Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “And what?” The anger poured out of him in a flood of words. “When Markie wakes up and gets onto comm, I’m a dead man. Station troopers will pinch me, and I’ll never be seen again. I’ve already committed two, maybe three capital crimes here! Talking directly to you is probably another one.”

  “How you keep your prize is not my trouble.” Her face narrowed, the first real expression he’d seen on her. “Now depart.”

  Spanich tugged at Austen’s shoulder, dragged the kid to his feet. “Come on.”

  Austen stood shaking. His mother slipped a small flechette gun from beneath her robes.

  Ah, thought Spanich, and wondered why he wasn’t surprised.

  “Let’s go,” he hissed in Austen’s ear. “Nobody deserves to be pushed around like this.”

  The flechette gun was unwavering. “Tranh Shankakini Clovis McVail Austen deLacey sub-Rachman sub-Nagona, you are coming home with me.”

  “Mother . . . ” The kid seemed so lost.

  “You already said that.” Spanich let his voice grow gruff, in his talking-to-idiot-techs tone. “Get a new line.” Gambling, he turned the kid with a hard tug on the shoulder and began walking him out like a drunk.

  “My son,” she said from behind them.

  Spanich tapped the hatch panel. At least that control was normal in this freakish room. With a hiss, the wall slid open.

  “Austen . . . ”

  He propelled the kid out, marching him with an arm twist. Austen wasn’t stumbling, though, which meant the heart hadn’t completely gone out of him. The hatch hissed shut behind them, without the characteristic whick-whine of flechettes that Spanich’s ears were straining for.

  “Engineering Supervisor Spanich,” said the shipmind. Its voice was tentative, a tone he’d never heard from a starship.

  “Shut the fuck up,” he growled. “You’re part of this, too.”

  Mare Imbrium {13 pairs} didn’t say another word as they left the ship, left the transfer tube, left the berth lock, left the docking boom, and made their way back into the oily, cold passageways.

  Well away from the locks-and-docks sector, he finally let go of Austen. Kid would be bruised for sure. “Alright then,” Spanich said. “You’re on your own.”

  “Wh-what?” Austen seemed dazed.

  “Snap out of it, kid. You’re free.” Spanich swatted him on the ass. “Now time to scoot.”

  “But I don’t know where to go.”

  “Sure you do. You’ve been living on Estacada Orbital for months.” Platinum-coated genetics or not, the kid had survived on his own. Hustling wasn’t the worst way to live.

  Austen glanced back they way they’d come.

  “Sure. Head back to Mare Imbrium thirteen if you want to.” Spanich leaned close. “But on your own terms.” Kid still smelled great. “And whatever you do, drop the stupid act. You got more education than anyone on this station who isn’t flash brass themselves. Damn well use it. At least be a smarter hustler.”

  “I didn’t think they’d find me,” he said.

  “Hah. You’re genetagged. Probably sniffed you out of the air recyclers, momma came running.” Spanich paused, then probed. “But the big dogs don’t know you’re gone, do they?”

  “I th-thought I’d got away clean.”

  “And that’s why she came with Mare Imbrium thirteen, instead of a battalion of special forces from the Household Guards.”

  “Right. No scandal.”

  “Yet,” said Spanich. “But you’ve been screwing the help, out here on big bad Estacada Orbital. Sullying yourself in the shallow waters of the gene pool.”

  Austen nodded. “Some things get erased.”

  Spanich thought about that, hard. “But not the entire labor force of a station. Too many of us know you, know you’ve been here a while.” He patted the kid’s arm. “I’m grabbing my kit and shipping out as an engineer’s mate in the next empty rack bound somewhere on the backside of this system. With a little luck I can get away before the Adjutant-Intendant puts out a warrant for my ass. You can stay here if you want, but you might consider the same.”

  “No . . . ” Austen stood firm. “I’m going back.”

  “After all the trouble I took to get you out?”

  The kid grinned, that old, easy smile flashing. “Back on my own two feet, walking in to set what terms I can. Like you said. Besides, on Mare Imbrium I can do something about those warrants. Or Mother can, if I ask her nicely enough.”

