Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  “I thought you’d gone under,” she whispers. “It’s good to see you back.”

  I open my jaw, struggling to ignore the pain. “How long?” I whisper.

  Mazy shrugs. “Weeks? I forget. They really worked you good that time, though.”

  “What?” I ask. My mouth is so dry. “What do you mean?”

  She doesn’t answer. Instead she pushes herself up on her elbow, reaches to my face, and pushes a strand of hair behind my ear. I try to pull back.

  “Stop it,” I mumble. “Get off my cot.”

  “Your cot?” says Mazy. “This is my cot. You climbed in here yourself.”

  “What?”

  “After they were finished with you, whispering that damned name.”

  I am confused. How could I climb here without knowing it? What cot am I in? “What name?”

  “Temetry,” she says, and watches my face for the reaction. There is none, because the name means nothing to me.

  “Who’s Temetry?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. You were the one screaming it, in the middle of the involutions. They had to pull you off the floor and double your involutions to shut you up.”

  Her words shake me. “I don’t remember any of that.”

  “Not after a session like that, I’m not surprised.”

  I lay there and say nothing.

  “Was he a boyfriend?” Mazy asks.

  I don’t answer. I try to cast my mind back, feeling as though I am probing a fresh wound. My mind is raw. Temetry. I reach back, back, and touch upon something. I handle it gently, calmly as I would a sand-hopper, lest it take fright and skitter away. Temetry; a feeling more than anything, a sense of something, insubstantial and shifting, but something definitely good.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Maybe a friend.”

  Mazy snorts, and runs her hand through my hair again. My body aches too much to push her away. “Well, you’re my friend now. You and me. I’ll look after you, don’t worry.”

  I don’t worry. I lie there, and wonder who Temetry might have been.

  Months pass. The cots grow quieter every night, as memories are plancked out of our minds. Soon there is no one left to miss, no home to yearn for, no one to cry for. More of us go under the Bell.

  Mazy shares my cot every night. She smooths my hair. When I become quiet, she speaks the name to me; Temetry. It has no meaning in itself, it is just a word that we share, something to bond us together. We lie in each other’s warm arms, and wonder on what it might mean.

  Our lives are involutions and sleep. Tolling the Bell becomes something rote, ringing out our Brilliance across the universe in our wake. There are no questions to ask of each other, because there is no past to speak of. There are only questions in the now.

  “Where do you think the Bell is going?” Mazy asks, most nights. I spin stories for her of all the furthest systems I’ve heard of, worlds where the people travel through Gideon bores and harvest the heat of stars on desert planets. Mazy smiles, laughs, and tells me about planets where everything is an endless city, and people drink the blood of plants and fly through the sky on rainbows and just have all the fun you could imagine.

  I wonder if I we are from an endless city, or a desert, or a jungle. I wonder what Temetry is. Is it a place, a person, or a thing?

  Around us, the one hundred dwindle. I forget my own name, and she forgets hers. We come to know each other by touch, by feel, by the one word that stays with us; Temetry. It becomes a totem.

  Then one day, I wake in her arms, and she is still. I shake her, but she doesn’t move. I open her eyelids and look into her eyes, and see within her a void, carved and hollowed out.

  Her heart beats, her body lives, but her mind is gone. She is under the Bell.

  Within a day she is only a memory.

  Simulacra move me to my own cot. The others are removed. Lying there, wondering on the meaning of this word Temetry, I realize I am the only one left.

  The only one left? Were there others?

  I am to be captain.

  Days pass and there are no involutions for me. Simulacra come in and out of my room, nameless as ever, and occasionally I ask the word at them.

  “Temetry?”

  They never reply. Their white bodies and flat blank faces seem to look past me. They bring me training cycles that I am to rewrite my mind with, sad stories of the origin of Subsidence, but I cannot watch them for long. All I want to know is the origin of this hole within me, this thing that I have lost.

