Tobler’s recent story sales include Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons. She’s a Sturgeon Award finalist and the senior editor at Shimmer Magazine. This i
s her first appearance in Interzone.
THE BARS OF ORION
CAREN GUSSOFF
ILLUSTRATED BY RICHARD WAGNER
SESSION ONE
In this universe, they called it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. In this universe, the treatment was drugs, or prolonged exposure, or cognitive therapy, or eye movement reprocessing.
In his universe, they called it Consequent Distress Condition. Blankenship didn’t know how it was treated; in his universe, he didn’t have it.
The therapist called him in from the waiting room. “Mr. Blankenship?” she asked, and when he stood, she said, “I’m Dr Reed.”
One would think in a city the size of Seattle – this one or the other – Blankenship wouldn’t keep running into people he knew. In his Seattle, her name was Meridian. In this universe, couples took on one or the other’s family name. In his universe, you made a whole new name. Like Blankenship.
Here, the other Blankenship was named Ferguson.
And his wife, Zhorah Blankenship, was still alive and married to someone else. She was called Zhorah Graham.
Blankenship followed this Dr Reed into her office. She motioned for him to pick a seat from the ring of chairs, and then sat directly opposite him.
Blankenship knew he couldn’t stay in this Seattle much longer. But it made Tibbi comfortable because it was familiar. So, they stayed. Blankenship would do anything for his daughter. Including combing his hair differently, as differently as he could, and meeting people he already knew.
He’d do anything for Tibbi. His beautiful, brilliant, funny Tibbi. And, if other universes were more like this one than their old one, she was truly one of a kind.
“Forgive me, Mr Blankenship. You look so much like an acquaintance of mine,” Dr Reed said. “You have a brother?”