Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  "You're wasted as a builder or a baker and you know it," I say.

  Lily's pinched look speaks to how she's more than ready to see any of the men in her life find bloody something already. Thread of normality to pluck at, as if one small worry can displace all the greater. I take Trevor's hand and tug him towards the stairs. I can hear the denial of tears in Iris's voice in the front-room where Violet must be giving her as much of a talking-to as I imagine Violet capable of. But upstairs all is still, just quiet breathing from the room where Trevor's aunt's been looking after Lily's girls and poor Daisy's little Rhys. As well to have got them all down at once, Nora's still not been up to much after the 'flu. We creep past that door, and then the bedroom that Iris still shares with Violet, and Ned's ajar and a shambles, to our own scant refuge from care.

  Suppose we can get on with setting up house on our own now the war is behind us. Suppose we all can, except Iris. Funny how that's not even occurred to me till just now, where she'd go. We're all still travelling on the rails the past laid down when the train's lost its bloody wheels. I'll be organising another march for the vote next.

  We've still not got electric in the bedrooms. I strike a match for the lamp and set it back beside the basin, doesn't altogether chase aside the grey dim of a day that's never going to go fair but enough for this. The dressing-table arches into an accusing void where a mirror ought to be. I've been fixing my hair in the largest shard Iris missed, sliver now of myself standing alone at the edge of the bed beside my husband.

  His shaving-soap's not been touched since he's been home, or nearly—he'd have tried, surely, but I can guess how that had gone, without having the sight of his face in a glass. Trevor's brows crease into a dark question when I reach to pick it up. "No, Helen, why…?"

  "Herbert is right, you know, you're a bit of a sight. I think I can help you get tidied up?"

  The frown is deepening into a proper scowl. "Hardly an invalid."

  "We have to do something with you, can't go about looking as if—as if you're about to run off to the hills to paint yourself blue."

  That's got me a smile, at least. Both of us that proud streak all the way back to when it was the Romans we were wanting out of our country. When I come back in from fetching hot water from the bath Trevor's sat himself in the chair at the dressing-table, gazing absently at the blank-faced oval of the missing mirror as he twirls in his fingers the white feather of cowardice that chit had handed him, when the shame ought to have been hers. "Suppose I ought to get on with learning, yeah. Blind men can do it, after all."

  I'm not going to tell him what I'd seen a blinded man do, in one swift moment when his nurse had set down the razor. I dampen the brush and draw it in sturdy swirls across the face of the cake of soap. How many times I'd watched my new husband do this in those few blissful months before the review-board and the letters from the ambulance-corps and the decision we'd made that even this service was still complicity in the act of war. Better to go to prison, than make it one bit easier for someone else to kill in our names.

  (He'd come to see me in my sentence over the demonstration and when we were only stepping out, but I'd not been let to visit him. Barely given leave to write, he was. Should have been there to meet him—should have been there with our baby in my arms. Should, should, should. First casualty of war.)

  Trevor closes his eyes as I touch the lathered brush to his face, as if he can't bear to look at me. (No, he's just imagining how to guide his own hand without a glass.) "Smells nicer than the barber's soap," he says.

  "Keep yourself still, do you want to lose an ear?"

  I have a go at pulling the safety-razor in a slow stroke down his cheek. At least he's young enough never to have even tried to fuss with a cut-throat for himself, father a sensible enough man to have started his sons straight on the newest miracle of modern invention. Trevor reaches up to join his fingers to mine on the handle, easing the angle. "More like…"

  And then it's just the soft rasp of the blade against whiskers, his patient submission to a necessity he'd never have asked of me. Not a drop of blood spilt, when I've finished. I'm proud of that, I believe.

  We'll sort what's to be done for his hair when it comes to it.

  Trevor's still not looking at me even as he wipes his chin with the flannel. "Can imagine Ned's first go at shaving," he says.

