Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

  The man made me nervous. He ate in front of us, right from the can. Gave me a spoonful; smiled lewdly as he slid it into my mouth; enjoyed the squirmy look on my face as I bit down on the bright yellow wrong-tasting triangles. They were crunchy like kelp polyps, but the sea-taste that made food food was missing.

  “Girl doesn’t have a name?” he asked.

  Something protective flexed in Kelb. He tightened, the way a man in a canoe might when a meat-whale breached.

  “I’m Adze,” I said.

  “You two brother and sister?”

  “No,” Kelb said curtly, but said no more. He leaned slightly across the table, and his face was stormy and I loved him so much my body hurt. Zimm shrugged, and we kept eating.

  Squares of thin fabric hung on his walls, covered in lines and colors. Kelb saw it, and stood. “Is that... it?”

  “That’s it,” the man said. “What you heard about. Why you came.”

  “What’s it?” I asked.

  “Paper,” Kelb said, and stood. “Can I touch it?”

  “Touch away.”

  “That’s paper?” I asked.

  It looked so flimsy, so harmless. I had imagined some drug or weapon, some magic tool of long-dead gods.

  What I knew about paper: that the old world had run on it, that it had helped men make the planet a living hell and finally destroy it. That people clung to it, even after everything. Carried pieces of it with them; wept over it, drew strength from it. With paper, somehow, men could make things even the Gods feared. And only the settlements whose Priesthoods banned paper altogether survived.

  But this—this stuff could not have kept my nose warm. How could it harm a God, or destroy a planet?

  “So what are you looking for?” Zimm said. “Books? Photographs? Words? Pictures?”

  “I want something that will prove what I already know. That the Gods are nothing but animals. No different from anything else in the sea.”

  “You’re an idiot,” I whispered, but he was too focused on Zimm’s smiling nodding head.

  From one of his hundreds of boxes, the old man pulled a small square. When he set it down on the table, I saw that the square was made of many many pieces of paper, stacked together. “Something like this?” he said, and handed one piece to Kelb.

  This was a smile I had never seen before. The smile I knew lurked somewhere inside of my scowling handsome friend. The one I dreamed that someday I would lure to the surface. A smile of pure and mighty happiness. I shivered inside, seeing it now. Maybe paper was magic. How else could something sit in a box for ages, yet emerge and make men feel things?

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  Zimm nodded. “The Gods, as our prisoners.”

  Kelb held it up for me. The square showed a God. But wrong, somehow. Flat and tiny, as though seen from far away. Captured. Caught inside this fearsome paper stuff.

  “Orca,” Zimm said, tracing his finger along four strange symbols in a corner. An old name for the Gods, one that made me quiver with the intimacy it implied. The hubris, to limit them to one word.

  In the paper, a God leapt from water bluer than any sea or sky had ever been. It leapt through a giant circle, held by two humans. More humans surrounded it, seated in high chairs. They looked down on it. They smiled. They cheered. It belonged to them; their pet, like the seal pups we sometimes raised when the weather was good and the sea was bountiful.

  “No,” I said, sick to my stomach, turning away.

  “Get enough of these and it’ll be easy to get the whole village on your side,” Zimm told Kelb, handing him more. “I even got some that show Gods getting killed, cut up, tortured, you name it. Show these around and everybody will start sharpening their spears.”

  Kelb turned from paper to paper. I shut my eyes, to hide from what his face was doing.

  Eventually, abruptly, Zimm snatched the stack of papers back. Looked at Kelb, then at me. His eyes hurt like harpoons must hurt. “What have you got for it?”

  Kelb said nothing. Looked at the floor. Looked at his hands. And in his silence, I knew. Finally. Why I was there. Why he had asked me.

  “I’ll give you all the pictures you want,” Zimm said. “For her.”

  He didn’t flinch. The proposition didn’t shock him. It had been his plan all along.

  “Kelb,” I said, or tried to say, but fear had left my mouth waterless.

  “You could have corn every day,” Zimm said, reaching out to touch me. I kicked his leg, hard. He cried out in pain, then laughed. Not pleasantly. Took a step closer.

