Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

That thing out there in the dark might be a hungry mouth, open and ready to swallow me.

  Visuals on, I stare at black nothing. I will some photons to sneak out of that blackness and give me a clue. But none come. Or I can’t see them. The end is the same.

  So here’s what I could do, I think, staring so hard my head starts to ache and the cocoon around me starts to feel like something designed to smother instead of something keeping me alive. I could just drift blind until someone finds me, if anyone does, if anyone’s there to do the finding. I have a week of air. I have enough water to keep me going almost that long, if the moisture reclamation sponges laced into the cocoon’s fabric hold out.

  Or I could start being a little more goddamn proactive.

  Launch the probe, CERA.

  I have one. It was a kind of concession to research outside of the tunnel-vision focus on what we were really trying to do. In case I found anything interesting. Now it might tell me nothing useful. It might be able to tell me, in exquisitely measured detail, just how fucked I am.

  But we have to know, don’t we? We always have to fucking know.

  I feel the craft eject the probe. I imagine it shooting toward the thing spinning invisibly out there, black and potentially lethal. I don’t trust any of what CERA is telling me. I don’t trust my eyes. I haven’t in a long time.

  They never showed me what was there until I didn’t want them to. And then it was all they would let me see.

  I ran, Kendra. Okay? I admit it. You got me. I ran. I was always running. Maybe I saw something in you that I didn’t know how to deal with. Maybe it’s just who and what I am. I ran away from you and then after you were gone I ran away from everything.

  But we were going to blast a hole through decades and pop out the other side. You weren’t just a little bit excited by that? You don’t think that was worth some sacrifices?

  Was it? Was it worth you?

  I hate questions without answers. I ran from them, too. Here’s the thing, Kendra—here’s my dirty little secret. I thought maybe, in the future, they’d have neatened everything up. Simplified things. The world would be a less messy place to be in. Everything would fit. Everything would make sense. And in that world, you would naturally come back to me, because we made sense.

  I believed in something better. I did. Better . . . and easy.

  And now look.

  Iron.

  I wait for more. I wait a while. Time spins out—I wonder if I’m hallucinating its passing. The truth is, I’m sort of wondering if there is such a thing as time anymore.

  CERA?

  The composition of the object is pure iron. It’s very dense. It’s highly probable that it is the last remnant of a stellar object.

  I wait again. There’s more silence. In that silence, I think I’m dreaming, and what I’m dreaming of is laying my cheek against something hard and cold in the darkness. Lying down on its surface and letting it pull me into itself. Because this—right here, in the ending-black, circling a ball of solid cold—this is always where I was headed.

  We try to make things mean things. We can’t. They don’t.

  CERA. Are there any records of any such objects on file?

  Everything I know about it is only speculation, Vita.

  Tell me.

  She does. I stare into the darkness and I listen.

  We have a lot of ideas about time, us temporally-bound creatures. I know them. I read all about them years ago in the kind of quantity that requires scientific notation. Some of it was research. Some of it was . . . well. Passing the time.

  Here’s one that I always liked, because it’s not about time, not really. It’s about spacetime, and it’s about probability and the shape of things. That every possible choice we could make has been made, somewhere, in some iteration of the universe. That bad decision you made that changed everything? Somewhere you didn’t make it. You took the other door and you got the lady and not the tiger.

  Of course, that leaves an almost infinite number of versions of you that got the tiger instead. And you personally? You only get the one choice. That’s the rule.

  The rule broke me. I wanted to break it. That’s why I climbed inside the cocoon. Somewhere there’s a me that came home when I said I would, said the right things, did the right things, and somewhere there’s a Kendra who didn’t drown in a country I still can’t even spell. Somewhere we’re together and we’re happy and we might even get to go on forever.

  But I don’t get to make that choice, even if the rules don’t totally apply to me anymore. Even if I broke the one. I get the choice I made. And now I get the darkness.

  How long?

  CERA is silent for a moment—for her a moment is a decade and I wonder what she can possibly be doing that holds her back from response. Then she vibrates at me out of the center of my cortex.

