Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 119

by Neil Clarke

  Her comm’ crackles in her ear, and a soft male voices says something in the edges of it that she can’t quite grasp.

  A voice?

  Unholy starlight, she is being rescued.

  She inhales enough to laugh weakly, deliriously. It tastes rotten. The quality of the signal is poor, they must still be far off, or God’s Brain is interfering with the signal somehow, but if she can receive them, they must be reading the distress signal from her beacon loud and furious. She waits, making an effort to breathe. Her lungs feel like metal.

  The crackle comes again, clearer.

  “This is the ship serial 009548221, The St. Michael. If you do not respond, we will assume you are disabled, and will rendezvous with your quadrants.” The voice is so human and soft that she barely understands it.

  She almost responds, starts screaming her head off in fact, but something stops her. When was the last time she ate? Or drank? And who is she again? She is Drift. Just Drift. The walls around her, crooked and curving, pulse as if waiting for something. She can’t feel anything but a metallic sort of cold, and her thoughts are sluggish and fractal, but part of her brain, she can feel, is buzzing with a foreign light.

  “HUD,” she says. Her voice is crinkled steel and harsh, living smoke. “Self-facing camera.”

  A square image of her face appears on the side of her HUD.

  She’s the wire frame of a person. Her eyes are huge and blind. Her skin is a deep black, much darker than normal, and it’s hard, and her veins, showing through her skin and spider cracked all across her face and eyes, glow a liquid blue-white that is a dull kind of familiar. Her glowing veins pulse blankly as if there’s still a heart beating somewhere in the collapsed spaces of her chest.

  She looks like a metal zombie. Exaggerated and more than a little ridiculous. She realizes she hasn’t blinked in several hours, and her eyes are dry and look like milky glass. She feels infectious. She realizes, softly, inside the tender egg of her skull, that she is patient zero.

  The ZY is airtight, of course. It’s also shielded against all known radiations, within a certain level of tolerance. But God’s Brain had almost instantly infected her. She’s been leaving behind bits of herself like bread crumbs even before she entered it. Back when it was just a dark spot on the edge of her eye. And she has the sinking suspicion, deep in her new metal skin and in her white blood, that it would be even more efficient now. That it’s now tuned to the human brain, her brain, with all its wild curves of light.

  If The St. Michael comes for her, it will be infected. She has to assume this.

  And yet, the stars are calling her. And they spit the future into black holes everywhere. Apocalypse is written all across her skin. The stars are the only parts of her that remain. Jangling loose inside her like a million tiny hearts.

  All she needs to do is wait, and they’ll come. All she needs to do is drift, and she will be saved.

  She should turn off her communications, in case she accidentally can’t control herself, and responds automatically to the voice of humanity.

  “Communications,” she says, and then, for no reason she understands. “Link on.”

  There’s a thick silence, warm with static. The walls swirl with light in a pattern that, she now recognizes, mimics the flowing cycles of her thoughts.

  “Hello?” the soft voice says in her ear. “Are you there?”

  The stars change inside her. They are the fireflies trapped in her loose, child’s hand. They are the lights of a wild city. They are going out like prayer candles in wisps of delicate smoke. There’s nothing left of her but the fine smoke of the stars.

  “Are you there?” the human voice repeats in her ear. Seeking, in its way, to reclaim her.

  About the Author

  Ryan Row lives in Oakland California with a beautiful and mysterious woman. His short fiction has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Shimmer Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. He is a winner of The Writers of the Future Award and holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University.

  Alone, on the Wind

  Karla Schmidt, Translated by Lara Harmon

  I am the first wingbeat; I started the stones rolling. But now I need help. We can’t keep cowering here like hens on their nests. We have to act, and soon, because my memories have started sinking into now and we; I need to share them before they stop meaning anything at all. But you shy away from me. Why?

  We have enough to do with the Dance of Stones. Folding dimensions so that the Stones do not drift away demands all we are. Memory tips the world out of balance too easily. Memory comes from regret.

