Aerovoyant

by P L Tavormina

  “I don’t know these plants.”

  Stavo hesitated. “Turaset, Grandson. Turaset had its own ecology. We brought Earth’s. We had little choice. We cannot eat sandsap.”

  “We can eat spiceberries.”

  “Not many.”

  Two people made their way from one building to another. They were thin and pale-skinned, and their clothing was torn and frayed. One held her stomach, the other put a hand under the woman’s arm. Both had blisters on their faces.

  “How did we survive?”

  Stavo turned to him. “We learned. We adapted. We evolved.”

  Three Months Later

  Most of Renico’s files were released and published throughout the cities. Prime Chancellor Joshi Nabahri ordered a temporary freeze on oil exploration and extraction and an immediate investigation into the practice of discerning. Seven councilors resigned, others drew intense scrutiny, and emergency sessions of Congress began untangling the full influence of the industry on the councils and the courts.

  * * *

  Alphonse pulled into the lane alongside Ardelle’s inn. The plum trees rested bare, snow rimming their branches like piped icing, and one of the horses in the barn whickered. The inn was as he remembered, only now ashy smoke spilled out of the chimney, sinking along the roof and down to the ground. Crisp winter air, with wood smoke lacing through, pulled it all together into the life he still wished for.

  The back door swung out and Ephraim trotted down the steps. “Al. I’ll get your bags.”

  They went in. Ephraim tipped his head at the dining room and continued up the stairs.

  Myrta rose from the table and hugged him. “Thank you, Alphonse.” Ardelle came from the kitchen with a platter of sandwiches. Four. There should be five. He wondered if Odile was here, wanted desperately to see her.

  “For what?”

  “Running for Council.”

  Ephraim’s steps plunked back down, and he came into the dining room. “You’re all set. First room.” Then, chuckling, he pulled out a chair. “‘Councilor Najiwe’ will have a nice ring.”

  “Don’t count on that happening. Di Les has held that seat for years, and Ivette won’t support me. They both play dirty.”

  “Your Grandfather’s name . . .”

  It touched the sore spot, the node in his heart. Anger had grown in Sangal over the past three months.

  “Isn’t enough to get past Ivette’s. She’s wanted me on the Council for years. When the files went public, the money she received from Renico, the councilors she backed, everything fell into a very straight line. I’m not trusted. And the way we got those files broke a few laws. Even with Nabahri promising pardons, even with the necessity of what we did, this race is all uphill.”

  Ephraim’s eyes were warm. “But not impossible.”

  The man was good. It didn’t fit his history, and Alphonse thought of Ivette, wondering if anyone’s story was ever complete. “Eduardo’s challenging di Gof. If we can knock off both of them, we’ll have a toehold. Your help’s important.”

  “You have a room here whenever you need it. And we’ve gone through the records again, this time with an eye to Renico’s timelines. The proposals they’ve developed for the foothills—Al, it’s remarkable. Those files have energized people. The network’s expanding.”

  Myrta sat peacefully, her hands folded neatly on the table. “That little taste of their vault makes me want more.”

  He’d never seen her at such ease. “You look rested.”

  “I am. I enjoy not being afraid. I have everything I wanted. Plus, you’re going to win, so things will get better and better.”

  That seemed a bit optimistic.

  “The records, one of them says our ancestors used my trait to find game herds. It’s how we survived.” She smiled, and it lit her face in a way Alphonse had never seen before. “And I finally know where I want to go.”

  He was shocked at her words, but a pleasant kind of shock.

  “I want everyone who has anything like what I have to be safe. I want each of us to see one another.”

  Alphonse tensed. It felt like a challenge, direct to him, to speak openly about his time-knowledge—what Ralen had called time-binding and said her father had also had. He wasn’t ready.

  “Take Jack, look at his selflessness. Look at Mama and Papa, their resilience. Melville had a gift to hear things that none of us can imagine. How much better if he’d been encouraged instead of having his ability used against him like it was.”

  He couldn’t talk about it, his life as a planet. Myrta should understand, she was close to this kind of thing, what it was like to wrestle with something so freakishly bizarre.

  She continued, “Everyone has something. If anybody’s living with anything like me, I want them to know they can talk about it.” Her gaze suddenly reminded him of Ephraim’s. Intent and focused. “There are people suffering because they have a certain combination of genes. And if I help you win your race, then I’d have a friend on your Council who understands. Alphonse, I want to go to Sangal with you and work on your campaign.”

  * * *

  After lunch, Ephraim and Alphonse met in the office. Odile was nowhere to be seen, and no one had mentioned her. Maybe she’d gone to the belt.

  Ephraim pulled out a copy of the records and took a ledger from the desk.

  Alphonse sat, craning his neck to see the pages better. “We need to think about all of this. The economics of the industry. Jobs. Carbon and climate. We have to balance all of it. Ephraim, I don’t know how to do that.”

  The whirl of time pulled at him, the efforts of past civilizations down through the ages trying to balance resources with wisdom, sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing.

  “Just go slowly and pay attention. If you make a mistake, pick yourself up and keep going.”

