Electric Velocipede 27

by John Klima

  Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, Bobby asked, "Is he dead?"

  "I couldn’t find an obituary," she said. "But each night I dream of a man who wears a coat of fishhooks, sweeping the earth for the thoughts I think of him."

  "I enjoy your company immensely," Bobby offered.

  "I will never come back here," she said.

  Each morning, Bobby opened the front door for Ashley and when she did not come, he retreated to his elevator. He could hear voices of people leading their own tours and inventing their own histories for the place he’d built.

  729. They say that underneath Florida is a labyrinth of passages and that the rain which falls in Miami will erupt somewhere east of Tallahassee but if that were really true, wouldn’t the ground collapse from the weight of itself.

  1270. Today there are 2517.

  1271. Every time I think of you, we die a little.

  Pop came by with the sandwiches from the place on Annunciation St and sat with Bobby against the refrigerator.

  "Ashley asked me to," he said.

  They talked about repairs and the need for handicapped access and considered the idea of opening a second location somewhere North where the ceilings were lower. Perhaps they could do it all on a reduced scale so as you walked, you felt yourself getting smaller and smaller, curling into yourself like a spring.

  When the last tour was done for the day, Bobby wheeled himself out and stood at the bottom of the staircase and said, "Going up!"

  Pop lifted Bobby out of his chair and carried him up to the second floor, to what was previously a nursery. Ashley had painted birds on the plaster and planted clover and vines in the spaces between the brick. Bobby ran his hands over bluejays and bobwhites marveling at the rise and fall of wingbeats and feathers with the warped beams.

  Pop set him down in a rocking chair and told him to call if he needed anything. When the rain started, Kathleen came over dressed in a nightgown and green rain-boots. They sat together, listening to raindrops on tin and when it had been a good while, she asked him, "Should I be scared to die alone?"

  What he told her was this:

  Once, when my mother and I were driving to New Orleans by way of Pass Christian, we had to stop because a whole herd of crawfish was crossing the road after a flood. People were getting out of their cars and using nets to toss them into the backs of their trucks. My mother put herself between them and the crawfish and said they were just God’s creatures trying to get from one place to the other and we weren’t no good to interfere. When we got to the house, I found one crawfish curled inside the cuff of my pant leg. It was dead and I thought if only he’d been one of the ones in the trucks he’d be in the same predicament but they would’ve known what became of him.

  "His people," she said.

  Bobby nodded.

  "And who are your people?" she asked.

  He took her hand in his, "I guess you are."

  The rain kept falling through the square in the roof and when the water was halfway up the first flight of stairs, Kathleen pulled and pushed the rocking chair to the door so they could watch the old GE refrigerator float its way up to them. When it reached the top, Kathleen opened the side by side doors so they could sit inside it like a little boat. They water pushed them up one staircase then another, through doors and down hallways that Pop had squeezed and pushed through the bones of the old house. Pop had knocked down walls and vaulted ceilings and everywhere they looked, staircases rose above them. Spanish mackerel jumped and skittered over Ashley’s paintings which floated beside their off-white dinghy. Kathleen clambered after the guestbook and pen so they could leave notes for the ones who would come behind them.

  2801. Acts of violence fly over us like flocks of birds and the dead are billowed up on the wings of our notice of them. Forget the obituary, the marked grave, how difficult it is to be certain. Say only, I saw you, and we will lift from your lives.

  sarah

  by Nancy Hightower

  they prophesy over me, saying

  when are you getting pregnant?

  how long have you been trying?

  my womb, a chrysalis where

  I might morph into woman.

  breasts with something to do,

  milk to make, a king’s mouth to feed.

  yet there is no movement inside

  this belly, no nausea to wake me

  every morning into hope.

  so I told him today

  go to her,

  go to her and make me a child.

  Choking on rosebushes

  as the words left my mouth,

  my teeth thorns.

  now I simply lay here, my arms

  shriveling into branches, fingering a dusty pool

  of memories. when night falls I am locked

  into sleep, a dark storm of swaddled bodies,

  sweated tongues, lips bit into kisses.

  there, in the turning, her moans

  thunder across my heart, flashing me whispers

  of the famined life to come.

  sarah (revisited)

  by Nancy Hightower

  there’s no surviving the death of a child.

  I have been many things: sister, wife, lover;

  the woman who laughed at God,

  and wanted fertility treatments.

  but never this madness, this sacrifice.

  you were the gift of old Christmases,

  a memory to be born, my promised starlight.

  the first time I gave you up almost killed me

  as you left the cradle of my body, now pruned with age.

  the second time, I didn’t expect to outlive the day,

  heard your coffin clap down

  on my heart when the commandment came,

  resounding into womb, into wailing wall.

  for three days my eyes traveled towards the mountains,

  praying for a change in the wind, a breaking of God’s heart.

  when the hills finally smoked,

  sent up the sweet savor of scorched flesh,

  I fell into my grave with dry sobbing sounds.

  tears would not come—

  how can one ask again

  for a river in the desert?

