by Neil Clarke
Amalyy sees him look, registers every flitting saccade of his eyes. Their face lifts higher.
Majd remembers this from the Collegiate too: that the Amoya don’t have external sex organs, reproduce asexually, but engage in elaborate coupling rituals to promote social bonding.
“And life is life,” they say. “And there are no dictates but freedom.”
Majd returns to Phoros Physicals. He can’t stay away.
This time it’s a dry weekend in Baalbek. Human and non-human tourists grip charred corncobs and cones of roasted chickpeas and seethe over the quietude of the ruins. Majd exits the cadet office of the Planetary Commune, passes the tiny memorial to his brother beside the fountain in the courtyard. He leaves behind the bright-smelling jasmine chain he bought from a hawker, draping it over Jassim’s nameplate.
The path to the Baalbek burial grounds throws up dust under his proxy body’s feet. On Hexler or on Earth or nowhere at all, Majd licks over chapped lips.
He’s been in the Physical a while, because he can’t remember what the interior of the Phoros cube looks like. He does remember Jassim quite clearly now: massive eyes shaped like unshelled almonds, white teeth, close-cropped hair and the scar on his crown from when a malfunctioning drone clipped him with a propeller. But Jassim’s eyes are wrong, molten, and another set of eyes—Amoya eyes—are brass buckshot pellets in his brow.
Majd sits beside the fresh earth of his brother’s grave. He recites ancestral poetry under his breath, words he’s never uttered outside of the Collegiate. They are verses about freedom, the yearning of all the oppressed people of his land. The slaves who raised the Temple of Bacchus. The shipbuilders who built Muawiyah’s navy. Muslims under the Crusaders, Maronites under the Mamluks, Levantines under the Ottomans, then generation after generation oppressed by war and strife and sent fleeing by the threat of planetary collapse. Spacefaring humanity subjugated first by the Noni, then the Amoya.
He imagines that every verse is about the Kawakby tribe, crushed beneath the heel of grief.
And he recites for Amalyy, for the eventual annexation of the Amoya home planets.
He goes through each verse tens of times, hundreds of times. When he is done, at the fresh grave of his little brother, Majd Kawakby Auroron-Hexler cannot recall how he arrived at this moment. Cannot recall how to move on to the next moment, how to keep going.
So he does what’s easiest. He lies back flat and goes to sleep.
The universe is an emptiness that balloons around the irritation of life just the way a pearl envelops a grain of sand.
Majd wakes up to his mother’s face shrouded in white.
He thinks a moment later that he is not supposed to be here.
“Habibi, are you awake?” she asks. She has not spoken so tenderly to him in years, and this is how he is sure that he has nearly died.
“Was it a PDE?” he asks. His voice doesn’t sound like it’s emerging from his own skull.
Raneem nods. “You wouldn’t come back when they tried to disconnect you.”
“How many days has it been?”
“Four.” Raneem puts a hand on his arm. It’s warm, or his own skin is ice cold.
It’s another three days before Majd’s sensations are moored enough to his skeleton that he can stand and pace the hospital cube. When he does, a Noni nurse brings him his belongings and his Device.
“You can go home tomorrow, Mr. Kawakby. Your Device creds have been broadcast to the Physicals on Auroron-Hexler—I’m sorry, but that’s the last time you’ll be able to use one.”
“So if I want to go to Earth again, I’d better pack?”
The nurse’s breathing sounds like cog teeth snapping an elastic band. “I’m afraid the doctors are worried about a relapse of your dissociative event if you visit a supra-c location. Stasis pods are a lot like Physicals.”
This takes a moment to mean anything. “No Earth?”
“No, sir. Anywhere in marvelous Auroron is fine.”
It feels like the syringing of a dense and heavy ichor from the depths of his gut, some ballast that had held him inside himself.
“Earth is my home.”
The nurse is gathering up his used gowns. “I thought the Kawakby children were born in Auroron?” they ask in Hexler pidgin.