  But what if there won’t be a future without these memories?

  The future comes from fear. It, too, tips the world out of balance.

  But the world’s long out of balance! Now that I’ve given you the chance to share in events through me, you have to become part of them! We need to change something!

  Change is eternal. Even without our help.

  And what about life? Is that eternal, too?

  Life must grow, to exist. If it does not grow, it falls back into death.

  Exactly! That’s it. We’re falling. It’s already begun. Please, let me tell my story and then—then you can make your decision.

  It begins with a youth named Tuela. Tuela was too fearful for a life among the Dancing Stones.

  “Tuela!” called Rasn. “Come back!”

  Rasn had always stood by me, even though I was the most difficult youth in eir group. If I stopped now and went back, ey would lay eir arm on my shoulder comfortingly, would explain to me that my siblings loved me and hadn’t meant it that way. And ey would’ve been right, because their laughter wasn’t mean. They laughed to hide their concern. They laughed to give me courage.

  I didn’t know why Rasn hadn’t followed me that time, why ey hadn’t pulled me aside under some salt-glittering, moss-overgrown rock and, with a mixture of disappointment, anger, and pity on eir face, brought me back. I was almost grown, but I still behaved like someone freshly hatched.

  The trail faded away under my feet as I ran ever higher, up against the bird-gravity. Finally I couldn’t go any further. Dizziness seized me as I looked around, and I clung to an overhanging rock.

  Above me, only blank, black space, but if I leaned far enough forward and peeked over the path’s edge: at my feet, the Dancing Stones. I hated being so far out on their edge; there were no hand-ropes here, no bridges. No buildings to protect you. Despite all of that, I let go of the rock overhang as I felt the whole mountain tilt and tip forward, positioning the Dancing Stones directly in front of me. I wouldn’t fall; the mountain would hold me down as long as I kept my feet on the earth. Still, I felt my stomach lurch, and I had to suppress the impulse to throw myself flat on the ground and cling to it with every cell in my body. I took another shaking step, the tips of my toes jutted out over the trail edge, and I spread my featherless arms out like wings.

  The wind snatched at the channels in my flightsuit and flared them out, ready to carry me away. Only one more short step and it would happen.

  I breathed deliberately, slowly, felt the fear, and watched the first birds I saw as they lifted from their nests, circled a few times in the air, and began to check the orbits of the Stones in their territories. The Stones’ complex movements looked completely different from this vantage point on their outskirts than they did closer to the center, where my school was. Where I felt safe. Yet seen from out here, it was the center that looked hopelessly dangerous. The boulders seemed to cluster far too close to each other. Some were so big that over the course of generations glittering cities had grown up on them, and some had only one or two pink huts clinging to them among the waving salt-grass. Here and there a few boulders drifted faster, others slower; some turned on a shared axis, others just around their own. Most were bunched together in stable groups by a flock’s bird-gravity, and between them drop-seas hung in the air like iridescent eggs, the smallest
just big enough that a group of youths could bathe in them, others as big as the mountain on which I stood.

  I’d never enjoyed being outside. Wherever you went you looked into the abyss, into dizzying depths, always finding yourself at the center of that baffling twisting and turning drift-flow, and everything everywhere seemed to only just scrape along without colliding. Beyond this controlled chaos, there lurked either profound nothingness or the fierce smiling face of the Yellow World, hanging sometimes over and sometimes under us. Unlike my siblings, I’d never picked up the knack of always knowing which direction to look in when leaving home.

  As always when I watched the Dancing Stones, I waited against my will for a convulsion, a collision, explosions and wreckage, the screams of the dying. But nothing like that happened. Of course it didn’t. The birds had everything under control, by instinct, and unlike conscious thought, instinct never broke down. Ever. The sun bathed the craggy meadow a few flight-minutes below me in a golden glow, and I saw the cloud-shadow of the mountain I stood on drift across it. I closed my eyes.

