by Yoon Ha Lee
“Pelisma, what’s going on?” Irim asked.
She could hardly speak. “Irim—Irim, I can see. Do wysps see? Well, I suppose they must.” This excitement was real! She looked around.
It was not the forest of her memory, glowing with green. It was not the black of night, nor yet the vague mass of shadow usually detected by her failing eyes. The wilderness had changed: now it was rendered in finely detailed layers of transparency, as if built entirely of smoky crystal. It had scents, too, in a strange organization she could scarcely comprehend. Shinca stood out even from great distance, each raising a blazing crystalline crown toward the dark sky, around which wysps swirled in complex patterns. Beneath her feet, soil and rock rippled outward like deep, clear water.
This was not a human world. And it was no longer cold, except to Irim. Irim, who was wounded and needed rescue.
“Irim,” she said, “stay by the tree. I’m going back to the waymarkers.”
“Pelisma, you can’t! That cave-cat’s still out there.”
He was right, of course. She searched the strange landscape, but how could she identify a cave-cat in this new sense, among twenty thousand utterly unfamiliar things? “Do you see the cat?” she asked. “Can you show me where it is, so I can figure out what it looks like?”
“What it looks like?” Irim took a deep breath and grasped her hand firmly. “Groundbreaker, it’s my job to protect you. Eyesight like yours does not get cured—certainly not in an instant. We have no idea what that wysp did to you, or why.”
“I’m not cured,” she said. “I understand that. It’s not exactly seeing, anyway. Irim—” She squeezed his hand. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but the wysp—it’s not human.”
“It might be a quiet soul—”
“It can’t be. Not unless there are folk who see through stone, for whom shinca and wysps are more real than people.”
“Is that what you see?” He was silent a moment. “But they must be spirits of some kind. Where else would they all come from?”
Where else, indeed? She sought for wysps in the shinca crown above her head, and as if she’d called them, several immediately converged on her position.
Irim gave a hoarse cry and fired his weapon.
Zzap!
Fire exploded from the shadows, a voracious living nightmare screaming alarms down every nerve in her body.
It felt like the river pouring in at the gate, faster every second. If she didn’t act, it would consume everything she cared about, every living thing! Pelisma leapt toward the flames, opened her mouth—
And swallowed them.
Energy blazed inside her, buzzing to the tips of her fingers and toes, tingling in her lips, and it was full of outrage for those who would put her world at risk. She whirled, looking past the bright silver-gold column of the shinca, and found a fainter light, the imprint of accumulated heat scented with fear and anger. Out of that imprint came a quavering voice.
“Pelisma?”
Pelisma opened her mouth to answer, but the energy within her rose in a sudden, terrifying tide. In an instant, she realized what it meant.
No! Not Irim, I mustn’t hurt Irim!
She turned, barely in time. White flame poured from her mouth, crackling in the air.
Irim screamed.
She tried to stop, but there was no containing this flood. Horrified, she turned further; the edge of the torrent touched the shinca, and somehow, vanished into it.
That’s it.
She faced the tree fully, pouring this hate out in the one place where it could do no harm. Anger surged in her heart, but she fought against it.
No, you don’t understand! Poor Irim, poor fellow, he didn’t mean it, he doesn’t deserve to die!
At last the fire drained away. She fell against the shinca, shivering. Slowly, her horrified exhaustion softened with an incongruous feeling of comfort and regret.
“Irim?” she asked, trembling. “In the name of Heile, tell me I haven’t killed you . . . ”
“Stay away from me!”
Pelisma fell to her knees. Tears tumbled from her eyes. “Irim, it was an accident, I promise. It won’t happen again.”
Voices called across the forest.
She raised her head. “Help!” she shouted. “Please, help us!”
The searchers came. They wrapped her in blankets, brought a stretcher for Irim. She could see its metal struts perfectly; also, the waymarkers and the vehicle that stood waiting.