  Today’s goal was finalizing a foothill response plan to the possibility of provincial designation. A slate of leaders in the towns and belt had been identified through Ephraim’s network, and preliminary bills had been drafted to prevent oil exploration. The only question remaining was where an assembly could be seated, if Nabahri named the province.

  After a time, Ephraim leaned back and ran his hands through his hair. They’d been at this for hours. “Have you been sleeping?”

  Alphonse scratched the back of his neck. He’d been spending most nights trying to get his head around sensato and how to control it. Ephraim didn’t need to know that. “Not really. Working with Ivette all those years and trying to leave behind everything she taught me. Knowing it works. It messes with me. Sleep’s a casualty.”

  Ephraim’s face, and his tone too, were kindly. “We all have a past that messes with us. You saw Mel. You saw what Odile brought out in him.”

  Maybe she’d gone back to Renico. No, that didn’t make any sense.

  “In hindsight, I shouldn’t have ever hinted we try to pull him out.” The man’s face was empty and full, like a cemetery, things hidden, precious and sad. “You saw Mel face his ghosts. I’ve never faced mine, not like he did. If you’re haunted by your past, well son, you’ve got company.”

  “You left that business. Melville didn’t.”

  Quietly, Ephraim said, “That’s a bit harsh. There were so many others, especially Ardelle, who saw to it that I got out. I failed to help Mel. Autore knows I tried. I knew him before he became so ill. We were good friends, once.”

  If Ivette could feel any of that regret . . .

  Ephraim stood and replaced the ledger onto the desk. “My memories from that time had a life of their own. Discerners, they . . . we . . . were taught to believe the program advanced society. With every victim we learned to feel some level of righteousness at the thought of improving life for the masses. Improving the future. There is profound satisfaction in believing you make the world a better place.”
/>   “You left that life and built a new one. It had to be hard.”

  “Sure, okay. But I’m telling you, it’s not that simple. Habits develop a life of their own. It took a long time to detangle the memories, to put the horror into its place, and pull the . . . sense of righteousness elsewhere. After a time, the nature of my torment changed, and now, for better or worse, in a way I rely on the horror. It reminds me what I’m capable of, the human drive that puts numbers ahead of the individual. What we’re fighting.”

  Ephraim turned to the window and murmured, “What he might have been rescued from.” He stood stock still, solid, like an ox in a morning moment of stillness. His shoulders lifted and fell and he turned back. “Your experiences are part of you, telling you what’s important. They’re your signposts. Odile says—”

  “Where is she?”

  Ephraim stared, his eyes changed after a moment and lined with understanding. “Oh, Al. What she did came at a cost. It’s taking a while for the drugs to clear.”

  “She wasn’t medicated.”

  Ephraim frowned, and he looked down, rubbing the toe of his shoe along the edge of the carpet. “Odile’s as cool as they come, son, but no good human being could torture another without aid. She needed to remember the names and details of every person that Mel took over the past forty years.”

  Alphonse blinked. Miere. She’d been a machine that day.

  “Memory enhancement, acuity, emotion-numbing medications, all at full strength, maybe double strength knowing her.”

  Groaning, Alphonse put his head in his hands and rubbed his forehead. He knew some of those drugs. Ivette had joked about them often enough.

  “She watched Mel experience each death he caused, and she knew that she was forcing that on him. When the drugs wore off, there was something of a backlog. Mostly emotion, and she couldn’t help but remember all of what she did to him. Every last detail of how she inflicted . . . how she tortured him.”

  He’d been in the shadows, lost in history, not really present at all.

  “She knew she was responsible for Mel’s pain. She’ll remember that day for a long, long time.”

  “Ephraim. Did she truly mean to become a discerner?”

  Slowly, sadly, he shook his head. “I thought—she thought she’d get straight at the data. Go in and get out, that was her intent. But, she’s always known that I wanted Mel out of that program, and she’s always known he’d be a powerful ally if he chose to. No, Al, she wanted the records, that was all. When they put her into that training, she must have seen a way to get at them.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Of course not. We all make sacrifices. Possibly she’s at the overlook.”

  * * *

  Alphonse hurried up the trail. As he rounded the top, he stopped in shock, three months of willful ignorance draining from him. He’d been too busy planning his campaign, and she’d been so clear she didn’t need him here.

  Odile sat hunched, her hair lying flat and limp, her body too small in the heavy coat she wore. A shudder seemed to pass through her.

  “Odile,” he said softly.

  She startled and looked around at him.

  Autore, her eyes—they’re so pained.

  He went to her and sat, unspeaking, the way Eduardo had done when Alphonse was small. He simply sat with her, breathing the same air. Being.

  Another breath rattled through her. He wanted to take her hand, her whole body, but she was barely there. She seemed to have forgotten him.

  “I didn’t know.”

  Her nose was red, her eyes bloodshot. Minutes passed. “It doesn’t matter.”

  But it did. She mattered. He sat next to her, unspeaking. He sat with her as Bel and Letra lowered in the sky. He waited with her as first sun set and hoped for the focus it could bring, for her, but it didn’t come.