  I don’t understand your question, Vita.

  Fuck. How far did we go?

  Another moment of silence. This time I can feel what it is: she’s actually thinking through it, reading entire books on the subject, consulting a hundred thousand databases’ worth of info. Getting all she can for me. But of course, when she speaks again I already know the answer.

  The theoretical timeframe within which stellar objects could potentially decay into spheres of iron-56 is 101500 years from our temporal point of departure.

  One sentence. Very simple. I almost can’t believe it took her so long to come up with that.

  There’s nothing, I think. I feel the words behind my lips. Nothing. Not technically correct, but practically true, and the latter means more than the former most of the time. Like: She left me. She’s gone.

  I’m gone. I can’t get back. With no one, with nothing, no energy source for the jump, no hand to pull back the slingshot. I can’t move on pure iron. I’m here. Here is the only when I’ll ever be.

  My cocoon closes tighter around me in response to the drop in my body’s temperature. I feel a flash of fear of smothering even though that couldn’t happen. But it will. It is. Air, water, food . . . Here I am in the dark, in my warm little center of the nothing that’s left. There’s nothing to do. There’s nothing that I can or should do. In the most fundamental way possible, I am inconsequential, and so are all my stupid little choices. The ones I made and the ones I didn’t. The ladies and the tigers.

  And somewhere in that darkness I realize that what I’m feeling is relief.

  CERA, I say, and really, the words are so much easier than I thought they would be. Take us away.

  I can almost sense CERA’s confusion, though I know that technically she can’t have any. Please specify a destination, Vita.

  Random. My eyes are open, staring at a darkness without stars. Iron dark. All I want to do is sleep. It doesn’t matter.

  I’m dreaming with my eyes open. I don’t need to close them now if I want the dark; it’s all around me. It’s the night face of everything. CERA is quiet in the center of my head, the cocoon is warm around me, and I drift. I think about water and blood and countries the names of which I can’t spell. I think about light in the strands of Kendra’s hair. I think about choices, ladies, tigers.

  I had to come billions of years to understand that it doesn’t matter. That it is what it is. That we had what we had and now it’s over. I shift my hands in the folds of the cocoon; it’s like I can reach into the dark and touch iron, close my fingers around it. Feel the coming cold. Sleep inside it. Dream.

  Mantis Wives

  Kij Johnson

  “As for the insects, their lives are sustained only by intricate processes of fantastic horror.”—John Wyndham.

  Eventually, the mantis women discovered that killing their husbands was not inseparable from the getting of young. Before this, a wife devoured her lover piece by piece during the act of coition: the head (and its shining eyes going dim as she ate); the long green prothorax; the forelegs crisp as straws; the bitter wings. She left for last the metathorax and its pumping legs, the abdomen, and f
inally the phallus. Mantis women needed nutrients for their pregnancies; their lovers offered this as well as their seed.

  It was believed that mantis men would resist their deaths if permitted to choose the manner of their mating; but the women learned to turn elsewhere for nutrients after draining their husbands’ members, and yet the men lingered. And so their ladies continued to kill them, but slowly, in the fashioning of difficult arts. What else could there be between them?

  The Bitter Edge: A wife may cut through her husband’s exoskeletal plates, each layer a different pattern, so that to look at a man is to see shining, hard brocade. At the deepest level are visible pieces of his core, the hint of internal parts bleeding out. He may suggest shapes.

  The Eccentric Curve of His Thoughts: A wife may drill the tiniest hole into her lover’s head and insert a fine hair. She presses carefully, striving for specific results: a seizure, a novel pheromone burst, a dance that ends in self-castration. If she replaces the hair with a wasp’s narrow syringing stinger, she may blow air bubbles into his head and then he will react unpredictably. There is otherwise little he may do that will surprise her, or himself.

  What is the art of the men, that they remain to die at the hands of their wives? What is the art of the wives, that they kill?

  The Strength of Weight: Removing his wings, she leads him into the paths of ants.

