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

by Anthology

“Snow,” I repeated, letting the word linger on my tongue for just a moment. “If you would consider letting me, a mere mortal know, why was I sent there?”

  Osiris laughed. “I will tell you, because now you are not a mere mortal any longer. You have eternal life! That life will take you many places in your world, not just Egypt. I wanted you to get a taste of the extreme climate conditions of the planet immediately. If I had just told you of the place you visited, would you have chosen to go? Would you have believed me?”

  I was honest. “I would have gone. For you, I would go anywhere, my god Osiris. But, no, I would not have believed you. Never in my wildest imaginations would I have dreamed such a place existed.”

  “Good. Thank you, Bek, for your honesty. I dare say, you may not always trust me so readily, but I am glad for your loyalty at the present. As for why you are to go there and many other places in this world—I am a god, yes, but I am a curious god,” Osiris said. “I must confess that you play a critical role in my curiosity. I long to test humankind and you will be at the center of those tests.”

  “I will do what you ask of me, Osiris,” I said, parroting what I’d said earlier.

  “Will you? Let’s see what you think after a few more trips back to your world. Are you ready?”

  I nodded, and Osiris touched his bracelet. He shimmered out of view, and I found myself in a vast desert.

  I sighed in relief. I was back in Egypt. The dry heat of the cracked earth radiated up towards my face and I closed my eyes, welcoming my return to the desert I had grown up in. A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead and I smiled.

  A noise startled me. I opened my eyes and slowly turned in a circle. A creature stood about ten paces away. I wondered briefly if it was a meat eater, but it didn’t look fierce or even hungry. It was about my height, narrow at the top, and larger at the bottom, with large, padded feet and a long tail. Before I could say anything, the creature turned and hopped away, bounding towards the sun one leap at a time.

  This was not Egypt.

  ***

  In spite of its many challenges, I lasted a couple of years in Australia. I was alone for a long time, but I knew how to survive in the desert. True, I was very dependent on the steady Nile River, but that just meant I knew how important a fresh water source was. It took me two days, but I knew that finding vegetation would take me closer to water. I had to trust that Osiris had put me within walking distance of what would keep me alive, just like he’d done in Nunavut without my knowledge.

  Life was tough, but I learned a lot. Eventually I explored further, and that’s where death found me. The original inhabitants of Australia—the aborigines—were surprised to see me. I’m guessing they figured I was inherently evil since I didn’t get a chance to explain myself before a spear pierced my heart.

  I died. I moved to another body and was placed back on Earth without seeing my god this time. I lived again, this time in a rainforest. The mosquitos were as large as my hands and the animals loved to pelt me with their excrement. I learned to live and then died in the tropics.

  The next time, death came to visit in the form of disease. My decline was long and drawn out, and I was thankful when death finally came. Again, I had no downtime in Osiris’ chamber. I was placed inside a village at the foot of a mountain. I looked up and saw that the mountain’s peak was smoking. The ground shook beneath my feet and the mountain began to make noise.

  I noticed the village was vacant. Osiris had known the mountain was unstable. He’d known the village was already abandoned, and he had chosen to put me in harm’s way anyway. I convinced myself this was a test. He knew what he was doing. He was a god, after all.

  I quickly scouted the village, hoping there was something I could use. Something I could do. Osiris had provided for my survival the other two times. This time, though, I found myself choking on the hot ash raining down from above. It seared my face and burned my throat. I could not escape. I was not going to survive.

  I didn’t want to disappoint Osiris. I remembered when I had just holed up in the cave during my Arctic life. Osiris hadn’t been content with that, so I determinedly tried to live. I could barely breathe, but I crawled as far as I could to leave the town. It was no use. Just past the village limits, I was struck by a chunk of volcanic rock, instantly breaking my femur. The pain was intense, but I knew I would be resurrected again. Living with a broken leg in a volcanic wasteland was no life when I knew the next would surely be better. I folded myself up and grasped my necklace, praying to Osiris for the end to come as soon as possible.

