Imaginarium 2013

by Sandra Kasturi

  Then Matt cries out like a baby. Isshy is here.

  Her brother hurls himself across the room, burying his face in the slime of Isshy’s mantle, keening in Kabuva. Ruthie feels herself glancing askance at their captor. The woman’s disgust is obvious.

  That makes it easier. When Isshy extends a tentacle, Ruthie takes it without hesitation, pressing her knuckles into the gelatinous flesh of her father’s one-time lover, then transferring a tentacle to her armpit so he can taste her.

  “You’re here to get us away?” she asks, hating that she sounds like a little kid.

  Isshy’s cap tightens, puckering.

  Matt pulls his face out of the slimy hug. “Isshy?”

  “I am getting immigration permits for you.”

  “Immigrate to where? Canada?” Her legs quake with almost sexual longing. Snow, she thinks. Cold.

  “You’ve betrayed the Fiends, child. There’s nowhere on Earth we can hide you.”

  “The Sponge, then?” Matt asks. “With you?”

  The soldier grunts. “To a refugee city on Kabuva.”

  “Offworld?” Living away from Earth, on a wholly squid planet . . . Ruthie tries to imagine it.

  “With you?” Matt repeats.

  Isshy signs regret. “My term of service was extended. But Earthtown is a good place. It’s on Blighted Sea.”

  Extended service: Isshy is buying their freedom with another tour. Ruthie shoves guilt aside: he got them into this, after all. “Can we leave right away?”

  Matt startles. His face darkens.

  “Or what, Mattie? Stay and die?”

  “Can’t we go to the Sponge?”

  The alien caresses Matt’s neck. “It’s not allowed, spawn. We’ve been infiltrated, twice—humans have been banned from the base.”

  “I never heard that.”

  “It’s classified,” snarls the Demo officer. “Don’t leak it. And before you go thinking there’s some choice in this for you, let me lay this out. You do the concert for the Fiends, then you go to Kabuva. That’s the deal.”

  Ruthie’s jaw drops. “You want us to sing?”

  “You’re bait, child.” Isshy is white now—angry. “They hope to catch the Fiends booby-trapping Fry Beach.”

  “Pardon me for trying to save some of your people, Sir. Fry Beach has state-of-the-art defences, kids. If we find out how the Fiends plan to crack its security . . .”

  “We can’t go back out there.” Ruthie says. “If they realize we’ve reported them, Mattie and I are dust.”

  “Life’s a gamble. You sing, we bag ’em, you go to Kabuva.”

  “Or we stay and the Fiends kill us?” Ruthie says.

  “Pretty much. We done here?” the woman asks.

  She looks at Matt. “What do you think?”

  “I think if there was any real choice, you wouldn’t ask my opinion.”

  “Matthew,” Isshy says, reproachful. “Your sister is doing her best.”

  Her brother turns red.

  “Say your goodbyes.” The woman mimes scrubbing her hands, as if they’re dirty. “I gotta get the boy out of here.”

  “Leave Matt,” says Ruthie. “I’ll go first.”

  “He’s been missing longer.” She takes obvious pleasure in peeling Matt out of Isshy’s grip. “We’re taking you out near your favourite obelisk, son; far as the Fiends know, you’ve been visiting Daddy.”

  Matt clings to the outstretched tentacle until she has bundled him out of reach. Then he’s gone, and Ruthie’s alone with Isshy.

  “Thanks for helping us.”

  “Child. There was never any question.”

  “We have to run all the way to your homeworld?”

  Tentacles spiral in distress. “Our attempt to help your government is falling into disgrace at home; the number of casualties is catastrophic.”

  “You never lose. When you show up, the Fiends always retreat.”

  “Ruth, it may be years yet before we leave. But leave we will. In defeat, I fear. You, Matthew—anyone close to us—you won’t be safe. Everyone with sense is getting their loved ones to Earthtown.”

  “Your pets?”

  “I hoped you weren’t angry with me anymore, spawn.”

  “Isshy, we’re in the shits now because of you and Dad.”

  “I can’t change the past,” he says. “But this could be a better life. Do you want to spend your days jammed in a car, starving?”

  “I want my goddamn father back,” she says sulkily.