  Unready Jewels: A mantis wife may walk with her husband across the trunks of pines, until they come to a trail of sap and ascend to an insect-clustered wound. Staying to the side, she presses him down until his legs stick fast. He may grow restless as the sap sheathes his body and wings. His eyes may not dim for some time. Smaller insects may cluster upon his honeyed body like ornaments.

  A mantis woman does not know why the men crave death, but she does not ask. Does she fear resistance? Does she hope for it? She has forgotten the ancient reasons for her acts, but in any case her art is more important.

  The Oubliette: Or a wife may take not his life but his senses: plucking the antennae from his forehead; scouring with dust his clustered shining eyes; cracking apart his mandibles to scrape out the lining of his mouth and throat; plucking the sensing hairs from his foremost legs; excising the auditory thoracic organ; biting free the wings.

  A mantis woman is not cruel. She gives her husband what he seeks. Who knows what poems he fashions in the darkness of a senseless life?

  The Scent of Violets: They mate many times, until one dies.

  Two Stones Grind Together: A wife collects with her forelegs small brightly colored poisonous insects, places them upon bitter green leaves, and encourages her husband to eat them. He is sometimes reluctant after the first taste but she speaks to him, or else he calms himself and eats.

  He may foam at the mouth and anus, or grow paralyzed and fall from a branch. In extreme cases, he may stagger along the ground until he is seen by a bird and swallowed, and then even the bird may die.

  A mantis has no veins; what passes for blood flows freely within its protective shell. It does have a heart.

  The Desolate Junk-land: Or a mantis wife may lay her husband gently upon a soft bed and bring to him cool drinks and silver dishes filled with sweetmeats. She may offer him crossword puzzles and pornography; may kneel at his feet and tell him stories of mantis men who are heroes; may dance in veils before him.

  He tears off his own legs before she begins. It is unclear whether The Desolate Junk-land is her art, or his.

  Shame’s Uniformity: A wife may return to the First Art and, in a variant, devour her husband, but from the abdomen forward. Of all the arts this is hardest. There is no hair, no ant’s bite, no sap, no intervening instrument. He asks her questions until the end. He may doubt her motives, or she may.

  The Paper-folder. Lichens’ Dance. The Ambition of Aphids. Civil Wars. The Secret History of Cumulus. The Lost Eyes Found. Sedges. The Unbeaked Sparrow.

  There are as many arts as there are husbands and wives.

  The Cruel Web: Perhaps they wish to love each other, but they cannot see a way to exist that does not involve the barb, the sticking sap, the bitter taste of poison. The Cruel Web can be performed only in the brambles of woods, and only when there has been no recent rain and the spider’s webs have grown thick. Wife and husband walk together. Webs catch and cling to their carapaces, their legs, their half-opened wings. They tear free, but the webs collect. Their glowing eyes grow veiled. Their curious antennae come to a tangled halt. Their pheromones become confused; their legs struggle against the gathering web. The spiders wait.

  She is larger than he and stronger, but they often fall together.

  How to Live: A mantis may dream of something else. This also may be a trap.

  Pony

  Erik Amundsen

  Skull Pony is eying me again. He drifts in the paddock, shifting every now and then, always facing me. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him and I’ve more than half a mind that thinks the feeling is mutual. The other ponies, they cluster around the rock at the center of the paddock, young near the middle, all of them grazing in their unhurried way, cropping up what they can find, but Skull Pony, he wants to tell me he’s wise to me. I believe him.

  It’s not a good idea to assign the ponies gender. It’s a step on the road to anthropomorphizing them and that’s the hell-highway to getting yourself killed by them, a kick or a bite or a weapon array from a design passed through hundreds of generations of hereditary memory. We’ve done brilliant things in our time as a species—the ponies, for example—but we’ve never been that good at walking around outside, making that any safer than it is. Too fast, too big, too much. We were never up to it at our best, and our last best was a while ago.