  The end did come, but it was not quick.

  When I finally did succumb to the effects of the volcano, the moment from death to life was not as pleasant as I remembered it being. The sounds of the volcano exploding above me were gone, replaced by the emptiness of Osiris’ chamber. Unlike the first few times, though, the moment was jarring. I found myself questioning whether I was really going to be resurrected this time, but after a few moments, I felt the cold stone against my naked back. I was back in my body again.

  I kept my eyes closed as I completed the process back. Footsteps approached and I knew he was there. Waiting.

  “Welcome back, Bek.”

  I cautiously opened my eyes and found him standing in front of me. He was still garbed as he had been the first day I saw him. His skin was still green. It was as if he had not aged, but I felt like it had been centuries since I had seen him last. My body, though, was still as young and as taut as the day I had stood in the pharaoh’s chamber. Identical, in fact, in every way.

  “Greetings, Osiris.” I stood and gathered the clothes from the ground. I carefully and slowly put them on, wary of what was next for me.

  “How has your life been?”

  “You mean lives, my lord.”

  He seemed to be staring at something over my shoulder, and hesitated. “Oh, yes, lives. How have they been?”

  I recounted the time I had spent in the land of the jumping mammals, then the weeks in the rain forest, and finally the hours in the shadow of a volcano. Three lives. Three moments.

  Osiris listened and then questioned my actions in the final life. “Did you think you would be able to evade the effects of the volcano?”

  “I knew you were a kind god and would do whatever you could to offer a way to safety. Just as you said, in the snow there was a carcass I could have harvested, and when I arrived in the desert, I found a river for fresh water. I knew you would have left me a gift to survive. I am sorry I was unable to locate it before I perished.”

  Osiris laughed. “But there was no escape. In this case, there was no way out. I placed you there as a lesson: sometimes there is nothing that can be done. But I saw your valiant attempts to stave off your fate, and for that you are commended.”

  I was confused. Did he want me to fight for every last breath, or did he want me to accept my fate?

  He saw the confusion on my face. “My dear Bek, what is it?”

  “Osiris. I’m sorry, my lord, but what is my purpose? What is it I am supposed to achieve? Why have I been gifted eternal life if I am supposed to strive for every breath in one life and accept defeat in another?” I asked.

  “Oh, Bek. I thought you would have figured it out. I am conducting experiments. I cannot control everything, but I can control you. Your body, your blood, your physical fitness. In all experiments, there are multiple variables, but the one performing the experiment needs one thing. A constant. They need a control.”

  I don’t know what I would have said, but I wasn’t given the chance. With a swift action, Osiris pushed a button on his bracelet, sending me to a new land, one lush with green grasses and tall trees. A few birds chirped in the distance and the sun was warm, but not overly so.

  I didn’t care, though. I was numb.

  My life meant nothing to Osiris. I was just a body. He could use me over and over through whatever means he chose. I was nothing special to him.

  Instead of living my life as he wan
ted me to, I made a decision that day. I would live like I wanted. Maybe there wasn’t much of a difference in what I would have done, but it was different in my mind. It was different in my motivation. I stopped living for Osiris and started living for myself.

  It was probably a few centuries before I saw him again. I lived more than a half-dozen lives in that span, but he kept resurrecting me and depositing me in a new place without a rest stop in his chamber. Each time, I was dressed like an ancient Egyptian and I had the bronze medallion. The places I went were different in climate, culture, and people, but one thing was always the same. Me.

  I encountered Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu (who wasn’t as hairy as the stories say). I met Hannibal. I saw Athens before Sparta overthrew it in the Great Peloponnesian War. The terra cotta warriors were new the first time I saw them.

  Decades sped by as my lives continued to come and go.

  When I saw Osiris again, I knew the Egyptian gods of old to be unreal. I had seen the “power” of a vast number of other gods, and had decided for myself that my master was a false one. He held dominion over my life, but he was no god.

