Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106

by Sam J. Miller

  Billi came across before their food had come out, unable to resist finding out more. Tish was tempting fate, and she knew it. If Billi put two and two together, word would be all over Penhellion before nightfall.

  “Going to introduce me to your friend?”

  Tish looked up, and casually stroked a hand across her lover’s wrist, their touch like electricity. “Hello, Billi,” she said. “This is—” barely a pause “—Angelo. Angelo, meet Billi.”

  She saw Billi’s eyes narrow, a slight nod. “You like my bar, Angelo, eh?” he said. “What’re you eating? Crab’s good. Crab’s always good here. Don’t touch the lobster, though. Trust me on that.”

  “Crab,” said Angelo—the name fitted, the name stuck. “I took Tish Goldenhawk’s advice.”

  Billi’s eyes narrowed again, and Tish wondered what connection he was making now. Then his eyes widened, turned more fully on Angelo.

  She had seen that look before, that mechanical movement.

  Billi raised a hand, held it palm-out toward Angelo with the fingers stiffly pointing.

  His palm glowed.

  Angelo ducked, dived forward, knocking the table aside, hard against Tish’s knee so that she screamed, then gasped as his weight struck her, sending her back off her chair.

  She looked up from the floor, as voices rose around them.

  The chair where Angelo had been seated was a blackened lump, smoking furiously.

  Billi was turning slowly from the burnt chair to where Angelo and Tish lay on the floor. He had a puzzled expression on his face, a smooth, mechanical glide to his movements.

  He was not Billi. Not for now, at least. Billi had been pushed aside and someone—the Accord, presumably—had taken over.

  Why try to kill one of your own angels?

  Billi raised a hand and Angelo stood, hauling Tish to her feet, kicking a chair and table back at the old man to stop him pursuing.

  They were standing by one of the Vanguard’s big picture windows.

  Tish looked out, suddenly dizzy at the height.

  Angelo took a chair and raised it.

  “You’re making a habit of this,” she said, as he swung it down against the window, crazing the glass.

  This time, he gave the chair a twist, and the glass gave way.

  Salty air leapt in through the opening.

  Angelo opened his arms and wrapped them around Tish as she stepped into his embrace, and then he jumped clear, taking her with him.

  They fell, air rushing, whistling in Tish’s ears.

  They were going to die on the rocks this time, she felt sure. This was a lovers’ end, and they would move on into the Accord for eternity.

  Fabric ripped, wings broke free, and their fall became a graceful swoop taking them out across the water, toward the place where the rainbows filled the air and the gulls and the pterosaurs flew.

  “You need to escape,” she told him. “You need to get away from here. Why ever did you stay here in the first place after they found you?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t think they expected me to still be here,” he explained.

  They were on an island, one of the many islands where the Grand River became the Grand Falls and tumbled over the cliffs to the sea far below.

  “If you want to get away why can’t you just . . . I don’t know . . . snap your fingers? If you’re of the Accord then you should be able to just slip away and reappear somewhere else.”

  “Like a god?” he laughed. He raised a hand and snapped his fingers. Nothing happened.

  Tish stood and looked down at the seated Angelo. Time to confront things.

  “If you’re no god, then who are you? What are you? Who are these people chasing after you? If they’re agents of the Accord, then why is this happening? What have you done?”

  He let her finish. He smiled. He shrugged. “I don’t know,” he told her. “I don’t know who or what I am. I don’t know why these people are chasing me or who they are. I don’t know what I have done, if I’ve done anything at all. I don’t remember much before a few tens of days ago. I don’t understand at all, but I can tell you one thing.”

  He waited. She asked, “What’s that?”

  “I love every moment of this existence. Every last detail. I’m soaking it up. I’m a sponge. I want more. I want ever and ever more.”

  Tish heard the buzz of a motor—a flyer, perhaps. “You have to get away from here,” she said. “They’ll destroy you.”

  “Will you come with me? Will you share it with me?”

  She nodded. She remembered that moment, walking back into the Falling Droplet and realizing that she was irrevocably changed. She felt that again, only more so. She hoped it would carry on happening, because she wasn’t finished yet.

  2. Er-jian-die

  I have no past. I have no future. Only now.

  I have many pasts and many futures, but as me, as this, there is only now. I am a composite. I have been cast for this occasion, for this task.

  I am of the Accord.

  I am assembled from the many, from the multitude. I will go back to the multitude.

  I am of the Accord.

  I am male, in this body. My skin is dark, my hair short, straight. I am slim and strong and fast, of course. Why would I be anything else?

  I am enhanced. In many ways.

  I am not alone. I will not be alone when I step out of this cabin. There are two others. Two like me, Ee and Sen. We are a team.

  I step out through the cabin door, having opened it first. My others are here already. Their heads turn, we nod simultaneously. I join them at the rail.

  We are high up, on the deck of a faux sailing ship that is really powered by twinned gravity-wave microgenerators below decks. Above us, sails bulge in a manner designed to appeal to the grand touristas.

  We are only a few hours from port. I know this for a fact, like I know much for a fact.

  I close my eyes. We close our eyes. Together.

  Data flashes.

  We open our eyes.