  I set down the latest of the cycles and exit my room. I walk the corridors and call out the word Temetry, though there is no one to respond. White-bodied simulacra move by me at times, carrying shapes on their flat white palms that seem to defy dimension. Pieces for the clapper, I presume, that revolve and involute as I watch.

  I wander for days. When I’m hungry I eat, food brought by the simulacra as I need it. When I’m tired I sleep. I know these explorations are pointless, that even were I to walk a hundred years I would never cover more than a hundredth of the whole of the Bell. But that doesn’t seem to matter now.

  I walk the involution rooms, hundreds of them, each stretching on and on, every one of them a hammer to hit the clapper at the Bell’s core, to keep us moving, to keep Subsidence alive if only in memory. I wander over dimples where generations have involuted the anthropic planes before me, where generations have gone under the Bell to keep Subsidence moving.

  I am alone, now, but for this word that haunts me; Temetry.

  This is my odyssey. I know that as well as any.

  I am sitting at a port looking out over our sparkling Brilliance, a branic contrail sizzling back through space like corolla borealis, when the captain comes to me. He sits by my side. I am not surprised. I have expected this for a long time.

  He is very old; his face riven with lines deep as the dimples. He is the first living thing I have seen for as long as I can remember.

  He sighs, and smiles at me.

  “Temetry,” he says.

  I smile back. Though we have never met, never spoken, I feel I know him well. “Do you know what it is?”

  He shrugs. His eyes flicker with quiet amusement.

  “I heard it in the Brilliance. You tolled the word into space. Even now, that word is floating through the anthropic planes, reverberating, echoing forever.”

  “I wish I knew what it meant,” I say.

  He only smiles.

  We sit quietly for a long time, as the Brilliance ripples out like a whip-tail from our Bell, glissandoing into space.

  “What happened to the others?” I ask him, at last. I don’t know who they might be, but I know there were others. I am not the only one the Bell took for fuel.

  “They went under the Bell,” he replies, his voice soft. “Left behind on the planets we passed. They’ll live out quiet, uninspired lives. They’ll procreate.”

  “And what about me?”

  “That’s your choice. You’ll be captain, if you want. You’ll steer the Bell, and ring out your beautiful, mournful, sweet Brilliance to the universe. The other Bells will hear, and know you, and Subsidence will continue. Or you will not.”

  “What else would I do?”

  He shrugs, answers slowly. “Leave. Start a new life on the next planet. Forget about the Bells, about the branes and the Brilliance.”

  I see it in his pale blue eyes. He has already made that choice, and left this place behind.

  “Where will you go?” I ask. His gentle smile gives me the answer. We both know the Bell keeps no logs. There is no home for him to return to. There is nothing left in his mind now but the beauty of the branes.

  He stands up.

  “Goodbye, child,” he says. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

  He walks away down the long and arcing corridor. I watch him go.

  The simulacra come for me as darkness falls across the Bell. They wipe away my drying tears, and carry me to my dimple. Through the long hours of the Subside
nce night, I planck the branes that toll us through space.

  We will snuff upon a planet soon. There will be a hundred waiting, thinking glory and duty await, ready to sacrifice their minds to the might of this Bell, to the continuation of Subsidence, trusting me as their captain to lead.

  But lead to where?

  All I have is this word. I dream it while the planes reticulated about me; Temetry. It has no meaning, but I feel its weight, like a Gideon bore sucking me down. I am not free. I am not alone. I am weighted to this dying Empire, and there is only the grace of the branes to tell of my loss.

  So I tell it to the branes. I dream them filled with this thing that is Temetry, this thing that matters so much even the Bell could not scrub it from my mind. I sing it, watch it spiral out into the dark, and wait for the Bell to snuff down.

  We come to a planet. It is black with vegetation, life creeping every inch of crust beneath twin helixing suns. There are one hundred waiting, adepts, all of them young.

  I walk out amongst them. The black vines underfoot writhe at my touch.

