Gran’s toenails have been black ever since I can remember. I don’t think she’s left the beach in twenty years. My mother told me that every moment of her childhood, every hurt and triumph, was accompanied by the smell of death because Gran couldn’t afford to live anywhere but here. Rags depended on handouts – like monks, only smellier. As Mom got older, she just couldn’t stand it anymore. She went to live with her aunt, who soft-soaped the smell out of Mom until not a whiff of dead god could be detected on her skin. Both of them want to forget the beach exists, and they mostly succeed. Now Mom pays a contractor to clean her house and shield her from the brilliance of entropy.
Gran and I are up to our waists, near the rotting bones now. These usually collapse by the time a god comes to shore. Bioluminescence replaces structure as gods are broken down by tiny creatures that shit light. The smell is overpowering. I have vomited twice by the time Genji stops running up and down the beach.
Why is he stopping here? Squinting, I see his neck bristle. His tail goes stiff. He begins to bark. Then he points. While the flies swarm on Trachea, the telling beam of Genji’s light has landed on Gran’s ass where she bends down to drag a torn intestine from the lapping water. The end of the intestine coughs out globs of crap fitfully, like a dribbly hose. Behind her towers the half-melted rib cage of a foetid fish-god. The bones are becoming holey and translucent as they liquefy.
“Well, that’s a surprise, Bettina! Dr Daw, is this the official prediction?”
Daw has a deeply unhappy expression on his face. Flies are abandoning Trachea and his fluffed-out hair for my grandmother and her stained mouth. She squints into the light but doesn’t smile. I duck away.
“Madame?”
Gran tries to ignore the flies but they’ve got her surrounded. Trachea’s halo abandons him and gathers around Gran’s head. She swats at it in thinly-disguised annoyance. Her new followers won’t go, though. They make a bright nimbus of suffering: young people on chemo, old people on respirators, newborns plugged in by overeager parents, etiolated women on a bad connection that blurs their empty, begging hands and pixelates the hollowness beneath their eyes. Children with no hands and their elders, all expectant, half-weeping with anticipation of the sight of core.
Drake looks pleased, starts rubbing his hands. That prediction machine’s a piece of shit, you can hear him thinking. He’s already tasting the sweet, sweet Mountain Dew.
Rogers intones, “And we’re told Madame here has a track record of… zero for 40,104. Can this really be right, Bettina? Has this person really never found anything in all her years as a Cleaner?”
“Never,” says Bettina. “The dedication of these Cleaners is truly remarkable. Madame lost her voice seven years ago in the infectious wave following the dismemberment of the Giant Goddess, but she continues to work here every day in all weathers. Despite the unconscionable smell.”
“Probably she can’t smell anything,” quips Rogers. “Maybe that’s why she stays.”
“Of course she can smell.” I snarl. “I can smell. We all can smell it. We’re here anyway.”
Bettina starts to ask Gran questions.
“She can’t speak,” I say. “Don’t frighten her. She’s old. Her voice is gone.”
Flies begin aligning themselves to me, buzzing.
What’s your name? Bucky.
Is that your real name? My name’s Baksheesh. It means ‘little gift’. My mother thought it was cute. Obviously it isn’t.
How old is the Madame? 109.
Has she ever found core? Not to my knowledge.
Why doesn’t she leave? God calls her.
But the gods are dead, or dying. She must honor them, I say. I say it out of duty to her, not because I believe it. Once they were alive, I say. Do they become less divine, in death?
“They can hardly qualify as gods if they die,” Daw drawls. I can feel his blue, intelligent eyes picking a trail over my face. I can feel him dismissing me, too. “But Genji predicts that core will be found here, tonight, by your grandmother. So perhaps she will get her wish after all.”
Yeah, and perhaps you’ll give out lollipops after? I don’t say it, but I think it.
Drake does nothing to take Daw down. Instead he launches into a description of his latest research proving that fairies and rainbows really are the same thing (or something) and I slip away from Bettina and Daw and the millions of tiny, distant eyes. Of course, just then Jacques Trachea would have to give a shout.