  “Your name is not really Osiris, is it?” I asked on a rare trip back to his chamber.

  “I was wondering when you would ask me that,” he replied. In that moment, the garments he had worn in my presence for years vanished, replaced by a utilitarian article of clothing. “I can be rid of those now.”

  “What should I call you?” I asked.

  “The only name I’ve had on your world has been Osiris, so that is as good a name as any. It would make me happy to hear you continue to use it.”

  And so, like any adolescent, I stopped doing what he liked. I found ways to make him unhappy. I ran towards death like a moth towards flame. I went through body after body until I finally realized I was probably living my lives just as he wanted me to. He was testing my body’s capabilities and I was simply providing him with more and more opportunities to test me.

  For centuries, I managed to live full lives. I even settled down and met a few women.

  But it wasn’t enough. There was one thing I lacked.

  I wanted to die.

  ***

  It wasn’t that my life wasn’t fulfilling. I certainly found various ways to entertain myself throughout the years, but after a certain point, it was all the same. One man’s dictator is another man’s king is another man’s president. They’re all the same. And that’s what my life was like as well.

  Dying from smallpox wasn’t too different from wasting away due to scurvy, or kicking the bucket after meningitis, or even a good bout of pneumonia. When you’ve had them all, the ending is unchanged. One death was the same as the next.

  And Osiris’ words came back to me again and again. The first time I had died, he had said, “I cannot say each death will be as seamless as the one you just experienced.” He was right. Each time I passed away, it was as if someone had jabbed another dagger into my ribs and sucked my organs out through a straw. My brain was jelly for longer and longer each time as I recuperated. I finally decided that the more years that passed between one death and the next meant a little bit more suffering for Bek.

  By the time I reached the Middle Ages, the pain was almost unbearable. So I began to think about how I could actually die.

  I was obsessed. I spent at least one of my lives simply contemplating death at a Buddhist temple until old age snuck up and took me in my sleep. That was a good life. I wish I could do that one again.

  I came to one conclusion: Osiris had to die. For me to die, he had to die.

  How do you kill a god? First, you acknowledge that he isn’t a god.

  In one of my few trips back in the Middle Ages, I confronted him. “You are not a god.”

  He regarded me with thin eyes. “No.”

  I knew I couldn’t fulfill my next statement yet, but I made it anyway. “One day I will kill you. For all the times you have killed me, you will pay.”

  He laughed and turned a dial on a dais. “Good luck with that. Have a nice death, Bek.”

  He’d sent me to the summit of a mountain. I suspect it was Mt. Everest or K2. Either way, I lasted a few hours.

  While he held the power of my resurrection, he also seemed unaware of how many lives I was living. He wasn’t attuned to each of my lives, and he’d even mentioned “my world,” leading me to believe he was some sort of alien who had come to our planet to conduct his own particular brand of experiments—with me at the fore.

  So, he wasn’t a god. I was still stuck with the problem of killing him. I had a lot of time to think about it, and I finally came to the conclusion that I was a clone. Each body after my first, born thousands of years ago in Egypt, was simply a clone. It explained the identical form and age as that first body. It allowed Osiris to prepare many duplicate sets of clothes as well. I didn’t know if he had hundreds of clones sitting in storage, or if he simply printed up a new one each time I died, but either way, I was a clone.

  That eliminated several different methods of taking Osiris out. After all, I was given a new body and new clothes each time. I was a constant. His control. That meant each body would be the same each time. No variations.

  But just as I was Osiris’ control, he had inadvertently given me one as well. Sometime in the 1400s, I had scratched the necklace with a 17-carat diamond I’d found in a South African mine. I had never tried to do anything to it before and was scared that perhaps Osiris would be angry.

