Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  But what about me? I’m the one who went to space without so much as memorizing the escape routines. I’ve undergone three months’ lead-up to liftoff, a week-long training course, and I haven’t so much as studied the station layout. How can I look down on the genii? They’re here for the money; I’m not even getting hazard pay.

  The next several hours are solitary, everyone keeping to their tubes, but eventually we emerge. It’s furtive at first, just passing each other as we pull a snack from under the floorboards, or slip into the bathroom tube. I keep telling myself that it’s the not knowing that’s the hardest, that if they’d just tell us to wait or jump I’d be fine. The reality is, though, that an acidic burn is running through my gut, and it’s not because of not knowing. I am thirty kilometers above ground, and I don’t even know what I’m doing here. My mind keeps going in circles; the logical thing to do when you haven’t been able to pay the bills for three years is to switch careers—but to what?

  “Right?” I ask James. I’ve been speaking aloud, and we’re eating together at the table. Bean curd in salt sauce.

  “I know what you mean,” James says as he takes a bite, less fearful than the last, more fatalistic. A quick shudder passes through his body as he swallows, then he continues. “I always think about my high-school history books. They teach you about the British Empire, right, about the ups and downs of the colonies. And they’ll talk about these sweeping social changes like they’re nothing. A piece of technology puts an industry under, a war over shipping lanes closes a number of ports. What did the calligraphers do when the printing press came for them? They had plans, but history decided to make them economic casualties.”

  I grunt understanding. “When do you think they knew?”

  He laughs. “Past what point do you just have to admit that it’s over?”

  “I guess it depends on how committed you are, and what other options you have.”

  He looks at me. “Very, and none.” There’s a pause, and it’s not awkward, which is an improvement. Eventually he says, “So you think everyone has a point past which they have to turn away.”

  “But again—turn away to what? What are you going to do, run a grocery store? Learn to cobble?”

  He chuckles, but I can tell it gets to him a bit. A guy like Dennett, he could have been anything. He chose what seemed to be a safe bet, something he was good at, something he could be proud of. Now look at him.

  We each take another bite of our curd.

  It says something about every person, I think, the time of their choice to give up hope. Me, I do it in advance. Kingsley didn’t, but he cracked early. James oscillates between emotional states, alternately certain that the man is coming, and certain that we’ve been totally forgotten. Anna’s smooth, angular face is expressionless, but her fingers tapping nervously against her thigh keep me from resenting her. It’s an intricate pattern she’s beating out, and I try to follow it for a while, certain that she wouldn’t be tapping out a random sequence. We all get through these times as we can.

  We’re sitting in the common room, nervously assembled following the soft impact that had announced the maybe-coming of our savior. Rather than sit in silence, we’ve started playing crib. We’re on our second game, now.

  James does laps of the common room between hands, a whole fifteen steps. Usually I’d ask him to stop, but given the circumstances I decide we all need our outlets. Besides, I need all the time I can get to avoid annoying the science majors with my ten-second counting handicap. “Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, and . . . wait—”

  “Oh, come on!” Anna snaps at me. We all get through these times as we can. Bitch.

  It’s been two hours, and now there’s no denying it. Nobody is coming to save us.

  “So, what the fuck?” I ask them.

  That question rings through the pod more profoundly than the arrival of the last pallet. Looked at from above, James is pacing out a very slight inward spiral, a visual representation of his emotional state. Every lap brings him a bit closer to the center of the pod, and his body becomes more tense as it approaches, like his movements are turning a crank on his own muscles. The flesh under his jaw is tight, a constant tension in the throat. His mouth is moving to some silent internal conversation, which I imagine as a calculation on mortgage rates.

  Anna is inscrutable, her emotional remove so much more profound than either of her male companions’. She’s very matter of fact: if we have to jump, we have to jump. In absence of evidence, there’s no point in speculating about the cause of our predicament. I had previously been in awe of this woman, monk-like in how she went about setting and achieving goals. That’s how it seems when she goes to the bathroom (‘Mission: Piss’ is a go, go, go!), let alone when she goes to space. Now this mindless adherence to the logical path feels a bit like an escape. She just sits there, content in executing the actions she’s computed to be best. Someone has to come unstick these cars eventually, she reasons, and the more people who jump, the more food for there is for me. These companies have been known to reward loyalty.

