Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106

by Sam J. Miller

  4. Er-jian-die

  “Your air, your feathers . . . so poetic. If you weren’t such an innocent I’d say you had the crassest line in smooth-talk, but you don’t have a clue, do you?”

  We have her. We have him. I see him through the eyes of Tish Goldenhawk and it is as if a distorting lens has been removed. He is male, of indeterminate age, of mid-brown skin tone and dark hair. He is beautiful and engaging.

  He draws you in.

  Even at this remove—proxied and many hundred kilometers distant—he draws you in.

  We debate, as he moves out of view. Act now, via proxy, or attend in body, allowing a short interval in which he might detect our approach and take evasive action? We do not know how much his powers have grown.

  Data flashes.

  Ee-jian-die takes the proxy, turns her head so that he is back in our field of view. Sen-jian-die and I withdraw, lock, open a channel through the consensus, step through.

  There is momentary disorientation and then we are standing on a plain, surrounded by cacti and thorn bushes and oddly balanced round boulders.

  The two of them are there, locked in conflict. A short distance away there is an encampment of bubble tents and track trikes. The people there look on, too damaged to stir.

  She has him in the beam. She stands, knees slightly bent, body tipped forward, one arm stretched out, palm first, fingers straight, and a beam of white light lances from her hand to him, the anomaly.

  He stands there smiling.

  He looks at us as we materialize, although he should not be able to turn his head at all.

  He raises a hand so that he mirror’s Tish Goldenhawk’s stance and his palm cuts out the beam, reflects it.

  It shines on her face and she crumples, sobbing, more damaged than she had been before.

  Ee-jian-die appears at my side, his proxying of Tish abandoned.

  He looks ashen, damaged by the encounter, even at a proxy.

  I allow myself to be identified as leader, even though we three are equal; we three are far greater than we three alone. “Your time is up,” I tell the anomaly. “Let these people go. Come back with us. Allow yourself to be reabsorbed.”

  He smiles in a way that indicates taht he is both amused and puzzled. “Reabsorbed?” he said. “Re . . . ?”

  I nod. “You are a glitch,” I tell him. “A chaotic anomaly. The Accord contains all the individuals who have lived and then died since its inception. You are a bug in that process, a self-resonant fluctuation in the billions upon billions of human elements within the Accord. A remix error. You’re a strange attractor and you need to be smoothed over. Come with us, you will not be lost, you will simply be reabsorbed.”

  “But how . . . ? How can I be reabsorbed if I am not yet dead?”

  He doesn’t know. He has grown, but he does not know.

  “ ‘This is the Accord,” I tell him. “We are living the afterlife. The afterlives.”

  “What happens if I say ‘no?’ ”

  “We will force you.”

  “And if you fail?”

  “You will carry on growing. Like a leak in a pool, you will continue to drag in those about you, soaking them up until they are husks. They are drawn to you. We are drawn to you. You are like a black hole in human form. You will suck us all in and the Accord will fail to be. It will crash on a galaxy-wide scale.”

  He—this thing, this entity, this it—is smiling. “So, if I believe you, then I—” it thumped its chest in apelike display “—am an alternative to the Accord? An alternative reality?”

  It laughs. “I like this,” it says. “It is all so beautiful. So, so beautiful.”

  We strike, synchronized.

  He locks him in the immobilizing beam, far more powerful than we have used so far. I lock him in a second, our combined beams more than doubling their intensity in combination. Sen moves in to interface, a physical connection with the Accord.

  The anomaly is still smiling.

  It turns and lashes out a beam of light and Sen flies through the air in several pieces.

  It turns again, and lashes at Ee, and I sense our hold—if ever we had had a hold—weakening.

  And then . . . light, dark, an absence that is where the pain would have been if my body had not immediately shut down those pathways. A lot of absence.

  Mental silence. Ee-jian-die and Sen-jian-die have been returned to the Accord. They will reappear, but not here, not now.

  I am still here, though. I have not been returned.

  I open the eye that I am able to control.

