Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 116

by Neil Clarke

  Jonas keeps walking, and Fox trails after him like he really is his little brother. The village parents let their children wander in the fields and play until dusk—it seems like negligence to Fox, who grew up in cities with a puffy white AI nanny to lead him from home to lessons and back. Keeping an eye on Jonas is probably the least Fox can do, after everything the family has done to keep him safe. Everything that happened since he rapped at their window in the middle of the night, covered in dry blood and wet mud, fleeing for his life.

  They pass the godtree, the towering trunk and thick tubular branches that scrape against a darkening sky. Genetically derived from the baobobs on Old Earth, re-engineered for the colder climes of the colony. Fox has noticed Jonas doesn’t like to look at the tree, either, not since his little brother tumbled out of it.

  The godtree marks the edge of the fields and the children don’t go past it, but today Jonas keeps walking and Fox can only follow. Beyond the tree the soil turns pale and thick with clay, not yet fully terraformed. The ruins of a quickcrete granary are backlit red by the setting sun. Fox saw it on his way in, evaluated it as a possible hiding place. But the shadows had spooked him, and in the end he’d pressed on towards the lights, towards the house on the very edge of the village he knew belonged to his distant cousin.

  “Time to go back, Jonas,” Fox says. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  Jonas’s lip curls again, and he darts towards the abandoned granary. He turns to give a defiant look before he slips through the crumbling doorway. Fox feels a flare of anger. The little shit knows he can’t force him to do anything. He’s taller than him by a head now.

  “Do you think I like this?” Fox hisses under his breath. “Do you think I like having stubby little legs and a flaccid little good-for-nothing cock?” He follows after Jonas. A glass bottle crunches under his foot and makes him flinch. “Do you think I like everything tasting like fucking sand because that patched-up autosurgeon almost botched the upload?” he mutters, starting forward again. “I was someone six months ago, I drew crowds, and now I’m a little shit chasing another little shit around in the country and . . . ”

  A sharp yelp from inside the granary. Fox freezes. If Jonas has put an old nail through his foot, or turned his ankle, he knows Damjan’s little arms aren’t strong enough to drag him all the way home. Worse, if the ruin is occupied by a squatter, someone on the run like Fox who can’t afford witnesses, things could go badly very quickly. Fox has never been imposing even in his own body.

  With his heart rapping hard at his ribs, he picks up the broken bottle by the stem, turning the jagged edge outward. Maybe it’s nothing. “Jonas?” he calls, stepping towards the dark doorway. “Are you alright?”

  No answer. Fox hesitates, thinking maybe it would be better to run. Maybe some desperate refugee from the revolution has already put a shiv through Jonas’s stomach and is waiting for the next little boy to wander in.

  “Come and look,” comes Jonas’s voice from inside, faint-sounding. Fox drops the bottle in the dirt. He exhales. Curses himself for his overactive imagination. He goes into the granary, ready to scold Jonas for not responding, ready to tell him they are leaving right now, but all of that dies in his throat when he sees what captured Jonas’s attention.

  Roughly oblong, dark composite hull with red running lights that now wink to life in response to their presence, opening like predatory eyes. The craft is skeletal, stripped down to an engine and a passenger pod and hardly anything else. Small enough to slip the blockade, Fox realizes. So why had it been hidden here instead of used?

  Fox blinks in the gloom, raking his eyes over and around the pod, and catches sight of a metallic-gloved hand flopped out from behind the craft’s conical nose. His eyes are sharper now. He supposes that’s one good thing. Jonas hasn’t noticed it yet, too entranced by the red running lights and sleek shape. He’s even forgotten his anger for the moment.

  “Is it a ship?” he asks, voice layered with awe.

  Fox snorts. “Barely.”

  He’s paying more attention to the flight glove, studying the puffy fingers and silvery streaks of metal running through the palm. It’s not a glove. Bile scrapes up his throat. Fox swallows it back down and steps around the nose of the craft.

  The dead man tore off most of his clothing before the end. His exposed skin is dark and puffy with pooled blood, and silver tendrils skim underneath it like the gnarled roots of a tree, spreading from his left shoulder across his whole body. Fox recognizes the ugly work of a nanite dart. The man might have been clipped days or even weeks ago without knowing it. He was this close to escaping before it ruptured his organs.