  He is here, on the Lady Cecilia. The anomaly.

  In a realm where everything is known to the Accord—where everything, by its nature, must be known to the Accord—he is different. He is unknown. He, by his very nature, does not conform with the rules that govern our existence, your existence, everyone’s existence.

  He must be found.

  He must be stopped.

  He must be reabsorbed before he becomes self-propagating.

  I turn. We turn. Together.

  We smell him.

  He has been here, on this deck, recently. He must be nearby.

  We will seek him out, find him, reabsorb him, before the Lady Cecilia docks. We know this for a fact.

  The Lady Cecilia docks at Penhellion, sliding smoothly into her space in the harbor.

  We have not found him, the anomaly.

  We have found places where he has been, places where he has spent long hours alone, no doubt doing battle with his perverse nature. They do that. They don’t understand, but they try. They are you and me, us; it is their nature.

  It is their nature to hide, and to run. This one has been here, in this world called Laverne, for longer than initial data indicated. Re-run analyses give him perhaps twenty more days’ existence in which to accumulate knowledge, experience, before he was first detected.

  His development is not linear. Those twenty days are days in which every aspect of his self has become exponentially more complex and data-rich.

  This one is no babe in arms, then. He is a whirlwind, a destroyer of worlds.

  He does not know it, of course.

  Our task is to stop him from finding out.

  Penhellion is a city built into a cliff. They could have built it on top of the cliff. They could have built it a few kilometers along the coast where the cliffs are not anything up to twelve hundred meters high. Human nature is not such, and they built it in the cliff. We built it in the cliff. We are of the Accord.

  Data
flashes.

  There are agents in this city. Many agents. They will look out for him and their reports will be relayed to us whenever they hold anything of relevance.

  They do not know they are agents. They do not know they have been selected. Sanji Roseway does not know that she is watching, as she happily stocks her fabric stall on Fandango Way. Neither do the street musician, Mo Yous, or the bar-owner, Milton Goldenhawk, or the dreamcaster, Serendip Jones. They will not know when they are reporting, or when they have reported. That is not their place.

  We did not see him leaving the Lady Cecilia, but he has done so. Those extra days, that logarithmic escalation of his survival instinct and wiles, have made a difference.

  We must not underrate him.

  But first, we must find him.

  He has been quiet, which has not helped us in our task. He should be like a whirlpool, drawing in the human debris of this society, feeding on it. Such activity sends out signals, leaves traces, a pebble dropped in our collective pool.

  But with experience comes guile and with guile, restraint. Perhaps he has stabilized. That would be unusual, but not a first.

  We remain in Penhellion, studying and using our agents to study. He will break cover. He will reveal himself by his actions. They always do.

  We proxy into a bar—a bar through the eyes of another.

  There has been a ripple—only the slightest of ripples, but detectable nonetheless. He has emerged.

  We look across the bar. We are behind the bar, its surface finely polished flutewood. The bar room is crowded, which is good. Picture windows show sunlight splitting into separate colors through water droplets. I like rainbows. I am not an artist, but once I think a part of me was a part of an artist. Alizarin crimson. Venetian red. Monastral blue. Yellow ocher. I could paint that view a million times and in every instance it would be different.

  My team, my others, are also proxying this bartender, and our gaze is drawn away from the picture windows, and we look along the bar.

  Another bartender is serving, or rather, not serving, but leaning on the flutewood bar-top, chatting. She is of indeterminate age, as are most adult humans. She has long auburn hair with natural wave, wide eyes with burnt umber irises.

  She is talking to him. The anomaly. He has the shape of a man, but we find it hard to focus our eyes—this proxy’s eyes—on that shape and determine any detail. He swirls and flows. He is drawing her in.

  “Tish?” we say, addressing the bartender. She looks, we nod toward the crowded room. This proxy is not communicative, but his meaning gets across even so.

  Tish moves off to serve other customers.

  We withdraw, as data flashes.

  The Falling Droplet. We are several levels away, in this cliff-face city. We open a channel through the consensus, arriving in seconds.

  We enter the bar. It looks different from this perspective, from the crowd rather than from behind the bar. I look around, orientating myself. We each look around. We scan faces, locating Milton the bartender and then Tish the other bartender.

  I see him. I point.

  He is intense. I feel dizzy, sick, as if I am being sucked in even though I know that cannot be so, due to the heavy levels of security built into my being.

  I am aware of the others, Ee-jian-die and Sen-jian-die, turning to look. I sense their turmoil.

  I open my hand and spotlight him. That should stun him, lock him into a pool of slowed time so that he will be swimming through perceptual treacle.

  He is unaffected.

  He drops a glass, ducks, moves, is gone.

  We channel, and are standing where he was.

  We know of the other exit. We look, and he is there, reaching for the door.

  We close our eyes, lock minds, shift consensus. There is no door there. There never has been a door there.

  He ducks, vanishes again. He is channeling too, although he does not know it. Short, desperate hops. He reappears by the windows, snatching a chair.

  He does not understand what is happening. He is resorting to violence, the chair his only weapon against us.

  I smile. He is making it easy.

