Other Worlds Than These

by John Joseph Adams

  In the backmost room, behind a series of massive doors, He discovers the bottomless gray ocean waiting.

  “What are you doing here?” The Divine One roars.

  The Authority calls to Him by name, and then says, “Hello again, my friend.”

  “You aren’t the same puddle,” He complains. “I don’t believe this. What kind of trick is this?”

  “Three offerings,” the Authority calls out. “And as always, in return, I will give you three items of your choice.”

  The Divine One orders His journal brought to Him. Riding in a high-gravity walker, a slave girl enters the room. Then He carves the journal into three equal hunks, each portion enormous, each describing a separate million years of wandering through the Milky Way. One after the other, the offerings sink into the thick gray fluid, and then with a quiet, decidedly unimpressed voice, the Authority says, “Accepted.”

  Standing beside the ocean, The Divine One shivers.

  “Do you want your usual?” the Authority inquires. “Three genealogies leading up to lesser incarnations of yourself?”

  “No,” He whispers.

  “No,” He rumbles.

  Then with a sorry shake of the head, He says, “Show me three journals. From minds like Mine, and bodies that are not...”

  Thinking the truth is easy. You fit together the puzzle more often than you realize, and in the normal course of days, you dismiss the idea as ludicrous or ugly, or useless, or dull.

  Understanding is less easy. You have to learn a series of words and the concepts that come attached to those words, and real understanding brings a kind of appreciation, cold and keen, not too different from the cutting edge of a highly polished razor blade.

  But believing the truth...embracing the authentic with all of your self, conscious and otherwise...that is and will always be supremely difficult, if not outright impossible.

  Josh sits alone, studying his lost love’s journals.

  “Something obvious has occurred to me,” he reads, hearing Pauline’s voice. “And ever since, I can’t think about anything else. But I can’t talk about it. Not to anyone. Not even Josh. Not even after sitting here for an entire day. I can’t seem to put down even a single word that hints at this thing that I know...

  “How can I tell Josh? Show him? Help him see...?”

  Closing the journal, Josh wipes at his eyes. And thinks. And after a very long while, with a courage barely equal to the task, he starts to examine every treasure that his lost love acquired over the last five years...given to her by an entity that does nothing by chance...

  He cries for a while, and then He stops.

  Another voice is crying. Astonishingly, He forgot about the slave girl. She remains inside the walker, waiting to be killed. Sad and hopeless, she wipes at her wet eyes, and her bladder lets loose a thin trickle of urine, and she very nearly begs. Please kill me now, and remove me from all this misery...!

  He won’t.

  With a gesture, He wraps her inside a more subtle exoskeleton. Then He beckons to her, saying, “Come here. Sit next to Me.”

  She has to obey. Doesn’t she?

  “Sit,” He says again. And then, unexpectedly, He says, “Or stand. Whatever makes you happiest.”

  She kneels beside the bottomless ocean.

  “Give it three offerings,” He suggests. “Three things you have made, or written down. Three examples of yourself.”

  The girl nearly faints.

  And then with a soft suspicious voice, she asks, “Why?”

  But He cannot tell her why. That becomes instantly obvious. All that The Divine One can manage is to throw a warm arm around her naked shoulder, squeezing her with a reassuring strength, and with a mouth that is a little dry and little nervous, he kisses her on the soft edges of her ear.

  Teller instantly senses that Josh knows.

  Yet they still can’t talk about it. Not directly. Not as long as there is still some taste of ignorance in the world around them. What they can do is smile and hold hands, sharing an enlightened warmth, thinking hard about how the world will change when everyone understands.

  Josh has already made his next appointment with the Authority.

  As it happens, Teller is at work that day. She sits behind her usual desk, smiles and kisses him before he walks to the usual room. With the Authority, he can talk. With a genuine pride, he can tell it, “I understand now.”

  “I know,” the voice purrs.

  “It’s really awfully simple,” he says. “Looking back, I suppose I must have heard the idea, or thought it up for myself...I don’t know, maybe a couple million times...?”

  The silence has an approving quality.

  “One soul,” he says. “That’s all there is. My old lover realized it when she read a book. A book of essays she had written in another realm. As a little girl, the author was riding on horseback through a woodland. She found herself thinking about how she was riding past one tree, and past the tree was another tree that she was also riding past, just as she was passing the rest of the forest that lay beyond both trees. She was thinking how there was no clear point where she could say, ‘I’m not riding past those faraway trees.’

  “So if there was no end point, she reasoned, and if the world was truly round, then clearly, she was riding past every tree in the world. Thrilled with the idea, she rode straight home and told her mother. ‘Run in a little circle,’ she claimed, ‘and the entire world passes by your shoulder.’

  “To which her mother remarked, ‘That’s a very silly idea, my dear.’”

  Josh pauses, sitting in the usual chair and placing the old gym bag between his feet.

  “Pauline was pretty sharp. I can almost see how she got from there to the idea about there being just the one soul.” He shrugs, admitting, “With me? I was lucky. In this one reality, at least, I happened to stumble over the right series of thoughts. I got to thinking about how when I looked at other souls—when I ask you to show me someone with my genetics, or nearly so—I always considered that person as being me. Essentially. Like minds in very similar situations, and we were the same people. A shared incarnation. But if we were the same, and if souls slightly different from my neighboring soul are the same as him...as me...well, then we’ve got a situation where there is no logical or meaningful end...”