“Aha!” Drake cries, waving long arms. “It would appear that even Genji is not infallible!”
“The results aren’t all in yet,” Daw replies in a crabby voice, and the clouds swarm and re-form as followers change camps. Daw holds position behind Gran’s bony butt. “We are close to pinpointing something quite extraordinary here. Please don’t be distracted by the shiny things you may see in Mr. Trachea’s camp.”
Gran reaches her hand into the decaying body and licks her fingers, sucks them with her thin lips. I wince.
“Look at this!” It’s Drake again. He’s very excited. Trachea works his trapezoids attractively as he pulls out cogs, wires, lights. From the sump he removes a long-flute-like thing that nobody quite recognizes. Then he pulls out an intact brass ship’s bell. I’m not sure what it means, but there is a collective gasp of wonder.
“Eureka!” Jacques’ teeth flash in the glow of his own halo. The bell rings wildly. Trachea’s halo is so full of rapt souls it flickers like static, a field of insect-sparkles and dim suggested outlines, entities not well-received but trying hard to be here. Share in the glory. Everyone loves him, the core-finder, the salvager, our salvation. I find myself caught up in it.
Gran’s mouth works. She vomits a little. She’s up to her hips in fish guts. She gives a jerk and I see her hands fumbling, like she’s trying to catch something that’s falling out of a cupboard. She bends over furtively, hissing, desperate-eyed.
Gagging, I reach her side. So do a cloud of flies. She’s juggling something shimmery.
“Is that a fish?” Bettina squeaks, turning her attention back to Gran. “What fish could survive inside the body of a dead god? Or was it loose in the harbour? We need to see that better…”
“A fish isn’t core!” Drake warns. “Core is inanimate and the product of abstract thought.”
Daw frowns. The smell must be getting through to him, because he turns his head and spits.
Gran makes a throwing motion with her right hand, but her left side leans into me and she secretly passes something small and slippery and moving. Holding it in my fist, I find the cloud all around me. Tiny lights, glimmering. My lips peel back from my teeth.
“It was just a fish,” I report, backing away. “She threw it back.”
I point to the lapping waves, and some of the cams go that way. Others follow me. They know what they saw. Most people do. But the thing is, in my line of work you quickly learn that people train themselves not to see what they see. They train themselves to be victims to people like me. I know how to play their expectations. It’s how I work.
So I weave among the clouds to bend over the disorderly pile of nets and rags. I slide the fish into a wet rag, unseen. I don’t know why Gran wants to keep it secret, but she does.
Drake is laughing and pontificating. “Stand down, everyone, it was just a fish!” he says. “Genji didn’t predict fish, he predicted core. So, let’s see where the core is tonight.”
While they’re distracted I slip away and put the fish into a cafeteria-sized baked bean tin that Gran uses to store her bits. It swims on its side in the dirty water. I leave it in the tent.
I can’t find Gran. I search everywhere, and I’m beginning to worry that she’s slipped and fallen in the murky shallows when I spot her.
Gran is walking up the beach without her rags. Bettina is walking alongside her. I run up there. Bettina is saying, “Your family will be so happy to have you home. Here, chew this gum. Your breath…”
Daw huffs up alongside
Gran. He’s trying to convince her to continue searching. She shakes her head. No moving Gran when she doesn’t want to go.
I smile, and chewing Bettina’s gum Gran turns and looks at me. I don’t know what to say.
It seems a betrayal, but how can I argue when I know it’s best for her?
“Are you really going?”
She nods. She blows me a kiss with her mucky fingers, and then she turns into Bettina’s halo and walks away just like that. Daw throws up his hands.
I return to the shoreline to see Genji sitting on one of Gran’s rags, whining. Daw tries to get him to make another prediction, but he refuses.
Drake is dancing because he has won a case of Mountain Dew, if not respect in the scientific community. He is dancing and almost singing. Daw scowls at his dog.
“What you got there?”
It’s two days later. I forgot how well Karl knows me. He is in the tent, pointing to the baked bean tin. I try to shrug, but I’m shaking.
