by Neil Clarke
That damn duckling picture was still on the screen, and I couldn’t help looking at it. “It matters, Lisa. There’s so much less pain and misery in the world now that I can’t even get my mind around it, and that matters. I’m not about to get down on my knees and pray to the machines, but . . . it matters. It matters a lot.”
Lisa turned her back to the wall then, slowly bending her knees until she was sitting on the floor. She looked beaten, as if all the fight had been burned out of her. “It matters more than our baby, you mean,” she said flatly. “And yeah, how can I argue? I can’t say that we should go back to the way things were, bring back all the war and disease and shit. I can’t say I want the world to burn. I can’t even say bring back the slaughterhouses and little birds getting eaten.” She turned her head to look at me, her face slack and infinitely weary. “But I can say one thing. I can say that I hate them. I hate them for treating the human race like it was their property. I hate them for making us into something less than human. And most of all I hate them for telling me that I’m not good enough to be a mother.” She made a dry, humorless laugh. “People in the old days didn’t know how good they had it. Back then, if you didn’t like the way God was running the world, you could just stop believing in the old bastard. You didn’t have to go through life being angry at him, hating him, wishing he’d get his fucking hands off of your life.”
I didn’t say it, but I knew she was wrong about that. My mother didn’t believe in God, and yet she hated him with a boundless ferocity. She hated the blood-soaked cruelty of nature as if it was an animate thing, and what other name is there for that animate thing if not God? And despite my attempts to be free of her, to be my own person, I was still my mother’s son. Her hatred of the old God was still a part of me. So now, with this latest act of the machines—this remaking of the world of nature, this act of compassion, of tenderness for all the creatures of the world, I found it impossible not to feel something like love for them.
So Lisa left me, for good and all, this time. There was just too much distance between us. “Irreconcilable differences,” as they used to say in court. We were simply lost to each other. I can remember every detail of her face and body, every nuance of expression and every habit of gesture. And yet when I visualize her I see her as a dim, far-off figure, obscured by misty distance, separated from me by a bottomless chasm.
The birds were chirping hello to another day when I left Ivan’s and weaved my way upstairs. I was debating whether to make some coffee or just drop into bed when I saw there was a message waiting for me on my screen. It was from Gwen, one of the people who works—or maybe a better term would be hangs out—as voluntary caretaker of the workshop where I get my sculptures scanned, enlarged, and 3-D printed as faux-bronze polymer.
HEY JAMES,
OUR ‘BOT BUDDIES JUST DELIVERED A NEW PRINTER. THEY ALSO BUILT A WHOLE NEW WING TO THE BUILDING HERE TO HOLD IT, BECAUSE THIS SUCKER IS BIG. LIKE, PRINTING OUT SCULPTURES 10 METERS TALL AND 5x5 METERS FOOTPRINT. NOBODY ASKED FOR THIS BEAST, OF COURSE, IT JUST APPEARED OVERNIGHT, THE WAY THINGS DO.
ALSO, SOME NEW EQUIPMENT AND SPEC FILES SHOWED UP AT THE SAME TIME. THEY’RE INSTRUCTIONS AND MATERIALS FOR ATTACHING BIG THINGS TO THE EXTERIOR WALLS OF BUILDINGS, EVEN GLASS-WALLED BUILDINGS LIKE THE HANCOCK TOWER.