  It had involved muttered words that I'm ashamed to admit I knew and Violet on her knees in the bath quietly sweeping up bits of the one mirror in the house that Iris wouldn't get to break. (We try not to think badly of Ned, that if he'd felt led to run out and bloody enlist it was his to say. But I know we've all thought it. As well we're not Ireland, I can only think what he'd be off about.) "Ned's still Ned," I say. "More's the pity."

  "Least he can walk down the shops and go to a barber. Be happy to see him, call him a hero and all." And at last he lifts those great slate-coloured eyes to mine, moody as a storm coming in over the water. "You deserve better than this, Helen, you should leave me."

  I've seen this look before, in Rouen and Cologne and the streets of my own city. Glaring limbless men feeling themselves useless, dangerous, unmanned. Women who only stared at nothing our innocent eyes could see. The children who'd given up hope of love or bread. "Stood up in front of Meeting and promised, we did. Not forgotten that?" I can't but tch at him, the look dawning in those glorious eyes. "I love you, Trevor, always have, since you brought me the sandwiches. Though why you brought me a pot of tea when I was chained to a bloody railing—"

  He's laughing in a way could have been sobs, only the flash of those dear crooked eyeteeth as his mouth turns up with every breath tells me which. "Ought to have known you'd be that stubborn."

  His lips taste of soap when I lean forward, soap and old iron and the promises we'd made to one another in that naive conviction that the world couldn't really be so mad as all that. Bother being proper anyway, his cool hands warming against my skin as we sort our way out of suddenly too many clothes (could have been my Nain's old corsets, catch me outside of a shirtwaist ever again) until at last at last we lie tangled in touch, the old bedstead singing our joy to the rest of the house and half the bloody street for all that we're minding it. Thinking only, this. I want this. I want you.

  And, in the sudden breathless quiet after, somewhere from down below a voice sounds like Iris shouting that we can bloody well shut it. Trevor rumbles a chuckle and buries his face in my neck. Barest hint of teeth brushing my skin, before he sighs, and tucks his head against me, with a murmur: "Wi wedi golli di." I have missed you.

  O, Lord, I have my husband back, and he is himself. Whatever else he may also be, he is himself, and we shall re-learn what that means, to us both, together.

  Jack Hollis Marr

  https://jackhollismarr.wordpress.com

  into the waters I rode down(Short story)

  by Jack Hollis Marr

  Originally published in "Accessing the Future", eds Djibril Al-Ayad & Kathryn Allan

  hhhhhh

  ??

  hhhhh

  well this is fucking useless isn't it

  kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

  that's worse Romaan STOP IT

  kkkkkkeyesn'tkkkkkanyoukkkkus?

  there's something now

  kkkkkkkaliyekkkkkKKKKKK

  fuck that hurt!

  what was that

  was that my name

  try again

  kkkkkkaliye?aliye!kkkkkk

  YES I can hear it now /// I can HEAR it (guess this is hearing?) this is fucking weird i tell you

  kkkkAliyeogdwekkkiditdkkkkknowwhatthismeans?

  Of course I know what it fucking means. I've been working on the project as long as any of them; longer than many. I guess Romaan thinks my work didn't count because none of it's been said aloud, only input through computers. Well, screw him. He's never spoken to anyone working on this back on Earth in person either, only in text relay, but I suppose that's different, right. After all, I'm only the fallbac
k after none of the hearing walking people's brains could adapt to the neural linkage, aren't I?

  Must fucking burn Romaan, that I could do this and he couldn't, just cos my battered old brain's had to adjust to so much fucking adaptive tech over the decades. Neuroplasticity. Nice little word. I suppose it's nice to have something they're jealous of, for once. God knows several degrees don't do it, not when you're old and a woman and deaf.

  The hearing's secondary, of course, a side bonus of the main task: that neural linkage between my brain and an animal's. I've been working on it most of my life, this fake telepathy, trying to match the other side's advantage in this strange war.

  We tried between people, but it was too overwhelming. We—lost people, in that stage.