“It’s lucky you found a way to signal us,” the driver rumbled. “Otherwise we might not have found you for hours.”
“Lucky indeed,” agreed the medic. The faint shadows that were her hands moved swiftly and busily over Irim. “The Wanderer must have been watching over you.”
“Thanks be,” Pelisma agreed, and found Irim echoing her precisely.
“You’ll be safe underground soon.”
“Thank you,” Pelisma said.
They would be safe, wouldn’t they? How could she be sure, when the wysp might control her actions? She touched Irim’s shoulder, and her sick guilt was diluted with another incongruous feeling of tender and sorrowful care.
She hadn’t killed him, though. She had to remember that. When the wysp took over, she’d managed to communicate mercy.
To communicate.
A pattern clicked into place, suddenly.
Her blindness had brought feelings of sorrow and helplessness, but the serious emotional instability had begun with the presence of wysps. Since she’d hidden her feelings from Irim, there would have been no way to link them with the moment of a wysp’s approach—but here in the forest, her feelings had resisted control every time wysps were nearby.
What if these incongruous emotions weren’t weakness, or age, but communication?
Imagine what it could mean to achieve real communication with this thing that was the most capricious, dangerous force in all Varin! A question leapt into her mind, full of unfiltered, helpless anger.
Why, wysp? Why did you turn me against my most trusted friend?
For an instant she found herself back in that moment, when the fire of Irim’s weapon had mixed with her memory of the Trao thundering in at the gate. The familiar awful conviction rose within her, that if she did not act, her world would be swept away.
Not her world: their world.
Perhaps wysps did have souls: souls suited to this wilderness as her own people were to the city-caverns, each just as easily threatened, but with no way to communicate until disaster threw them together.
Oh, praise be!
Was this joy hers, or did it belong to both of them? Could she ever untangle the wysp’s meanings enough to answer questions about fire, and trees, and food grown beneath the sun—those questions her people so desperately needed to have answered?
All at once, she remembered Irim’s voice, reading reverently. Great things may be achieved in the name of love.
“Blessing of Eyn,” Pelisma breathed. Surely the Wanderer had brought her to these events. Blindness had turned her people’s confinement into her own, changing her heart and bringing the wysps—her people’s threat turned into a personal need. What else could have driven her out into this voyage of discovery? And now her path was clear: she must learn everything possible about the wysps, their vision, and their world.
Think how she might then change her own.
About the Author
Juliette Wade has turned her studies in linguistics, anthropology and Japanese language and culture into tools for writing fantasy and science fiction. She lives the Bay Area of Northern California with her husband and two children, who support and inspire her. She blogs about language and culture in SF/F at TalkToYoUniverse and runs the “Dive into Worldbuilding!” hangout series on Google+. Her fiction has appeared several times in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, and in various anthologies.
The Halfway House at the Heart of Darkness
William Browning Spencer
Keel wo
re a ragged shirt with the holo Veed There, Simmed That shimmering on it. She wore it in and out of the virtual. If she was in an interactive virtual, the other players sometimes complained. Amid the dragons and elves and swords of fire, a bramble-haired girl, obviously spiking her virtual with drugs and refusing to tune her shirt to something suitably medieval, could be distracting.
“Fizz off,” Keel would say, in response to all complaints.
Keel was difficult. Rich, self-destructive, beautiful, she was twenty years old and already a case study in virtual psychosis.
She had been rehabbed six times. She could have died that time on Makor when she went blank in the desert. She still bore the teeth marks of the land eels that were gnawing on her shoulder when they found her.
A close one. You can’t revive the digested.
No one had to tell Keel that she was in rehab again. She was staring at a green ocean, huge white clouds overhead, white gulls filling the heated air with their cries.
They gave you these serenity mock-ups when they were bringing you around. They were fairly insipid and several shouts behind the technology. This particular V-run was embarrassing. The ocean wasn’t continuous, probably a seven-minute repeat, and the sun’s heat was patchy on her face.