  Alphonse ached for the determined, fiery woman he knew. He’d give anything for that woman to have a lifeline that might bring her back. A whisper of a thread through the wilderness. He’d give anything; he’d give the thing he held dearest.

  “Odile,” he whispered. “We are part of Turaset. We are. It’s not a thing to be used. We need this planet. It can exist in any number of ways and it has through time, but we . . . can’t, and we need to understand the scale of our actions. I . . . what I’m trying to share with you, it’s important.”

  She turned to him, the barest light in her eyes.

  He hung onto that light, clung to it, and he cracked open a door he wouldn’t close again to let her know that he knew that she’d always been right in her passion. He said simply what was in his heart. “We need to feel the things that came before. We need to know the things that have come before. We need to understand that we’re changing our home.”

  A tear stole down her cheek. She leaned against him and trembled through another long breath. “Thank you.” She said the words, but any emotion behind them was unapparent.

  Tentatively, he put his arm around her. “I’m worried about you. I want you to be better.”

  She shuddered, another breath. “Al.” Her frame was so still, so frail, slight, and frightened, and the silence hung between them again. “This is . . . better. I’m getting better.” After another long moment she said, “Trust me.”

  “We can talk about it.”

  “No.” She pulled away, and the chill in the air sank in. He crossed his arms, hugging himself. Eventually, Odile leaned on him again. This time, something of her old self came through. An awareness, a watching of the things around her, of Alphonse. The slightest pressure against him, the faint substance of her, the warmth and trust—it was a step. He put his arm around her shoulders again. He pulled her jacket around her a little more snugly. He thought of the future, the march of time, possibility and growth, change, and cycles—and he smiled.

  THE END

  Appendices

  1. Timeline

  2. Cultural conventions

  3. Known genetic variants

  4. Political structure of Nasoir

  5. Glossary

  1. Brief timeline of colonization of Turaset.

  The collapse of civilization on Earth in the late twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries resulted from two things—a rapidly warming climate and an exponential rise in computer sentience. In parallel, advances in molecular biology, most notably gene-splicing technology (CRISPR), enabled radically new gene-engineering strategies of crop plants, livestock, and humans.

  Within this milieu, dozens of ships from numerous space agencies fled Earth determined to start over and, once established on new worlds, avoid the lure of advanced technology. The ships’ cargoes held genetically modified seed and embryo banks. While diverse and extensive in scope, these banks did not include all the species Earth had to offer. Species with no obvious value (e.g., Varanus), disease vectors (e.g., Aedes), and parasites (e.g., Giardia) were not included in the cargoes, for obvious reasons.

  Of the fleeing ships, six arrived at Turaset decades later. As a planet in the “Goldilocks” zone of a distant star system, Turaset first appeared to be an ideal, if tiny, new home with a breathable atmosphere and no initial evidence of intelligent life. The day length (27 hours) and orbit (420 days) were Earth-like, and water covered eighty-eight percent of the planet’s surface.

  The touch-down site was named “Good Air” (later, Gaderr). Although the ships were not designed to launch back into space, they could manage travel between land masses. Such travel was intended and expected after the colony took hold—an estimated five to ten years’ time. This time frame was thought long enough for the colonists to develop agriculture suited to Turaset and to begin having children.

  However, three months after landing, the rotation of Turaset’s two stars aligned with the planet in the celestial arrangement later known as Conjunction. The colonists grew sick, as
a previously-unrecognized form of cosmic radiation hit the planet’s surface. The first instance of this event killed seventy percent of the colony and was called the Great Death (later, the First Great Death). Crops and livestock were similarly devastated.

  The mission at Gaderr became feeding and housing survivors and finding a means to survive the radiation. This state of affairs lasted for close to a century, and the goal of dispersing to other sites was forgotten. Scientists and engineers looked to Turaset’s brightly-colored native species, which were immune, and reasoned there must be a biological solution—pigmentation genes—they could force into humankind. Many generations passed before the pigment genes were adequately expressed in the human form.

  Roughly five hundred years later, the colony at last took hold. Gaderr achieved Earth-analog status, and dispersal to secondary sites began.

  Approximately a millennium after landing, multiple outposts across Turaset (including all four major land masses) were largely self-sustaining. This was a turning point in history—Earth-like agriculture had blossomed and trade began. This expansion era continued for many generations. Turaset had been tamed, and the founders’ vision realized.

  The Second Great Death, biological rather than radiological in nature, occurred during the second millennium. One theory holds that the transport of goods across and between continents trafficked disease organisms. A second theory speculates that silent DNA, inadvertently introduced at Gaderr alongside the pigmentation genes, had been activated. Some argue that the combination of these factors precipitated a pandemic. Sixty-five percent of the human population died. Several staple crops and animal species (e.g., soybean, dromedary) were lost.

  During this period, any remnant of ancient recorded history from Earth was scoured for techniques to fight plague. This effort led some Turasetians to argue that the Second Great Death would never have occurred had their world hewn to more technologically-advanced practices. They claimed that the agrarian lifestyle adopted by the colonists (part of the founding precepts meant to avoid a second rise of computer sentience) lay at the root of the Second Death. They said more advanced technology was necessary going forward.