Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  The pamphlets claim you are neither human nor alien and incapable of willful intent; you are not devious; you do not conspire to replace me, to wear my dresses, court my husband and disown my children; you are unthinking, unplanning, harmless; you are here for my comfort, I should thank your world for sending you.

  You have no family; you are a construct, a robot; you were not born; you will not die; you have only the home I give you and learn only the things I teach you.

  These are the toys and letters I sent my children when I was abroad; these are the folds and refolds my husband made so I would think they had been read.

  This is a closet for all your things; this is its lock; this is a key; do not lose it, it is the only one.

  This is the way to stumble like a human; this is the way to delete your messages from the people with whom you no longer wish to speak; this is the way to reclaim your childhood by clinging to anger and hurt; this is the way to insult your neighbors while making it sound like you are paying them a compliment; this is the way to eat ice cream in the middle of the night because you are old and no one is looking; this is the way to ignore your husband when he calls out to you from the porch and you are in your own world, sitting high in a swing and your legs are not chewed off at the knees—you are back in your space ship, you are finding a new planet, a new species, forging new treaties and living the life you always knew you would live without consequence or regret—there are no mistakes, no cardiovascular impairments—you are not host to an alien robot hell-bent on devouring you.

  I think you are beginning to look a little like me; usurper; slut; flesh-eating mongrel; ingrate; monster; orphan; spy; speaking to you now I feel a stranger’s hand inside my jaw moving it for me.

  My granddaughter has sent me a note expressing the appropriate level of gratitude for the sweater—it is warm and tight knit and shines like burnished steel—it is cold for our kind where she is going and now she will be comfortable; she wonders if she will be a famous explorer; she wonders if the sun flashes blue before disappearing beyond the horizon of deep space; I have left the note on the dresser in your room.

  You will have to write my correspondence for me; you will have to go to the market and buy avocados which do not give in; you will learn to make a roux; you will touch my husband’s shoulder when he is about to fall asleep in church; you will watch the news and tell me when the next ships leave; the pamphlets say you are happy for this opportunity to be helpful; your only desire is to assimilate into our culture; you do not miss your home.

  They say you will stop eating when only good flesh and good circulation remain; you are designed as a recycler; the flesh you have taken from me is converted into energy which fuels I know not what; you are a marvel; in a thousand years our scientists could not understand the science your makers have wrought.

  I dream you will not stop; I will shrink to the size of a basketball and you will carry my head under your arms; you will tell people your name and it will be my name; you will tell people your husband is my husband, my children your children, my home is yours as well; you will place me on the sill and one day, when the window is open, I will fall down and roll into the garden, into the fields and I will watch you from the horizon, the blue of my eyes glowing in the night when you pretend to look for me.

  Do not believe the lies my children say about me; do not think I have not worked hard my entire life; do not think I do not notice your pity when you scrub blood from my sheets, when you allow me to lean against your legs when I am on the toilet; there are a thousand ways for a body to die, to live, to be born, to evolve; a thousand things I know I do not know.

  Am I only meat to you? A mother, a friend, a tyrant? Do you sleep, do you dream, do you derive satisfaction by making more and more of me disappear every day?

  There is a story my husband told me before I went abroad and I was afraid we would not find anything, we would fail in our mission: we can only see what we expect to see; when Pizarro sailed across the Atlantic, his ships appeared as great white birds on the horizon and not until he strode onto the beach, his armor shining like a burnished oyster shell, did the Incas realize he was a person at all.

  The Found Girl

  David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

  Melissa stalked a trash compactor in the Elemental Caverns deep in the depths below the Street, where steam hissed from newly regrown pipes and oversized dendrites spread across the ancient brick of the connective tunnels. The glowing moss that dripped brown water filled the air with a faint glow, enough to let Melissa squint her way through the Caverns.