The beach was empty. She was propped up in a lounge chair—no doubt her position back in the ward. With concentration, focusing on her spine, she could sense the actual contours of the bed, the satiny feel of the sensor pad.
It was work, this focusing, and she let it go. Always better to flow.
Far to her right, she spied a solitary figure. The figure was moving toward her.
It was, she knew, a wilson. She was familiar with the drill. Don’t spook the patient. Approach her slowly after she is sedated and in a quiet setting.
The wilson was a fat man in a white suit (neo-Victorian, dead silly, Keel thought). He kept his panama hat from taking flight in the wind by clamping it onto his head with his right hand and leaning forward.
Keel recognized him. She even remembered his name, but then It was the kind of name you’d remember: Dr. Max Marx.
He had been her counselor, her wilson, the last time she’d crashed. Which meant she was in Addiction Resources Limited, which was located just outside of New Vegas.
Dr. Marx looked up, waved, and came on again with new purpose.
A pool of sadness welled in her throat. There was nothing like help, and its pale sister hope, to fill Keel’s soul with black water.
Fortunately, Dr. Max Marx wasn’t one of the hearty ones. The hearty ones were the worst. Marx was, in fact, refreshingly gloomy, his thick black beard and eyebrows creating a doomed stoic’s countenance.
“Yes,” he said, in response to her criticism of the virtual, “this is a very miserable effect. You should see the sand crabs. They are laughable, like toys.” He eased himself down on the sand next to her and took his hat off and fanned it in front of his face. “I apologize. It must be very painful, a connoisseur of the vee like you, to endure this.”
Keel remembered that Dr. Marx spoke in a manner subject to interpretation. His words always held a potential for sarcasm.
“We are portable,” Dr. Marx said. “We are in a mobile unit, and so, alas, we don’t have the powerful stationary AdRes equipment at our command. Even so, we could do better, there are better mock-ups to be had, but we are not prospering these days. Financially, it has been a year of setbacks, and we have had to settle for some second-rate stuff.”
“I’m not in a hospital?” Keel asked.
Marx shook his head. “No. No hospital.”
Keel frowned. Marx, sensing her confusion, put his hat back on his head and studied her through narrowed eyes. “We are on the run, Keel Benning. You have not been following the news, being otherwise occupied, but companies like your beloved Virtvana have won a major legislative battle. They are now empowered to maintain their customer base aggressively. I believe the wording is ‘protecting customer assets against invasive alienation by third-party services.’ Virtvana can come and get you.”
Keel blinked at Dr. Marx’s dark countenance. “You can’t seriously think someone would . . . what? . . . kidnap me?”
Dr. Marx shrugged. “Virtvana might. For the precedent. You’re a good customer.”
“Vee moguls are going to sweat the loss of one spike? That’s crazy.”
Dr. Marx sighed, stood up, whacked sand from his trousers with his hands. “You noticed then? That’s good. Being able to recognize crazy, that is a good sign. It means there is hope for your own sanity.”
Her days were spent at the edge of the second-rate ocean. She longed for something that would silence the Need. She would have settled for a primitive bird-in-flight simulation. Anything. Some corny sex-with-dolphins loop—or something abstract, the color red leaking into blue, enhanced with aural-D.
She would have given ten years of her life for a game of Apes and Angels, Virtvana’s most popular package. Apes and Angels wasn’t just another smooth metaphysical mix—it was the true religion to its fans. A gamer started out down in the muck on Libido Island, where the senses were indulged with perfect, shimmerless sims. Not bad, Libido Island, and some gamers stayed there a long, long time. But what put Apes and Angels above the best pleasure pops was this: A player could evolve spiritually. If you followed the Path, if you were steadfast, you became more compassionate, more aware, at one with the universe . . . all of which was accompanied by feelings of euphoria.
Keel would have settled for a legal rig. Apes and Angels was a chemically enhanced virtual, and the gear that true believers wore was stripped of most safeguards, tuned to a higher reality.