  He fluffs his cap. “I wish that, too.”

  She spends the evening atop her cliff, watching the fry gambol in the tide. Dozing with her back against a tree, she dreams of being on the run with Matt. Her brother is a baby again, easily transported, too young to balk or argue. They hide in a blizzard, amid curtains of freezing snow. Ruthie feels safe, invisible, in control.

  When she wakes, Matt is beside her, watching the sunrise. Light spills gold over the water; peach and magenta clouds unfurl, like streamers, across the sky.

  His eye falls on one of her burns.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she says, irked.

  “Cast iron maiden.” It is something Dad called her, before he went away.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you to steel up a little.”

  “Get cold,” he says.

  “Life hasn’t been getting easier.”

  “Cut off human contact. Dump my lover without so much as a ‘do you mind, dear?’ Yeah, that’s an answer.”

  Tears springs to her eyes. Her fingers twist, of their own accord, into a Kabuva sign: hurtful, unfair.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean—” He reaches out.

  She slaps his hand away. One of us has to have a hard shell, she thinks. You can’t be an open wound all the time.

  “I screw up, Mattie,” she says instead. “I don’t ask your opinion enough. But this mess—I didn’t make it.”

  He forms a clumsy chain of signs. We should run.

  Which is ridiculous. Instead of saying so, she signs: How?

  Matt opens a bottle of water and takes a long, slow gulp. “Something terrible’s going to happen,” he says, in his clear, light voice and Ruthie feels her stomach dropping into a pit.

  Detonate a Dust bomb on a windless day, and it will expand in a sphere before falling downward. The nanotech weapon disassembles everything it touches. If it falls straight down, touching bare ground, the crater it makes will form a hemisphere.

  The Atlanta monument, like so many from this war, reflects this reality. Its focus is a copper-lined crater, big enough to stand in and half-filled with offerings: flowers, stuffed animals, photos of the dead. Carved into its rim are images of the city in various eras, artists’ renderings of famous citizens and heroes from the Democratic Army. The Fiends reduced Atlanta to atoms.

  It is a creepy place to stage a concert.

  Ruthie and Matt set up their backstage in a nearby grove of magnolia trees, pitching a small tent and unpacking their gear: the electronic synthmasks that play their backup music, the minicello, and two mesh sheaths woven from strips of seaweed. It has been years since they performed, and Ruthie’s sheath is a bit short. But they still fit; neither of them has gained much weight since the so-called good days.

  Squid start arriving before they are set up, flowing up from the beach, arriving in flitters, in buses from the barracks in Koloa. First there’s a half a dozen of them, then thirty, then fifty.

  Sam breezes into the tent, leering. “Ready for the big day, kiddies? Where’s your donation bowl? You’re supposed to be singing for money.”

  “We are singing for money,” she says. “How long do you need to do your thing? An hour?”

  “That should do. I expect a cut, you know.”

  She goes through the motions of haggling. Finally she says, “I need to dress.”

  His plastic eye puls
es. “Go ahead.”

  “Get out, pervert,” Matt says, and to her relief he does. “You okay, Ruth?”

  “No. I’m a big bag of emotion.”

  “It’s not a bad thing.”

  “Bad timing,” she says.

  “It’s always a bad time,” her little brother says.

  Wrestling with grief and fear, she peers outside.

  In the time it has taken to play out the little farce with Sam, the audience has swelled. Hundreds of squid are out there, setting up seawater sprinklers, lying on kelp mats and each other. They smell of overripe seafood, and they are passing things around—touchables, food, scent packs, drugs. Vendors from the Row hawk goods avidly from the sidelines.

  Disturbed, Ruthie wrings out the brine in her dress, slithering into the mummy-wrap of seaweed strips. She swallows a pill called Hot Flash that will send her sweat glands into overdrive, then tests the microphone and display screen within her singing mask. Her hair goes into a ponytail; then she slicks it against her neck with gel.

  The waiting squid are hooting a tune, their flute-like voices tootling in the meadow. It is a song about death—that’s all the fry seem to sing anymore—and it brings up the gooseflesh on her burned arms.

  “Lament to Blighted Sea,” says Matt. He is in his sheath, ready but for his mask. “You think we’ll get to Kabuva?”