  The Street gave her the mission the usual way: pictographs glowing on the side of the steps leading up to the two-storied, red-brick building the Found Children called The Castle. She had puzzled for a moment as to what the “trashcan + clamp” had meant, but eventually she’d figured that the Street lost a compactor and needed it retrieved.

  And of course, she knew the quartered circle that indicated the caverns.

  The Found Children didn’t like the Caverns. They were haunted. With so few real people around anymore, ghosts and demons felt free to roam a world filled with buildings that moved and talked, where mysterious magics dusted the air and flitted around.

  So Melissa accepted the Street’s request. She wouldn’t let any of the younger children risk waking the demons.

  After all, La Llorona lurked this far under the Street. Melissa glimpsed her bedraggled hair and torn-up clothes the last time she’d rescued a lost machine for the Street. Held her breath and hid as the demon ghost snuffled and tramped around the darks of the Caverns.

  “Hello,” she whispered to herself. She stopped at the concrete edge of an ancient sewer and knelt to look into a puddle of muck collected in a depression. The telltale kinked track of the compactor looked fresh. The muck would dry out in six hours, maybe twelve on a humid day. He had been by here recently, then, headed deeper into the caverns. On tiptoes she headed deeper, swallowing hard and hoping she was being ghost-quiet.

  Scuffling whispers echoed through the stale air from deeper in the caverns.

  Melissa froze.

  The sounds carried the scent of earth and water. She looked around a corner carefully. Somewhere, deep along one of the arrow-straight tubes, a faint fire flickered.

  “La Llorona,” Melissa whispered to herself, the back of her neck prickling.

  Melissa knew the stories from her days hiding in the Outskirts. Alien and incomprehensible the old demon stalked abandoned, wet sewers, snatching up wayward orphans, devouring those who had lost hope.

  If La Llorona showed, she would tempt Melissa with her demonic tongue. Melissa shied away from the tunnel, keeping her hope, keeping her strength.

  She looked down at the tracks. The trash compactor had been wooed by La Llorona’s voice and tricked into coming down here, no doubt. And the Street needed it rescued. And the Street was good to the Found Children. It had given them a safe building, and good food.

  Melissa steeled herself and followed the tracks where they led, right down the tunnel toward La Llorona. The glow down that way was brighter, and the smell of smoke unmistakable.

  “Infernal fire,” she said softly. The smells of rotting things and burned flesh overwhelmed the purer smells of earth and water.

  Smoke should be sweeter, but no one told La Llorona that.

  Halfway down, the trash compactor shuddered in spastic circles, twitching a half turn to the left, then backing to the right one full turn. Back and forth he stuttered in little circles, and Melissa could tell the machine was caught between the call of La Llorona and the freedom and sweet air of the Street.

  Right now Melissa wanted nothing more than to call on the beautiful, angelic, and pure Blue Lady to come save her. The same Blue Lady that had appeared in the Outskirts, and given her food. Then told her and the Found Children about the Street, and the safe place.

  But the Blue Lady didn’t always come when you screamed and prayed. And it was better to save
your prayers for when you really needed them. So Melissa gritted her teeth and approached the wayward machine.

  Fortunately, the Old Man on the Street had shown her what to do in cases like this. When the trash compactor paused to reevaluate its path she leapt onto its chassis, her muddy feet scrambling up and over its metallic arms and mouths. On top was a button covered by a clear plastic guard. She flipped up the guard and mashed the button down, then whispered, “I am lost, take me home.”

  Immediately, the trash compactor stopped twitching, oriented itself back the way Melissa had come, and trundled off. She clung to it, her bony knees hooked into one of its bumpers, her fingers clutching the front edge, her slim body laid across the top. The little treads whirred and the compactor sped up with a flurry of dank water and mud as it carried them away from La Llorona, and then eventually with a burst of light, out of the Elemental Caverns entirely.