  These people do not know what I have brought to them. They look at me as though I am a god. They have adapted to the light of this place; their skin is dark, their violet eyes are wide, but they are people like me. I wonder at their dreams, at their lives, at the new adaptations the Bell will force upon them.

  The captain’s words haunt my mind.

  They talk to me, honor me, offer feasts in my name, but I do not know my name. The honor is for Subsidence. The feasts are for the Bell.

  I stand for a long time, looking out at them and their world as though through glass, studying a thing I once knew. I watch their twin suns spiral overhead, patterns dictated by forces unleashed at the start of the universe, tracing through time, inexorable, unstoppable.

  One of their leaders comes to me at last. She is tall, regal, dressed in long robes of finely braided black twine. I know to her violet eyes these fabrics have color. To me it is all the same.

  “Is something wrong, Bell-captain?” she asks, her eyes downcast.

  I look over her one hundred and wonder how I can steal away their minds. I look over her black world and wonder if I could adapt, could make it my home.

  “Do you know what Temetry means?” I ask her.

  She looks up briefly, and I see in her eyes the frisson of confusion.

  “Is this a test?” she asks warily.

  I wonder if it is.

  I walk past her, to the first of the one hundred.

  “Do you know Temetry?”

  I ask them every one, but none of them know, and at each of their answers the path before me becomes more clear, like order folding out of the branes.

  I return to my Bell with none aboard. I will sound the clapper myself. I will toll the distances alone, and at each planet waiting for me, I will ask my question.

  I will not fade away like the captain. I will not give my life to Subsidence. I will find the meaning of Temetry, and make of it my home.

  Years pass.

  Always there are more planets; worlds of lavic sulfur ice, worlds of ammonia oceans, worlds of aluminum sands, and on each one, the descendants of Subsidence. They live afloat on tar-balked ships of petrite, in cloud-castles held aloft by technologies long forgotten, in Gideon bores beneath the ground, in bubbles of molten neon endlessly revolving through the core.

  At each I am met by the one hundred, and hopes that Subsidence has resurged, that the hand of the empire will once again come to steer their lives.

  I bring no solace, only questions. I ask every one of them of Temetry, but none of them know. I leave them behind, my Bell empty and sounding only with my voice, my dreams in the Brilliance, my turn of the branes.

  I see the wonders of the Universe from my dimple. There are galaxies yet forming, out near the discordant rim of existence. I see red shift blur the anthropic landscape about me, feel the echo of entropy as it is born. I hear the stripling birth-song of stars yet to bloom, the grand harmonies of systems flung out like the petals of a sand-flower, spiral arms interwoven as though the arms of long-lost lovers.

  I dream of Tesseracts, and Temetry. I enfold Klein bottles and slice Möbius strips, and think of Temetry. It is the only thing to sustain me. A hundred times I have thought to leave the Bell behind, and a hundred times I have pulled back, held by this weight in my middle, pinning me in my place.

  At each planet I tell them I will take none of their one hundred. At each I tell them to forget Subsidence. The Empire is gone. It is dead.

  And I travel alone, in my Bell.

  Others come.

  I feel them first as grace notes in the rippling Brilliance, the tolling of loss through the branes. I feel them gathering at my back, tracking me through my enfoldments, keeping pace, adding their long melancholic tones to the anthropic landscape about me.

  The sound of them fills me with sadness. I need not see them, the large colorless hulks of their Bells, to know they have come because of me. But I have nothing to give them.

  Every passing day there are more. They swarm at my back, each Bell a string to planck the branes, to make the anthropic landscape tremble with ordered life. I feel them rising as though a wave, cresting behind me, an orchestra to pulse my dreams of Temetry to the universe.

  At the next planet, a world of grey lead mists, I meet the first of them.

  He is young, as I once was. Has it been twenty years? His hair is long and dark, his skin pale, his eyes so full of yearning.

  He stands before me, looking at me as though I can give him back what he has lost. This world’s one hundred watch us, there in the boiling mists with our two vast Bells snuffed down behind us. I do not know what to say.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “I am searching for a thing I can’t remember.”