“Your Gran pull that out god’s ass? I heard something about that shit.”
“Nah, we threw that away. This is just… you know. Just a regular fish.”
His eyes are so big and dark and long at the edges. He blinks slow. If Karl were a woman people would call him a siren.
“Regular fish. You keeping it why?”
Another attempt at a shrug by me. “No reason.”
He lunges past me, displacing the air so suddenly that the sides of the tent billow. Before I can move, he has the tin in his hands. The fish lies sideways in the water, still looking up with one eye.
“You got core in this fish. Don’t lie to me, Bucky. I already know. You think I’m stupid? Genji the core dog pointed to your old Gran. Not Jack-off Trachea. Now I’m giving you a chance. You want to split the fish, you pay what you owe and keep the rest, then we go our separate ways.”
Yeah, right. Pay what I owe? He wants the whole fish.
“You can’t sell this fish, Karl. It isn’t core. It isn’t anything. It’s just a fish.”
“Bullshit. So core’s usually some kind of man-made object. So what? A fish is a god-made object. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is the gods are dead.”
“Only if Daw’s right. And if Daw’s right, then his dog picked your Gran. So that’s core.”
“It’s not core. Anyway, Drake won the bet.”
“If Drake won the bet, then we can’t understand nature. I’m not stupid, Bucky. I get how this works. So the gods can’t all be dead after all. That fish is a symbol of hope.”
“Karl, you’re not making sense. They could both be wrong. Maybe we don’t understand nature. But the gods are dead also. God being dead is a fact. Can’t you smell it?’
He touches his nasal plugs, smiles.
“It has to be one or the other. Maybe Daw’s dog made a mistake this one time, but he could improve the design.”
All my conversations with Karl, always, are this discursive. Exactly this discursive, no more and no less.
“I thought we were arguing about who owns the fish.”
“That fish is mine,” says Karl, heatedly.
I fuck him two or three times to get rid of him. Agree to meet him at the pricing outlet up in Koko-mart. He seems spooked by the fish, and leaves it with me when he goes away beating his hands on his thighs and chanting to the rage track in his ears.
Later. Washing Karl’s doomed little fishes out of my blowhole. Thinking, ha, die little fuckers. You not eat my sweet. I can’t even imagine a world where every little pleasure could represent someone’s whole lifetime, exploding out of me.
Gran trying all those years to serve the gods. Who knows what gods want anyway? It’s not like they tell you. Not now, in death. Not ever. Probably.
On my way to Koko-mart with the fish I see something dark lying too close to a patch of city bugs, just at the edge of the beach. It’s angular and shiny, and for a moment I think Trachea has left some of his equipment behind. Then I blink and recognise Dordogne. The bugs are onto him.
“It’s over,” he whispers. “New dawn. New day. I wasted my life. Can you take me to hospital?”
He’s skinny, but it’s hard getting him up and taking his weight. His muscles are like soup all the way up the beach to the train, but there’s a stickiness to his skin. Maybe it’s the bugs, but he feels like rubber.
“I stick to you,” he sighs in my ear. “That what I do now. I stick to you.’
I keep him going all the way from the train to the hospital waiting room, where his eyes turn yellow in the artificial light. The last thing he says to me is, “You sell that fish, Bucks. Don’t waste your chances. Fish gonna be big. Offspring of a god? Gonna be big. You get a piece of it. Don’t be like me and your Gran. Bless you, Bucks, you gonna be alright.”
On my way home I look up the numbers wagered at Koko’s to try and get an idea of the possible value of this fish. The numbers, in theory, are big. The fish’s existence is just a rumour and that makes it special, like it’s glowing with some kind of potential energy. If I’m going to act, I need to do it soon, before people forget all about Drake and Daw and their bet.
Standing in the crowd outside Koko-mart, the fish and I observe each other extensively. There’s something wrong with that one fin. It swims on its side, looking up at me out of its left eye.
Offspring of a god? Really? Hnh. I doubt it.