  “You did good work with the trash compactor,” the Old Man said, walking beside her down the center of the asphalt strip, “that took a lot of courage. I know you don’t like being underground.” Melissa looked up at him. He wore a simple cream-colored suit with a pink tie. Sometimes he dressed differently—when she met him he had been wearing sandals, khakis, and a patterned shirt—but he otherwise always looked the same with his lined and careworn face and the shiny implants at his temples, forehead and base of his skull.

  “I guess so,” she said, walking beside him. Her head came just above his elbow, and she wore the same long skirt and t-shirt that she had worn that morning into the caverns. The t-shirt had a stylized rocketship on the front with three colorful monkeys hanging off it as it shot into space.

  “We appreciate it, nonetheless. Even if we lack courage ourselves anymore.”

  “You mean you’re afraid?” she asked. “But you’re an adult.”

  “No, we’re not afraid, either. Not afraid, not courageous. It doesn’t apply to us any more.”

  “Because you . . . transcended?”

  “Yes,” he said, steering her toward the front steps of the safe building. The Castle. The other kids, all younger than her, had finished playing for the day and were heading back toward The Castle. Most of them were dirty, a few nicked up from playing rough, but they were otherwise healthy and in good spirits. They had a freedom now that they had lacked before, and they reveled in it.

  The only cost to that freedom was the occasional task laid on them by the Street. Most of the cleaning things she let them handle, but as the oldest, she took the difficult things like the trash compactor onto herself. She couldn’t let any of the younger ones risk themselves with La Llorona.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Feeling afraid?” he asked. “Or courageous?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not yet,” he said. She imagined a smile further creasing his face, but it remained calm. “We still remember it, after all. We remember the fear and courage of all of us. And that’s enough, in a way. Though it’s nice to actively see yours. We take some pleasure in knowing these things are still around and still possible.”

  “Is that why you like my art?”

  “Well, we like neo-primativist compositions. And your color choice is fairly unique for someone of your age and background.”

  “Thank you. I think.” She stopped at the base of the stairs, then turned to look up at him.

  “What for?” he asked.

  “For this,” she said, spreading her arms, indicating the Street as a whole. “You make it safe and clean and okay for us.”

  “You make it clean, you and your friends.”

  Melissa glanced up the stairs. Darkness was settling and the others had all gone inside. When she looked back, the Old Man was walking away, his hands in his pockets. Far beyond him, down at the east end of the Street, a ten-foot-tall block of walking metal, a checkpoint sentry, ambled forward awkwardly and then squatted to block that end off from unwanted guests. Another such sentry blocked the west end.

  As she kept looking to the east, a bright light flared over the city. The silhouetted skyline was darker than it had been this time a year ago. A pillar of light grew, glowing blue and white, reaching for the heavens. Melissa wondered what it was.

  An invocation for the Blue Lady lingered on Melissa’s tongue long after the pillar of light faded and vanished, but never passed her lips.

  “What’s out there?” Melissa asked the sentry the next day, craning her head as she looked up at the strips of steel along its side. “Now, I mean. It’s all changed. I don’t understand it anymore.”

  “You were out there before, weren’t you?” the sentry replied.

  Parts of the steel block could change and move, revealing barriers, maybe weapons even, but she couldn’t be sure of that. It was doing that now, to talk to her. The booming voice coming from a new porthole opening up. Small machine irises bloomed and twisted to point themselves at her.

  Nothing got past the sentry without the Street’s say-so. Except La Llorona.

  Melissa guessed that only the Blue Lady could stop the demon. But she hadn’t seen the Blue Lady since she came to rescue the Found Children.

  “Yes,” Melissa said. The sentry must know her story, she thought. But then, he hadn’t appeared until just after most of the adults in the city transcended. Maybe the sentry wasn’t like the rest of everything here on the Street, knowing what seemed like everything there was to know. “My mother and I lived on the streets for years, when I was little. She died four, maybe five years ago, I don’t know any more.”

  “How did you fare on the street?” the sentry asked.