  That was during my rebellious stage, though, and I didn’t care. After death came a few weeks later when a shaft of that diamond mine collapsed on me, I reappeared in Renaissance Italy. I looked at the necklace and saw that the medallion was unchanged. There was a long scratch on the back, almost scoring the bronze piece from top to bottom. I smiled. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had found my control. Just as I stayed the same in each life and location for Osiris, the medal Osiris had sent with me was the same each time as well.

  For hundreds of years I didn’t dare act on my knowledge of the necklace. I learned metallurgy and other crafts. I created my own works with many types of metal, and curated collections based on the design of Osiris’ medallion. When the technology finally advanced, I ran the medallion through an X-ray and tested it. I found the homing device Osiris had planted in it. His technology was far beyond my own, so duplication was probably out of the question for a while, but that didn’t stop me from trying. Eventually, I settled on adding to the medallion, and making the extra mass not just bronze. Something a bit more…explosive.

  Even then, I needed a way to control it. I needed to be awake and conscious during the moment of transfer. I had to get Osiris to talk to me. He hadn’t given me an audience since the waning days of the Roman Empire, so I wasn’t hopeful, but I knew I needed the medallion to be ready whenever the moment struck.

  I had spent the past few decades killing myself over and over. Any way you can imagine to kill yourself was probably on my radar at some point during those years. Every time, I’d just reappear on Earth, ready to live and die again.

  Each time I got ready to die, I gripped the medallion, hoping that the next time I did so, Osiris would be standing near me in his chamber. Each time, though, I simply opened my eyes on Earth; no supposed Egyptian gods were staring me in the face.

  Nothing changed until I went back. It was fitting, I thought…I went back to Egypt. I found the Nile River and marveled at how civilization had grown up and encompassed all the land surrounding the river. I didn’t know if my plan would work, but I submerged myself in a bend in the river, upstream from Cairo. There was no one else around. Just me. And the medallion. I put it in my mouth and forced myself to swallow river water at the same time.

  I felt the water burning my lungs—this wasn’t the first time I’d drowned—and knew the end would be near. I clamped my teeth down on Osiris’ medallion and sank to the bottom of the river. The end would be welcome. I hoped I wouldn’t be back. This was my end—at the
place where it all began. My eyes shut for what I hoped was the final time and I let the water take me.

  Each time before, the moment from one life to the next was seamless. The soundtrack of life kept playing for me, but I hoped to stop the conductor once and for all.

  ***

  The rushing water of the Nile was gone. I was dry and naked on the floor of Osiris’ chamber. I felt disappointment ripple through me. I had failed.

  I kept my eyes closed, waiting for Osiris to appear. The silence was interminable. I’d lived thousands of years, though, so what was a few more minutes? Any minute, the being I’d once met in the pharaoh's palace would stroll in and doom me to another cursed life on Earth. Any moment…

  But he never came. Minutes had ticked by in my head before I dared open my eyes to find the chamber empty. No clothes lay next to me. There was just me and the chamber. For the first time in hundreds of years, I was completely surprised.

  In the moments between lives, I had never left this room. There were doors, but I had never before had the opportunity to discover what lay beyond them.

  Now was the time. Now was my moment. Would it end in disaster or victory?

  Slowly, purposefully, I sat up and inspected my surroundings, a place I’d been to dozens of times, but only now had free rein to explore. While there were doors, most were false. Placed there to resemble the pharaoh's palace in Egypt, a place now in ruins on Earth.

  But one door did open. One door did lead beyond the confines of the chamber.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. I thought I’d seen everything, but the room I entered was vast. The far wall was barely visible and each empty spot was filled with…me. Hundreds of some sort of cryogenic tubes were lined up end to end, and from inside all of them, the same face stared back. Me.

  But the endless amount of Bek clones wasn’t what grabbed my attention. In the middle of the room was a workstation with a table in the middle. A body lay on the table, a bloated, sopping wet version of myself. I recognized the clothing. It was me. The last body I’d had, which I’d drowned in the Nile.