  Quietly, the Authority says, “Yes.”

  “I belong to one vast soul,” Josh mutters.

  “You do,” says the voice.

  “And if there can’t be two separate souls in the universe, then the two of us...well, I guess you and I are the same person, in essence...”

  “Absolutely.”

  “A beautiful, joyous notion.”

  The silence is pleased.

  “If not entirely original, that is.” Then Josh laughs, a disarming tone leading into the calm, simple question, “Why don’t you just tell us? At the beginning, with our first meeting...why not say, ‘This is the way it is’?”

  “There are different ways to learn,” the Authority replies.

  “I suppose.”

  “To be told a wonder is one thing. But to take a very long, extremely arduous voyage, and then discover the same wonder with your own eyes and mind...isn’t that infinitely more appealing, Josh...?”

  Josh says nothing.

  After a little pause, the Authority asks, “What three offerings do you have for me today, Josh?”

  Reaching inside the gym bag, he says, “Actually, I brought just one little something.”

  “Yes?”

  With both hands, Josh lifts his gift into the light. Then with the final words, “You cruel shit,” he turns off the magnetic bottle, and a lump of anti-iron begins to descend towards the slick gray face of the ocean.

  THE CITY OF BLIND DELIGHT

  CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowd
funded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Spectrum awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.

  There is a train which passes through every possible city. It folds the world like an accordioned map, and speeds through the folds like a long white cry, piercing black dots and capital-stars and vast blue bays. Its tracks bound the firmament like bones: wet, humming iron with wriggling runnels of quicksilver slowly replacing the old ash wood planks, and the occasional golden bar to mark a historic intersection, so long past the plaque has weathered to blank. These tracks bear up under the hurtling train, the locomotive serpent circumnavigating the globe like a beloved egg. Though they would not admit it and indeed hardly remember at all, New York and Paris and Tokyo, London and Mombasa and Buenos Aires, Los Angeles and Seattle and Christchurch and Beijing: nothing more than intricate, over-swarmed stations on the Line, festooned and decorated beyond all recognition.

  Of necessity, this train passes through the City of Blind Delight, which lies somewhat to the rear of Ulan Bator, and also somewhat diagonally from Greenland, beneath a thin veneer of Iowa City, lying below it as a bone of a ring-finger may lie beneath both flesh and glove, unseen, gnarled and jointed ivory hidden by mute skin, dumb leather. The Line is its sole access point. Yet in Chicago, a woman in black glasses stands with a bag full of celery and lemons and ice in her arms. She watches trains silver past while the cream and gold of Union Station arches behind her and does not know if this one, or this, or even that ghostly express gasping by is a car of the Line, does not know which, if any of these graffiti-barnacled leviathans would take her to a station carved from baobab-roots and papaya rinds, or one of mirrors angled to make the habitual strain of passengers to glimpse the incoming rattlers impossible, so that the train appears with its headlight blazing as if out of thin air, or to Blind Delight itself, where the station arches and vestibules are formed by acrobatic dancers, their bodies locked together with laced fingers and toes, stretching in shifts over the glistening track, their faces impassive as angels. It is almost painful to imagine, how close she has come how many times to catching the right one, but each day she misses it without realizing that she has missed anything at all, and the dancers of Blind Station writhe without her.

  She will miss it today, too. But he will catch it. He will even brush her elbow as he passes her, hurrying through doors which open and shut like arms, and it is not impossible that he will remember the astringent smell of cold lemons long afterward. She has no reason to follow him—this train has the wrong letter on its side, and he is running too fast even to look at the letter, so certain is he that he is late. But she longs to, anyway, for no reason at all. She watches the tails of his blue coat slip past the inexorable doors.

  The car this man, whose name is Gris, enters is empty even at five o’clock. An advertisement looms near the city map, a blank and empty image of skin spreading across the entire frame, seen at terrible closeness, pores and hair and lines beaming bright. It is brown, healthy. There is no text, and he cannot think what it is meant to sell: Lotion? Soap? Perfume? He extends a hand to touch the paper, and it recoils, shudders. The hairs bristle translucent; goosebumps prickle. Gris blinks and sits down abruptly, folding his hands tightly around his briefcase. The train rocks slowly from side to side.

  He does not worry about a ticket-taker: you use your ticket to enter the station these days, not the train. Once within the dark, warm station, which is not unlike a cathedral, all trains are open to the postulant. He is a postulant, though he does not think in those terms. He once took an art history course in college—there was a girl, of course, he had wanted to impress, with a red braid and an obscure love of Crivelli. The professor had put up a slide of Raphael’s self-portrait, and he remembers his shock on seeing that face, with the projector-light shining through it, that face which had seemed to him disturbingly blank, vapid, even idiotic. He is like me, Gris had thought, that is my face. Not the man who was a painter, but the man who was affectless, a fool, the man who was thinner than the professor’s rough mechanical light. I am like that, he thought then, he thinks now. Blank and empty, like a child, like skin.