  (Saira, my dear Saira, who will never be the same; I see her each week, her in her bed and me in my chair, and she smiles and touches my hand, and doesn't speak. Leish, Persis; oh, my dead dears. I reread that poem this week, before the linkage that might have done the same to me, thinking of you. Rock-a-bye baby, washing on the line. The drowned dead voices asking, How's it above? I imagine your voices in those lines, the white bone talking: When she smiles, is there dimples? What's the smell of parsley? I am going into the darkness of the darkness forever. My lost darlings all, I'm so sorry, I am. I think of your sinews in the far-away earth, and how I'm not enough. I can't give you back the world, the smell of parsley, anything at all. Would you have been pleased that we succeeded, in the end?)

  My Romaan was the one who worked out the audiovisual part; he's brilliant, if annoying, and being able to promote this sort of shit to civilians always does the Service good, doesn't it? Look at how helpful we are. We can even give veterans back some of the senses we cost them. Know he'll expect me to be over the moon (ha, there's an old-fashioned phrase, now) over actually hearing for the first time in my life. That's what I'm supposed to be excited about, isn't it? Noise, or the simulation of it, in my skull. Big deal. Bunch of hissing and clicking and the odd weirdly three-dimensional word that hurts and echoes. I'd stick with text, if it wasn't for the rest.

  But. The rest. To get down there, and not in a clunky suit but slipping easy as fish through not-water through the strange thick air, resting light in alien animal mind, witch-riding a foreign familiar in a world no human's ever touched, not with skin and eyes and nose—and ears, I suppose, those too (do the otterfishcatsnake things they showed me have ears?)—this extraordinary modern magic that will, if it goes right, let us eavesdrop on the other and its hidden world…For that, oh God, for that.That's worth all the hissing and clicking inconvenience, the drilling in my skill, all the years of different aids.

  And, I mean, it's war. Doing my bit for the Effort. All the shit I was meant to do, defective daughter of a military family. Daddy would be so proud, the old bugger. Thank fuck he's dead. Last thing I need's him being proud that his broken little girl's able to be a spy.

  ***

  Them the enemy the Bad Guys the invaders (though how they're invading planets that used to be theirs…but you don't question that, do you, old woman? Not if you've got the sense you were born with) and worst the aliens. NotOfUs. The Others. Headless freaks, The Blob. Spooks, Dad called them. You'd think he'd've been less shitty, given the crap people in his own beloved military called him in his day, but I reckon there wasn't much that'd make Dad be less shitty. Whatever they are, they can move easy through that thick weird air down there, and we can't. We can protect our mining interests in vehicles and suits, missiles and lasers and bombs from space, but we can't walk among them. And we can't do what they can, use our minds as weapons, not directly. Neither of those things.

  Well. I can, now.

  ***

  The animal they bring me's as high as my knee, as long as my body lying flat. It does have ears, little hollow dents. I wish I could reach through the clear glass or plastic and touch it, see if those are thin scales or strange fur, if it's warm or cool against my own smooth skin. Its head is small, sharp-nosed, its legs short like a ferret's, its back supple as a cat's. Its gill-like orifices pulse gently. It looks at me through one nictating eye and then the next, turning its head like a bird. I can't remember its scientific name; we've been calling it the catsnake, and it fits.

  I look for the implants but they're invisible, hidden in the scale-spike-fur. My own make my head throb, pried between the plates of my skull. I wonder if it's afraid. I can see its sides expand and deflate slowly as it breathes; maybe it's sedated. Lucky bugger.

  we're goingkkkkkto trythelinkage hhhhhere first, Romaan says. The existing link, the one through the computer, is working so much better now, though I'm still adjusting to (the illusion of) actually hearing words in my skull. Whatever part of my brain that input stimulates aches, a constant weird throb. I'd rather he just used my old text relay, but he's too fucking proud of his invention. And I don't want to look ungrateful, do I? That doesn't look good for the cameras that've been trained on me these recent weeks, on and off, for this marvellous breakthrough: hearing to the deaf! Sight to the blind! Pick up thy bed, and walk!

  This isn't being filmed, though. The Service doesn't like too many records of its little failures, and we've had too many of those in this long project. I'm very aware of that as I close my eyes, let them wire me up yet again, little clips and clamps, the vibrations that used to be my sound. I move my hands on the padded arms of my chair, feel-hear them run through me: bass throb, treble sting. Familiar and easing, beneath the godawful kkkkkHHHkkkkness they've given me.