  I see sky, a thorn bush.

  I see her. Tish Goldenhawk. Looking down at me.

  “What can I do?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I tell her. The body that carries me is too fundamentally damaged. It could be repaired, of course, but what is the point? My task is over, I have failed. I will be reabsorbed. Someone else will be sent, and they will try again. The anomaly will have grown, but it will be fought, only not by me next time, or at least, not by the combination of traits that is this me.

  “What happens to us when he has sucked us dry?”

  She is strong, this one.

  “If this is the Accord, then where does the data go when he has absorbed it? You said he’s some kind of black hole—what’s inside him?”

  “Who knows?” I say. “The physically dead enter the Accord and we live on, again and again, for eternity. But attractant anomalies like this remove us from the afterlife. It’s like asking where the dead went before there was an Accord. They died. They stopped being. They ended. If he takes us from the Accord, we end.”

  “What can I do?” she repeats, and I realize that she does not mean to ask what she can do to help my mortally damaged body, but rather what can she do to stop the anomaly, the attractor, her lover.

  “He said I was his air, his feathers, that I held him together,” she said. “I want that to stop.”

  In that instant I want to paint her. Like the rainbows, I could paint her a million times and each would be different, but always her strength, her purity, would come through.

  “You have to get close to him,” I tell her.

  5. Tish Goldenhawk

  “You have to get close to him,” this wreck of a human construct tells her. “Hold him.”

  Tish Goldenhawk nods. In her mind she can see Angelo holding Ferdinand, absorbing him. She knows exactly what this agent of the Accord means. “What then?”

  “That’s all,” he tells her. “I will do the rest.”

  Angelo waits for her in the encampment, smiling. She should have known he would not go on without her.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. His words have no meaning. They are just vibrations in the air. “They tried to kill me.”

  She nods. “They’re dead now,” she says, wondering then at the lie—whether she has made a fatal mistake already.

  He shakes his head. “One lives,” he says, “but only tenuously. He does not have long, I think.”

  He turns. “We must move on,” he says. “There will be more of them. Another day and we will reach a city, I think. A city would be good.”

  She looks at him, tries to see him as she had once seen him, a charming, exciting escape. That had only ever been one of her fantasies. She tries to see him as her lover, but cannot. Tries to see him even as human, but no.

  “I can’t,” she says in a quiet voice.

  He turns, raises an eyebrow.

  “I can’t go on.” Getting stronger. “I’m leaving. Going home. You don’t need me anymore.”

  “But . . . ”

  “No buts,” she says. “I can’t do this. I’m exhausted. Drained. I’m leaving.”

  He is not human, but there is so much in him that is.

  “You can’t,” he says. “I . . . You’re my support. My feathers, the air that holds me up. The air that I breathe!”

  “I’m tired,” she says. “You can’t lean on me anymore. I’m none of those things . . . I’m not strong eno
ugh. Can’t you see? It’s me who needs supporting!”

  “I will always support you,” he says.

  He opens his arms, just as he had for Ferdinand, who had been too weak to continue.

  He steps forward.

  She waits for him to come to her, to hold her.

  Scent of cinnamon, of dry, dusty feathers. She holds him.

  She senses the flow, the seething mass of energies. They came from . . . beyond.

  He gasps, straightens.

  She holds on.

  He is looking down at her. He knows. He dips his head and kisses her on the brow.

  She holds nothing, holds air, hugs herself. She drops to her knees.

  There are feathers, nothing else. She gathers some. She will cast them for him, with bread, when she gets back to Penhellion.

  She does not doubt that she will go there, go home.

  Poor Milton. Poor Druce. She has changed. She does not know what can be salvaged, but she will go home now and she will see.

  She stands.

  Even if nothing can be repaired, she has no regrets. She would do it all again.

  She is of the Accord.

  They all are of the Accord.

  First published in The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 1, edited by George Mann, 2006.