“That’s not what ‘home’ means in our language,” says Majd.
He wills a connection to his mother’s Device, leaves a note. There’s still a Physical available. Paid for. You should go. For Jassim.
Then he contacts Amalyy and asks them over. There’s the thing they have been dancing towards.
Majd considers taking two doses of Mint, decides against it. He doesn’t want to protect his thoughts from their transgressions, not really. In Auroron, political congress is a fragile and new thing, sexual congress well outside the bounds of coexistence even to the most liberal of policymakers.
Raneem is not a liberal policymaker. Raneem would withdraw his tribesname. The world is too delicate a jumble considered from above.
Jassim, he thinks, would have grown up to understand.
Amalyy, too, understands. The two of them might stay combatants—enemies—in some sense, but not in all senses. That is the important part.
“He’d have been a doctor or a scholar,” says Majd, fingers tracing the hook-hairs between Amalyy’s backplates. “Or, to be honest, a politician. Fast wit. Politician’s voice—this loud honeyed voice. And a whip of a tongue. Even an Amoya would have fallen for him.”
“He was many things, this young Jassim Kawakby Auroron-Hexler,” says Amalyy. Majd winces at his brother’s full name.
Amalyy pitches their body closer on Majd’s bed, their purring a gentle vibration against Majd’s ribs. “Perhaps too much life in him to call him a martyr. As you said.”
“More life in him than in me,” Majd says, shifting away.
“Life is life, Unraveler,” Amalyy says, and shifts closer, and pulls Majd near, and holds him. “Death is death, and life is life.”
For A. and M., who might’ve chosen other titles.
About the Author
Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon, not far from Pigeon Rock. She now lives in North London, where she works on transport systems for the future. In her spare time she boxes, runs, and hunts for the perfect almond croissant. Sara is a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her fiction has recently appeared in Clarkesworld #110 and at Lackington’s, and you can find her on Twitter as @fortnightlysara.
Old Friends
Garth Nix
I’d been living in the city for quite a while, lying low, recovering from an unfortunate jaunt that had turned, in the immortal words of my sometime comrade Hrasvelg, “irredeemably shit-shape.”
Though I had almost completely recovered my sight, I still wore a bandage around my eyes. It was made from a rare stuff that I could see through, but it looked like dense black linen. Similarly, I had regrown my left foot, but I kept up the limp. It gave me an additional excuse to use the stick, which was of course, much more than a length of bog oak carved with picaresque scenes of a pedlar’s journey.
I had a short lease apartment near the beach, an expensive but necessary accommodation, as I needed both the sunshine that fell into its small living room, and the cool, wet wind from the sea that blew through every open window.
Unfortunately, after the first month, that wind became laden with the smell of rotting weed and as the weeks passed, the stench grew stronger, and the masses of weed that floated just past the breakers began to shift and knit together, despite the efforts of the lifesavers to break up the unsightly, stinking rafts of green.
I knew what was happening, of course. The weed was a manifestation of an old opponent of mine, a slow, cold foe who had finally caught up with me. ‘Caught’ being the operative word, as the weed was just the visible portion of my enemy’s activities. A quick examination of almanac and lodestone revealed that all known pathways from this world were denied to me, shut t
ight by powerful bindings that I could not broach quickly, if at all.
I considered moving to the mountains or far inland, but that would merely delay matters. Only the true desert would be safe from my foe, but I could not go there.
So I watched the progress of the weed every morning as I drank my first coffee, usually leaning back in one white plastic chair as I elevated my supposedly injured leg on another. The two chairs were the only furniture in the apartment. I slept in the bath, which I had lined with sleeping moss, which was comfortable, sweet-smelling, and also massaged out the cares of the day with its tiny rhizoids.
The day before I adjudged the weed would reach its catalytic potential and spawn servitors, I bought not just my usual black coffee from the café downstairs, but also a triple macchiato that came in a heavy, heat-resistant glass. Because I lived upstairs they always gave me proper cups. The barista who served me, a Japanese guy who worked the espresso machine mornings and surfed all afternoon, put the coffees in a cardboard holder meant for takeaways and said, “Got a visitor today?”
