. . . and even all our ancient mother lost
was not enough to keep my cheeks, though washed
with dew, from darkening again with tears.
Even the thought of standing makes her tired.
No, she reminds herself—that part of her brain that isn’t yet ready to surrender. It’s not the thought of getting to my feet. It’s the thought of the five containers remaining between me and the bridge. The thought of the five behind me. That I’ve only come halfway, and there’s the other halfway to go.
Something soft, weighing hardly anything at all, lands on her cheek. Startled, she opens her eyes and brushes it away. It falls into a nearby clump of moss and gazes up with golden eyes. Its body is a harlequin motley of brilliant yellow and a blue so deep as to be almost black.
A frog.
She’s seen images of frogs archived in the lattice, and in reader files, but images cannot compare to contact with one alive and breathing. It touched her cheek, and now it’s watching her. If Oma were online, Nix would ask for a more specific identification.
But, of course, if Oma were online, I wouldn’t be here, would I?
She wipes the rain from her eyes. The droplets are cool against her skin. On her lips, on her tongue, they’re nectar. It’s easy to romanticize Paradise when you’ve only ever known Hell and (on a good day) Purgatory. It’s hard not to get sentimental; the mind, giddy from clean air, waxes. Nix blinks up at all the shades of green; she squints into the simulated sunlight shining down between the branches.
The sky flickers, dimming for a moment, then quickly returns to its full 600-watt brilliance. The back-up fuel cells are draining faster than they ought. She ticks off possible explanations: there might be a catalyst leak, dinged up cathodes or anodes, a membrane breach impairing ion-exchange. Or maybe she’s just lost track of time. She checks the counter in her left retina, but maybe it’s on the fritz again and can’t be trusted. She rubs at her eye, because sometimes that helps. The readout remains the same. The cells have fallen to forty-eight percent maximum capacity.
I haven’t lost track of time. The train’s burning through the reserves too fast. It doesn’t matter why.
All that matters is that she has less time to reach Oma and try to fix this fuck-up.
Nix Severn stands, but it seems to take her almost forever to do so. She leans against the rough bark of the tree fern and tries to make out the straight line of the catwalk leading to the port ’tainers and the decks beyond. Moving over and through the uneven, ever-shifting terrain of the forest is slowing her down, and soon, she knows, soon she’ll be forced to abandon it for the cramped maintenance crawls suspended far overhead. She curses herself for not having used them in the first place. But better late than fucking never. They’re a straight line to the main AI shaft, and wriggling her way through the empty tubes will help her focus, removing her senses from the Edenic seduction of the terraforming engines’ grand wrack-up. If she can just reach the front of this compartment, there will be an access ladder, and cramped or not, the going will surely be easier. She’ll quick it double time or better. Nix wipes the rain from her face again, and clambers over the roots of a strangler fig. Once on the slippery, overgrown walkway, she lowers the jumpsuit’s visor and quilted silicon hood; the faceplate will efficiently evaporate both the rain and any condensation. She does her best to ignore the forest. She thinks, instead, of making dockside, waiting out quarantine until she’s cleared for tumble, earthfall, and of her lover and daughter waiting for her, back in the slums at the edge of the Phoenix shipyards. She keeps walking.
2.
Skycaps launch alone.
Nix closes the antique storybook she found in a curio stall at the Firestone Night Market, and she sets it on the table next to her daughter’s bed. The pages are brown and brittle, and minute bits of the paper flake away if she does not handle it with the utmost care (and sometimes when she does). Only twice in Maia’s life has she heard a fairy tale read directly from the book. On the first occasion, she was two. And on the second, she was six. It’s a long time between lifts and drops, and when you’re a mother whose also a runner, your child seems to grow up in jittery stills from a time-lapse. Even with her monthly broadcast allotment, that’s how it seems. A moment here, fifteen minutes there, a three-week shore leave, a precious to-and-fro while sailing orbit, the faces and voices trickling through in 22.29 or 3.03 light-minute packages.
“Why did she talk to the wolf?” asks Maia. “Why didn’t she ignore him?”
Nix looks up to find Shiloh watching from the doorway, backlit by the glow from the hall. She smiles for the silhouette, then looks back to their daughter. The girl’s hair is as fine and pale as corn silk. She’s fragile, born too early and born sickly, half crippled, half blind. Maia’s eyes are the milky green color of jade.
“Yeah,” says Shiloh. “Why is that?”
“I imagine this wolf was a very charming wolf,” replies Nix, brushing her fingers through the child’s bangs.
Skycaps launch alone.
Sending out more than one warm body, with everything it’ll need to stay alive? Why squander the budget? Not when all you need is someone on hand in case of a catastrophic, systems-wide failure.
So, skycaps launch alone.
“Well, I would never talk to a wolf. If there were still wolves,” says Maia.
“Makes me feel better hearing that,” says Nix. A couple of strands of Maia’s hair come away in her fingers.
“If there were still wolves,” Maia says again.
“Of course,” Nix says. “That’s a given.”