  It was really only a step. Most youths did it as soon as they could walk steadily. I wiped away the tears that had forced their way out from under my eyelids. If I didn’t do it now, I would have to go on living like this: hobbled, always relying on help. Until the day I died.

  Not far below me my siblings, with their crash helmets and their wind-flared, colorful flightsuits, passed by in close formation. I saw how two of them let themselves fall behind and drop into the ripple between manipulated gravity fields, shrieking and relishing the acceleration before Rasn called them back into line and they let an updraft catch them. Despite their quick pace, the group’s movement seemed almost stately as they wheeled through a passage between two Stones turning counter to each other.

  And then they were gone. Rasn had left me out here alone, and I stood on the edge of a cliff. With outspread arms, knocking knees, and flapping flightsuit. It was the thought of the scornful and pitying looks I’d receive if I had to return to school riding piggyback again that let me finally act.

  I jumped.

  An air current seized my body and pulled me headfirst inexorably toward the center. Use your arms and legs. Don’t lose your nerve. Keep your goal in sight. Use the changing gravitational foci, torque, and any passages between the Stones that emerge. Theoretically I knew the right responses—I’d certainly read more about aerodynamics, bird neurology, the inverse square law, localized dimensional distortion, and heightened gravity than even Rasn—or any of the other teachers.

  But the texts hadn’t told me what it’s like when you almost soil your flightpants for fear or when your own vomit flies past your ears and you can hardly hold your eyes open because you’re in a headwind without protective goggles. They didn’t say what happened when you suddenly forgot all the theories. When you no longer had any idea how to spread or bend your arms and legs to use a current, to steer, to dodge an obstacle. Or to land.

  In spite of everything, I hit the field I’d aimed for. Or the field hit me. The landing broke my right knee and the pain was so sharp that I waited, yearning, for unconsciousness. But it didn’t come and I began to explore the pain and accept it. And even though I couldn’t get to my feet to leave without help, a feeling of elation suddenly seized me.

  It happens, youths breaking something on their first flight attempt. I could count myself lucky that nothing worse had happened, as I hadn’t taken my helmet with me when I’d run away from flight lessons. I’d done it. I’d bested the airspace between two Stones under my own power and my injury would prove it. Despite my broken bones, now I wanted to stand up at any cost and make the rest of my trek back the same way: Alone! On the wind!

  The attack came the same moment I’d made this resolution. An old bedraggled bird swept down on me, biting at my head and ripping off tufts of my hair and shreds of my skin with her long talons. A few steps away another pair of birds stirred in the morning sun; the female rattled an egg into place under her blue-black feathered belly and yawned hugely, while the male eyed me with distrust and stuck his violet penis out of his mouth in a threatening gesture. The bird above me spat out wild inarticulate noises and aimed her talons at my eyes.

  I acted from pure instinct, striking out, getting a hold of the bird’s lower jaw, gripping under her upper row of teeth with my other hand at the same time. And I tore with all my might, until she cracked and my fingers bled from her sharp teeth, until her lower jaw hung loose and she made gurgling sounds. But she still wouldn’t leave me alone, and as I got hold of her pink feet, I smacked her against the rocks over and over until she was finally quiet and her age-grayed wings hung limp around her. The bird was dead and I was alive. Stupid animal.

  We feel a hint of outrage. We shift anxiously on our feet. We remember; we were there. We could have intervened. But we knew what was done was done. We felt it as the egg shattered. As the child shattered. It was her last egg. She could lay no more. She was ready to move on. No being should ever hold back another who moves on.

  The less thickly settled edges of the Dancing Stones, with their salt marshes full of juicy mussels, have been bird territory since this small world shattered. That’s longer ago than we can even imagine. Here they live and with the seven-layered kernel in their bird-brains create the Dance of Stones; here they nest in the ten thousands on every single boulder, and the childcatchers prowl their territories and search the nests for newborns.

  But I was no childcatcher; I had never in conscious memory seen a nest up close. Only as I cautiously straightened up did I realize why the bird had attacked.