  “Stop,” Kelb said, and unbuckled his sack, dumped its contents on the table. Seal meat, cured and smoked. Dried fish. An unspeakable sum. More than Kelb could ever have stockpiled. Some of it had to be stolen. That much meat meant people would starve.

  “I get that much food for the spoonful of corn I fed her,” Zimm said. “Richer settlements to the North pay me plenty. I want her.”

  Kelb counted out three cards. “That much food for these,” he said, his voice a child’s. “Or no deal.” He stood up straighter, made his face hard.

  “Fine,” Zimm said, making a great show of undisappointment. “Never was one for damaged goods anyway.”

  And then Kelb’s hand on my shoulder, steering me towards the exit. “We’re leaving.”

  The cold had never been so cold. My mouth hurt from the metal sweetness of the ‘corn,’ and from how hard I fought to keep from screaming obscenities at Kelb. The Shore glittered, at the bottom of a steep hill to our right. Black dots circled. I wondered if the Gods could see us from there; know who we were and where we lived and what we had done. What was in Kelb’s heart.

  “What changed your mind?” I asked, starting down the hill. “You brought me to sell to him. Didn’t you?”

  Kelb said nothing.

  “Was it the sex? Would you have handed me over if last night hadn’t happened?”

  I kept my head down and blundered forward, into bitter wind. We reached the flat expanse of ice after an hour or many of walking.

  “Adze,” he said.

  “No!” I called, stepping onto the ice.

  “Adze,” he said, and I ran. He followed, repeating my name with every breath. Finally I let him overtake me. His hands grasped my shoulders. His hands were so big, so strong. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Okay. I’m sorry. I never—I didn’t…”

  “You’re a liar,” I said. I tried to wriggle free, but he would not let me. “You’re insane. I was stupid not to see it. I saw you how I wanted to see you. How I used to see you, when you were the only one who would be nice to Schoon and me, because we were orphans, we were damaged.”

  Kelb pulled me tighter. He hugged me. He wept. He never wept when Schoon died. “I’m sorry,” he said, over and over, until it wasn’t about Zimm and his horrible paper or his plan to sell me anymore.

  It would have been easy to kick him in the crotch or knees, incapacitate him, take the cards from his bag, chew them up and spit them out, flee back to the village. I told myself the reason I didn’t was because I couldn’t make it back alone, but I knew that was half the truth or less. The whole truth was that I still loved him, wanted him, couldn’t bear the hurt of him hating me. And the whole truth was that we were the same.

  The sweet kind child-Kelb was real, but so was the savage monster. Kelb was both. A gentle boy who loved me fiercely, and a wicked murderer who would sell me into slavery. An idealist who loved humanity and wanted us to be free of backwards superstition… who didn’t care who died in the pursuit of his ideals.

  Kelb was both, and so was I. A devout believer and a wicked sinner.

  We were the same. We were animals who wished we were more than that.

  The gods were just animals.

  I shook free of him. I shut my eyes. If he brought those cards back, he’d endanger everyone. “Go,” I said, knowing what needed to be done to save my village, and wanting desperately not to know. “I’ll catch up. I want some space.”

/>   He nodded, kissed my forehead, went. I squatted, and sat. We were out where the ice was thinnest, a skin of blue-green above unthinkable depths. I prayed, but felt nothing. I waited until he had gone too far to come back and stop me. With my teeth I tore off my sealskin boots, unwrapped my footwrappings. My toes deftly opened my jacket, burrowed deep to unwrap my torso. I shimmied until the cymbal came loose. I lifted it, flipped it over so the smooth bottom was flush with the ice. So the ice would act as an amplifier.

  I lay on my back and rested my ankle on the cymbal. I lifted my leg and brought it down as hard as I could, striking the cymbal with a force no other human could match.

  “Adze!” Kelb cried, stopped short by the hollow ring, which wobbled in the air but would sound clear as singing through the water under the ice.

  I stood up. I lifted my leg to point accusingly in his direction. He ran towards me, towards land, but he was very far away from both.

  I thought about shouting I’m sorry, but what was the point? What did it matter what I was?