  It’s an even worse idea to give the ponies names, shit, that will get you pulled if you ever say it out loud. Normally, anyway, but DeJesus said the name and we’d all been thinking it real loud, and that’s got everyone in a shitty mood. We would have pulled up stake at the sight of him in better times. Better times not being these times, and Skull Pony not being aggressive, yet, and so clearly important to the herd, we’ve been hoping to just work around him. Tag the ponies we want, get them in the barn and off to market.

  Skull Pony dates to somewhere in the Dark Third. He’s got a weapons array on him that flicks in and out of the sheath on his belly and has an uncommon resemblance to a pecker bone. Thus he: kind of a reddish brown and angular, he’s got a white mark all across his face that, when you look at the overall shape of the beast dead on—and he’s always looking at you dead on, sliding his silver pecker slowly in and out its sheath—calls to mind a skull peering in three quarters, canted just a little to the left. He’s a good nine times as old as the next oldest we’ve dated in the herd. And that’s weird. Usually there’s so little in common between generations spread out so far that they’re not much inclined to herd together. More often, they’ll spook and run from one another. Sometimes they fight, and the next generation gets born armed and skittish.

  That’s always a miserable shame. Most of the first generation after a herd’s dander gets up is nothing but a menace, and you have to put them down. Skull Pony’s got just that kind of a look. Only we won’t risk it. Killing him would spook the herd, and better times aren’t these times, and well, we’re an enlightened species. Enlightened species, far as I can tell, we all learn that you must be very, very superstitious when you’re in space.

  Skull Pony is an omen like a dry and wracking cough that leaves you dizzy, a sign you need to lay off the smoking. So of course we do the thousands-years-old human thing and ignore it and hope it’s not what you think and it’ll go away on its own. But there I am, floating on the end of the magnetic tether, sidling up to a promising-looking colt, and there he is, right with me. I can’t hear him, but I imagine I can—the raspy pulse of breath, the jets and shifts and the drawing sword sound of the pecker-bone maser. The others are all glad it’s me; everyone who isn’t me ought to be.

  The colt is grazing, huggin
g close to the rock and near to a parent. Resemblance is close and clear, but, with the exception of Skull Pony, the herd is pretty homogeneous; variations on a set of themes. Ponies don’t have genders, but they do have parents. Usually it’s two or three. Design by committee works about equally well with all species, as far as I can tell, and it makes for some damned funny-looking children. Occasionally, a single parent will get an idea and reproduce on its own; Law of Heaven alone knows where they get those ideas. At this point, our lives are so full of things that we did so long ago that we can only look at them and wonder what we were thinking; so full that if wondering was all we ever did from here on out, we’d never get through all of them.

  I catch Skull Pony’s reflection off the colt’s saddle. I watch that reflection, seeing it see me.

  I want you not to be here.

  I breathe, because that’s important to remember, and so I can keep my posture as relaxed as I can. Ponies don’t know from tension, exactly, but they aren’t stupid, and when I change my ways, the colt will notice and then we are going to have to go through this all afresh and anew. And time is not factoring on our side on this project.

  There are some wranglers who will just scoop up all they can of a wild herd, tranquilize them and take them back to their ring, and sure, it’s the quick, and, as long as you’re careful to kill off all the ponies packing weapons, relatively easy way. Assuming any you catch live. Assuming any you catch can be broken in the ring. Assuming any who live and can be broken have traits that you want to use. In case you missed my opinion, or the opinions of my associates on the matter, we’re not in favor; but sometimes, it does give us those come-hither glances. Also, I would love it if Feng cooked Skull Pony right now. He could make that a birthday present for me.

  The colt’s parent isn’t much bothered by me. Sturdy thing, it’s clearly not interested in anything but what it’s gleaning, molecule at a time, from the surface of the rock. Steady, not terribly fast in the running, and not too bright. The colt, on the other hand, got all the good from the parent present and clearly some other things besides. It’s a little skittish with me, but not very. I can put my hand on it. It doesn’t shy at the touch of the diagnostic cloud. It grazes on some of it, but that’s only natural. Ponies glean up any matter they can find: rocks, ice, methane, the corpses of other ponies, the corpses of spacemen who don’t pay attention to omens, the usual things you find.