  “Don’t see why not,” she lies, then surprises herself by hugging him. “If anything happens, we meet on the cliff.”

  “The high spot.” With a half-smile, he pulls his mask over his face. She does likewise, adjusting her mic.

  Tech check. The words appear just above her eyes.

  A-OK, she texts back.

  “Let’s do this,” Mattie says aloud.

  They emerge from the tent, hand in hand, and the cacophony of singing toots turns into a one-pitch whistle. Matt steps up to the lip of the Atlanta monument. The weeds on his legs and arms whutter in the breeze, carrying scents to their audience.

  Ruthie is almost too stunned to move. There must be a thousand of them. How did the Fiends do it? She sees officers here and there, trying to disperse the crowd, only to get slapped down by a dozen hostile fry.

  Bad morale, she thinks.

  Mattie is letting go with a piercing high note. She activates the synthesized accompaniment coded into her mask, and the air fills with a clatter of shells and stones in surf.

  Don’t let your mind wander onstage. Daddy’s voice, so deeply internalized it feels real. She boots the minicello, playing tones and chirps as her brother works his way into the song. It is a bloody-minded kid’s chant about newborn squid drifting below the skin of the sea, yanking birds down from the surface, devouring them.

  The listeners are mottling, their caps turning beige and coral as they relax. Ruthie remembers opening with this same piece in dozens of clubs across America. Daddy intertwined with Isshy at the water’s edge, Scotch and soda in his hand. A sick and twisted family, sure, but a happy one. Isshy believed they’d win the war. Matt loved it all so much. . . .

  They finish singing the birdhunter piece and warble through a transition. Maybe we can do this in Earthtown, Ruthie muses, be dancing monkeys on Kabuva.

  Concentrate, her dead father’s voice admonishes.

  Another platoon of squid wriggles over Vendor’s Row as Matt begins a piece about pressure hallucinations—squid hear ghosts when they swim at too great a depth. Ruthie opens her throat, pouring out accompaniment. The words are grim, but the alien harmonies ring true.

  They segue into “Mad Moon,” a more patriotic piece, and the audience pales.

  Ruthie brings the song order up on her mask display, deleting several numbers. She switches the rah-rah stuff with bleaker material, and texts the revised list to her brother. Matt nods without breaking a beat. He cuts the last chorus of “Mad Moon” and starts an awful ballad about two doomed lovers who get poached out on a rock in the sun, because the tide refuses to come ashore and save them.

  Yeah, they love that one. Morbid fucking aliens.

  The crowd gets ever more dense. A few officers go through the motions of trying to curb their wayward troops while clearly enjoying the show. The stick-in-the-muds have been dragged to the middle of the mosh, entrapped, their protests drowned out. The crowd is singing along, so loudly that Ruthie’s mask vibrates against her cheekbones.

  A thousand squid, she thinks. Why sabotage Fry Beach when they could just drop a dust bomb right here. . . .

  Her skin crawls. She misses a note. Matt, lost in song, doesn’t notice.

  We have time, Ruthie thinks. Sam’s only ten feet away . . . if a bomb’s going off, he’ll get clear.

  We have to get them away, she texts. THIS is the trap.

  Matt doesn’t answer; his eyes must be shut.

  Dropping notes left and right, Ruthie calls up a menu of folk songs coded into the synthesizer. There used to be some old “Follow the Leader” things, pieces they rarely played in clubs but . . . here. Matt knows this one.

  First, they’ll need to get these soldiers up. Watching Sam fearfully, she waits for the end of their current number, then wrenches her cello through the opening of a jig called “Jump and Fly.”

  Matt jerks in surprise . . . then he starts in on the intro as smoothly as if they’d planned it.

  We’re the trap? He finally responds. U think?

  Yes. Lead them to the beach.

  A creeping chill on her neck makes Ruthie glance back.

  It’s too late. The fog generators in the graveyard are all running, pouring out an opaque, rolling cloud. Behind them, the ground is crawling with shadows.

  So much for finesse. Ruthie stops playing. The crowd, which was beginning to dance, devolves into confusion.

  “Run!” Ruthie screams, even as she hears the ‘phut’ of the first grenade launcher.