  The way she watches James in his pacing makes me think of a naturalist watching an endangered leopard die of exposure.

  King jumped, but James falls. The distinction is in the little things, the way he climbs down like he’s scrabbling for purchase, like he’s trying to claw his way back up and failing. It’s an entirely different sort of thing. When he’s gone, I think of him in the past tense. Kingsley I imagine down on the surface, amusing the crew of whatever ship was sent to scoop him out of the water, buoyant and useless in his space suit. He’s a real person, with a present and a future. James is just gone.

  Anna and I listen to the airlock cycle, alone now in the stratosphere, and she murmurs her little sacrament. “Wait three seconds . . . ” she says, but the rest she mumbles to herself, too low for me to hear.

  “Why do you do that?”

  She glances at me, then away. “Just a little supersti-superstition,” she says, stammering almost like a hiccup. Then she turns away and pulls her long skinny arms into her chest, and I can see that they’re trembling. She walks to the other side of the room, faces the wall, but she doesn’t make for her own tube. After an appropriate amount of time, I walk over to her.

  “Why haven’t you left?” she asks without turning. “There’s no reason for you to stay after all this.”

  “Actually, there was no reason for me to stay before all this. But this is a story.”

  She turns to me, tears in her eyes. “So, you have your story. Go, now.”

  “I have the beginning of the story. It’s not over until I see how all three of you end up.”

  Her face screws up. “I stay up here, and they come get me. That’s what happens. Imagine it, and, just . . . go!”

  I stare at her. “Why are you so willing to stay up here?” Keeping her eyes cast down, Anna Petrovic shuffles away from me like a little girl who has fully internalized her scolding. “Why do you say that when people jump?” She just shakes her head.

  “Just go,” she says in a tiny voice. Then, “I’ll come right after you.” That’s when I get it.

  “You’re afraid.” She just stares at me, so I prod her. “That’s it, right?”

  After a moment, she says, “Heights. I don’t . . . ” then swallows, “I don’t want anyone around to see me get in that hatch. I especially don’t want you to see me like that.”

  Ouch. You don’t call me paparazzi. That’s our word.

  “Well, too bad,” I tell her. “This is the end, and at least one of the four of us is getting what we came for. I need my ending.” The despair in her eyes is almost enough to sway me. “Besides,” I say, “I thought you were going to stay and wait for them to—”

  “Fuck them,” she says, and retreats to her tube.

  I briefly consider jumping first out of gentlemanly courtesy, but then I come to my senses. No self-respecting self-hating journalist could pass up the opportunity to describe the end of her story he
re. There was something about the irrationality of the fear, a product of exemplary simian frontal lobes wrapped around a treacherous reptilian center. I wouldn’t enjoy watching her scrabble around trying to force herself to jump from near orbit, but I’d do it. I’d do it for . . . a credit? A dramatic ending easily twisted to support whatever laughable through-line I’m able to sponge out this amorphous soup of anecdotal evidence?

  She robs me of that ending, however, mooting the shit out of my ethical dilemma. It takes her about an hour in her tube to work up the courage, but when she does there’s just no stopping her. Fear becomes an action item, and she buries it with characteristic efficiency. Anna says goodbye with a bit of real warmth, which is nice, then she snaps the helmet on, and down she goes. The hatch cycles. She never even flinched.

  A few hours in my sleeping tube don’t seem out of order, so I get them. Somehow, seeing Anna’s bravery has calmed my nerves a bit. I’m scared to jump, but not terrified. I sleep well for three hours, and then a gong wakes me gently.

  It’s the impact of another pallet arriving, though not nearly enough time has passed for it to be the next regular shipment. It has to be help.