  The nest was old, the grass in it brown and slimy, and it was just as tattered as the bird now lying dead at my side. The pale blue egg was hidden beneath tufts of grass. It looked like there was no longer any male to go with the dead female, and likely she had covered the egg to protect it against the hot sun at the beginning of the day or from cooling off during the night while she was away.

  The egg was shattered. The youth inside was brown-skinned and very blond, just like me. It could’ve hatched any day. A tiny creature, lying before me in the frail blue shell as if it were sleeping, with little legs pulled up and balled fists. On its head was the egg tooth, pale blue and gleaming, with which it would’ve opened the eggshell. Many youths came to school with their egg teeth hanging on grass bands around their necks as good luck charms. I still had mine myself and felt for it, as if with only a little luck I could take back what had happened. I’d smashed in the youth’s tiny ribcage with my fall. My triumph had dissolved into nothing, transformed into two small dead bodies that lay near me in the grass.

  On the first day I did nothing. On the second day, early in the morning, I licked the salty dew from the grass. I needed a freshwater drop-sea, but I couldn’t find one. With great effort and pain I hid the corpses in a hollow in the stone that I covered over with moss, so the childcatchers wouldn’t find them. Then I scattered the nest to the winds. The second night I spent shivering and alone under the open sky. I could die out here. That would be fair. I could hope for rescue. Rasn knew where they’d left me behind. They would search for me. But maybe they would come too late. I could try to make my way back to civilized regions on my own. All in all, this option seemed to offer not only the greatest chance of survival but also the greatest chance that my crime against society wouldn’t be discovered. I had to try to move a few Stones further at least. To somewhere where there was water and people. I crawled around, found a place I could push off from, and started on my way.

  While I worked onwards Stone by Stone, I realized this was exactly why Rasn had left me behind: to force me to learn to fly if I wanted to survive. When I reached school on the fourth day, I was received like a hero. But I didn’t feel triumph. I only felt guilt.

  Guilt means keeping the past alive. Regret.

  Yes, I couldn’t forget what I’d done.

  We had forgotten, until you told us about it again.

  And n
ow the memory makes us angry. Anger exerts too much gravity; the Stones could crash into one another. We do not want to hear any more. We must keep the balance.

  Wait! Stay! I promise, at the end equilibrium will be restored again.

  In the eyes of Rasn and the others I would have been a sibling-killer if I’d explained what had happened. And if I hadn’t been so obstinate, weak, and self-absorbed, things would never have gone so far. I was too much of a coward to face the consequences. But I atoned in my own way—by becoming the best flyer in my group. At any time of the day or night, I was out and about among the Stones, and out in space, too. I wanted to become a watercarrier, and that required the hardest training you could imagine.

  Rasn supported me. Ey was proud of me and of emself, because ey thought ey had awakened such courage and drive in me. But I distanced myself from em internally. Ey didn’t know how deeply ey was mistaken about me and eir fear for my life filled me with contempt.

  But the Yellow World didn’t make only em afraid. Everyone feared the desert sands of our big sibling, which are so acidic they eat flesh from bones. Everyone feared the heat and the storms that raged over the lowlands and ground the mountain ranges down to glass-smooth whispers. The gravity there dragged at us, making breathing a torture.

  Only close to the poles were the storms less frequent and the days not quite so hot. There, water gathered under the surface where we could reach it. And there, cliffs rose up out of the sand, and in the cliffs were settlements of wild tribes, up to a thousand members strong—heavy thickset people with black eyes peering out from the eye-slits in their protective sand-masks. They killed without scruple. And they ate their dead.

  In school I’d learned it was the inhabitants of the Yellow World who’d shot to pieces their own little brother-world, moving hand-in-hand with them through the heavens. Yet we’d survived and still danced in all of our wreckage right under their noses, while the Yellow pulled jealous faces at us. They wanted to destroy us, but in the end we’d fared better than they had. Our world is green and warm and the air the bird-gravity holds around us is salty and mild. The only thing we’re missing is fresh water.