  Now that Austen had outed himself, he didn’t seem to have any problem with the starship’s name. Spanich gave him a long, slow stare. “Then what, kid? You ran away from something? Sure you want to go back to it?”

  “No.” He looked around. “But what’s here? They won’t let me be. And you’re right. I can be traced anywhere I’m likely to be able to get.”

  For a brief moment, Spanich consider inviting Austen to berth out with him. It would be harder to sign on two, but not impossible. He shook off the idiocy, pulled the kid close for a rough kiss that mostly proved they both needed to shave, then took a step back. “I’m going, then. Good luck.”

  “You’ll make it off Estacada Orbital,” Austen said behind him. “I’ll see to that.”

  “Then you’d better fucking hurry,” muttered Spanich, but not loud enough for the kid to hear. He picked up his pace. There were maybe only a few minutes of freedom left. At the next junction, as he turned, Spanich glanced back. It would be just like the kid to be standing there, staring.

  But no. A couple of off-shift sanitation techs, a trundlebot loaded down with something lumpy, and no sign of Austen, prince of the Imperium Humanum.

  “What do you know?” he asked no one in particular. “Sometimes they grow up.”

  He went for the rest of his tools and his gear. There was always room for a man who could torque vacuum, out here in the Deep Dark. All he had to do was live to not tell the tale.

  About the Author

  Jay Lake lives in Portland, Oregon, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects. His 2012/2013 books are Kalimpura from Tor Books, and Love in the Time of Metal and Flesh from Prime Books. His short fiction appears regularly in literary and genre markets worldwide. Jay is a past winner of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards. Jay can be reached through his blog at jlake.com.

  The Language of the Whirlwind

  Lavie Tidhar

  The sky was the color of ash and the Whistler has been at it again: the shrill sound of his whistle rang like a curse down the abandoned street. Damn kid, the priest thought. Damn stupid kid. It was a miracle he was still alive.

  It was a miracle. The boy was cursed, or blessed, or both. Perhaps he had been a normal child, once. But the year before he had lost his speech, and now nothing remained of it but the whistling.

  The priest himself had been cursed, or blessed, or both. It was hard to tell, anymore. One year ago, he thought. How can everything change in one year?

  He ran a hand through damp, thinning hair and looked warily up and down the street. All quiet—apart from the ceaseless whistling. But empty streets meant nothing any more, in this empty, ruined city. You never knew who or what may be hiding behind a fallen wall, or in the shadows of an abandoned shop . . . looters and slavers and hunters and snatchers—or the guards of a half-hundred banded-together groups, from the roof-dwellers to the children of the ruins to . . .

  The boy kept whistling. Touched by God, the boy was. No one knew who his parents had been—or who had given him the whistle. The first the priest knew of him was when he saw him, in that first week after the Event—the catastrophe, the apocalypse, that thing that had happened, suddenly and inexplicably, to the city of Tel Aviv. He was not yet a priest, then. He had been a . . . well, did it matter? He had had a wife, and two children, still very small—some friends—a job—a television licence.

  Gone. All gone, and in their stead he stood, a priest praying for salvation.


  Praying to the Fireman.

  He walked passed ruined shop fronts, around a Merkava tank half-buried in the broken asphalt of the road, watching the mountain, listening to the whistle of the boy.

  The boy. He had first seen him, walking down this same street, two weeks after he had lost everything he had. The whirlwinds had come from the sea, tearing through Tel Aviv like biblical avengers, throwing up cars, tearing down houses and power-lines, making rag dolls of men, women, children . . . cats and dogs. There were so few left. Only cockroaches and rats there were in plenty, still. There was good eating on a rat. The priest had a friend who kept a farm in an abandoned pharmacy, hundreds and hundreds of pink, fat, juicy rats . . . people, survivors, came from all over the city to buy the meat. A whole industry had sprung around it, street stalls offering the visitors sheesh-kebabs of skewered rat in cumin and salt, rat stews with barley, and boneless meat in thin, flat pita bread made with year-old flour . . . and besides the food stalls a small market emerged, the alte-zachen souk, where scavengers came to sell and trade the refuse of a city that had once held two million people. It was said less than ten thousand now remained.

