Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 119

by Neil Clarke

  And the Yellow’s only riches gather under the surface. Oceans of fresh water filtered through thick strata of earth and stone, rid of the ever-replenishing acid on the surface. They drilled for it, built caverns, moved ahead of the storms in their caravans to tap new wells.

  In secret, by night, we took only what they’d taken from us. And when they stood in our way, we killed them.

  It was my fourth mission, and I was proud to be with the watercarriers. I hadn’t killed so far, but a part of me hoped I would get the chance to prove myself this time. The more I put myself at risk, the less guilt I felt.

  Like every other time, I was nervous before we set out. Seven of us, plus ten birds on their tough grass leads, we stood at one of the outposts currently facing the Yellow World, the invisible outer limits of the atmosphere a bare ten minutes distant.

  The plan was always the same: we would fall toward the Yellow World and rely on our gliding skills, in the shadows of the night.

  The birds determined our course, they made sure we had air, and with the uncanny sureness of sleepwalkers, they found the places that gave access to water. Under the protection of night we would search for an entryway, would kill the watch, would keep watch ourselves.

  The birds did the real work. They would smell the water, would seek it out. They would unfurl as much of our spacetime as needed to draw the water up through wells, halls, and stairways, and let it flow up into the air. There it would gather, a new drop-sea hanging shivering over our heads, swelling and never overflowing. And before the morning dawned, the birds would let themselves and us fall up, back home, with our shimmering, priceless spoils. We would disappear over the horizon and the settlers down below would never discover who’d killed their watch and taken their water. So we had always done, and we’d never lost a watercarrier or been caught.

  My flight companion had gleaming brown plumage and scuttled restlessly here and there on my back while we waited for the order to begin the mission. It was no comfort, the thought that he could bite me or drive his talons into my flesh at any moment. Bound together, we were at each other’s mercy. If I fell, the bird on his lead would be dragged down with me, and if he saved himself by rolling space together, making himself dart back upwards, he would have no choice but to save me, too, taking me with him. Most of the birds were well-trained and cooperative. Despite that, I didn’t like them so close to me, didn’t like their appraising, cold bird-gaze. My companion produced smacking guttural noises and stuck his penis in my ear. I knew that he only wanted to be friendly, but I didn’t like that sort of affection. I put my helmet on quickly and made certain the visor was shut securely against wind and sand.

  Judging by feel, the Yellow World was below us now. Very far below. And between us and the Yellow World was nothing but a little vapor glistening in the sunlight.

  “Ready?” cried Utjok.

  I worshipped our squadron leader even more than I’d worshipped Rasn as a youth. Utjok was stronger, harder. Ey was considered one of the best.

  We gave em the thumbs-up sign and I felt my bird clamp tight to my back. Utjok raised eir arm and as ey let emself fall, we pushed off one after another from the mossy outpost and dove headfirst toward the Yellow.

  On my first three missions I’d had my fear under control, had almost savored it, like a well-deserved punishment I had to endure. But this time it was worse. As I felt us leaving the atmosphere of the Dancing Stones, the panic built into a massive wave and broke over me. It was worse than my first catastrophic flight attempt. I screamed in mortal terror, as though seized by a horrific premonition—one which would turn out to be accurate. The bird on my back had no pity for my distress. He was a dumb animal that, aside from the breeding instinct, was guided only by careful training. He bit me until he drew blood, and brought me to my senses.

  When I could think halfway clearly again, I found myself drifting aimlessly between the Dancing and the Yellow, surrounded by my atmosphere, which the bird had pulled out of the larger atmosphere as one pulls drops out of a drop-sea. The other members of the squadron were a good ways ahead; Utjok looked back at me. I corrected my course, joined up with them, and let myself fall into formation.

  Two meager mealtimes later, we’d reached the first layer of Yellow’s atmosphere. I hadn’t had the energy to shake with fear the entire time, and I already had enough flight experience to get myself back under control. So despite the bird skittering restlessly on my back, I’d even managed to catch a little sleep here and there.