“Not yet,” I said. “But I will have shortly. By the way, I wouldn’t go surfing here this afternoon . . . or tomorrow.”
“Why not?”
“That weed,” I replied. “It’s toxic. Try another beach.”
“How do you know?” he asked as he slid the tray into my waiting fingers. “I mean, you can’t . . . ”
“I can’t see it,” I said, as I backed away, turned, and started tapping towards the door. “But I can smell it. It’s toxic all right. Stay clear.”
“OK, thanks. Uh, enjoy the coffee.”
I slowly made my way upstairs, and set the coffees down on the floor. My own cup in front of one white chair, and the macchiato at the foot of the other. I wouldn’t be resting my limb on the spare chair today.
I had to wait a little while for the breeze to come up, but as it streamed through the room and teased at the hair I should have had cut several weeks before, I spoke.
“Hey, Anax. I bought you a coffee.”
The wind swirled around my head, changing direction 270 degrees, blowing out the window it had come in by and in by the window it had been going out. I felt the floor tremble under my feet and experienced a brief dizziness.
Anax, proper name Anaxarte, was one of my oldest friends. We’d grown up together and had served together in two cosmically fucked-up wars, one of which was still slowly bleeding its way to exhaustion in fits and starts, though the original two sides were long out of it.
I hadn’t seen Anax for more than thirty years, but we scribbled notes to each other occasionally, and had spoken twice in that time. We talked a lot about meeting up, maybe organizing a fishing expedition with some of the old lads, but it had never come together.
I knew that if he were able to, he would always answer my call. So as the coffee cooled, and the white plastic chair lay vacant, my heart chilled, and I began to grieve. Not for the loss of Anax’s help against the enemy, but because another friend had fallen.
I sat in the sunshine for an hour, the warmth a slight comfort against the melancholy that had crept upon me. At the hour’s end, the wind shifted again, roiling around me counter-clockwise till it ebbed to a total calm.
Even without the breeze, I could smell the weed. It had a malignant, invasive odor, the kind that creeps through sealed plastic bags and airtight lids, the smell of decay and corruption.
My options were becoming limited. I took up my stick and went downstairs once more to the café. The afternoon barista did not know me, though I had seen her often enough through my expansive windows. She did not comment on my order, though I doubt she was often asked for a soy latte with half poured out after it was made, to be topped up again with cold regular milk.
Upstairs, I repeated the summoning, this time with the chill already present, a cold presence of somber expectation lodged somewhere between my heart and ribs.
“Balan,” I called softly. “Balan, your luke-warm excuse for a drink is ready.”
The wind came up and carried my words away, but as before, there was no reply, no presence in the empty chair. I waited the full hour to be sure, then poured the congealed soy drink down the sink.
I could see the weed clearly in the breakers now. It was almost entirely one huge, long clump that spanned the length of the beach. The lifesavers had given up trying to break it apart with their jetskis and zodiac inflatables, and there were two ‘Beach Closed’ signs stuck in the sand, twenty meters apart. Not that anyone was swimming. The beach was almost empty. The reek of the weed had driven away everyone but a sole lifesaver serving out her shift, and a fisherman who was dolefully walking along in search of a weed-free patch of sea.
“Two of my old friends taken,” I whispered to the sun, my lips dry, my words heavy. We had never thought much about our futures, not when we were fighting in the war, or later when we had first escaped our service. The present was our all, our time the now. None of us knew what lay ahead.
For the third time, I trod my careful way downstairs. There were a dozen people outside the café, a small crowd which parted to allow me passage, with muffled whispers about blindness and letting the sightless man past.
The crowd was watching the weed, while trying not to smell it.
“There, that bit came right out of the water!”
“It kind of looks alive!”