  He nods. He steps closer. I feel his need to reach out, to touch me, to know me.

  “Temetry,” he says.

  I nod. I watch as his eyes fill with tears. He makes no effort to brush them away. They slide down his cheeks like the oscillating Brilliance of the Bells.

  “Why are you following me?” I ask.

  “Because you are beautiful. Your search is beautiful. In the emptiness your tolls ring with meaning.”

  “But I do not know the meaning. It is only a word.”

  He smiles, steps closer, as though he is grateful for this.

  “I remember nothing,” he says. “I do not know who I am, or where I came from. Your word is everything to me.”

  I shake my head. I do not want this. I cannot be responsible for him.

  “You should not follow me. It is a dream I have followed for too long. It has no meaning.”

  “You are wrong,” he says, his voice firm. “It is the light of all the Bells. Your tolls spill hope through the universe.”

  I too feel like crying to hear him say it so. I have no hope. Only the endless reticulation of the branes, and the black of space, and a word that is empty at my core.

  “Don’t follow me,” I tell him. I can do nothing else. “Please. I am as lost as you.”

  I do not speak to the one hundred. I return to my Bell. I have been a fool to continue this long. I am a fool with impossible dreams.

  That night I resolve to leave the Bell at last. I will make my life among these people in their thick mists. I will learn their ways, and forget the word that has haunted me for twenty years. I will at last be free.

  That night I dream of Temetry. It is a swollen river flowing from the clapper of my Bell, spreading out across the universe, dappling the branes with its flavor, ringing out for melancholy, and loss, and a thing once loved. It is beautiful, endless, threading the anthropic landscape with hope.

  I wake to a thought that upturns my world.

  I dare not think it, can scarcely imagine it. As I hurry to the first dimple I ever used, I cannot voice it aloud in my mind. It is too large, too terrifying, and I cannot bear any more, not now, not so close to the
end.

  But I must know.

  At the dimple I enter the involuting trance, turning non-orientable shapes in non-Euclidean space as I have a thousand times before, until I can feel the flow of anthropy unfolding around me, the branes swelling like budding fruit within, opening the pathways that will allow my Bell to travel through the enfoldments of space.

  But I do not travel. I reach out.

  Here is my own trail. I can feel it in my Bell’s Brilliance, the hints of what I was twenty years ago, stitched together and held fast by the single word that remained throughout, spreading back from now to the time I was a child: Temetry.

  It arcs up through the mesosphere of this leaden planet and out into space. It is the path I have left, the vibrations of Temetry that these other Bells have followed, the hope they have sought.

  I speed my involutions, turning the endless flood of images harder than I have for years, reaching back, tracking my Brilliance through enfoldments and entropy, piecing together the reverberation of my travels through Subsidence’s empire.

  In the midst of it, I launch the Bell. I can feel Temetry thrumming through me like a geyser of hope, a feeling I cannot hide, cannot mask from the other Bells. If I am to do this, they will surely follow. I do not care. Let them. All that matters is Temetry.

  My Bell races the branes, back along a trail I have written across the stars for these past twenty years, with the fleet of Subsidence in my wake.

  Days pass by, perhaps weeks, swimming up the contrail of my Brilliance to its source. I have traveled back through so many years already, five, perhaps ten. I have spun together the fading echoes of Temetry I left scattered through the darkness, leaping from tone to tone, straining at the limits of my shuddering mind to hold the trail together.

  Then the trail is gone.

  Its notes are too diffuse, split apart and wafted by solar winds and the expansion of the universe, broken by entropy, the echoes too faint for me to hear. I strive for it, I reach out desperately, but it is gone.

  I collapse about my dimple. I feel like a child again, rewritten by her first involutions, scarcely able to think. There is only Temetry, and my failure. I sag there, and sob, because now I have lost all hope. It has dispersed, been erased, rubbed out by the endless reshuffling of the universe. Time has blown away my Brilliance. There is no more trail to find.