by Kij Johnson
And now, on this second Eluder Ship, there was only her.
Outside the windows, lightning the size of a hundred dead planets forked across Maera’s surface. The star looked ancient, tired, ready to sleep forever. The aliens throughout the chamber paused to stare up at the star.
Her wrist flickered like the star outside. On the film, the mustachioed man. The woman with the beautiful black hair. Another party. A different day. A cake with five flames. Eyes reflecting candlelight. The boy, blowing the flames out. Smoke and applause. Silent cheer.
“You said you wanted a story,” the Perslop said, “Well I have one. A few weeks ago I confronted a group of wandering Ergs. One told me that he’d captured a human—”
Betsy started in her seat.
“The Erg said the human was an ugly, repulsive thing,” the Perslop continued. “With dark hair covering most of its carbuncle head, and liquid leaking from its odious eyes. It pleaded for its life. And the Erg, a compassionate being, decided ultimately to let it go. But afterward he became terribly distraught. He said he’d missed his opportunity to destroy a creature which had caused so much of the galaxy’s pain. For a long time I considered this Erg’s position.
“I once had a vast starship. I found a bore-worm nibbling in my refuse berth. I believed in the sanctity of all life, and decided to let it live. Six weeks later, my ship was infested with bore-worms, and no one would dock with me for fear of having their hulls eaten. I had to incinerate my ship. You see, I let one worm live, and thousands returned to ruin me. Is it not the same with humans? If we let one live, do we not give them the chance to destroy us again? I told the Erg that he did the righteous thing, but I truly did not—do not—believe it myself.”
The Twirlovers chirped quietly.
“Where did he find this human?” she blurted. “How many weeks ago was this?” Dark hair covering its head? she thought. Julio, is he speaking of you?
The first Twirlover said, “Please, tell us more, beloved! This is wonderful!”
“What more is there to tell?” the Perslop said. “We may be reborn in a new universe, but if we carry that worm along with us, do we not risk infestation again?”
Betsy stared into the Perslop’s tripod eye-cups. It knows, she thought. It knows what I am. Then she remembered the aeroform creature studying her and the Whidus staring at her and the Twirlovers’ odd behavior around her.
They all know, she thought. Every one of them knows!
“Do not fear, human,” the Perslop said. “I’ll not kill you. I define myself by being what you are not. I let you live even though every pulse of my hearts says you should be squashed between my arms like vermin.”
Betsy stared at the Perslop, shivering. Weakly, she said, “Was your story about the human true?”
Outside, a brilliant solar flare leaped from Maera and grew angrily out into space. The Daughter, shedding her last vestiges of life. Soon now.
The Perslop gestured to her screen. “Is your story true? Is not history filled with lies and obfuscations?”
On the screen, a beach, waves crashing silently. Umbrellas casting large shadows. A beautiful young woman smiling shyly at the camera. The future wife of the boy. A burning ball of light in the sky. Everyone watched the screen.
“So beautiful,” the Perslop said. “And gone forever . . . ”
Silence. Even the Twirlovers went still.
“Please!” she said. “Tell me! Was it true?”
“Why?” the Perslop said. “Why should I tell you? Why do you deserve an answer?”
She took a deep breath. “Because someone I love might still be alive,” she said. “To me, that’s everything.”
The alarm trilled, startling her. “Gravitational collapse imminent, beloveds! Please take your positions inside your transitional shells!”
“No!” she cried. “Not yet!”
The Perslop began to move away.
“Wait!” she screamed. “Please tell me!”
The Perslop paused but did not turn back. “I am the last of my kind,” the Perslop said. “I came over here to tell you that you are not.”
The Twirlovers shrieked and suddenly merged. They tumbled madly, yelping, barking, while the Perslop left for its transitional shell.
Ninety seconds to collapse.