Her lips move. She reads from the old, old book: “Good day, Little Red Riding Hood,” said he. “Thank you kindly, wolf,” answered she. “Where are you going so early, Little Red Riding Hood?” “To my grandmother’s.”
Nix Severn’s eyelids flutter, and her lips move. The home-away chamber whispers and hums, manipulating hippocampal and cortical theta rhythms, mining long- and short-term memory, spinning dreams into perceptions far more real than dreams or déjà vu. No outbound leaves the docks without at least one home-away to insure the mental stability of skycaps while they ride the rails.
“You should go to sleep now,” Nix tells Maia, but the girl shakes her head.
“I want to hear it again.”
“Kiddo, you know it by heart. You could probably recite it word for word.”
“She wants to hear you read it, fella” says Shiloh. “I wouldn’t mind hearing it again myself, for that matter.”
Nix pretends to frown. “Hardly fair, two on one like this.” But then she gently turns the pages back to the story’s start and begins it over.
The home-away mediates between limbic and the cerebral hemispheres, directing neurotransmitters and receptors, electrochemical activity and cortisol levels.
There was once a sweet little maid . . .
Shiloh kisses her brow. “Still, hell, I don’t know how you do it, love. All alone and relying on make-believe.”
“It keeps me grounded. You learn the trick, or you washout fast.”
The skycap’s best friend! Even better than the real thing! Experience the dream and you might never have to come home.
The merch co-ops count on it.
“You could look for other work than babysitting EOTs,” whispers Shiloh. “You’ve got the training. There’s good work you could do in the yards, in assembly or rollout.”
“I don’t want to have this conversation again.”
“But with your experience, Nixie, you could make foreman on the quick.”
“And get maybe a quarter the grade, grinding day and night.”
“We’d see you so much more. That’s all. And it scares me more than you’ll ever know, you hurtling out there alone with nothing but make-believe and plug and pray for waking company.”
Make haste and start before it gets hot, and walk properly and nicely, and don’t run, or you might fall.
“The accidents—”
“Going under and never coming up again.”
“The odds of psychosis or a flatline are astronomical.”
Shiloh rolls over, turning her back on Nix. Who sighs and shuts her eyes, because she has prep at six for next week’s launch, and she’s not going to spend the day sleepwalking because of a fight with Shiloh.
. . . and don’t run, or you might fall.
The emergency alarm screams bloody goddamn murder, and an adrenaline injection jerks her back aboard the Blackbird, back to here and now so violently that she gasps and then screams right back at the alarms. But her eyes are trained to see, even through so sudden a disengage, and Nix is already processing the diagnostics and crisis report streaming past her face before the raggedy hitch releases her.
It’s bad this time. It doesn’t get much worse.
Oma isn’t talking.
“Good day, Little Red Riding Hood . . . ”
3.
Of course, it isn’t true that there are no wolves left in the world. Not strictly speaking. Only that, so far as zoologists can tell, they are extinct in the wild. They were declared so more than forty years ago, all across the globe, all thirty-nine or so subspecies. But Maia has a terrible phobia of wolves, despite the fact “Little Red Riding Hood” is her favorite bedtime story. Perhaps it’s her favorite because she’s afraid of wolves. Anyway, Shiloh and I told her that there were no more wolves when she became convinced a wolf was living under her bed, and she refused to sleep without the light on. We suspect she knows, perfectly well, that we’re lying. We suspect she’s humoring us, playing along with our lie. She’s smart, curious, and has access to every bit of information on the lattice, which includes, I’d think, everything about wolves that’s ever been written down.
I have seen wolves. Living wolves.
There are a handful remaining in captivity. I saw a pair when I was younger, still in my twenties. My mother was still alive, and we visited the bio in Chicago. We spent almost an entire day inside the arboretum, strolling the meticulously manicured, tree-lined pathways. Here and there, we’d come upon an animal or two, even a couple of small herds—a few varieties of antelope, deer, and so forth—kept inside invisible enclosures by the shock chips implanted in their spines. Late in the afternoon, we came upon the wolves, at the end of a cul-de-sac located in a portion of the bio designed to replicate the aspen and conifer forests that once grew along the Yellowstone River out west. I recall that from a plaque placed somewhere on the trail. There was an owl, an eagle, rabbits, a stuffed bison, and at the very end of the cul-de-sac, the pair of wolves. Of course, they weren’t purebloods, but hybrids. Both were watered-down with German shepherd genes, or husky genes, or whatever.
There was a bench there beneath the aspen and pine and spruce cultivars, and my mother and I sat a while watching the wolves. Though I know that the staff of the park was surely taking the best possible care of those precious specimens, both were somewhat thin. Not emaciated, but thin. “Ribsy,” my mother said, which I thought was a strange word. One I’d never before heard. Maybe it had been popular when she was young.
“They look like ordinary dogs to me,” she said.