  “We need to get out of the sun,” called Utjok eventually.

  I shivered and wished we could fall a little further through daylit regions to warm up. But light might drastically reduce our chances of going unseen; we didn’t know how far their telescopes reached. So we moved along a wide-flung arc in the diffuse area between day and night, toward the point where, together with the desert stronghold we were aiming for, we would turn with the planet into the dark night.

  As soon as the planet’s atmosphere was thick enough, we let our formation’s atmosphere go; the wind struck us unchecked and the air smelled metallic. My bird let go of my shoulders and glided with a pleased smile on his face only two arm-lengths above me, free. For a moment I was happy not to feel his talons any longer, yet suddenly I felt alone. In the palpably stronger gravity, without the support of the kernel in his bird-brain, I found it hard to keep my balance in my flightsuit, and the wind howled so loudly around my helmet that I felt as though I’d gone deaf. Whenever our goal took shape in the distance, we dove deeper still, until it disappeared just below the horizon again.

  Utjok pointed behind us. “Something’s brewing back there. Make sure you don’t fall into a downdraft,” ey bellowed over the noise of flight.

  I threw a glance back over my shoulder. It was true, the night behind us was pulling together into still blacker night, and our smooth gliding flight picked up a tailwind; the birds let out uneasy noises as the wind began to rip at their tails and wings and their tethers. We kept picking up speed.

  “A storm!”

  Utjok made signs that we should shift course to the left. And then behind us, next to us, and, in the next second, right in front of us, a series of poisonous yellow flashes struck out of the blackness into the sand and opened our eyes to something we hadn’t planned on:

  Riders—at least five hundred—in a long line, one after the other. The animals they rode they called armor-mules. Their hooves, eaten away by the acidic sand, oozed downwards into cone shapes like melted fat. The riders were wrapped against the storm, squatting on their animals like black ghosts; and we shot towards them at a speed that made controlled maneuvering almost impossible.

  As one of the mules sheered off to run up a dune and the rider on his back stiffened, I knew we’d been spotted. One moment he looked like a playing piece on a broad gameboard and the next I could already make out the folds on the wraps he wore and what he was pointing at us—which could only be a firearm. In that moment, the best we could hope for was to stay in the air.

  “Up! Higher up!” bellowed Utjok and gave the birds a sign. I felt us bear up against the wind that was trying to press us down, carried by a wave the birds hurled behind us. And the storm rose with us, and the sand, and the riders on their mules.

  I caught a last glimpse of the rider from the dune’s crest as he was thrown through the air. I’d flown too low. I tried to throw myself into the upswell but coasted right under it instead. I felt my bird fish for me, but the Yellow World’s gravity was stronger; it grabbed me, tore my bird’s lead, and left me spinning while around me sand and riders and my squadron, too, plunged towards the earth.

  You couldn’t say I regained consciousness. I regained pain. I couldn’t move my legs, and my arms stood at wrong angles to my body. My left hand lay unprotected in the sand, the skin red, weeping, and the burning was so piercing I retched bile that ran out of the corners of my mouth into my helmet. The sun stood high in the iron-gray sky and all around me was noth
ing but sand. On Yellow, very little grew that could cope with the acid in the ground, and from school I knew that without armor-mules or the right footwear, you had no chance in the desert. Where my flightsuit was torn away, my raw flesh baked in the sun; my tongue was swollen and my throat too dry to swallow. After a while, I discovered one single clear thought buried under all the agony: I would die down here.

  The hope of returning back home as myself shrank down to nothing, just like my brain would shrink under the sun to a fraction of its present size. My vocal cords and my tongue would waste away, my ability to think would collapse, and I thought I could already feel my body fluids gathering together and concentrating to keep alive the part of me that wanted to survive at any cost. That wanted to go home. That was already thinking about laying eggs. I lay dying.

  Is that all? How does this story justify change?

  No, I’m not finished. Tuela didn’t die down there.