Maera flickered and angry waves rippled across its surface, but Betsy could not summon the will to close her shell. On her viewscreen, the park, the blond-haired boy skipping, scaring away pigeons. Dappled sunlight. A breeze through trees. A dead pigeon on the dirt. The boy, stopping, staring. Staring.
Suddenly, she understood why the boy stared at the bird for so long.
This is the first time you knew death! she thought. You knew the bird would never rise again. And you knew that one day you’d fall too, that everything falls! That’s why you gave these films to your son. You wanted him to remember you, forever!
Seventy-five seconds.
The Perslop had been right, she thought. I could be polluting the new universe with this history.
Sixty-five seconds.
But all those lives, erased? I can’t kill you, great-great grandfather. You are the first. Without you, we would be nothing. My ancestors, without all of you, I am nothing.
Sixty seconds.
The fourteen billion-year history of this universe had already unfolded. But for the World to Come, the story had yet to be written. Maybe the World to Come was a lie, but then again, maybe there was new life on the other side of the event horizon. Maybe they truly had been doing this forever and ever. A flower gone to seed.
She jumped out of her transitional shell, took off her grandmother’s computer from her wrist, and placed it inside the shell. Then she pressed the button to seal it inside.
She’d send the Biography, its mammoth history, with its eons of joys and sorrows, through Maera. She hoped that in the next universe, humanity would be different. Better. What every parent wishes for her children.
“Goodbye,” she said.
The Twirlovers still tumbled together in the air beside her, as wild as a radioactive atom. The alarm continued to wail. “Get in your shells!” she screamed. But they ignored her.
Twenty seconds.
She ran to the rear of the chamber and leaped into an escape pod. She pressed the emergency activator and in an instant she was hurtling away from the Eluder Ship at a large fraction of the speed of light. In the window behind her, Maera blinked twice, like two eyes closing, then began to fade. The star shrunk to half its size, and a moment later the sky filled with white light. The ship bleated a thousand warnings as Betsy closed her eyes.
“I’m coming, Julio. I’m coming for you.”
She had watched the ancient film so often that it still played in her mind, projecting on the back of her eyes like a movie screen. The boy in the park, running, laughing. Falling. Scuffing his knee. Father picking him up, kissing him, comforting him. Above them, a sun.
A young sun.
About the Author
Matthew Kressel has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, and the anthologies, Naked City, The People of the Book, and After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia, as well as other markets. In 2011 he was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his work publishing the speculative fiction magazine Sybil’s Garage. When he’s not designing websites or setting up computer networks for a living, he’s learning to play the trumpet or teaching himself Yiddish. He co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in New York alongside Ellen Datlow, and has been a long-time member of the Altered Fluid writers group. His website is www.matthewkressel.net.
January
Becca De La Rosa
Fionn took the dogs out to the water, and there, in the river’s reflection, he realized that January had left. He plunged his hands into the water, but she was not there; he sent the dogs barking over the hills, but they did not come back with her or a trail to her hiding place. No scent la
y over the land. Exhausted and uneasy, Fionn and the dogs trudged back to the house. January was not there, either, though he hunted in every room, under tables and inside wardrobes. He only found his wife, curled up in the oven. The dogs lost interest and went to their beds. Fionn sat down on the kitchen linoleum.
Mara lay tucked neatly between the grill and the oven floor. She should have had to snap her neck to fit, and her throat should have been a mess of small bulging bones, but these days she bent at impossible angles, and her feet seemed to have disappeared entirely into the fan in the oven wall. She wore no clothes. It was a businesslike nudity rather than erotic. Charcoal dusted her skin.
“She’s disappeared,” Fionn said, to the linoleum, the oven, the snake-like curve of his wife’s neck.
Mara blinked her wide eyes. “Who?”
“January. She’s gone.”
“Not too long ago,” said Mara, “you were saying the same about me.”
“Don’t pretend you’re jealous.”
“All right,” she said agreeably. “Who is she? A lost lover?”
Fionn stared at her. “It’s January,” he said.