SO THE OTHER FOLKS HERE WERE SCRATCHING THEIR HEADS WONDERING WHAT’S UP WITH THIS AND WHAT WE CAN DO WITH IT, BUT NOT ME. MY THOUGHTS WENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR PIECE GECKOS, OF WHICH YOU SENT US SOME PICS OF YOUR CLAY ORIGINAL A FEW WEEKS BACK, ASKING IF WE HAD ANY IDEAS ABOUT WHERE YOU MIGHT DO AN INSTALLATION OF A LIFE-SIZE COPY. YOU MAYBE REMEMBER THAT I WROTE YOU BACK SAYING THAT I THOUGHT THIS WAS A REALLY GREAT PIECE, AND IT DESERVED AS BIG AND NOTEWORTHY AN INSTALLATION AS WE COULD MANAGE. WELL, HOW ABOUT A FIVE TIMES LIFE SIZE COPY, DUDE? YOU COULD PUT THOSE FIGURES TEN OR TWENTY STORIES UP ON THE SIDE OF THE HANCOCK TOWER! IS THAT AN AWESOME THOUGHT OR WHAT? WE ALL FIGURE THIS MUST BE EXACTLY WHAT THE AIS HAVE IN MIND. NOBODY ELSE AROUND HERE HAS BEEN TALKING ABOUT STICKING ANYTHING BIG ONTO THE OUTSIDE WALL OF A BUILDING, SO THIS DELIVERY HAS GOT TO BE THEIR WAY OF GIVING YOU THE GO-AHEAD TO DO THE BIGGEST- AND COOLEST-ASS SCULPTURE INSTALLATION THIS TOWN HAS SEEN SINCE, WELL, FOREVER.
GET BACK TO US QUICK, DUDE, OR JUST SHOW UP WITH YOUR CLAY ORIGINAL. ALL OF US HERE ARE REALLY JAZZED ABOUT FIRING UP THIS BIG PRINTER AND MAKING THIS PROJECT HAPPEN.
YRS. ETC.,
GWEN
I sat staring at the text on the screen for a long time, waiting. Waiting for the good feeling this news should have given me. It didn’t come. It didn’t come, and it kept on not coming. I got up and pulled the dust cover off of the two clay figures that were Geckos. A crazy obsession of a piece; one that I had kept working on, giving up on, trashing and restarting, re-thinking and un-re-thinking, over the past four years. I’d finished plenty of other work, but this was my Big One. It’s no Guernica, no Nude Descending a Staircase, no Balzac, but it’s as close to all of that as I expected I’d ever get. It was the best thing I’d ever done. It had as much of me in it as I could tear out through my skin. It had my blood and sweat and everything I knew about what’s beautiful and true in it. It had my love of Lisa in it, and her love for me.
I visualized the whole installation project to come. There would be six or eight volunteers from the fabrication shop; Gwen, José and Steve, maybe Philipa and her latest partner, probably some others whose names I don’t know. There would be the cheerful camaraderie, the enthusiasm of working on a nifty new project. The specs and equipment the AIs had provided would be pondered and discussed carefully in advance, and then we’d set off to the site and do whatever it was we were supposed to do. Set up a scaffold or run cables from a window or whatever. The project would take a while, maybe a few days. And when it was done we’d all look up at it, a big, conspicuous sculpture, visible for miles around, with my name attached to it. The crew of volunteers would grin and pop open beers and congratulate me, still breathless from their exertions.
And it was all a crock of shit. If the machines wanted that sculpture expanded to five times life size and stuck onto the side of the Hancock Tower, they could do it themselves. In hours, maybe minutes or seconds, they could use their nano-assembly trick to make it materialize in place, no human participation required. No camaraderie, no good friends toiling happily together. All of that was crap. It was just their way of putting some stupid humans onto a hamster wheel, running from nowhere to nowhere as fast as their stupid little legs could go.
“Fuck you,” I said, talking to the empty room, to the room that would have been empty if there were any such thing as an empty room in the world today. “Fuck you. You can go to hell.” I went to the cabinet where I kept my stone-cutting tools and pawed through it until I found the heaviest mallet. “You can all go straight to hell,” I said to them, to them, them, them, as the room got blurry through my tears.
There’s something I never told Lisa. Because it was silly and goofy, and because it wouldn’t have made a difference. Because I was afraid she’d laugh at me with that cruel, barbed laugh she used when she was angry enough. It’s this: I have seen our child. She doesn’t exist and she never will, but I’ve seen her. She comes to me like a ghost. Standing in a doorway and looking in at me, sitting on a sunlit patch of grass in a park, looking out a window at the huge world that waits for her. I see her as she would be, not yet three years old, all toddling legs and chubby arms; tiny, gentle fingers. I see her eyes looking at me; wonderful eyes that are too wise and too full of no bullshit for a kid her age, and yet innocent. They’re eyes that haven’t known pain, aren’t even sure that pain is a real thing in the world, and yet belie enough strength to endure pain when it comes. They’re eyes that are open wide to the whole world, ready for all of it. I see our child; I see her as all the best parts of Lisa and all the best parts of me embodied, walking around, breathing and living. And it rips my fucking heart out every time I see her.