It was one of these hot pads that had landed Keel in Addiction Resources again.
“It’s the street stuff that gets you in trouble,” Keel said. “I’ve just got to stay clear of that.”
“You said that last time,” the wilson said. “You almost died, you know.”
Keel felt suddenly hollowed, beaten. “Maybe I want to die,” she said.
Dr. Marx shrugged. Several translucent seagulls appeared, hovered over him, and then winked out. “Bah,” he muttered. “Bad therapy-V, bad, death-wishing clients, bad career choice. Who doesn’t want to die? And who doesn’t get that wish, sooner or later?”
One day, Dr. Marx said, “You are ready for swimming.”
It was morning, full of a phony, golden light. The nights were black and dreamless, nothing, and the days that grew out of them were pale and untaxing. It was an intentionally bland virtual, its sameness designed for healing.
Keel was wearing a one-piece, white bathing suit. Her counselor wore bathing trunks, baggy with thick black vertical stripes; he looked particularly solemn, in an effort, no doubt, to counteract the farcical elements of rotund belly and sticklike legs.
Keel sighed. She knew better than to protest. This was necessary. She took her wilson’s proffered hand, and they walked down to the water’s edge. The sand changed from white to gray where the water rolled over it, and they stepped forward into the salt-smelling foam.
Her legs felt cold when the water enclosed them. The wetness was now more than virtual. As she leaned forward and kicked, her musc1es, taut and frayed, howled.
She knew the machines were exercising her now. Somewhere her real body, emaciated from long neglect, was swimming in a six-foot aquarium whose heavy seas circulated to create a kind of liquid treadmill. Her lungs ached; her shoulders twisted into monstrous knots of pain.
In the evening, they would talk, sitting in their chairs and watching the ocean swallow the sun, the clouds turning orange, the sky occasionally spotting badly, some sort of pixel fatigue.
“If human beings are the universe’s way of looking at itself,” Dr. Marx said, “then virtual reality is the universe’s way of pretending to look at itself.”
“You wilsons are all so down on virtual reality,” Keel said. “But maybe it is the natural evolution of perception. I mean, everything we see is a pr
oduct of the equipment we see it with. Biological, mechanical, whatever.”
Dr. Marx snorted. “Bah. The old ‘everything-is-virtual’ argument. I am ashamed of you, Keel Benning. Something more original, please. We wilsons are down on virtual addiction because everywhere we look we see dead philosophers. We see them and they don’t look so good. We smell them, and they stink. That is our perception, our primitive reality.”
The healing was slow, and the sameness, the boredom, was a hole to be filled with words. Keel talked, again, about the death of her parents and her brother. They had been over this ground the last time she’d been in treatment, but she was here again, and so it was said again.
“I’m rich because they are dead,” she said.
It was true, of course, and Dr. Marx merely nodded, staring in front of him. Her father had been a wealthy man, and he and his young wife and Keel’s brother, Calder, had died in a freak air-docking accident while vacationing at Keypond Terraforms. A “sole survivor” clause in her father’s life insurance policy had left Keel a vast sum.
She had been eleven at the time—and would have died with her family had she not been sulking that day, refusing to leave the hotel suite.
She knew she was not responsible, of course. But it was not an event you wished to dwell on. You looked, naturally, for powerful distractions.
“It is a good excuse for your addiction,” Dr. Marx said. “If you die, maybe God will say, ‘I don’t blame you.’ Or maybe God will say, ‘Get real. Life’s hard.’ I don’t know. Addiction is in the present, not the past. It’s the addiction itself that leads to more addictive behavior.”
Keel had heard all this before. She barely heard it this time. The weariness of the evening was real, brought on by the day’s physical exertions. She spoke in a kind of woozy, presleep fog, finding no power in her words, no emotional release.
Of more interest were her counselor’s words. He spoke with rare candor, the result, perhaps, of their fugitive status, their isolation.