by Neil Clarke
“Another helicopter will come from the Island,” the man said, struggling to remain calm.
“Maybe. Maybe they’ve got ant troubles of their own, on the Island. Come with me, now. We’re going to the caves. There are some women there who will need those vials.”
“Wait,” the second white-coated man said. “You don’t understand. We can’t stay here. Our instruments have detected a big storm approaching. There will be a wave like nothing that you’ve—”
“Yes,” I said, grimacing, turning away from him. “I know about the wave. Put your weapons down and follow me. We’ll be going through the trees. If you bring any metals, the ants will smell it. They can taste it from very far away, and they’ll come.”
One of the guards didn’t follow.
He sloshed back through the water to the flying machine and climbed into the cockpit. I watched him struggle with the controls, twitching while the ants bit him again and again. The motor started and the machine’s mounted wings began to whir.
In silence, the three that remained watched the heli fly crazily back towards the island.
“The protocols,” the white-coated man whispered. “Without them, they’ll shoot it down.”
But nobody shot it down.
“I think they’re busy,” I said.
The remaining guard put his weapons down shakily.
Ants were already marching out onto the sand.
Nosey came to me, hours later, but there was still no sign of Skink.
“Show me where he is, Nosey,” I said, making the signal for Nosey to find people. The old yellow dog whuffed and skittered off into the mangroves.
I followed with a sense of dread.
The Island People had been set to building bark tents and catching toads; I was expecting many more Island People to arrive over the following days and weeks. We would not stay. They would be angry with us. There might be more shootings.
But the Island People were not like the wireminds. They knew about the local poisons as well as the bacterial remedy, and so long as they brought their children with them, they would not die if left alone. I would let their anger cool in our absence. Maybe, one day, we would make contact with them again.
Nosey whuffed again, excitedly.
“Skink!” I shrieked, and ran to my future husband.
He sat in a bloody puddle of mud, staring into the dead, filmed eyes of an enormous shark that had wriggled its way through the shallow water, desperate to get to him, but then become trapped by the gills in a snarl of stilt-roots.
“Skink!” I cried again, shaking him by the shoulders. “Where are you hurt?”
Skink’s dark eyes gradually focused on me.
“A bullet went through my leg,” he said quietly. “It’s not bleeding anymore.”
“Where’s Bloodmuzzle?”
“Inside the shark,” he said.
He didn’t cry.
Nosey licked the small leg wound clean, and I helped Skink return to the camp. Once he was settled, I went back to the mangroves with a long shell knife and cut the dead shark open, determined to get my mother’s dog out of its guts.
Inside its stomach, along with poor Bloodmuzzle’s remains, I found a little black plastic package.
The totem for the Clan is the shark.
I held the voice of my mother’s brother in my hand. The vials had brought life back to the dead mothers in the caves. The recorder would bring life back to the whole Clan.
“I am Rivers-of-Milk,” I said with astonishment to Nosey.
He tilted his long face to one side. His hearing wasn’t that great.
One Flesh
Mark Bourne and Elizabeth Bourne
And your very flesh shall be a great poem.
—Walt Whitman
Jupiter’s immense horizon appears flat as a flitter, stretching beyond the reach of vision. Cloud banks the size of continents drift in what might be sky. Organic molecules paint them in autumn colors: oranges and browns and peach and gold. Behind the clouds, the rising sun shines like a silver coin.
Lightning flashes.
Jen’s eight eyes close reflexively. The purple afterimage glows against her eye lids. She feels nine again, with that same gut-clenching mix of elation and fear she always had watching a storm approach. She hasn’t been nine in a long time.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand . . . Jen counts to herself. At twenty-three, thunder booms and the air tastes metallic.
She keeps her upper eyes closed as she reopens the four on her underside, where she senses phantom breasts. Her real breasts wait back at the station on her bipedal body. For the next few days Jen is the first human to skate the winds of Jupiter’s biosphere, the thin (by Jupiter’s standards) concentric shell nested between the freezing upper and hellish lower domains.