I should take that money. It would be great. But the thing is, in all of this whole thing, nobody ever asks the fish about its own plans. And that doesn’t seem fair after all Gran went through, and after all the fish (presumably) went through.
Then again, Gran gave me the fish. It was all she had to give and now it’s worth money. She turned out to be a proper money-giving Gran, in the end.
I’m a little surprised with myself when I say, ‘What you want, fish?’
It doesn’t answer me. It’s not like Genji. Nobody has improved it. It’s just a fish that swims slightly screwy.
So I have to guess. I have to guess at this, just like I have to guess at everything else.
The unfinished raft, I leave it behind. I’m a thief, remember. So I steal this boat. I go out by night, no motor, only a paddle.
When I loose the fish in the sea I don’t say anything. I don’t even think anything. If the fish is god, it knows what I’m thinking anyway.
When it’s in the open water I look hopefully for a sign that something’s changed. All it does differently is stop swimming on its side with only one fin working, stop looking up at me from the water. It straightens itself out and swims down and away into darkness.
After it’s gone I feel quiet. I wish I could stay out here, never go back to land. Out here on the moving water with the bioluminescence starring my wet hands like I’m five years old playing with glitter. Galactic me.
Wish I could stay, but I’m not made for this place.
When finally I turn back, paddle in hand, I see the Meta gleaming on the shore. The bluffs on either side are dark and blurry, but the Meta is so sharp and bright that even from this distance my throat tightens and I catch my breath. The memory of Dordogne’s skin sings against my palms. I know what I have to do. It doesn’t even feel like a choice. I put the paddle down and kick off my shoes.
The whole world can’t be like Meta. There must be other places, other shores or certainties, where the tide doesn’t cast up toxic brilliance. I can swim for one of them. The water’s fucking cold tonight, but I can swim.
ROCK DAY
STEPHEN BAXTER
Stephen Baxter has some 35 novels to his credit and has won the Philip K. Dick, the John W. Campbell, the BSFA, the Sidewise, and the Locus awards. Stephen’s latest project has been the Northland trilogy: Stone Spring, Bronze Summer, and Iron Winter, a saga of a different prehistory. He is involved with the international SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) programme, and a study to design a starship with the British Interplanetary Society, both of which activitie
s fed into the inspiration behind the story in this volume.
Matt woke that morning to the usual noises. The buzz of a lawn mower, probably Mister Bowden’s a few doors down. The soft pad of a dog’s paws outside his bedroom. That was Prince.
He rolled out of bed in his pyjamas, and walked barefoot to the door. But the door wouldn’t open. He almost walked right into it. He took a step back and tried again. The door was straightforward promat, it should have broken up at his approach and folded back into its frame. It remained a stubborn blank panel.
Matt was eleven years old. He rubbed his face, greasy with sleep sweat. Maybe he wasn’t quite awake yet.
Something smelled funny.
He looked around at his room. It seemed messy, the bed with the crumpled sheets, heavy cobwebs up on the ceiling, the smart-posters inert and peeling off the walls. He didn’t remember the room being this bad. He wasn’t that much of a slob. Dad would kill him, if he saw it.
And the Mist wasn’t working. Everywhere he looked stuff should have been sparkling with messages sent and received, his projects and games, reminders about school. Nothing. Maybe Dad had grounded him, shut it off. But for what? He couldn’t remember doing anything wrong, or at least no more wrong than usual.
He tried the door again. It still wouldn’t open. But there was always a backup system, as Dad would say, in this case a handle and hinges. He turned the handle, the door was sticky in its frame, but it opened with a tug.
And there was Prince, waiting outside Matt’s bedroom just like every morning. Prince was a blue roan cocker spaniel. He’d been lying there with his head between his paws. Now he got to his feet a bit heavily, as he was ten years old, and, tail wagging, jumped up for a tickle. Then he grabbed the toy he’d brought this morning, a chewed rubber bone, and Matt had to wrestle him for that for a bit. And then Prince curled up against the wall again and raised his front paw so Matt could stroke the soft hairs on his chest. The same every morning, just the way boy and dog liked it.
Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction Page 10