  He swings the chair—but not at us, at the window. It shatters, he turns, he throws himself after the chair.

  We look out of the smashed window at the sea and rocks below.

  He is not dead.

  He cannot be dead.

  He can only be reabsorbed.

  We remain in Penhellion, even though our anomaly has probably moved on now. He would be foolish to remain, after our first contact. We do not think he is a fool.

  He is still here. Or rather, he has not gone far—only as far as the clifftop community.

  We tackle him immediately when contact is made, through our proxy Billi Narwhal.

  He pulls the same trick and evades us.

  He is fast, but he appears to be a creature of habit.

  He has another weakness, too—the woman, Tish Goldenhawk. She is with him. She appears to have retained her integrity too, which is a bonus.

  He is an anomaly. He can be detected by his disruption patterns, but equally, he can lie low. That is the nature of an anomaly. Or one of its natures.

  But Tish Goldenhawk . . . If we find her, there is a high probability that we find him.

  3. Tish Goldenhawk

  “Who are you? What are you?”

  Tish Goldenhawk has traveled the length of Laverne’s main continent with the man she calls Angelo, and finally she realizes that her invented name for him, “Angelo,” is a more appropriate label than “man.”

  She has traveled the length of the continent with him, but today is the first time she has seen him kill, although she suspects it is not the first time he has killed. She has dispensed bread and feathers for his victim before confronting Angelo.

  She has traveled the length of the continent with him and she is ill, drained both physically and mentally, like a scag addict.

  He smiles. He shrugs. He says, “I don’t know. I did not know the first time you asked me and I have not yet made that discovery. You are beautiful. Death is beautiful. I soak up beauty. That is as close as I have come to defining myself—I am a receptacle.”

  Death. Tish had never witnessed violent death until today. She hoped young Ferdinand would find peace in his absorption into the Accord.

  They were walking, Tish and Angelo at the front, and his ragged band of followers, now numbering some twenty-four, doing as their role demanded, following.

  Angelo accumulated followers. It was his nature. People he encountered, people with a sharp enough sense of perception, of distinction, were always able to detect his special nature, his divinity, the fact that he had been touched by the Accord.

  They wanted to be with him.

  They wanted to share with him.

  They wanted to give to him.

  And he, like a child with toys made of flesh and not even the slightest sense of responsibility, took.

  The first time Tish had found him with another, she had ranted and raved, and he had smiled and looked puzzled, and she had seen that he had no concept of what she was feeling, and anyway, she could never be the first to cast stones in matters of infidelity.

  Blind to herself, Tish had first seen the weakness in others. In Maggie and Li, who had joined the group late but had given so wholeheartedly, she had first seen the addict look in the eye, the transformation of devotion into something physical, something living. Each of them carried a cancer, and that cancer was Angelo.

  Ferdinand had been one of the first to join. Tish and Angelo and three or four others had stayed the night in a grand ranch-house somewhere a few days to the northwest of Daguerre. The welcome was warm—as welcomes for Angelo tended to be—and the seventeen-year-old son of the owner had been cute and, instantly, devoted.

  Ferdinand had come with them. Told his parents he was guiding them to the river-crossing and just carried on with them, and then they’d had to speed up a bit, hitching a ride on
a goods wagon, because their welcome at that ranch would never be as warm again.

  Ferdinand supplanted Tish as Angelo’s favorite, if he could be said to have such a thing. To be honest, she was not too put out by this development, as already she was starting to feel that psychic leeching that would only get worse.

  Ferdinand went from fresh-faced disciple to hollowed devotee to shuffling, skeletal wreck in only twenty or so days.

  It happened among them—it was happening to all of them, only at a slower rate—and yet it had taken far too long for Tish to notice. In the worlds of the Diaspora suffering had long since been banished. It was not even something readily recognized, like a language newly encountered. There was a whole new syntax of suffering for them to learn.

  “What am I? I don’t know. But I can tell you that it is like flying. I wish to fly and I fly, but once I am up there it is only the air and a few feathers that prevent me from plummeting. So tenuous the thread of existence!

  “You are strong, Tish. So much stronger than the others. You hold me together. You are my air, my feathers. Without you . . . well, I don’t know what I would be without you to support me, to contain me.”

  She was growing weak. Had been growing weak.

  But not as rapidly as Ferdinand.

  She came up on them early that morning, when the sun was still heavy over the mountains, painting them gold and pink.

  Angelo was holding him, his arms easily enfolding the wasted frame.

  Tish almost turned away. She had seen this kind of encounter often enough by now. She closed her eyes and thought back to those few precious nights when it had just been the two of them, sleeping rough, both enfolded by his wings.

  She had been strong then.

  She opened her eyes just as Ferdinand started to vanish.

  She watched. She could see through him. See the stones, the thorn bush, the tussock grass, the inside of Angelo’s embracing left arm, previously obscured by Ferdinand’s bony torso.

  Things blurred. Things dissolved, melted, slipped away from this existence.

  He was gone.

  Angelo turned to her, his expression startled as if he did not know what had happened, had not expected it to happen; but beneath the surprise there was satisfaction, a thrill of pleasure, of strength, and the first hint of that crooked-toothed smile.