No. Not the first. The body she inhabits is proof of that, even if nothing like it ever existed among the thunderheads of Earth.
Kilometers below, burnt orange clouds stretch to infinity. For over an hour she’s observed a yawning vortex opening in the mottled cloudsea. Now it’s wide enough to swallow Arkansas, and Kansas for good measure. Deeper down, it’s fifty-seven thousand kilometers to a pressure of forty-five million Earth atmospheres, a temp of twenty thousand K, and a realm where hydrogen becomes monatomic.
For the hundredth time in the seventy-two hours since she left Callisto station, Jen thinks of her husband. How the curl of his black hair falls into his dark brown eyes. The dimple in his chin that he keeps because she likes it. The beak of a nose he refuses to fix, clinging to a vestige of ethnicity. She also thinks he wouldn’t want her out here.
This was our only chance, Ras. I wish we could’ve talked. But I’ll be back soon.
Clusters of colored beads rise from the Stygian depths. The creatures ride the updraft from the growing storm system. Eventually, they level off at an altitude just above hers, then float toward a finger of salmon-hued vapor budding from a cloud deck a hundred kilometers away.
Excitement flutters Jen’s hearts. This is it. She stretches into the cool hydrogen wind.
Pumping a gust of hydrogen from her anus, she jets toward the swarm. The looming cloud mass reminds Jen of the Tower of Babel. It was a seminal tale for the girl who’d grow up to become the premiere authority on interspecies communication. But these aren’t primates and cetaceans floating among the clouds.
Ras paced outside the office door. A wall plaque bore the ubiquitous tree-and-stars logo of NanCon, Inc. Beyond the door, some desk-bound cog was taking plenty of time before acknowledging him.
Every muscle ached. Ras’s neck cracked as he twisted it to ease the soreness. He wondered if he’d slept wrong. He dimly remembered a nightmare about suffocating and an urgent desire for home. Home was where Jen was, and she was away on vacation. Perhaps that was the answer.
Hurry back. He repeated the thought, wishing that it could travel the cold distances to Io. I don’t like sleeping alone.
He squared his shoulders and rubbed his bristly chin. His reflection glared back at him in the door’s shiny red surface, like an old Earth devil. Then the door chimed and his image shimmered as the permeable membrane allowed him entrance. Ras set his face in a grim frown, the one Jen called his “bad daddy” face. After years with university faculties on two worlds, Ras knew exactly how pissed to look.
The office inside included one mahogany desk, one Louis Quinze chair, a variety of irises growing from the carpet—in bloom no less—and a wall-sized window featuring a framed view of Callisto’s stark, rover-tracked landscape. Jupiter was rising over Valhalla Basin.
Ras confronted the assistant. “Well? You kept me waiting long enough.” He tried to control his irritation. Jen said it turned him into an asshole, and he knew she was right, dammit. She should be here to stop him acting like an idiot.
The assistant retorted, “Dr. Bodogom, you can’t demand to see Dr. Douglas!”
Anton Douglas’s assistant was either genuinely young, or else an old
-timer tripping the faddie parade: illusory three-dee stars freckled his shiny indigo skin; his eyes—golden cat eyes—took up half his face. Shimmering lumiafields accentuated the assistant’s smooth blue groin. He—the male voice was probably original—stroked his bare crotch seductively.
Ras ignored the attempt at provocation. He liked being an old-style human. It gave him the right to be cranky. And at least the boy wasn’t a herm. The current trend of displaying a double set of massively enhanced, neon-colored genitalia was tiresome.
Young, Ras decided. We’ve created a lost generation. The irony of the thought was obvious.
The assistant’s golden eyes closed. “He knows you’re here.” When the young man opened them again, they were bright blue. “Dr. Douglas appreciates your patience. He’s waiting for you inside.” The green outline of a door appeared on a far wall.
Few people saw Anton Douglas. Ras and Jen hadn’t met him even when Douglas recruited them. The old man hadn’t netted in since he quarantined the Jupiter system for his own private purposes three years ago. Ras ignored the rumors that NanCon was run by an impostor. Or an AI. Or Douglas’s clone. Or gray-skinned aliens. You heard all sorts of things.