I took the mallet back to where the two clay figures
of Geckos were standing on their low plinth, and lifted it up over my head, my arm already tasting the long swing downward, the thudding impact on soft clay. “You can all go to—”
I was sitting on the floor, my back to the studio wall. The mallet lay on the floor beside me, near my right hand. A hand that seemed disconnected from me; that only made a vague twitch when I told it to move. As my mind slowly cleared, I became aware of a buzzing, numbing pain through my whole right arm. The bleachy smell of ozone was in the air.
The two figures of Geckos were in front of me, but for a few seconds I resisted the urge to lift my eyes to look at them. When I did, I was looking up at my sculpture, unharmed, un-bludgeoned, not smashed into an amorphous lump. I let out a long, shaky breath.
A motion caught my eye. One of the little insect-sized bots was crawling up the wall on my right. Probably it was one of the team I’d seen in Ivan’s studio, busily engaged in repairing the building’s exterior woodwork. It paused in its climb as I watched it, as if it was looking back at me. How much like a bee it was, I thought, busily going about its little bee life. At that moment the bot flexed itself in an odd way, seeming to expand a little and then shrink again, as if taking a breath. Then it continued up the wall, disappearing into a crack under the frame of a window.
“All right then,” I said, climbing to my feet, flexing life and sensation back into my right arm. “Okay.”
Sarah Pinsker is the author of the 2015 Nebula Award—winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the 2014 Sturgeon Award—winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her wife and dog.
SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING
FALLS INTO THE SEA
Sarah Pinsker
The rock star washed ashore at high tide. Earlier in the day, Bay had seen something bobbing far out in the water. Remnant of a rowboat, perhaps, or something better. She waited until the tide ebbed, checked her traps and tidal pools among the rocks before walking toward the inlet where debris usually beached.
All kinds of things washed up if Bay waited long enough: not just glass and plastic, but personal trainers and croupiers, entertainment directors and dance teachers. This was the first time Bay recognized the face of the new arrival. She always checked the face first if there was one, just in case, hoping it wasn’t Deb.
The rock star had an entire lifeboat to herself, complete with motor, though she’d used up the gas. She’d made it in better shape than many; certainly in better shape than those with flotation vests but no boats. They arrived in tatters of uniform. Armless, legless, sometimes headless; ragged shark refuse.
“What was that one?” Deb would have asked, if she were there. She’d never paid attention to physical details, wouldn’t have recognized a dancer’s legs, a chef’s scarred hands and arms.
“Nothing anymore,” Bay would say of a bad one, putting it on her sled.
The rock star still had all her limbs. She had stayed in the boat. She’d found the stashed water and nutrition bars, easy to tell by the wrappers and bottles strewn around her. From her bloated belly and cracked lips, Bay guessed she had run out a day or two before, maybe tried drinking ocean water. Sunburn glowed through her dark skin. She was still alive.
Deb wasn’t there; she couldn’t ask questions. If she had been, Bay would have shown her the calloused fingers of the woman’s left hand and the thumb of her right.
“How do you know she came off the ships?” Deb would have asked. She’d been skeptical that the ships even existed, couldn’t believe that so many people would just pack up and leave their lives. The only proof Bay could have given was these derelict bodies.
—
Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.
Gabby Robbins: A scavenger woman dragged me from the ocean, pumped water from my lungs, spoke air into me. The old films they show on the ships would call that moment romantic, but it wasn’t. I gagged. Only barely managed to roll over to retch in the sand.
She didn’t know what a rock star was. It was only when I washed in half-dead, choking seawater that she learned there were such things in the world. Our first attempts at conversation didn’t go well. We had no language in common. But I warmed my hands by her fire, and when I saw an instrument hanging on its peg, I tuned it and began to play. That was the first language we spoke between us.
—
A truth: I don’t remember anything between falling off the ship and washing up in this place.
There’s a lie embedded in that truth.
Maybe a couple of them.
Another lie I’ve already told: We did have language in common, the scavenger woman and me.