“Must be creating a gas somehow, the decomposition . . . ”
“ . . . check out those huge nodules lifting up . . . ”
“. . . a gas, methane, maybe. Or hydrogen sulphide . . . nah . . . I’m just guessing. Someone will know . . . ”
As I heard the excited comments I knew that I had mistimed my calls for assistance. The weed was very close to catalysis and would soon spawn its servitors, who would come ashore in search of their target.
I had meant to ask the owner of the café, a short, bearded man who was always called “Mister Jeff” by the staff, if he could give me a glass of brandy, or at a pinch, whiskey. A fine armagnac would be best, but I doubted they’d have any of that. The café had no liquor license but I knew there was some spirituous alcohol present, purely for Jeff’s personal use, since I’d smelled it on his breath often enough.
But as I said, it was too late for that. Palameides might have answered to a double brandy, but I secretly knew that he too must have succumbed. It had been too long since his last missive, and I accounted it one of my failings that I had not been in touch to see where he was, and if all was well with him.
“Someone should do something about that weed,” complained a thickset young man who habitually double-parked his low-slung sports car outside the café around this time. “It really stinks.”
“It will be gone by morning,” I said. I hadn’t meant to use the voice of prophecy, but my words rang out, harsh and bronze, stopping all other conversation.
Everyone looked at me, from inside and outside the café. Even the dog who had been asleep next to one of the outside tables craned his neck to look askance. All was silent, the silence of an embarrassed audience who wished they were elsewhere without knowing why, and were fearful about what was going to come next.
“I am a . . . biologist,” I said in my normal tones. “The weed is a known phenomenon. It will disperse overnight.”
The silence continued for a few seconds, then normal service resumed, at a lower volume. Even the double-parking guy was more subdued.
I spoke the truth. One way or another, the weed would be gone, and likely enough, I would be gone with it.
As the afternoon progressed, the stench grew much worse. The café was shut, staff and customers retreating to better-smelling climes. Around five o’clock, nearby residents began to leave as well, at the same time the Fire Brigade, the Water Board, the police, and several television crews arrived.
An hour after that, only the firefighters remained, and they were wearing breathing apparatus as they went from door to door, checking that everyone had left.
Farther afield, way down the northern end of the beach, I could see the television crews interviewing someone who was undoubtedly an expert trying to explain why the noxious odors were so localized, and dissipated so quickly when you got more than three hundred meters from the center of the beach.
The “DO NOT CROSS” tapes with the biohazard trefoils got rolled out just before dusk, across the street about eighty meters up from my apartment. The firefighters had knocked at my door and called out, gruff voices muffled by masks, but I had not answered. They could probably have seen me from the beach, but no one was heading closer to the smell, however well-protected they might be. The sea was bubbling and frothing with noxious vapors, and weedy nodules the size of restaurant refrigerators were bobbing up and down upon the waves. After a while the nodules began to detach from the main mass of weed and the waves carried them in like lost surfboards, tendrils of weed trailing behind them, reminiscent of broken leg-ropes.
I watched the nodules as the sun set behind the city, mentally mapping where they were drifting ashore. When the sun was completely gone, the streetlights and the high lamps that usually lit the beach didn’t come on, but that didn’t matter much to me. Darkness wasn’t so much my friend as a close relative.
The lack of artificial light caused a commotion among the HAZMAT teams though, particularly when they couldn’t get their portable generators and floodlights to work, and the one engine they sent down the street choked and stalled before it had even pulled away from the curb.
I had counted thirteen nodules, but more could be out in the weed mass, or so low in the water I’d missed them. My enemy was not underestimating me, or had presumed I would be able to call upon assistance.
I had presumed I would be able to call upon assistance, a foolish presumption built upon old camaraderie, of long-ago dangers shared, of the maintenance of a continuum. I had not thought that my friends, having survived our two wars, could have had a full stop put to their existence in more mundane environments, or at least not so soon. Which meant that they had met the same fate that now threatened to be mine.