Mara laughed. Her hair tumbled out of the oven and onto the floor, so close that Fionn might have reached out and touched it. He knew better. “January was your friend too,” he told her. “Don’t you remember?”
“No. Tell me a story about her.”
Fionn thought, and found none. Mara had had few friends, but the ones she’d had were close; and Fionn could think of a hundred stories about each, events he had witnessed and ones he had only heard about, so well-worn with age and retellings that they felt whole and solid as fruit in his mouth.
“She isn’t real,” Mara said. “I could tell as soon as you said her name.”
“What do you mean, she isn’t real?”
“We know these things,” his wife said. She disentangled one hand to tap her forehead with a thin and pearly finger, and then coiled it back into a spring-tight fist, and slipped it away into the depths of the oven. Her we unnerved Fionn, because it was a growing we, one she mentioned more and more, a crowd steadily approaching from behind, ready to throw envious arms around her neck and pull her backwards, away from him.
“Some people just aren’t real,” Mara said, as if she had sensed a faux pas and wanted to remedy it. “You can tell by the sound of their names. She is not a real person, or not the kind of person it’s easy to find in reality, at any rate. How long has she been missing?”
“Since I went out to the water, maybe.”
“How long has that been?”
“An hour or so.”
Mara nodded thoughtfully, her chin and the crown of her head knocking against the grill, the oven wall. “What do you remember?” she asked.
Fionn thought about January. He could picture her easily, standing at the edge of the river with a yellow scarf in her hair, but he did not know if it was his river, and her smile was distant and unfocused. “I don’t know,” he said. “I know her face, I feel as though I know her, but I can’t tell you why.”
“We can talk about it later,” Mara said. “You look tired. You were out in the cold. Cook your dinner, Fionn.”
In the past year and a half Mara had grown more watchful over him. She ordered him to wear scarves and boots in bad weather, reminded him of meals he would otherwise have forgotten, sent him off to bed at a reasonable hour. She made sure he kept all his appointments and ordered him to visit the doctor for small but persistent illnesses. Why, he had asked her once, laughing, did she care so much? Didn’t she want him to die comfortably of starvation one day, so they could live together forever, pressed to each other’s hearts like baking bread inside an oven? “Don’t even joke about that,” Mara had hissed. “Don’t you dare.”
Fionn sat beside the oven to eat his dinner, while Mara sang to him, an unrecognizable and tuneless song, but comforting in its own way. The dogs gathered at his feet.
“I’ve thought about it,” Mara announced, when he had finished. “I think you ought to look for her. If you know her but don’t know her, if her disappearance is so troubling to you, there must be a reason. There is a purpose behind it.”
“Is this one of the things you just know?” he asked.
She blinked at him, her eyes too big in her thin, flattened face, a strange facsimile of herself. “Don’t ask me that, Fionn.”
So he asked, instead, “Will you help me?”
Mara smiled her same sweet smile. “Of course I will. But you won’t be able to look for her here. You know that, don’t you? You’ll have to leave.”
“I know,” he said.
Fionn washed the dinner dishes slowly, listening to Mara hum below the rush of water. Soap grew fluttering bubbles and each bubble spelled out January’s name. January, the color of a sun rising, her voice in his ear, January waiting. “Where would you look for her, if you were me?” he asked his wife.
Mara maneuvered her head around to look up at him, a thoughtful owl. “I would examine the clues,” she said. “I would start at the beginning.”
“Elliptical,” he said dryly.
“But accurate.”
Fionn bent, kissed the air beside her cheek, and shut the oven door.