  “Well enough,” she replied. “We sang songs for people on the streets, back when they were filled with people. Sometimes people put money in the cup. Sometimes we went to the shelters, but mom was scared of them.”

  “You still tell stories, don’t you?”

  “When the other children need them,” Melissa replied. “To explain the world.”

  “How often does that happen?”

  “All the time,” she said, flashing a smile at the sentry, and stepped across a steel ribbon in the road that marked the edge of the Street. Over to the other side. Nothing much happened, though she felt a tingle that told her the sentry had looked at her very closely. She turned her head and smiled again at the steel block and walked out into the north-south road. No vehicles used it any more, and outside of the Street, she could see weeds and grass had begun to sprout in the cracks.

  This road itself seemed to be a no-man’s land. “Her” street did not continue on the other side, there was just a blank wall, the side of what had been a large hospital that had declined rapidly in the last six months. There were hardly any patients any more. And those that needed help, she heard, got it from machines grown in their own homes.

  “It’s nice out there,” the Old Man said from behind her. She turned back. He leaned against the sentry, but she hadn’t seen or heard him approach. He was wearing jeans and sneakers now, with a tie-dyed t-shirt. “The transcended are pitching in to help the people left behind in a big way. It’s relatively safe for a girl on her own, even one as young as you. Safer than it was before you came to join us in The Castle.”

  “I like the Street,” she said, turning to face him now. A shiver ran down her spine as she stood in the middle of the road, knowing in that instinctual way that she should not be able to do this, to stand where cars had once whipped by, and more to stand outside the protection of the Street. Spirits were out here, demons and all the rest, like La Llorona. She looked around again and took in the vacant buildings, the closed off streets, the emptiness of it all. Far away, to the south, she could see figures moving across the road, dim outlines in the distance.

  “The Street likes you,” the Old Man said.

  “Are you the King of the Street?” Melissa asked. Or President. Or leader. She didn’t understand the new world.

  She’d barely understood the old one. The busy streets, the cars, the busy and stressed people. S
uits. Acrid air. Factories. Hunger. Steel buildings. Jobs and homes.

  Planes. She wondered if she’d dreamed them. Like metal birds, filled with people, going here and there, far over head. She missed the contrails.

  “No,” the Old Man said, “this is just a facet of the Street. This body was once an individual that lived here in one of the apartments. Now he is part of the Street, speaking to you with the voice of all of us. One of us.”

  Melissa still didn’t get it. She looked off in the distance, away from the Street and asked the same question she asked every week, just to reassure herself that she wasn’t trapped. “Can I leave the Street?”

  “If you want to,” the Old Man replied. “You’re not our prisoner. Or even our ward. Though we would have . . . concern for you. We would prefer you to stay.”

  “Concern?”

  “Accidents still happen. The world is safer, but not completely safe.”

  Melissa thought about La Llorona hidden away beneath the Street, hiding in the caverns down there. Was the Street completely safe either?

  She wondered if the Blue Lady would help her if she left the Street? She thought so. She had seen her, after all, in the Outskirts.

  But if Melissa left the Street, she would leave the Found Children alone. And who would warn them about La Llorona? The Street did not seem interested.

  “I’ll stay,” she said, and walked back through the sentry’s gates. “For now.”

  “. . . La Llorona lost her children a long, long time ago. Some say she drowned them, and was cast back into the world after she killed herself. And that’s why we must fear her. She’s looking for lost children,” Melissa said, looking around at the other children.

  Only ten of the thirty in The Castle sat and listened to her tales on the benches by the sidewalk, mostly the youngest ones. They sat with their lunch—provided, as always, by the Street—and listened in fascination edged with disbelief. Last week she had twelve listeners. More the month before.

  “I saw her in the Elemental Caverns,” Melissa said, stomping a thinly shod foot on the concrete sidewalk. “Right here. Right beneath our feet. She will take you and bind you and make you hers forever.”