  Why not?

  Maybe because the chain of events hadn’t yet led to the change we need. Maybe I was saved so I could bring it to that end.

  We reject that. There is no higher power. If there is, then we are that power, or a part of it. We do not know. It does not matter to us. But still, we want to know why Tuela lived on.

  Unfortunately, I can’t remember. I wasn’t conscious. But there is someone who was. Pierre told me about it. Let’s remember what he recalled.

  Pierre paused at the kitchen gateway and looked up into the sky. The evening was still bathed in pale green light emanating from the Heights hanging slantwise over the horizon, but soon it would be pitch black. The wind drove sand and small stones and leaves before it.

  As a boy, Pierre had been afraid of the Heights, of the ghosts that dwelt there. Elder Rock had told him about them. Many generations ago, it was said, the Heights had been a small planet, and this world had been covered in thick forests. But the tribes quarreled with the Deathbirds, there was war, and the acid that had rained from the sky had made a dead sand world out of the dark-green jungle world. Only a few had survived, and even for these, what was left over was barely enough. It was then that the Deathbirds left the world and took the small world for themselves, and the tribes cursed them because they were trapped here below. After the last cataclysmic acid storm, so the legends said, the surviving tribes looked into the sky searching for the small world and found only rubble remaining. The Heights were shattered; the Deathbirds had gotten their punishment.

  At this point Elder Rock always dropped his voice and whispered, “But their ghosts still fly up there among the rubble. On especially dark nights, they descend. And if they catch anyone not keeping a close enough eye on the sky, they rip off his head and take it back up with them.”

  Then Elder Rock would pull on Pierre’s ear and laugh. And afterward Pierre would lie awake and stare at the sky through the open sand-shutters, not daring to sleep.

  Today, now that he was an adult, he welcomed the Heights in the sky in the evenings, because on any normal night they afforded a few meters of visibility in the blackness. It was only on nights like this that you couldn’t see them at all. The wind kept intensifying, whirling dust and sand into the upper layers of the atmosphere. Light emanated now only from the ever fiercer lightning strikes forking down.

  The men and women from Pierre’s tribe ran across the stronghold’s courtyard. Their scarves and masks pressed against their faces, they fought against the wind hurling acidic sand at them, tied the animals fast in their stalls, and secured hatches and doors.

  Pierre turned his gaze away from the black sky and ran over to one of the greenhouses to stack sandbags that would shield the milky glass from the impact of the wind and windblown debris. Then—a dry thunderclap and a new cluster of lightning strikes beyond the wall, hitting one on top of the other, first far out in the desert and then, instantly, right near Pierre. And then one of them crashed into the cripple-palm whose fronds spread over the courtyard and the greenhouse. It burned, burned blazingly, while the lightning strikes moved on. Pierre’s eyes ran, his ears were deafened by the roaring flames, and he groped his way along the ground, hands protected by thick gloves, ignoring the sand burning where it forced itself under his clothes as he crept towards the place where he had last seen the boy.

  He lay so close to the trunk of the palm that the flames had singed his hair away. It was Jen’s son, still too young to have been given a name, though his nickname was Cakes, the word he said most often. He must have followed Pierre outside.

  Pierre lifted the boy up, carried him, heart racing, into the second courtyard where the fires were kept alive in high glass chimneys, and climbed up the outer steps with him. Inside the walls the howling of the storm became high and wailing.

  Jen was, as expected, in the upstairs hall, tending to cuts and acid-burned eyes. Her breasts swayed under the thin cloth of her nightshirt, her hair spread heavy and black over her back.

  As she spotted Pierre she abandoned her patients. He laid the boy carefully in her arms. Some glanced over, curious. Most found it easier to avoid looking at them.

  “I’m sorry. A lightning strike. He had . . . ”

  Jen didn’t look at Pierre, turning her back to him and laying the boy on one of the smooth-polished stone benches that ran the length of the walls. She covered him up as though he could still feel cold.