  He was going there now, to the rat market and the rat men, to search amidst the stalls of the alte-zachen souk, for there were relics to be found, hints and secrets only he could decipher, and the might lead him to the Fireman. He watched the mountain rise in the distance as he had every day since the whirlwinds had come from the sea, and slaughtered the people of Tel Aviv, and took away his life . . . the day the mountain had risen, impossibly-high, emerging in the heart of Tel Aviv and rising, rising, felling houses and shopping malls and office towers as it rose. The heart of the city was a mystery. It was not possible to climb the mountain, no more than it was possible to leave the city. Only one had gone before, and would one day return . . . or so the priest believed. So his new religion affirmed. The Fireman had risen into the sky and up the mountain, where the great, cold beings lived. There were intelligences there, a whole other world, it was whispered: great beings as large as worlds, with cold clear eyes, who watched the city from their heights, and though slow, cold thoughts . . . Why had they come? Their mountain rose above the city and beyond the mountain there were other mountains, other skies . . . but outside of Tel Aviv there was nothing, a ring of darkness surrounding the city. None could climb, could ascend the mountain—and none could leave the city. We are prisoners here, he thought, for the untold time. I was born here and I will die here, as my sons have. The city is my tomb.

  A whistle—he jumped, then realized it was the Whistler, who was following him. The boy, the cursed boy . . . he had seen him that first time, two weeks after the storm had lashed the city into bloodied submission and turned its few survivors into rats. The boy had been walking down the street, the whistle blowing—a small, brown-haired boy with large, serious eyes, in shorts and sandals and a once-white shirt splattered with old, dried blood. And as the priest (who was not then yet a priest) watched, a whirlwind had come, and then another, and another . . .

  How to describe them? He was currently engaged in writing the Holy Book of Fire, the story of the city and the Fireman and of the Prophecy that he had seen, that he had known so fervently to be true. In the Holy Book he had attempted to describe the whirlwinds:

  They came from the sea. Storms, sentient tornadoes. Invisible, aware, and hungry, they came from the sea. The whirlwinds. How many we could not tell. They threw cars into the air and brought them down like bombs, and when the army rose against them they broke our tanks and plucked the men from inside them, or roasted them in the metal, like crabs in their shells . . . they painted the city with our blood and re-drew it, filled with broken-down houses and streets that were no longer there, and graves, so many graves . . . they came from the sea but they are the children of the mountain, and they were sent from high above, to remind us we are mortals.

  To remind us how easy it is for us to die.

  The Holy Book currently filled half an A4 notepad that he had originally found in an abandoned stationary shop. His disciples were not many, but when they gathered, in the place that had once been a pharmacy and was now a slaughterhouse and a church, he read to them passages from the book, and they repeated the words, so they could spread them.

  He alone had seen the Fireman, had seen him rise to heaven in a chariot of flame. He alone knew the tru—

  The whistling returned, louder than before, and he saw the Whistler was gaining on him. The boy no longer wore his sandals, and the soles of his feet were black and hard, but he wore the same bloodied shirt, the same faded shorts as when he had first seen him. It was his eyes that the priest found most disturbing though . . . they were the grey and brown of the sea before a storm, the color of the sky the day the whirlwinds came . . . when he had first seen the boy he had seen the whirlwinds come to him, one and two at first and then three, four, ten, until their silent howling filled the world and ripped apart buildings still standing, tossed cars like game balls—but the boy himself was unharmed, and he stood there, surrounded by the storm, and whistled.

  The boy was cursed, or blessed, or both. If he had any parents, brothers, sisters, he had none, now. Alone, he still stood. Like the priest.