  This is perfect. The three of them jump, and just hours later help arrives. This is good. The mechanic will probably be some union type, have a mustache and weathered skin, the sad, knowing face of a man with more than two daughters. He’ll make the perfect ending, a generational antonym to provide some context and imply that I’ve communicated something profound through juxtaposition alone.

  It makes me sick. I think about the way King jumped, and James, and Anna. Each of them, braver than me. In the end, they broke down, knowingly made a career misstep that proved they had a soul. Now I sit and wait for my quote, please sir, won’t you tell me what you think of today’s struggling young professionals? It’s what I should do, but the scientists should have stayed in the pod. Could I have respected any of them if they had?

  The space suit fits like a space suit, leaves my shoulders untouched while chafing all the hair off of my armpits. When I lock the helmet, I realize my breath stinks. Vaguely, I’m happy there’s nobody around to see me jump, or to know that I could have stayed, but didn’t. It feels cleaner with only myself as witness.

  I squeeze down the ladder, close the hatch behind me, and say Anna’s little prayer. Then I push the button, and the floor begins to slide away beneath my feet. I’m still on the ladder, though; I don’t want this to be passive. Air sucks past me for an astonishingly short amount of time and then I’m basically in a vacuum, atmosphere so thin it might as well not be there. It’s just me and the ladder, now, and the Earth fills the hatch entirely, a bright white circle like if you had to climb down into heaven.

  Looking and seeing nothing below, and really feeling all the distance there, I get suddenly very calm. Somehow I know that the jump will be fine and that I’ll be fine too. I’ve needed some time to think, for a while now.

  By the time I touch down I’ll have my ending figured out.

  No Portraits on the Sky

  Kali Wallace

  The stranger fell from the sky just after dawn.

  Rela heard the snap of branches and looked up. The sun was rising in a gray haze beyond the forest’s eastern edge, and the mist was retreating from the aerie. In the canopy above, a dark figure tumbled through the fog, bouncing from branches and whipping past leaves. Rela watched with her breath caught in her chest, her heart stuttering. But as the person fell closer she could see he was no skywarden. He wore no tools, no ropes, no soft sticky gloves the color of spider silk.

  The stranger missed the bridge as he fell, but a line of cocoons caught him. He tangled in the ropes and set the pods swaying before twisting free again. Rela heard a thump as he landed. She couldn’t see the platform through the shivering leaves and broken cobwebs, and when she held her breath to listen, she heard no shouts of alarm, no curious cries. There was only the drip of dew and the rustle of settling branches.

  Holding tight to the bridge, Rela leaned over the ropes for a better view of the sky. The canopy was thick, but she was high enough and there were breaks enough for her to see patches of bland gray through the trees, and the dark imperfections marring its smooth expanse.

  Everybody in the forest knew the sky was falling. They muttered and fussed when scraps ripped free and fluttered down, draped over gardens and saplings and pods, left brown patches of crisp leaves and dead moss behind. Some days it was worse than others, a soft white rain, and spiders scurried to devour what they could before it did too much damage. Children, unconcerned, collected the tatters to poke them with sticks, burn them with embers, and laughed as the translucent threads pulled and curled and shriveled. The fallen sky made a high hissing noise as it burned, not unlike the call of the fat brown beetles that lived in knots and hollows.

  Everybody knew the sky was falling, but Rela didn’t know if there were more wounds now than there had been yesterday. She rarely looked at the sky anymore.

  Her spiders chattered and nipped at her bare arms. The ropes the stranger had struck were old, easily frayed, and the cocoons dangled precariously.

  “Fix the line,” Rela said. The words trembled on her tongue, but her spiders calmed at the sound of her voice. One of the largest, a green and gold ropemaker with bright sparking eyes, crept down her arm and onto the rope. Rela stroked a hand over its back and let it nip at her fingers. “Fix the line, lovely. Go.”