The other flyers haven’t noticed her. Yet. Jen studies them. They’re still heading for the cloud-mountain rising dozens of kilometers from far below. The scenery is achingly beautiful. Even though everything she sees, thinks, and feels is being recorded within a crystalline chip embedded in her skull, she won’t need sensemem playback to recall this. Jupiter will be part of her forever.
A powerful gust sends her reeling. She fights to maintain stability. Her wings are not at all like arms and legs. Pain tears through her flesh—flesh that now feels like what it is: nonhuman, and not meant for girls from Arkansas.
She falls, and between one second and the next remembers:
Rags of mist streaked the fjord’s cobalt water. If she walked off the cliff’s edge, she could touch them as she fell. The view from Preikestolen was spectacular, no doubt about it. Ras had taught her gliding, both in virt and in short-distance sessions. Still, the fear was surprisingly primal.
“You’ll love it,” he said, a huge grin illuminating his face. “It’s the closest you can get to heaven.”
“What does an atheist know about heaven?” she replied. “That water looks like it’d hurt.”
“Only if you hit it. Which you won’t.” Ras examined Jen’s straps and harnesses again. His touch reassured her.
She hesitated, then blew him a kiss as she launched herself into the wind, and then she was flying. She spotted Ras behind her, a silver hawk in pursuit. Laughter bubbled up as she dove to frighten him, before turning, as he’d taught her, to rise into the clouds.
That night, at home in the Canadian Rockies, they made love until they were exhausted, waking hours later in a bright patch of morning sunlight feeling as if they were gods.
Now Jen struggles to wrestle control away from the largest planet in the solar system. She drops like a rock. The cloud tops are no more substantial than fog, and she rips through them. If she doesn’t stop falling, the pressure and heat will crush the life from her. Her eyes, top and bottom, clench shut.
A voice rises from a place she can’t identify. Home. Remembering.
It speaks in images that touch her mind the way a child touches a butterfly: delicate, trying to be gentle. The creature, for all their care to remove its cognition, flows through her—seeing, feeling, and tasting what it finds. Jen trembles at the unexpected intimacy.
Carefully, it presses her aside and fills her body, their body. Home. Its longing is so strong Jen cries out, or tries to. Its thoughts are ill-fitting, yet unbound by language, she understands. Free. Released.
Impressions intrude into her mind. Jen stops struggling. Spread yourself on the Breath of the World. Feel the Winds. Allow them into you as your Old Ones allowed you into them at the Remembering.
Her wings change angle and the air pushes her up. She is flying, fast, faster than she’s ever flown on Earth. This colossal world lifts Jen higher with each stroke. Someone else—someone both blood-close and completely strange—shares her flesh. Together they rise, toward the other flyers.
Hormones flood her system sparking a physical reaction, orgasmic in its intensity, that she doesn’t understand. Something that was closed has been opened. Her body is readying itself for a Remembering.
Terror overwhelms her. A chittering noise clacks from her vocal cords. A sign of nerves? The consciousness tries to soothe her. Jen realizes she can’t manage, so she releases control, taking on the familiar role of observer. The green indicators hovering in her vision announce that data is being recorded and analyzed.
You taught me to glide, Jen pictures for Ras. Now let me teach you to fly. Just be alive when I get back.
Ras was alone in a suite that could have been a showroom for the Nostalgianet. Chairs and a fireplace built for an English country manor stood solidly on real wood floors; an Ormolu clock ticked on the mantel; ornately framed neo-impressionist paintings brightened the walls.
The largest painting was a portrait of a dark-eyed woman and four children, toddler to teenager. The artist had captured a haunted look in her eyes, even among her children, even surrounded by the accouterments of vast wealth. It was a study of loneliness.
Forty years ago, Tessa Douglas, wife to the most powerful man both on and off Earth, underwent a private suicide ceremony for reasons her biographers still couldn’t agree upon and her husband never spoke about.