When Mara had first returned, when Fionn recovered from the shock and the strange new logic of his wife as a ghost, he found himself prone to odd hungers. Down in the village, putting sliced pan into a basket, the desire for physical sensation would suddenly snatch at him and he would spend the next hour wandering through the shop aisles, touching knobbed avocados, rough soda bread, the silky synthetic feathers on a feather duster, paper napkins, basil leaves, broom handles; leaving a trail of opened packaging behind himself. Day by day, in slow increments, Mara grew stranger. In the beginning, although he could never touch her with his own hands, she had reconciled her shape to the things around her, the oven walls, the floor. Now she was forgetting how to exist in a concrete world. Her hands sank through iron. Her hair floated around her face like breathing seaweed, immune to gravity or the illusion of gravity. Her bones dwindled, she grew tightly coiled like curled ribbon. Fionn wondered what it would be like to touch her spiralling fingers, how her drifting hair would feel; but he did not know and never would, and this knowledge was a recurring illness that left and returned to attack him and left again. Having a ghost wife was like being married to a concept, an abstract noun, something beloved but elusive.
That night he dreamed of January, while a storm vaulted the roof to scream against the angles and planes of the house. Dressed in a yellow macintosh and wellingtons, January stood against the backdrop of foreign hills and valleys. Her hair whipped in the wind; small dragons snapped among the tangled ends. She smiled, and didn’t smile. Fionn, who did not seem to exist in this dream at all, saw that a chain around her neck held three small charms: a frowning sun, a sliver of moon, a lidded eye. January held a book in one hand. Her fingers were blackened with soil or ash. Fionn asked a question, and January answered, her answer was in the affirmative, she reached for him. Downstairs, Mara sang wistfully into the echo of the oven.
The next morning Fionn left the house and followed the last few traces January had left behind on his land and in the water: a yellow flower, yellow paint splashed on a broken fence, a bird with yellow plumage on its chest. January left her messages in odd places, borrowing from landscape and flora and fauna as she pleased. Fionn followed her trail down to the barren orchard. Rainwater dripped from the apple trees, although the storm had blown over hours ago. The ground was wet and mulchy.
A small girl in a yellow smock sat in the crook of a tree-branch, looking down at Fionn. Light pressed against her back, hiding her face from him; her feet, dangling down, were bare, and yellow ribbons flapped and tangled from the hem of her dress. One of the dogs barked at her, half-heartedly, and then gave up and trotted away towards the river.
“I’m looking for January,” said Fionn.
The girl said, “I know.”
“My name is Fionn.”
“Fionn Cogann. It says so on your van.”
“Do you know where she is?”
She shifted, and Fionn saw that a black sun had been painted over her mouth, with triangular rays like the points on a compass, making her look odd and dangerous, poisonous, many-toothed. He stared, fascinated and appalled. “Come up here and talk to me,” she suggested, so he pulled himself up to settle on the upper branches of the apple tree. Closer, the girl looked to be about ten or eleven, and above her fierce black mouth, black freckles had been dotted across her cheekbones. “I’m Swan,” she said.
“Do you know where January went?”
“No.” Swan brushed moss and rainwater from her hands. On one palm, Fionn noticed, someone had painted an open eye; on the other, an eye-shaped moon. “She’s gone altogether, or hidden very well. How do you know her?”
Fionn thought of January, solid and unplaceable. “I don’t know.”
The little girl shrugged. “January can be like that.”
“How do you know her?”
“She is my sister.” When Swan smiled, it stretched the sun out into a mouthful of fangs. “Though she didn’t live with me, not for years. She lived where she pleased.”
“How did you know she was missing?”
“The same way you did.”
At one end of the world, the villagers worked and conversed, brought children to school, studied, cooked; at the other end, Mara lay in Fionn’s oven like a snail curled up in its own shell; but this was somewhere in between the two, a dim twilight place, utterly inexplicable. “Has she done this before?” Fionn asked, half hopelessly. “Disappeared without warning?”
“Hundreds of times,” said Swan. “But never like this. This time is different, and I know it, and you know it.”
They stared at one another. Swan’s pockets, Fionn saw, were full of cut flowers, daisies, buttercups, children’s flowers, but none of them was wilting; they stood up tall and elegant, as though sipping water from some hidden source. Fionn sighed. “Have you been sitting here waiting for me?” he asked Swan.