  It hurt Pierre to his soul. All of it. That he couldn’t help. That he couldn’t touch her. That the boy lay there. He felt guilty, although he knew it wasn’t his fault. He turned away and ran out again into the raging night.

  It was dangerous to go up on the wall then, but Pierre had to check the telescopes. If they weren’t carefully wrapped and tied up, the sand would grind the lenses blind within an hour.

  He pulled his mask over his face-scarf, hooked his belt into the safety line, and pulled himself along against the storm, hand over hand, until he reached the first telescope. Through the thick dust shimmered a last greenish hint of the Heights that Pierre used for orientation. At the second telescope the wrapping flapped loose against its bindings, and it was pure luck that it hadn’t yet been ripped away. Pierre cast a glance through the telescope before he wrapped it, more out of habit than hope that he would be able to see anything in this weather.

  But he did see something. A snaking line of points of light. A caravan. A big one, with many mules shoving their armored feet along and just as many swathed riders.

  But they weren’t expecting any caravans. An unexpected train of this size could mean only one thing: an exodus. And that meant war. In a day at most.

  Pierre looked out, screening his eyes behind their protective goggles with his hands and staring intently in the direction where he had seen the caravan. Nothing but darkness. Again a series of lightning strikes flashed across the sky and Pierre used the opportunity to look once more through the telescope. Nothing. He waited. But even in the harsh light of the next stormfire, the desert remained empty. Not a single mule and not a man to be seen. There was nothing but sand and blackness out there.

  It is hard for us to remember. But if we let ourselves fall far enough, we know the Dancing Stones were a sphere. That is true.

  There was war. That is true, too.

  They hunted us in their woods, slaughtered us, stole our eggs. The woods were all-concealing, and we liked the trees. In trees you sleep well. We would have gladly stayed there.

  But they were everywhere and we never heard them coming. Only as the trees first disappeared did we truly see them. And we sallied forth.

  There was much anger and bitterness and fear and destruction and death and no balance at all. We refuse to think about it any longer.

  The kitchen gate into the courtyard stood open so that the first sunlight shone in and warmed Pierre’s hands. With him at the table sat Jen and Elder Rock. They blew silently on their mugs of tea, shoved dried fruit in their mouths and chewed, sucking it entirely dry of sweetness and flavor before swallowing the fibers. They were dirty and ex
hausted; they’d been on their feet the entire night. Jen’s eyes were swollen. Pierre didn’t dare look at her.

  “There’s nothing out there,” said Elder Rock. “Lor was on the wall the entire night and kept watch.”

  “But I’m certain. It was an exodus, an entire tribe. We have maybe half a day to prepare.”

  Rock sank into himself just a little more.

  “We’ll never manage it. Not after this past night.”

  “Are you certain?” asked Jen. She seemed calm.

  “I’m certain,” said Pierre.

  Then no one said anything more, no one moved, until Jen suddenly stood up and clapped her hands.

  “Well then. To work!”

  If Jen said, ‘To work,’ then to work she would go and prepare for a battle. Five hundred in the desert against two hundred in the stronghold. They had a real chance. At least Pierre hoped so.

  Elder Rock stood up as well.

  “I’ll give the alarm,” he said tiredly and left the kitchen.

  As the bright sound of the bells broke the air, Pierre asked, “How are you?”

  Jen didn’t answer. Pierre suspected that in her silence she blamed him, just as he did himself. Because the boy had been with him. He stood up to take her in his arms. She let him.

  “Oh, to hell with you,” she said sadly.

  She sounded as exhausted as Pierre felt.

  She’d never let him come to her bed since they’d married, hadn’t once allowed him to show tenderness and comfort her. Her first husband had been murdered as he stood waterwatch below in the outer entrance on a lightless night. His throat had been sliced so cleanly through that his head just barely remained resting on his shoulders. Her marriage to Pierre wasn’t going to improve now that her son from that old marriage was dead, too. Pierre let the hug go.