  He tried to ignore the boy. He was afraid of the whirlwinds, afraid of being taken, too soon. After they came he had prayed to die, prayed in the old religion, prayed to God and His angels, but no angels came, and there was no God. He had been there that day when the mountain rose and he saw the Fireman, driving his fire truck along the road, driving over everything in his path, driving like fire, like wind, charging at the mountain as those who dwell above reached down and took him, and the great municipal fire truck rose up in the air, higher and higher, until at last it disappeared beyond . . .

  He knew then. Knew the Fireman had been chosen. A holy messiah, as it had been of old, in the old bible, chosen to lead his people out of darkness and into the light. Knew that he would return. That day he had shelled his old, dead identity and became the priest.

  He walked through the silent city, and the Whistler followed him.

  From above, the city:

  The carcasses of cars and tanks lie rotting in the sun on Ibn Gvirol and Herzl streets, and along the Yarkon river human skeletons lie bleaching in the sand. Fires burn, here and there, and on the rooftops of the city one can see newly-formed habitats, green gardens and colonies of migrating humans whose children may never see the streets below. All along the shoreline small fires burn, where refugees gather to watch the wall of darkness on the horizon: you may go this far, but no farther. Along the Ayalon Highway the rider clans race and war. Above all towers the mountain, its peak rising beyond the cloud, and beyond it can just be seen the outlines of other mountains, other lands . . .

  The rat market was near the old bus station. Here, amidst ruined shawarma stalls and the remains of massage parlors, the Rat Lord made his home, and with him his band of hangers-on, the traders in white meat, the male and female prostitutes, the singers, the dancers, the mad and the lost.

  The cries came from everywhere, and with them the mouth-watering scent of char-grilled flesh. “White meat!” they said. “White meat on a stick!”

  “Coins! Stamps! Tennis rackets! Footballs! Pens!—” and all the other useless things the scavengers found amidst the abandoned shops.

  “Onions! Fresh onions!”

  “Oranges! Juicy oranges!”

  “Lettuce! Tomatoes! Cucumbers! Garlic!”—from the roof dwellers and the small kibbutzim, those communal societies that had formed in the ruined city, and grew produce on the ground that peeked from underneath the broken-down concrete.

  “Tinned pears! Tinned fish! Tinned peas! Tinned corn!”—In this the scavengers always did good trade, though prices were rising as stock had become increasingly harder to come by.

  “Baby clothes . . . family photographs . . . ID books . . . ” from a wizened old woman whose teeth were a bygone dream.

  A wide
board set up to one side. Photos pinned on to it, hand-written notices. Have you seen this child? Have you seen my wife? Have you seen my husband, have you seen my son, have you seen, have you seen, have you—

  But no one has, and they are gone, gone, all gone into the clouds—

  “White meat! Tender and sweet! Tasting like honey, the bestest white meat!”

  The priest paid for a skewer (a pair of earrings, a handful of gold teeth), and on a whim he couldn’t quite explain paid for another, and gave it to the boy. To shut his whistling, he thought. The boy let the whistle drop onto his chest, where it hung by a string. He bit into the meat. There were three little rodents per skewer.

  “Books! Get your books here! Good books, thick books, plenty of paper!”

  The bookseller smiled up at him as he approached. The boy trailed behind. “Good paper, priest. Soft and strong, good for starting a fire and good for the bum—”

  “I have the only book I need,” the priest said, patting the place where his notebook was, and the bookseller nodded. “Are there news?”

  “He has not yet descended to be amongst us,” the priest said. “But the time is approaching.”

  “The Fireman . . . ” the bookseller said. “I’ve heard the stories. A biker clan tried to challenge the mountain last week, did you know?”

  The priest shook his head. The bookseller said, “Raced up old Dizengoff Street—what’s left of it—straight up the side of the mountain. Ahead they went, five of them, then four, then three. One made it almost to the place where Dizengoff Centre used to stand, before—”

  The priest nodded again. “It is folly to try,” he said. “What happened?”

  “Combustions,” the bookseller said. “spontaneous combustions, as spectacular as—”

  “It is His mark,” the priest said, feeling excitement slide down his throat like a reviving medicine. “The time is nigh, I have told you.”