  The spider scurried away, and others followed, trailing fresh threads of silk. Rela left them to their repairs and followed the bridge to the nearest trunk, climbed down a ladder and crossed to a junction between three trees. There she stopped, and again she listened. This corner of the aerie was remote, little used and little visited, home only to the faded cocoons of sleepers whose names and faces were long forgotten. That was why she had chosen it for her morning routine, apart from her fellow weavers who spoke to her in soft voices, with pitying glances; they did not know what to say to her anymore, and she preferred to work alone. The swaying cocoons and bright blue lights of her spiders’ eyes were the only sign anything had disturbed the canopy.

  Nobody else had seen the stranger fall.

  Her heart still pounding, her throat tight, Rela crossed a bridge to an old platform. Its wooden planks were softened with mold, split and warped by water and time. Half a dozen cocoons hung around its perimeter: sleepers who had been wrapped and silent for longer than Rela had been alive. Silk webs draped the cocoons in delicate curtains, and through the veils their painted features were soft, indistinct, their eyes no more than dark, blank blotches, their solemn mouths washed away.

  The stranger lay face-down at a corner of the platform. His shoulders were twisted, both legs bent, one arm tucked crookedly beneath his chest. Rela hesitated, uncertain, but she could not help if she could not see his injuries. She dragged him away from the edge and rolled him onto his back. An odd gray cloth, soft and slick to the touch, covered his entire body. He wore no harness and carried no tools. His arms were too short, his legs too long, and a smooth, blank mask hid his face.

  Rela drew her knife. Her spiders crowded up her arms and back. She saw no blood yet, but they could smell it, and they clicked and flashed eagerly as she sliced into the gray cloth to free the man’s shoulders and arms, his neck beneath the unsettling blank mask, his hips and groin and peculiar long legs. Beneath the pliable gray fabric there was another layer, soft, white, damp with sweat and splotched with blood. Rela cut that away as well. It had been a long time since she had used her spiders to heal broken bones and battered flesh, but she remembered what to do, and with each careful step she pushed her worry about where the man had come from to the back of her mind.

  “Go on,” she said, but quietly, a whisper that would not carry.

  The spiders raced down her arms and picked away the white fabric to reveal the stranger’s skin. Beneath the man looked like no person Rela had ever seen. The people of the forest were the same color as t
he leaves, softer green for those who dwelt in the shade, deeper green for those who climbed in the canopies and worked in the sunlight, and their hair curled and tangled like vines. The stranger was as brown as wood and hairless all over.

  And he was alive. Each breath was shuddering and shallow, but he was alive.

  Rela pressed the tip of her knife into the man’s side and opened a cut the length of a finger. She held the skin apart to let a few of her smallest spiders pick their way through his seeping blood. They balked and blinked at the first taste, but Rela did not let them flee.

  “Go in,” she said firmly. “You remember, little ones. Go in. Heal.”

  Reluctant, flashing their dismay, a dozen quick red spiders burrowed into the stranger’s body and pulled the incision closed after them. Rela sent others down the man’s legs to chew away the last of the gray clothing and weave a sturdy cocoon around his feet.

  She turned her attention to the man’s head. Bruises mottled his neck and shoulders, and the mask he wore was as hard as the shell of a nut. In its flat, reflective surface Rela saw only her own face and the sparking eyes of the spiders perched on her shoulders. She probed around the stranger’s jaw and neck with her fingertips, worked the mask loose and pulled it free. The stranger’s face was as brown as the rest of his body, round and young and smooth. His dark hair was shaved close to his scalp. Rela pressed a finger to one eyelid to pull it open.

  The stranger gasped. Rela jerked back, but she caught herself before she lost her balance. The spiders chirped and flashed and fled before gathering again. A strangled half-word escaped the man’s throat. It drew into a long, pained groan when he tried to lift his head. Rela placed a hand on the man’s brow; his skin was hot and damp with sweat.

  “Don’t move,” she said. “Don’t move. You’re hurt.”

  She rubbed her thumb soothingly over his forehead and leaned close to look him in the eyes. His pupils were wide, his gaze unfocused. She did not know if he saw her at all.