They didn’t, though. Despite the fact that these animals had never lived outside pens of one sort or another, there was about them an unmistakable wildness. I can’t fully explain what I mean by that. But it was there. I recognized it most in their amber eyes. A certain feral desperation. They restlessly paced their enclosure; it was exhausting, just watching them. Watching them set my nerves on edge, though my mother hardly seemed to notice. After her remark, how the wolves seemed to her no different than regular dogs, she lost interest and winked on her Soft-See. She had an eyeball conversation with someone from her office, and I watched the wolves. And the wolves watched me.
I imagined there was hatred in their amber eyes.
I imagined that they stared out at me, instinctually comprehending the role that my race had played in the destruction of theirs.
We were here first, they said without speaking, without uttering a sound.
It wasn’t only desperation in their eyes; it was anger, spite, and a promise of stillborn retribution that the wolves knew would never come.
Ten times a million years before you, we feasted on your foremothers.
And, in that moment, I was as frightened as any small and defenseless beast, cowering in shadows, as still as still can be in hope it would go unnoticed as amber eyes and hungry jaws prowled the woods.
I have wondered if my eyes replied, I know. I know, but have mercy.
That day, I do not believe there was any mercy in the eyes of the wolves.
You cannot even survive yourselves, said the glittering amber eyes. Ask yourself for charity.
And I have wondered if a mother can pass on dread to her child.
4.
Nix Severn reaches the ladder leading up to the crawlspace, only to find it engulfed in a tangle of thick vines that have begun to pull the lockbolts free of the ’tainer wall. She stands in waist-high philodendrons and bracken, glaring up at the damaged ladder. Briefly, she considers attempting the climb anyway, but is fairly sure her weight would only finish what the vines have begun, and the resulting fall could leave her with injuries severe enough that she’d be rendered incapable of reaching Oma’s core in time. Or at all.
She curses and wraps her right hand around a bundle of the vines, tugging at them forcefully; the ladder groans ominously, creaks, and leans out a few more centimeters from the wall. She releases the vines and turns towards the round hatchway leading to Three and the next vegetation-clogged segment of the Blackbird. The status report she received when she awoke inside the home-away, what little there was of it, left no room for doubt that all the terraforming engines had switched on simultaneously and that every one of the containment sys banks had failed in a rapid cascade, rolling backwards, stem to stern. She steps over a log so rotten and encrusted with mushrooms and moss that it could have laid there for years, not hours. A few steps farther and she reaches the hatch’s keypad, but her hands are shaking, and it takes three tries to get the security code right; a fourth failure would have triggered lockdown. The diaphragm whirs, clicks, and the rusty steel iris spirals open in a hiss of steam. Nix mutters a thankful, silent prayer to no god she actually believes because, so far, none of the wiring permitting access to the short connecting corridors has been affected.
Nix steps through the aperture, and the hatch promptly spirals shut behind her, which means the proximity sensors are also still functional. The corridor is free of any traces of plant or animal life, and she lingers there several seconds before taking the three, four, five more steps to the next keypad and punching in the next access code. The entrance to Isotainer Three obeys the command, and forest swallows her again.
If anything, the situation in Three is worse than that in Four. Her red gloves have to rip away an intertwining wall of creepers and narrow branches, and then she must scale the massive roots of more strangler figs before she can make any forward progress whatsoever. But soon enough she encounters yet another barrier, in the form of a small pond, maybe five meters across, stretching from one side of the hull to the other. The water is tannin stained, murky, and half obscured beneath an emerald algal scum, so there’s no telling how deep it might be. The forest floor is quite a bit higher than that of the ’tainer, so the pool could be deep enough she’d have to swim. And Nix Severn never learned to swim.
She’s sweating. The readout on her visor informs her that the ambient temperature has risen to 30.55˚C, and she pushes back the hood. For now, there’s no rain falling in Three, so there’s only her own sweat to wipe from her eyes and forehead. She kneels and brushes a hand across the pond, sending ripples rolling towards the opposite shore.
Behind her, a twig snaps, and there’s a woman’s voice. Nix doe
sn’t stand, or even turn to see. Between the shock of so abruptly popping from the dream-away sleep, her subsequent exertion and fear, and the effects of whatever toxic pollen and spores might be wafting through the air, she’s been expecting delirium.
“The water is wide, and I can’t cross over,” the voice sings sweetly. “Neither have I wings to fly.”
“That isn’t you, is it, Oma?”
“No, dear,” the voice replies, and it’s not so sweet anymore; it’s taken on a gruff edge. “It isn’t Oma. The night presses in all about us, and your grandmother is sleeping.”
There’s nothing sapient aboard but me and Oma, which means I’m hallucinating.
“Good day, Little Red Riding Hood,” says the voice, and never mind her racing heart, Nix has to laugh.
“Fuck you,” she says, only cursing her subconscious self, and stands, wiping wet fingers on her jumpsuit.
“Where are you going so early, Little Red Riding Hood?”
“Is that really the best I could come up with?” Nix asks, turning now, because how could she not look behind her, sooner or later. She discovers that there is someone standing there; someone or something. Which word applies could be debated. Or rather, she thinks, there is my delusion of another presence here with me. It’s nothing more than that. It’s nothing that can actually speak or snap a twig underfoot, excepting in my mind.
Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Page 13