  He falls asleep and does not hear the station call. But the Line is patient. The doors wait, open into the dark, a soft, sucking wind blowing out of the tunnels and across the platform. The Line has determined the trajectory of its passenger. He stirs when the skin-advertisement shivers above him, and bleary-limbed, steps off of the silver car, into the station-shadows.

  The sun filters in a pink wash through the lattice of bodies. Gris thinks of Crivelli’s angels, how sharp and dour they were on the walls of the girl with the red braid’s bedroom. These people are like that, the top-most ones staring down at him, their hair making strangely colored banners, fluttering with the train-generated winds. He is grateful the floor is plain tile, that he does not have to walk on stomachs and thigh-bones. He gapes—do not all tourists gape? He gapes and his chin tilts up to the banners of hair, ignoring the rush of those for whom the human ceiling is no more unusual than one of glass and iron. They swarm around him; he does not notice.

  Across the gleaming floor, a calf clicks its hooves. Gris shifts his gaze numbly, the smell of the calf beguiling—for it is roasted, brown and glistening, its ears basted in brown sugar, its skin crisp and hot. There is a long knife in its side, and with clear, imploring eyes, the calf looks up at him, turning its pierced flank invitingly. It swishes its broiled tail. A girl runs up in a blue smock, knocking Gris’s briefcase down, and pulls the knife out, cutting a pink slice of veal and chewing it noisily. She thrusts the blade back in towards the calf’s rump, a tidy child. He feels his mouth dry, and though he has found his way to the City of Blind Delight in the place of the woman with the black glasses and the lemons, he is lost as she would not have been.

  Near the apex of the ceiling, a woman with long red hair like a sheeting hensblood and black eyes detaches herself from the throng, smoothly replaced by a young man with hardly any hair at all on his legs. She climbs down the wall as nimble as a spider dropping thread, and in no time at all slaps her bare heels on the clean floor, retrieving a green dress and golden belt from a darkened booth and covering her skin, chilled from the heights. Barefoot, she strides towards the conspicuous tourist as the calf wanders off, holding her hand out in a nearly normal gesture of the world to which Gris is accustomed. This woman is called Otthild, and she was born here, in Blind Station. Her mother was a ticket-taker, a token-changer. She kept her hair bobbed and curled like a silent movie gamine, her uniform crisp and red, even when it was stretched by her belly and the buttons uttered brassy cries of protest. When the time came, she shrugged off her blazer and trousers, hung her hat on a silver peg, and climbed up the wall of limbs, helped along by a crooked knee here and an elbow there, until she reached a rafter of long, thick torsos clasped together leg by arm, and on this she lay, and gave birth to her child in mid-air, a daughter caught by the banisters and neatly deposited at the gleaming turnstile by an obliging windowsill with a yellow beard. Otthild was thus the darling of the Station. She had never taken the Line out of the City of Blind Delight, nor desired to.

  There are many words for what Otthild does. They have little meaning in the City, but she collects them like seashells from the tourists. Of all, she prefers fallen woman, since this describes her birth perfectly. Most of her customers are tourists—she prefers them to locals, and the pay is better. She shakes the stranger’s hand, and he is absurdly grateful. She guides him to the door of the Station, a gorgeously executed arch of four women, standing on each other’s red shoulders—the topmost pair held their children outstretched, and the youths clasped hands in a grace
ful peak. She instructs her bewildered charge to purchase a return ticket from the coiffed man in a glass booth before they leave, and again he is grateful for her. The arch winks as Otthild passes beneath them, her polished hair shining against her dress.

  Outside the Station, the City of Blind Delight opens up in a long valley. No road in its heart connects to any road which might lead into a long avenue or highway by which, traveling quickly, a man might reach the smallest town on any map he knows. The Line is entrance and exit, mother and father. There are lights down there, in the vale, as there are lights in any city. But here the light comes from strange lamp-posts, faceted diamonds, each face as large as a hand, and more like bowls than lamps, full of clearest water. Within, black fish circle, their luminous lures dangling green and glowing from thin whisker-stalks. Otthild ticks the glass of one near her with her fingernails, and the light swells up, washing her cheeks.

  “Come down,” she says, “come into the city, down to the river.”

  Gris goes. He does not know why, though he suspects it has something to do with her hair, and his blankness. She leads and he follows and he wants to be surprised that he is not hanging his clothes up in a half-empty closet and drinking scotch until he falls asleep in his computer chair, but she is walking before him down a long road to a long river, and the late sun is on her scalp like Crivelli’s annunciation.

  The river that flows through the City of Blind Delight is filled with a rich brandy, and all folk take their sustenance there. It has no name, it is simply “the river.” Other cities have a need for names. It floods its banks regularly—there is a festival, but then, there are festivals for everything here. The river inundates its shores and fields of grapevines sprout in the swampy mud without the need of vintners to tend them. In the fall, the purple fruit drops off and rolls back into the water, and the current is so sweet on that day. But now it is summer, and the vines loop and whorl, and some few lime trees bend over the water, their branches heavy with green tarts.