  A black shape passed beneath me, majestic and immense. I shut my eyes and kept my leg extended. I was not afraid. I was the bearer of the cymbal. They would trust me.

  A crack split the air. A sharp black head broke the ice between us, then dove. The God spiraled her body beneath the water, shoving her tail out of the water and bringing it down hard against the broken edges of the ice. Cracks fanned out.

  “Adze, please!” Kelb called. More loud cracks; the snouts of two more Gods shattering through the ice in front of me. I stood my ground, standing over my warm clothes, shivering.

  He stopped running. He stared at me, close enough now that I could see the pain on his face. See the fear—and then, something worse than fear. Something he’d never felt before: belief. Final, fatal, too-late belief. What cruelty, I thought, that he should find his in in the moment that I lose mine.

  Kelb sobbed, once, then turned and ran again.

  He ran even though he knew it was folly, because it might buy him a few more minutes of life. A thousand times we had seen seals behave the same way, when the Gods separated them from their rookeries, trapped them out on the ice and then tipped the ice to spill them into their mouths.

  In a matter of moments he stood on a massive separate sheet. Raw ocean roiled all around him. I counted twenty fins, circling.

  I expected Kelb to scream, kick, curse, fight. Die flailing at the Gods the way he had lived his whole life. But Kelb merely walked to the edge of the ice and knelt. His eyes shut. His lips moved. Praying or apologizing or promising. I wouldn’t let myself look away. I watched them slap the water with their tails, in great synchronized sweeps, one after the other, until the churning water destabilized the ice and Kelb spilled into the sea. One came up from beneath him, held him in its jaws almost delicately. Kelb did not fight. He turned to look at me one last time, his mouth a sideways squiggle, either smile or frown, before the matriarch grabbed hold of the upper half of him and pulled.

  Some villages believe that if a God drags you down, you become one of them. And maybe that’s true for them. But for us, when they pull us under, we die.

  The way back to land was long, and riddled with broken ice. If they wanted to kill me I was going to die.

  I stood up, walked to the pink-frothing edge of the ice. I showed my puny armless self to the Gods. The matriarch rose and held position, exposing her entire gorgeous head. Blood still stained her teeth. If I had hands, I could have reached out and touched her.

  For forty seconds, she stared at me. Her eye pierced through to what I had somehow failed to see before this day. She was an animal, and so was I. She was not a God, and I had not been chosen for divine protection. I wasn’t better or purer or more full of faith than anyone else. I was a wicked, sinful creature, born out of balance and bound there, like all my accursed kind. Hungry even when full. Wanting, always. Defined by the wanting and damned by it. Inventing Gods to give meaning to our lives, and shape to our hungers, but they could not stop us from destroying everything, including ourselves, including them. My armlessness, my inability to ever hurt them, was the only reason to let me live.

  She withdrew, then. Slid back through the ice. Cried out underwater to her brothers and sisters. I stood there, shivering and wet beneath a useless sun, and watched my Gods abandon me.

  DROWNED

  – LAVIE TIDHAR –

  THIS IS A story my father told me, from the time before we came to live on the Land. In that time there were many wonders and magical things in the world. The world was very small then, unlike now. My father says the world was very large in the old days and then it grew smaller, and smaller still, until a person could cross from one side of the Earth to another in the time that it takes the sun to rise and set over the Land. “Imagine that,” old Grandma Toffle says and laughs with all her good white teeth, “Imagine that, little Mai!”

  Old Grandma Toffle claims to remember many wonders, but her mind flits and darts like a dragonfly on water. She says she remembers going up in the air, for instance. This is the story old Grandma Toffle tells, especially when she’s in her cups:

  “One day, little Mai, when I was a small girl, smaller even than you, on an early morning that was cool and bright, with the droplets of last night’s rain still shining on the needles of the pine trees, I heard a noise. My father was in the yard, mending cloth, and my mother was working beside him, picking tomatoes in the garden, for they were red and sweet then, a good harvest—oh! You have never tasted such tomatoes as the ones I tasted then. I stood between them, and I looked up, for I had never heard such a sound, and I saw a dark bird fly slowly across the sky. It emitted a strange sound, and its wings did not move, and as it came closer I saw it was a contraption like a bicycle with wings, and a woman was sitting in a harness. She looked down and she smiled and—oh! It was such a smile as to catch the cruellest heart and make it soft and malleable. My father looked up, and my mother also, and I knew all in our Land looked up too, for we had never seen a flying woman, or a man, at that.

