Bjorn Bjorn sat down beside me without preamble, so close our legs pressed at the thighs. The touch was electric, but it only made me hunger for Bee’s presence, the pain of losing her still sharp after a year and a half.
“It’s beautiful.”
I nodded. “Hard to believe they’re all gone. An entire race—”
“Not that.” She tipped my head up with her hand to look at IO’s sun. “I’m going to build a house with a sunroof right on the edge of the Bright Hem. Imagine waking up to that view every morning.”
I turned back to the ghetto. Anarchy stood by one of the giant anemone buildings, tapping at it with one of its legs. With a sudden puff of dust, its leg broke through the wall. Sheepishly, it stepped back. Sometimes, I didn’t know if it actually knew what it was doing.
Standing, I yelled out, “Don’t destroy everything before we get a chance to see it!”
I wanted nothing more than to be touched by someone right then, but the someone I wanted was dead, her body thousands upon thousands of light years away. Thankfully, right then the rest of the crew stumbled noisily from the woods behind us.
“Remember the rules, people,” I said.
“Right,” Return said. “Don’t die.”
I turned to face the Unknown Knowns, lined up against the trees of the Bright Hem as though for a photograph. Behind them, the falling shadow of the False Sky spread across the horizon like an approaching storm.
“The rules of the Unknown Knowns are to explore responsibly and…” I paused. “To not die.”
Return whooped a war cry and raced Roam into the ghetto. Bjorn sighed, rummaging through her backpack for whatever scientific instruments she needed for her endless tests. Artemisia, journal in hand, began to sketch as she walked into the empty city.
A loud crash sounded behind me. The anemone Anarchy had damaged crumbled to the ground in a rush of pinkish dust, revealing spars of whitish metal sticking up through the rubble like ribs and chunks of wall which looked like a cross between shell and skin. The rubble shifted as Anarchy climbed out, its graffiti-painted shell now a uniform pink.
I trotted down into the ghetto, eager to begin my own exploring. The only real concession we made to safety was our walkie-talkies. I clicked mine on for a moment and caught Return in the midst of a joke – “…so the priest says to the prostitute…” – and clicked it off. The coral street didn’t lead straight into the ghetto, but twisted and split and rejoined itself as though Dr Seuss had been the city planner. Towards the center of the ghetto, giant spires punctuated the horizon. Skyscrapers? Spaceports? Shopping malls?
The coral crunching under my boots was the only sound as I walked deeper and deeper into the ghetto. I stopped to get my bearings and looked at the buildings around me. To my left was a three-story polyp, a typical home of the aliens who lived here, I guessed, though there were no windows or doors, just dimples in the calcified surface. Up and down the coral street the polyps and anemones and hydras all blended into one another. In each one, something had lived. Someone had lived.
It was too easy in the human ghetto to begin to see all aliens alike. One Hermit Crab stands for all Hermit Crabs. All the Lampposts have exactly the same views and interests.
Take the Spiders, which are as alien as they come. In essence, they are perfectly round metal shells about the size of a beach ball, but they’re called Spiders because they have two bulbs on opposite sides of the shell, each serving as a hub to four telescoping legs they use both for transportation and a Morse code-like form of communication. It’s impossible to say whether Spiders are self-aware robots or simply inhabited the metal shell as a vehicle – mostly because they’ve never said. Their shells are featureless except for the legs, though they’d adopted the human art of graffiti, their tags the only way to tell them apart. Anarchy was so named because of the circled A repeated on its body ad nauseam. It’s a stretch to call them Spiders, but humanity has ended up defining everything about the strange new world of IO in familiar, generic terms.
Which means that all we see is the group, because we’re unfamiliar with the aliens as aliens and we want to think about them in the easiest terms possible. We box them in. We categorize. We forget.
I forget.
And yet millions of aliens had lived in this ghetto. It was impossible for me not to imagine them having lives and careers, hobbies, loves. In the human ghetto, those who didn’t lose themselves in Ledge often began to hate those aliens among us. On the street corners, these wretches would pass out homemade flyers, haranguing everyone as they passed, human and alien alike.