  “What’s that?” Jonas murmurs, standing behind him now.

  “Disgusting,” Fox says.

  But there’s no time to mourn for the dead when the living are trying to stay that way. A month hiding in the family cellar, then Damjan’s accident, the tearful arguments, the bloody operation by black-market autosurgeon. Uploading to the body of a braindead little boy while his own was incinerated to ash and cracked bone to keep the sniffers away. It was all for nothing.

  His chance at escape had been waiting for him here in the ruins all along.

  “You can’t tell anyone about this, Jonas,” Fox says. “None of your friends. Nobody at school.”

  Jonas’s nostrils flares. His mouth opens to protest.

  “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll tell everyone who I really am,” Fox cuts him off. He feels a dim guilt and pushes through it. This is his chance to get off-world, maybe his only chance. He can’t let anyone ruin it. He needs to put a scare into the boy. “Your parents will be taken away to prison for helping me,” he says. “They’ll torture them. Do you want that, Jonas?”

  Jonas shakes his dark head. His defiant eyes look suddenly scared.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” Fox repeats. “Come on. Time to go home.”

  Fox thought himself brave once, but he is realizing more and more that he is a coward. He leads the way back through the rustling fields, past the twisting godtree, as dusk shrouds the sky overhead.

  Don’t tell anyone. It’s the refrain Jonas has heard ever since the morning he came into the kitchen to find all the windows shuttered, their one pane of smart glass turned opaque, and a strange man sitting at the table, picking splinters from the wood. When he looked up and saw Jonas, he flinched. That, and the fact that his mother was scrubbing her hands in the sink as if nothing was out of the ordinary, made Jonas brave enough to stare.

  The man was tall and slim and his hands on the table were soft-looking with deep blue veins. There were dark circles under his eyes and the tuft of hair that wasn’t hidden away under the hood of father’s stormcoat was a fiery orange Jonas had never seen before. Everyone in the village had dark hair.

  Damjan, who had followed him from his bunk how he always did, jostled Jonas from behind, curious. Jonas fed him an elbow back.

  Their mother looked up. She dried her scalded red hands in her apron. “Jonas, Damjan, this is your uncle who’s visiting,” she said, in a clipped voice. But this uncle looked nothing like the boisterous ones with bristly black beards who helped his father repair the thresher and drank bacteria beer and sometimes leg-wrestled when they drank enough of it.

  “Pleased to meet you, what’s your name?” Jonas asked.

  The man tugged at the hood again, pulling it further down his face. He gave a raspy laugh. “My name is nobody,” he said, but Jonas knew that wasn’t a real name.

  “What’s uncle’s name?” he asked his mother.

  “Better you don’t know,” she said, still twisting her fingers in her apron. “And you can’t tell anyone uncle is visiting us. Same for you, Damjan.”

  But Damjan hardly ever spoke anyways, and when he did he stammered badly. Jonas was going to tell his new uncle this when the front door banged open. His uncle flinched and his mother did, too, cursing under her breath how Jonas wasn’t allowed to. He didn’t know what they were scared of, si
nce it was only father back from the yard. He stank like smoke.

  “Burned everything,” he said. “The gloves too, I’ll need new ones.” His eyes flicked over to Jonas and Damjan, slightly bloodshot, slightly wild. “Good morning, my beautiful sons,” he said, crossing the room in his long bouncing stride to ruffle Jonas’s hair how he always did, to kiss Damjan on his flat forehead.

  “Wash first!” Jonas’s mother hissed. “Damn it. Wash first, you hear?”

  Father’s face went white. He swallowed, nodded, then went to the basin and washed. “You’ve met your uncle, yes, boys?” he asked, slowly rinsing his hands. “You’ve said hello?”

  Jonas nodded, and Damjan nodded to copy him. “Is uncle here because of the revolution?” he asked.

  Lately all things had to do with the revolution. Ever since the flickery blue holo-footage, broadcast from a pirate satellite, that had been projected on the back wall of old Derozan’s shop one night. The whole village had crowded around to watch as the rebels, moving like ghosts, took the far-off capital and dragged the aristos out from their towers. Jonas had cheered along with everyone else.