Painting was Jen’s obsession, and Ras wondered what she would think. He strolled across the hardwood floor to pull drapes away from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Callisto’s panorama contrasted sharply with the room’s quaintness. Jupiter loomed, flanked by Ganymede’s and Io’s bright points.
Io. Jen was there in a NanCon soloship. Ras could visualize her, nude (as was her habit), her red hair pulled back, paintbrush in hand, working on her landscapes. Ras loved her boldness. Sometimes he feared it. Nothing fazed her.
Hurry back, sweetheart. Ras pressed his palm to the window. Even after all the decades of their togetherhood, she still thrilled him. Her touch on his body; the smell of her skin; the taste of her mouth. The morning before they left for Callisto, Jen had stood before their window, naked and fragrant with the scent of their lovemaking.
I need you.
Ras turned around, then inhaled sharply.
The aged man in the center of the room looked just as startled. “There you are,” he said, kneeling to set an armload of wood into the fireplace.
What Ras noticed first wasn’t his clothing (a stained Tharsis Dust Devils sweatshirt, shorts fashioned from cut-off plaid trousers), but the flesh he was wearing.
The jowly, hang-dog face with folds under the eyes that looked deep enough to hold water. Cottony white hair dabbed the back of his bald head, which reminded Ras of a chocolate egg. The topography of veins beneath the skin of his hands. Skinny brown legs that didn’t look strong enough to carry their owner.
Anton Douglas was a forceful reminder of how people used to age: wrinkled skin hanging like taffy; the pains accompanying cellular breakdown and the failure of subcellular functions; genetically programmed senescence.
That was before the biotech renaissance a century ago. Ras’s own legions of intercellular robots kept his apparent age at thirty-five Earthyears, and had for four decades. Ras hadn’t seen anyone who looked old since he was a child.
If Douglas were still on Earth, he’d be approaching his 132th birthday. The oldest person in human history. Why would he, of all people, let this happen to himself? What terrible sin needed such awful restitution? Ras glanced at the portrait, wondering what tales she could tell.
The old man wiped his hands on his shorts. “Oak logs burn best, don’t you think? Burn longer.” He pulled a wooden match from a pocket and scraped it across the fireplace stonework. The stick flared and Ras caught an acrid whiff of burning powder.
T
he man grinned at his expression. “When was the last time you smelled that, eh? Probably never, I’d say. Pity. ’Course, these aren’t from oak trees. Grew ’em in the fablabs upstairs. Can’t tell the difference, though. I can’t anyway, so I s’pose no one else can either.” He stood slowly, pushing himself up by pressing his hands on his knees.
Ras realized he’d been holding his breath. He stepped toward the old man and offered his hand. “Dr. Douglas. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
Douglas shook Ras’s hand, but his grip carried no enthusiasm. He examined Ras as if he were a newly created life form. “So. Welcome. I hope my assistant didn’t annoy you. I took him on as a political favor,” he continued. “The boy’s as harmless as he is brainless. Take the ‘con’ out of ‘contemporary’ and what have you got?”
“It was fine, Dr. Douglas. I’ve taught too many of his ilk to be bothered.”
“Glad to hear it. Call me Anton.”
Despite the invitation, Ras could never call this man by his first name. it would be like calling God “Jo,” if he believed in God.
Douglas sat in the bentwood rocker next to the fireplace. With a simple gesture he commanded Ras to sit in the chair beside him. “I’ve been following your work, Dr. Bodogom. You were born in Aresopolis with a backyard view of Olympus Mons.”
He paused, and Ras couldn’t tell if it had been a question or not. “That’s right,” he finally said.
Douglas continued, his eyes unblinking. “You moved to Earth with a full scholarship to Harvard. Terminal degrees from Harvard and Copernicus U. You returned to teach at U. Mars with high commendations as well as a Nobel Prize for discoveries in Martian paleontology, specializing in the remains of water-dwelling forms from the Sigerson-Sachter deposits.”
He looked at him the way Lars Sigerson had so long ago at the base camp near Lowell Ridge. Annoyed and a little disbelieving. “You shared another Nobel sixteen years later for research on molecular manufacturing applications.”