  “‘Is it a plane?’ I asked my mother, trying out the word, but she shook her head and said, ‘No, no, there are no more planes.’ At that I was a little sad, for I had always dreamed of going up in a plane and looking down on all the people and the Land.”

  “You always did look down on all the people,” says old Grandma Mosh, who lives beyond the stream, and old Grandma Toffle shoots her an angry look, for it is known that the two have fought all their lives and will continue to fight even from beyond the grave.

  “The curious contraption circled overhead,” old Grandma Toffle says, “then drifted low, and lower still, and I ran after it, and all the others came out of their gardens and yards and ran after it too—”

  “I remember,” old Grandma Mosh says.

  “You don’t remember what you had for lunch a week ago!” shoots back old Grandma Toffle, and old Grandma Mosh grins with the teeth that she still has.

  “But I was the fastest,” old Grandma Toffle says, “and I reached the pilot first, just as she landed. Her long hair was tied back, and she wore large aviator glasses over her eyes, which she removed on landing. She landed in the small field this side of the brook, as the field lay fallow that year. She looked at me running towards her and she smiled.

  “‘Hello, little girl,’ she said. She spoke Language, but with an accent that was different to ours. At that I got shy and I said nothing, at first. The other children, who ran behind me, all came to a stop, and together we stood and stared at her. We waited and shortly our parents came, walking a little slower, but no less excited, I think, than we were.

  “‘Hello,’ said the pilot—a little shy herself, I think now. Mr Gideon the Bellwether—you don’t know him, of course, little Mai, for he died many years ago now, in the time the storm came—”

  “The second storm,” old Grandma Mosh says.

  “First or second or third, it was not the storm that got him,” old Grandpa Win interjects. �
��It was his wife, who had enough at last of his ways—”

  “He fell and broke his leg in the ditch over the hill,” old Grandma Mosh says.

  “But how did he get there and why?” old Grandma Win says, darkly, and old Grandma Toffle scowls at them both.

  “Who is telling this story?’ she says.

  This is a problem I sometimes have, I find. The stories and their tellers all become confused, for to grow up and grow old is to carry more and more stories, and who can truly say how Mr Gideon, who was the great grandfather of our current Mr Gideon, or so I think at any rate, really died, or why, and during which storm? But it’s important to know these things, and carry the tale forward. But suffice it to say that Mr Gideon was Bellwether that year, and so it was he—

  But let old Grandma Toffle tell the story.

  “‘Hallo!’ Mr Gideon said, and puffed out his chest, quite self-importantly.

  “And, ‘Hallo,’ said the pilot, pleasantly enough.

  “‘Have you come from afar?’ said Mr Gideon, speaking for all.

  “‘From beyond the plains of Suf,’ said the pilot. ‘And before that I was in Tyr for a time.’

  “‘What news do you bring?’

  “The pilot shrugged. ‘ll is as it was,’ she said. ‘In Tyr they sing still of the old days, and water, and in Suf the sun harvest is plentiful. I myself was hoping to beg your hospitality for a day or three, and for sunlight, if you’d spare it, for my aircraft.’

  “At that I could not supress a cry of delight—” said old Grandma Toffle—

  “A squeal!” said old Grandma Mosh.

  “For it really was an aircraft, it was a sort of plane!”

  “It was not.”

  “It was too!’

  “‘Be welcome here,’ said the Bellwether, ceremoniously, as was and is the custom, ‘share of our bread and story with us small, and tell us of the Land and of the Sea.’”

  “The pilot inclined her head in gratitude. ‘The sky is clear and the winds are quiet, for it is early yet,’ she said. ‘And I have light enough to lift again, and take a person with me.’ Her eyes reflected sunlight and her smile was warm. The adults cast uncertain looks at each other, and we in our eagerness all raised our hands and vied for her attention. ‘Pick me! Pick me!’