  “He is,” father said, exchanging a look with Jonas’s mother. “Yes. He is. A lot of people had to leave the cities, after the revolution. Do you remember when the soldiers came?”

  Jonas remembered. They came in a roaring hover to hand out speakaloud pamphlets and tell the village they were Liberated, now. That they could keep the whole harvest, other than a small token of support to the new government of Liberated People.

  “Some of them were looking for your uncle,” father said. “If anyone finds out he’s here, he’ll be killed. So don’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. Pretend he’s not here.”

  Jonas’s new uncle had no expression on his gaunt face, but on top of the wooden table his hands clenched so hard that the knuckles throbbed white.

  After supper is over and Jonas goes to bed, Fox stays behind to speak to his parents. There is a new batch of bacteria beer ready and Petar pours each of them a tin cup full. It’s dark and foamy and the smell makes Fox’s stomach turn, but he takes it between his small hands. His cousin Petar is tall and handsome in a way Fox never was, but he has aged a decade in the weeks since Damjan fell. There are streaks of gray at his temples and his eyes are bagged. He slumps when he sits.

  His wife Blanka conceals it better. She is the same mixture of cheery and sharp-tongued as she was before. In public she holds to Fox’s hand and scolds and smiles as if he really is Damjan, so realistic Fox worried for her mind at first. But he knows now it’s only that she’s a better actor than her husband, and more viscerally aware of what will happen if someone discovers the truth: that Damjan’s brain-dead body is inhabited by a fugitive poet and enemy of the revolution. She drinks the stinking bacteria beer every night, even when Petar doesn’t.

  “Jonas and I found something in the field today,” Fox says, hating how his voice comes shrill and high when he’s trying to speak of something so important. “A ship.”

  Petar was using his thumb to wipe the foam off the top of his cup, but now he looks up. “What kind of ship?” he asks.

  “Just a dinghy,” Fox says. “Small. One pod. But everything’s operational. It only needs a refuel.” He takes a swallow of beer too big for his child’s throat, and nearly chokes. “Someone was going to use it to break the blockade before a nanodart finished them off,” he says. “Now that someone could be me. If you help me again. With this one last thing.”

  His chest is tight with hope and fear. Petar looks to Blanka.

  “You would leave,” Blanka says. “In Damjan’s body.”

  Fox nods his bandaged head. “The transfer was a near thing,” he said. “Even if we could find that bastard with the autosurgeon again, trying to extract could wipe me completely.”

  That isn’t true, not strictly true. He would probably survive, but missing memories and parts of his personality, the digital copy lacerated and corrupted. That might be worse than getting wiped.

  “So, we would have another funeral,” Petar says. “Another funeral for Damjan, but this time with all the village watching and with no body to bury.”

  “You can tell people it was a blood clot,” Fox says. “An after-effect from the fall. And the casket can stay closed.”

  Petar and Blanka look at each other again, stone-faced. People are different out here in the villages. Hard to read. It makes Fox anxious.

  “Then you can be at peace,” he says. “You don’t have to see . . . This.” He encompasses his body with one waving hand. “You just have to help me one more time. It might be the best shot I’ll ever have at getting off-world.”

  “Maybe the ship was put there as a trap,” Blanka says. “Did you think of that, poet? To draw you or other aristos out of hiding.”

  Fox hadn’t thought of that, but he shakes his head. “They wouldn’t go to that much trouble,” he says. “Not for me or anyone else that’s left. All the important people digicast out before the capital fell.” He leans forward, toes barely scraping the floor. “I’ll never forget what your family has done for me.”

  “Family helps family,” Petar mutters. “Family over everything.” He looks up from his beer and Fox sees his eyes are wet. “I’ll need to see the ship,” he says. “You’ve been safe like this, in Damjan’s body. Maybe now you can escape and be safe forever. Maybe that is why Damjan fell. His life for your life.”

  His shoulders begin to shake, and Blanka puts her arm across them. She pulls Fox’s beer away and pours it slowly into her empty cup. “It’s time for you to go to bed,” she tells him, not looking into his eyes—into Damjan’s eyes.