She did put me on her sled, did take me back to her stone-walled cottage on the cliff above the beach. I warmed myself by her woodstove. She didn’t offer me a blanket or anything to replace the thin stage clothes I still wore, so I wrapped my own arms around me and drew my knees in tight, and sat close enough to the stove’s open belly that sparks hit me when the logs collapsed inward.
She heated a small pot of soup on the stovetop and poured it into a single bowl without laying a second one out for me. My stomach growled. I didn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I eyed her, eyed the bowl, eyed the pot.
“If you’re thinking about whether you could knock me out with the pot and take my food, it’s a bad idea. You’re taller than me, but you’re weaker than you think, and I’m stronger than I look.”
“I wouldn’t! I was just wondering if maybe you’d let me scrape whatever’s left from the pot. Please.”
She nodded after a moment. I stood over the stove and ate the few mouth-fuls she had left me from the wooden stirring spoon. I tasted potatoes and seaweed, salt and land and ocean. It burned my throat going down; heated from the inside, I felt almost warm.
I looked around the room for the first time. An oar with “Home Sweet Home” burnt into it adorned the wall behind the stove. Some chipped dishes on an upturned plastic milk crate, a wall stacked high with home-canned food, clothing on pegs. A slightly warped-looking classical guitar hung on another peg by a leather strap; if I’d had any strength I’d have gone to investigate it. A double bed piled with blankets. Beside the bed, a nightstand with a framed photo of two women on a hiking trail, and a tall stack of paperback books. I had an urge to walk over and read the titles; my father used to say you could judge a person by the books on their shelves. A stronger urge to dive under the covers on the bed, but I resisted and settled back onto the ground near the stove. My energy went into shivering.
I kept my eyes on the stove, as if I could direct more heat to me with enough concentration. The woman puttered around her cabin. She might have been any age between forty and sixty; her movement was easy, but her skin was weathered and lined, her black hair streaked with gray. After a while, she climbed into bed and turned her back to me. Another moment passed before I realized she intended to leave me there for the night.
“Please, before you go to sleep. Don’t let it go out,” I said. “The fire.”
She didn’t turn. “Can’t keep it going forever. Fuel has to last all winter.”
“It’s winter?” I’d lost track of seasons on the ship. The scavenger woman wore two layers, a ragged jeans jacket over a hooded sweatshirt.
“Will be soon enough.”
“I’ll freeze to death without a fire. Can I pay you to keep it going?”
“What do you have to pay me with?”
“I have an account on the Hollywood Line. A big one.” As I said that, I realized I shouldn’t have. On multiple levels. Didn’t matter if it sounded like a brag or desperation. I was at her mercy, and it wasn’t in my interest to come across as if I thought I
was any better than her.
She rolled over. “Your money doesn’t count for anything off your ships and islands. Nor credit. If you’ve got paper money, I’m happy to throw it in to keep the fire going a little longer.”
I didn’t. “I can work it off.”
“There’s nothing you can work off. Fuel is in finite supply. I use it now, I don’t get more, I freeze two months down the line.”
“Why did you save me if you’re going to let me die?”
“Pulling you from the water made sense. It’s your business now whether you live or not.”
“Can I borrow something warmer to wear at least? Or a blanket?” I sounded whiny even to my own ears.
She sighed, climbed out of bed, rummaged in a corner, and pulled out a down vest. It had a tear in the back where some stuffing had spilled out, and smelled like brine. I put it on, trying not to scream when the fabric touched my sunburned arms.
“Thank you. I’m truly grateful.”
She grunted a response and retreated to her bed again. I tucked my elbows into the vest, my hands into my armpits. It helped a little, though I still shivered. I waited a few minutes, then spoke again. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but it kept me warm. Reassured me that I was still here. Awake, alive.
“If I didn’t say so already, thank you for pulling me out of the water. My name is Gabby.”
“Fitting.”
“Are you going to ask me how I ended up in the water?”
“None of my business.”
Just as well. Anything I told her would’ve been made up.
“Do you have a name?” I asked.
“I do, but I don’t see much point in sharing it with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m going to kill you if you don’t shut up and let me sleep.”
I shut up.
—
Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.