  About the Author

  Keith Brooke is the author of fourteen novels, six collections, and over seventy short stories; his most recent SF novel alt.human (published in the US as Harmony) was shortlisted for the 2013 Philip K Dick Award and is story “War 3.01” is shortlisted for the Seiun Award. He is also the editor of Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: the Sub-genres of Science Fiction, an academic exploration of SF from the perspectives of a dozen top authors in the field. Writing as Nick Gifford, his teen fiction is published by Puffin, with one novel also optioned for the movies by Andy Serkis and Jonathan Cavendish’s Caveman Films. He writes reviews for the Guardian, teaches creative writing at the University of Essex, and lives with his wife Debbie in Wivenhoe, Essex.

  Hair

  Adam Roberts

  1

  It seems to me foolish to take a story about betrayal and call it—as my sponsors wish me to—“The Hairstyle that Changed the World.” All this hairdressing business, this hair-work. I don’t want to get too worked-up about all that. Like those massed strands of electricity shooting up from the bald pate of the Van de Graaff machine. And whilst we’re on the subject of haircuts: I was raised by my mother alone, and we were poor enough that, from an early stage, she was the person who cut my hair. For the sake of simplicity, as much as economy, this cut would be uniform and close. To keep me quiet as the buzzer grazed, she used to show me the story about the mermaid whose being-in-the-world was confused between fishtail and feet. I’m sure she showed me lots of old books, but it was that one that sticks in my head: the singing crab, more scarab than crustacean; the wicked villainess able to change not only her appearance but, improbably, her size. I used to puzzle how she was able to generate all her extra mass when at the end she metamorphosed into a colossal octopus. Mostly I remember the beautiful young mermaid, a girl with the tempestuous name Ariel. The story hinged on the notion that her tail might vanish and reform as legs, and I used to worry disproportionately about those new feet. Would they, I wondered, smell of fish? Were the toenails actually fish-scales? Were the twenty-six bones of each foot (all of which I could name) formed of cartilage, after the manner of fish bones? Or human bone? The truth is, my mind is the sort that is most comfortable finding contiguities between different states, and most uncomfortable with inconsistencies. Hence my eventual choice of career, I suppose. And I don’t doubt that my fascination with the mermaid story had to do with a nascent erotic yearning for Ariel herself—a very prettily drawn figure, I recall.

  This has nothing to do with anything. I should not digress. It’s particularly vulgar to do so before I have even started; as if I want to put off the task facing me. Of course this account is not about me. It is enough, for your purposes, to locate your narrator, to know that I was raised by my mother alone; and that after she died (of newstrain CF, three weeks after contracting it) I was raised by a more distant relative. We had enough to eat, but nothing else in my life was enough to. To know that my trajectory out of that world was hard study, a scholarship to a small college, and the acquisition of the professional skills that established me in my current profession. You might also want to know where I first met Neocles (long final e) at college, although what was for me dizzying educational altitude represented, for him, a sort of slumming, a symptom of his liberal curiosity about how the underprivileged live.

  Above all, I suppose, you need to know that I’m of that generation that thinks of hair as a sort of excrescence, to be cropped to make it manageable, not indulged at length. And poverty is like the ore in the stone; no matter how you grind the rock and refine the result it is always poverty that comes out. Thinking again about my mother, as here, brings her colliding painfully against the membrane of memory. I suppose I find it hard to forgive her for being poor. She loved me completely, and I loved her back, as children do. The beautiful mermaid, seated on a sack-shaped rock, combing her long, coral-red hair whilst porpoises jump through invisible aerial hoops below her.

  2

  To tell you about the hairstyle that changed the world, it’s back we go to Reykjavik, five years ago, now: just after the Irkutsk famine, when the grain was devoured by that granulated agent manufactured by—and the argument continues as to which terrorists sponsored it. It was the year the World Cup descended into farce. Nic was in Iceland to answer charges at the PPC, and I was representing him.