  Fox goes. The room he shares with Jonas is tiny, barely big enough to fit the two quickfab slabs that serve as beds. Jonas isn’t asleep, though. He’s sitting upright with his blanket bunched around his waist.

  “You’re going to take the ship, aren’t you?” he says. “You’re going to go up into space and visit the other worlds and see all the stars up close. That’s what aristos do.” The penultimate word is loaded with disdain.

  “I’m going to get away from the people who want me executed,” Fox says.

  Jonas slides down into his bed, turned away facing the wall. “Aristos go up and we sit in the mud, teacher says. Aristo bellies are full of our blood.”

  “Your teacher spouts whatever the propaganda machine sends him,” Fox says wearily. “Bellies bloated with the blood of the masses. That was my line. Bet your teacher didn’t tell you that.”

  Jonas doesn’t reply.

  Fox undresses himself and climbs into bed. He tries, and fails, to sleep.

  Jonas doesn’t sleep right away either. He’s wary of bad dreams since the day he climbed the godtree. The day they learned, in school, about the smooth white storage cone embedded in the backs of the aristos’ soft-skinned necks.

  Their new teacher was a tall stern man dressed all in black, replacing the chirping AI that had taught them songs and games, but everyone got brand new digipads so they didn’t mind. All the lessons were about the revolution, about the aristos who’d kept their boot on the throat of the people for too long and now were reaping the harvest, which made no sense to Jonas because the teacher also said aristos were weak and lazy and didn’t know how to work in the fields.

  One day the teacher projected a picture on the wall that showed a man without skin or muscles, showing his gray skeleton, and a white knob sunk into the base of the skull.

  “This is where aristos keep a copy of themselves,” the teacher said, pointing with his long skinny finger. “This is what lets them steal young healthy bodies when their old ones die. It’s what lets them cross the stars, going from world to world, body to body, like a disease. Like digital demons.”

  Jonas thought of his uncle who stayed in the basement, the hood he always wore. That, and his soft hands, his way of speaking that swallowed no sounds, made it obvious.

  He was an aristo. It made Jonas frighte
ned and excited at the same time. Had he lived in a sky-scraping tower in the city and eaten meat and put his boot on the throat of the good simple people? Had he skipped through the stars and been to other worlds?

  When Jonas came home from school, he tried to ask his father, but his father shook his head.

  “Whatever he was, he’s family,” he said. “Family over everything. So you can’t talk about him. Don’t even think about him. Promise me, Jonas.”

  But it was hard to not think about. Especially hard to not think about the stars and the other worlds. Jonas knew the branches of the godtree were the best place to watch the stars from. To dream from. Sometimes they looked close enough to touch, if he could only climb high enough and stretch out his arms. Jonas was a good climber. Feeling electric with new excitement, he dodged his mother’s chores that day and went out to the fields.

  He barely noticed Damjan following, how he always followed.

  Fox is waiting outside the small quickcrete cube of a building that serves as the village school. The pocked gray walls are painted over with a mural, a cheery yellow sun and blooming flowers. All the children streamed out a few minutes ago, chattering, laughing. Some of them came over to touch Fox gingerly on the head and ask if he was better yet. Fox encounters this question often and finds it easiest to nod and smile vaguely. He knows Damjan was never much of a talker.

  But the last of the children have gone home now, and Jonas still hasn’t come out. It’s making Fox anxious. He stands up from his squat—he can squat for ages now, Damjan’s small wiry legs are used to it more than they are to chairs—and walks around the edge of the building, towards the window. The smart glass is dimmed, and scratched, besides, but when he stands on tip-toe he can see silhouettes. One is Jonas and the other a tall, straight-backed teacher with his arms folded across his chest. The conversation is muffled.

  Fear prickles in Fox’s stomach again, the fear that’s threatened to envelop him ever since a friend woke him in the middle of the night and showed him his face on the blacklist, declared an enemy of the Liberated People. The new government isn’t stupid. They know to start with the children. Jonas’s head is full of the vitriol Fox helped spark not so long ago, back when he’d fooled himself into thinking the violence of the revolution would be brief and justified.