They’re the enemy, they say.
They’re the ones destroying us, they say.
They’re alien, they say.
But we’re the aliens here on IO.
I had trouble picturing what sort of creature lived in this pseudo-oceanic landscape. What first came to mind were Bosch’s fish with legs, pretending to swim through the air as they walked from home to work. For a moment, I could see them flooding the street around me, their mouths rhythmically gaping open to taste the air, rambling in and out of their homes. But was I right to think these were houses lining the street? Were we instead in a cemetery? The giant polyp was tacky to the touch, and when I brushed my fingers over one of the dimples, it sprang open with a pop: a window.
The crystal-clear window curved outwards to me like an eye. Light flooded inside to reveal a room that probably hadn’t seen the sun for decades or centuries. The floor and the walls were dotted with small mounds that could’ve been anything from chairs to televisions, alien technology as impenetrable to me as calculus. What struck me the most were the shelves on the wall holding what were unmistakably books. My heart began to race with excitement. Were these unknown aliens really so much like us? I pressed all the divots, opening window upon window until one finally revealed a door, an oval hole in the wall that only went up to my neck.
Cautiously, reverently, I bent down and entered the polyp. The wood-textured floor gave under my feet like a sponge. There were no chairs or sofas or tables, but it was hard for me not to imagine – despite the strangeness of the buildings – these aliens as bipedal, as humanoid, as something close enough to humanity that we could call them brothers and sisters, the Bosch fish but with arms and alert, intelligent eyes. Sure, they might have blue-green skin or gills or be without noses, but we could look them in those bright-yellow eyes and say, “Friend.”
I wandered farther into the house, but without light switches the farther rooms were only barely lit with reflected light from IO’s sun. The interior of the house was musty and cold like a cave. I stopped in a room whose floor was taken up with a sunken pool, filled to the brim with some foul-textured, semi-gelatinous liquid. With just a nudge from my toe, it disintegrated with a sigh into slush that let loose a smell so foul I sprinted from the house, my eyes blind with tears, the insides of my nose and mouth feeling caked with garbage.
Even across the street, the smell wafted to me – rotting feet, vegetables stewing in their spoiled juices, sulfur, burnt coffee. I threw up, rushing back towards the edge of the ghetto, somewhere far enough away that smell would never reach me again.
Had the others figured out about the dimples? I pictured all of them, like Anarchy, demolishing walls until the building collapses. I flipped on the walkie-talkie to share what I’d found and heard Return’s voice again, this time frantic with worry and anger.
“Where are you guys! Fuck, Roam’s in this, this thing and he can’t get out and I’m afraid to touch it! And he’s—”
“Return!” I interrupted. “Where are you?”
“Fuck,” he said. “Damn it, Jamon, why’d we bring the flares if you aren’t even going to pay attention to them? This whole thing is your fucking fault!”
“We’re coming,” Bjorn chimed in, calm as an iceberg. “Tell us what’s going on.”
The red glare of a flare slowly revolved in the sky. I followed it back towards the Bright Hem, running through
the bland, coral-lined streets, guessing at each turn and praying that I chose correctly, cursing the free-form nature of the city I’d so admired earlier. I listened to the walkie-talkie with half my mind, unable to shake Return’s accusation from my thoughts.
If something happened to Roam, if something happened to any of us, it was my fault. I was the one who organized this stupid explorer’s club. I was the one who led us on pointless expedition after pointless expedition. I was the one driving the car, just like with Bee.
Bjorn got the story out of Return as I ran. The brothers had found a gigantic rectangular park dotted with humongous, open pits, each filled with a gelatinous sewage which smelled like a mix between compost and rotting meat. Next to each pit rested a large metal square, and when Roam stepped on one a clear cube grew up from the square to trap him inside.