  And then, the linkage.

  Not much at first: sharp little zap all through me, leaving a dull ache in my back teeth, heavy sort of throb in my balls that could almost be pleasure. And then—falling. Not like falling in dreams, not like the sick whirl when you miss a step (I remember that, so clearly), but vertigo, everything spinning, no up no down and nothing to hold onto (somewhere my fingers clench, but I can't feel it, I can't feel it, oh god the old paralysis, please no—) and darkness and lights all mixed and through the computer feed my own screaming fed back to me on and on and on, ringing through me so that I batter myself against glass, supple body thrashing helplessly between panes like a sample on a slide somehow living and aware, the noise must stop the noise must stop -

  -and this is not my body and these are not my ears that hear, this is not-i and i together, pulse of gills and beat of strange slow blood. catsnake is this you, i, i-thou, we? catsnake is frightened, and so is aliye. hush, hush. rock-a-bye. you're hurting us, we're hurting us. see, the screaming has stopped. see, there through the distorting glass, the woman in the chair. when she smiles, there's dimples. there, the slow breathing, the calming blood. i-thou-i, resting nested. nest-memory, slow weed-breathing thickness by the slow river's bank, dark hole hollow, infant scale-skin against adult fur: so we are twice mother, thou and i? so I held my baby. how soft her tiny fingers were, her soft and dented skull! so; so. we are together.

  -and then we are not, and I am in my chair with everything hurting and my fingers tearing at the implants, Romaan shouting kkkkkk and the catsnake thrashing panicked in its narrow tank. I get myself free and wheel myself across to it, press my hands against the glass. There are alarms somewhere: I can feel them. The film on its eyes is flickering fast in panic. I have never touched an animal that wasn't human before—how strange it is that I still haven't, when I've been in its bloody head! I wish I could hold it to me like the baby we remembered, touch its strange pelt.

  So. Hush. Rock-a-bye. The prick of a needle in my neck, putting me to sleep. Rock-a-bye, Aliye, falling into vertigo-darkness. Rock-a-bye, catsnake. Silence all.

  ***

  It's months before we're ready, catsnake and me. I'm never able to make it—her?—us?—understand what it is we're doing, and I'm glad. It's its planet down there, after all, that I'm going to be creeping over in its head, when it's released, its planet that we're filleting with mining gear in the cause of Need. There are less of them now than there used to be, I'm t
old: rivers dammed or dried, swamps drained, and a warzone besides. I wonder what became of the kits in the nest, the thick quiet hollow, if they died or throve. There's no way to ask it. Its animal-brain works in now and glimpses, flashed sense-memory. We can't communicate, not properly, though I can stir or soothe it in its glass box.

  What's it like to walk again, Mum? He does care so much, in his own way, doesn't he, my Romaan, though he doesn't understand a thing. Desperate to have given me that, like he tried to give me hearing I didn't want, had never had. To have given it back, as if I ever ran on four stubby legs beneath a wiggly back and tasted electricity in the air. Blinked back through my text relay: It's not so bad. It shuts him up, for a bit.

  But there are always others: You must be so happy, Aliye. Ms Parlak, it must be so liberating for you. Will you tell our viewers what it's like? No one fucking saying: "Well done, Aliye, you and your team've fucking cracked a military and scientific problem we've been working on for a couple of lifetimes, you genius woman. How does that feel?" Romaan's shaking hands, accepting the awards. Saira would be furious with him, our son pushing me into the background like that. She would have understood, my Saira. She would.

  I asked Romaan to turn off the noise. He didn't want to—he's been angry, the little shit—but he did it. Eventually. I suppose it hurts to have your mother reject what's meant to be a gift,e ven an incidental one, a side-effect. He took it better when I explained it helped me with the catsnake, that its hearing from inside is strange and muffled, the underwater booms and bangs close to what I feel through skin and bone without my ears.