  A Product Protection Court hearing is not much different than any other court hearing. There are the rituals aping the last century, or perhaps the century before that. There’s a lot of brass and glass, and there is a quantity of waxed, mirror-like darkwood. I had represented Nic at such hearings before, but never one quite so serious as this. And Nic had more to lose than most. Because I had itemized his assets prior to making our first submission before the Judicial Master I happened to know exactly how much that was: five apartments, one overlooking Central Park; a mulberry farm; forty assorted cars and flitters; more than fifty percent shares in the Polish National Museum, which although it didn’t precisely mean that he owned all those paintings and statues and whatnots at least gave him privileged access to them. The Sydney apartment had a Canova, for instance, in the entrance hall, and the Poles weren’t pressing him to return it any time soon.

  He had a lot to lose.

  In such circumstances insouciance is probably a more attractive reaction than anxiety, although from a legal perspective I might have wished for a more committed demeanor. He lounged in court in his Orphic shirt—very stylish, very Allah-mode—and his hair was a hundred years out of date. It was Woodstock. Or English Civil War aristocrat.

  “When the JM comes in,” I told him, “you’d better rise up off your gluteus maximus. Stand yourself straight.”

  “You’re not the boss of me,” he said, indulgently.

  Judicial Master Paterson came in, and Nic got to his feet smartly enough and nodded his head, and then sat himself down perfectly properly. With his pocketstrides decently hidden by the table he looked almost respectable. Except for all the hair, of course.

  3

  I saw him only twice again after that—after, I mean, the afternoon in the PP courtroom painstakingly picking my way through the brambles of intellectual property legislation. Once, and then once again. But that day went better than I had hoped. I see-you-tomorrowed him on the steps of the courthouse, but he was staring at the sky. The bobble-layer of clouds on the horizon was a remarkable satsuma color. Further up things were cyan and eggshell. The surface of the icebound estuary, which had looked perfectly smooth and flat in daylight, revealed under the slant light all manner of hollows and jags. Further out at sea, past the iceline where waves turned themselves continually and wearily over
, a fishing platform sent a red snake of smoke straight up from the fakir’s basket of its single chimney. The ocean had lain a sheet of firework sparkles over the profound dark of its depths.

  “Tomorrow,” he replied absently. He seemed hypnotized by the view.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him, mistaking (as I now think) his distraction for anxiety about the prospect of losing some of his five apartments or forty cars and flitters. “The JM said he recognized that some individuals have a genius for innovation. That was a good sign. That’s code for: geniuses don’t need to be quite as respectful of the law as ordinary drones.”

  “A genius for innovation,” he echoed.

  “I’m not saying scot-free. Not saying that. But it won’t be too bad. You’ll keep more than you think. It will be fine. Don’t worry. Yes?”

  He suddenly coughed into his gloves—yellow, condom-tight gloves—and appeared to notice me for the first time. God knows I loved him, as a friend loves a true friend, but he bore then as he always did his own colossally swollen ego like a deformity. I never knew a human with so prodigious a self-regard. His selfishness was of the horizoning, all-encompassing sort that is almost touching, because it approaches the selfishness of the small child. His whim: I shall be humanity’s benefactor! But this was not an index of his altruism. It was because his ego liked the sound of the description. Having known him twenty years I would stand up in court and swear to it. He developed the marrow peptide-calcbinder treatment not to combat osteoporosis—the ostensible reason, the thing mentioned in his Medal of Science citation—but precisely because of the plastic surgical spinoff possibilities, so that he could add twenty centimeters to his own long bones. It’s not that he minded people using his treatment to alleviate osteopathologies. With a sort of blithe single-mindedness, he was pleasantly surprised at other useful applications.

  Accordingly, when he did not turn up in the courtroom the following day my first thought was that he had simply overslept; or gotten distracted by some tourist pleasure, or that some aspect of his own consciousness had intruded between his perceiving mind and the brute fact that (however much I tried to reassure him) a JM was gearing up to fine him half his considerable wealth for property-right violation. It did not occur to me that he might deliberately have absconded. This possibility evidently hadn’t occurred to the court either, or they would have put some kind of restraint upon him. You would think (they thought, obviously) that the prospect of losing so many million euros of wealth was restraint enough.