  Hundreds of the fry react, surging away from each other at shocking speed. Unarmed, out of armor, they can only flee as the first grenades pop overhead, coffee-coloured Dust spreading in the air like bursts of fireworks before smearing into a deadly, downward-drifting haze. Squid who are fully enveloped by the brown wind vanish in a puff. Others lose body parts: caps, heads, tentacles.

  The shrieking starts.

  Grabbing Matt’s hand, Ruthie runs crossways between the approaching Fiends and the roiling, panicked offworlders. She drags her brother toward the cliff. A mumble, an undertone, follows: she is praying. In Kabuva.

  Fry surge onto the beach path, fleeing for the ocean and safety. Others charge unarmed into a row of flamethrowers at the front of the Fiend line—with predictable results. One cluster hurls fry over the wall of fire, up and into the oncoming wave of human guerillas. It is an acrobatic trick Ruthie saw performed in the same clubs where she sang as a child. The flying squid vanish into the graveyard, disappearing into the cloud of smoke and artificial fog. Human screams spread where they land.

  One freaked-out squid slides toward them, whistling, and Ruth’s idiot brother tries to jump in front of her. She yanks him to ground, shouting the word for “Ally” in Kabuva. A line of old-fashioned bullets chops through the alien before she finds out if it heard her.

  “Stop!” Matt yells. But Ruthie scrambles up, mulishly using her greater strength to force him to the high ground. If they can get around the Fiends, they might escape before the Sponge orders a strike on the whole cemetery.

  “Ruthie!”

  “All we can do now is get away!” The words run in her head, getaway, get away, git way. But Mattie breaks free, leaving her with a handful of seaweed rags as he pounces on half of a dead Fiend holding a grenade launcher.

  Phut! He fires at the edge of the cliff. A Dust grenade digs out the edge, excavating a crater ten feet deep. He promptly fires two more, creating a scalloped incline within the rock, a crude slide, a new escape route to the beach.

  Squid start pouring through
the gap, making for the ocean. They don’t wait for the Dust to settle, and so they bleed and lose tentacles as they flee.

  Ruthie makes a grab for the launcher. “Someone’s gonna mistake you for a target.”

  “Let ’em.” His face is wet. Stupid, over-sensitive . . .

  He still needs her.

  “You’ve done your good deed; now come on!” A grenade detonates nearby and they flee uphill. The high point of the cliff is in sight; they’re clearing the Fiend line . . . almost at the rear. No chance to get to the van from here, the van’s gone. She must write it off as she has written off her parents, an education, an ordinary life.

  All Ruthie has left is her brother.

  A Fiend comes up the path, methodically firing into the crowd of squid escaping down Matt’s improvised slide.

  It’s Holly. Ruthie feels it before she truly recognizes the other woman. Holly has decided that she needs a Friend or two.

  Their eyes meet, and Holly’s lips move. Shouting Matt’s name, but he can’t hear it over the battle noise.

  Stay quiet. He’ll never know who was behind them. Damned cougar—Matt doesn’t need her. Run for it, force the squid to send them to Kabuva. He’ll never know.

  It is an easy choice, the kind she’s been making on his behalf for years.

  Instead, Ruthie tugs his arm. Points.

  Matt turns. Looks. Sees that his supposed girlfriend is in on the squid slaughter.

  Ducking a flying piece of monolith, Matt sprints back. He and Holly converge, crouch with their heads close. She reaches for Matt’s hand. . . .

  Ruthie clutches her chest. Will he take it? If Mattie leaves her, who is she supposed to be?

  The ground turns to jelly underfoot.

  There’s an awful, impossible light, a glow on the horizon. A torch thrusts up from the ocean, burning white-hot to the clouds. It bulges, grows fat, frying the anti-aircraft platform to ash. And now the sound is coming too, a clatter and shriek, something tearing that was never meant to be torn, louder, louder. The sound bites like a saw into her skull.

  On the battlefield, everyone—human and offworlder—freezes, staring in the direction of Oahu.

  It’s the Sponge, it has to be the Sponge, and how could the Fiends touch that? How could there ever be the slightest possibility of them being powerful enough to destroy an undersea squid—