The buildings around me shifted from organic polyps and anemones to hard-angled shells. Then the shells fell away from the coral street until the street enlarged into a gigantic avenue, and then a field, and then an ocean. In the middle distance before me solid, geometric shapes rose up from the ground in shining obsidian, temples to algebra. But closer by were Roam and Return. Roam stood at the edge of a transparent cube and Return battered at the cube with a climber’s ax.
Even from this distance I smelled a familiar odor – the rotten liquid from the house I’d entered, but less repellent in the open air. Here it smelled like compost, rot engineered for a purpose. Still, I gagged as I ran towards the brothers. Bjorn and Artemisia were nowhere to be seen, and Anarchy was MIA, too; the Spider was the only one of us who might be able to decipher what had happened to Roam.
The big bear of a man was inside an auditorium-sized cube which shimmered in the sunlight like a block of ice. A few yards from the edge, Roam lumbered towards us as though he were fighting his way through pudding. His eyes were painfully wide. His mouth twisted out words, but his voice reached us as a drawn-out moan.
“Do something!” Return spat. He hit the cube again, but the axe bounced off without making a dent or a sound.
“What happened?”
Return glared at me. “Who the fuck knows? Roam and I walked around the pit there and he tripped on that hole and this happened.”
A narrow ledge of metal stretched around the cube, and near us was a hole inlaid with colored dots spaced across its surface. They were separate from the metal, as though they could be pressed down or removed, and covered in tiny markings.
“They’re buttons,” I said.
“What?”
“These are buttons,” I repeated. “Roam must have pressed one when he tripped.”
“No.” Return shook his head as another moan escaped from the cube. “No, no, no. Then we press another and another until we get Roam out of there.”
I stepped towards him, hands out in caution. “We don’t know what these buttons do.”
Return held the climber’s ax as though deciding whether or not to bury it in my skull. I stepped away, and put my hands at my side.
“A button put him in there,” Return said, bending down over the depression and stabbing buttons at random. “A button will let him out. It’s as simple as that.”
Bjorn ran up, followed quickly by Artemisia. Across the great field of coral, Anarchy rolled toward us like a metal tumbleweed. Inside the cube, Roam’s face grew purple and his cheeks puffed out, every movement still in slow motion, his hands moving slowly toward his throat.
“Help me,” Return pleaded, but I didn’t know what to do. Bjorn knelt by his side but shook her head at the array of colors and symbols. Artemisia’s dark eyes were fixed on Roam, her mouth open in shock or horror.
Return pressed another button, turning the cube from clear to red. Now Roam moved at normal speed, but his screams shattered the air. His beard curled as though singed with fire.
Return pushed still another button and the cube turned blue. Black spots developed on Roam’s fair skin like mold on a piece of bread. Artemisia vomited on the perfectly manicured ground.
I pulled Return away before he could press another button.
“Look at your brother,” I demanded. “You’re making things worse, that’s all.”
Return went limp in my arms. The black spots on Roam’s skin grew larger, changing the color of his clothes and hair as well. A spot spread into his right eye, blacking it out like spilled ink on a page. He must’ve seen what Return had been doing with the buttons, because he dropped to his knees by a row of buttons inside the cube. One was larger than the rest. After a split-second of deliberation, the black leeching into his remaining eye, Roam pushed that button.
Whirring came from everywhere, a flock of birds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, each bird taking flight at the same moment. Roam turned smiling to face us, the black fading from his body. He reached out, and Return reached out in turn.
Then Roam’s body twisted on itself like a wet rag. It separated into a man-shaped cloud of bloodless fragments of bone and flesh and cloth, and those fragments swirled up and were spit into the pit in a single stream. The whirring softened into silence, and the cube descended into the ground.
Return dropped to the ground, the sudden dead weight of his body yanking him from my arms. Artemisia sprinted off without a word. Bjorn Bjorn gathered Return up and held him fiercely, tears falling from her eyes to settle in his hair. My body felt like a balloon. I was unable to cry, unable to believe what I’d just witnessed. I walked to the edge of the pit, inhaling the stench as though I could punish myself that way for Roam’s death. Roam’s grave was a galactic cesspit, mixed now with the trash of generations.
What were we doing out here? What was humanity doing out here?
Anarchy appeared beside me and tapped out a quick message. “Why Roam abandon?”
I figured I’d misheard, but when I asked the Spider to repeat the message, it was the same. “Abandon” was the same word it had used to describe this godforsaken ghetto.
“What do you mean, ‘abandon’?” I asked, walking away from Return and Bjorn. I didn’t want to take the chance they might overhear.
“Abandon shell.” Anarchy tapped on its shell for emphasis. “Like aliens abandon ghetto.” The Spider pointed with one appendage to the cube. “Device abandons shell. Why Roam abandon?”
It struck me then what Anarchy had seen. To the Spider, Roam had pressed the button that caused his death. It thought Roam had committed suicide. Anarchy thought that Roam had abandoned life.
Just like this ghetto had been abandoned.
The buildings around me, the entire vast cityscape, it all became the empty husk of a dead insect. The ghetto hadn’t been abandoned. The aliens had committed suicide en masse. The pits weren’t full of a civilization’s garbage. They were full of bodies. All across this ghetto, in large fields like this one, in front of pits like this one, millions of aliens had walked into a cube like this one and given up.
Anarchy was tapping away, but I couldn’t focus on what it was saying. This ghetto used to house a living culture; now it was a tomb.
The Spider tapped me on the shoulder.
“Listening?”
“Why did you bring us here?” I said, my voice shaking.
“Never see ghetto recently abandoned.” Anarchy’s body bobbed on its legs, a sign of excitement. “Study humanity abandonment, but not happen years.” Anarchy paused. “Not happen never,” it added in a few quick taps that were hard for me not to see as an afterthought.
I returned to Return and Bjorn Bjorn, putting my hand on her shoulder. She raised her head, her eyes wet and puffy, but in IO’s harsh, unending light she looked like a Valkyrie come to scour battlefields for the souls of the noble dead. My throat was choked tight with guilt. Behind me, I heard Anarchy’s slow tapping approach.
“We should go,” I whispered gently. Bjorn nodded, lifting Return as though he were an empty bag, and letting him lean on her shoulder as the four of us walked back towards humanity’s False Sky.
What Anarchy told me meant the Spiders believed humanity was going to “abandon” – we would die out through suicide like these poor saps or through burning out our brains with Ledge. Oh, look at the silly little humans, the poor purposeless fucks! Shit, I was angry at all the fucking aliens touring around our ghetto, soaking up our doomed civilization that’ll be gone in a few years, galactic mayflies.
But I couldn’t be angry with Anarchy. I’d treated the Spider like it was human, which was my own fault. Just like I’d anthropomorphized the aliens in this ghetto, giving them human hopes and dreams, thoughts and feelings, their imagined lives funhouse mirror images of our own.
When it was just Anarchy and me left on the subway, the others gone their separate ways, the Spider asked me again, “Why Roam abandon?”
I couldn’t be angry with Anarchy.
But I couldn’t answer it either.
***
Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Albedo One, Drabblecast, Fantasy Scroll and Daily Science Fiction. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award. This is his first story for Interzone.
A MAN OF MODEST MEANS
ROBERT REED
Sure, everybody makes shit up. But the false and wrong don’t matter so much when the man is sleeping in somebody else’s bed. Invite him into yours for the night and every word matters. He says that he’s a spectacular lover, except of course he isn’t. Oh, and he swears to be nothing but considerate, except two minutes later he farts the pictures off the wall. And don’t get me started about trust. Every guy promises to be trustworthy. What does that tell you? And most of them claim to be trusting souls. Except they’ll eventually ask about past boyfriends and husbands, and worst of all, they want to know about kids. And then there’s the creepy stare. That stare seems inevitable. I’m sitting in bed talking about my life, sharing what I want to share, and he’ll give me the standard the-bitch-is-a-wack-job look.
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 11