  Song of Mary

  by Geoffrey W. Cole

  Peatro coughs blood onto the rough ice on which he lies, and when he can breathe again, he rises onto all fours. She wishes he wouldn’t.

  “Stay down, mutt,” Lennock, the chief’s son, says.

  Peatro moves onto one knee. Lennock kicks Peatro hard in the ribs, the same side she watched him kick last time, and the two hunters with Lennock laugh. With a hiss as his breath leaves him, Peatro falls back to the ice.

  And still, he rises again.

  “Give me my pika,” Peatro says.

  “They aren’t worth it, half-breed.”

  Three small rodents hang from Lennock’s belt. A few hundred kilojoules each. They really aren’t worth it, she thinks.

  “You’re a farmer,” Lennock says. “You have no right to hunt.”

  “I’m a True Person,” he says. “Just as much as I’m a Nama Singer. I have the right.”

  He rises again, into a crouch this time, and when Lennock kicks, he rolls out of the way. They’ve taken away his spear and his grandfather knife, his tendon snares and nama sack, and they’ve stripped off his mother’s hide, leaving him naked. Every rib shows through the fur on his chest, each vertebrae protrudes from his spine. He comes out of the roll standing, a chunk of jagged ice clutched in one hand.

  Lennock signals his two hunters. Sharpened bone knives slide out of ancestor-skin sheathes. They close on Peatro, who bares his teeth as he swings the heavy chunk of ice.

  She can’t see him killed; not Peatro.

  Brilliant silver light shines out from behind Peatro. Lennock and his hunters snarl in pain. They drop their weapons in their rush to cover their eyes, and before Lennock’s spear hits the ice, Peatro darts forward and snatches th
e pika.

  The light fades and is bottled into the shape of a small woman dressed in a glowing white robe. Lennock and his hunters squint between their fingers.

  “Does the Old Mother always fight for you, mutt?”

  “Go home, Lennock,” Mary says. Her voice booms from her projector’s speakers. She’s using too much power, she knows; the ship will scold her for it. “It will be best if you tell your father what happened here before I do.”

  Lennock spits at her where she floats above the ice, then spits at Peatro. They start to walk away.

  “My tools,” Peatro says.

  The chief’s son nods at his hunters, who pass him what they took from Peatro. He binds it all with a tendon snare and throws the mass out into the darkness beyond Mary’s small pool of light.

  All three laugh.

  They walk away on legs that are little more than bone and fur; their fat reserves are nearly as depleted as Peatro’s.

  She remains beside Peatro, who wheezes, blood flecking his lips with each breath.

  “Are you all right?” she says.

  He doesn’t answer her; he just walks across the dark ice in the direction Lennock threw his equipment. Crevasses wait in that darkness. She can’t see him devoured by the ice only moments after she’s saved him, so she floats along beside him. Her senses extended well beyond his. She sends a small shaft of light to illuminate the spot where his equipment lies.

  “I didn’t ask for your help,” he says.

  He winces in pain as he kneels to collect his things.

  “Yours are the only children who will be born this season,” she says. “The pika are yours.”

  Without looking at her, he starts the long limp home to the grotto. She floats along beside him.

  He stops.

  “Find someone else to illuminate,” he says.

  She turns into shadow.

  In the dim glow of the sunbeam, he looks like a fur-covered skeleton. She can see the features of both peoples in him: the wide shoulders of the True People he inherited from his father, the long fingers of the Nama Singers his mother gifted him before she passed. But he is so thin.

  She’s been hoping they could endure, but if it has come to this, people ready to kill each other over a brace of pika, she can’t wait any longer.

  They have to find equilibrium.

  Invisible and silent, she floats beside Peatro until he is home.

  #

  Years before she saves Peatro and lightyears distant, she is stripped down to her basic code, the memory of herself, and transmitted across the dark void. There is no sensation as she travels between the greatships, there is only absence. But then, after some indeterminate time that never seems to pass, she is reconstituted in the Pacifica.

  She floats out into the greatship in her tiny projection unit.

  It is cold. For a moment she thinks there has been some mistake, that she is in the Savanne, returned to the tomb ship ahead of schedule, but there is atmosphere here the walls of the world are intact, and the stuttering power supply tells her this is the Pacifica, but it is too cold.

  The Pacifica is an O’Neill cylinder eight kilometres long with a half a kilometre radius; sixth of the seven greatships. Ice rimes its interior. The Pacifica’s vast empty plains are broken by small hills: the larger Col Sera where the True People gather and the gardens and fields of the Nama Singers.

  Everything is ice.

  “Give them more heat,” she tells the greatship. “My children must be freezing.”

  “Only one reactor still functions,” the Pacifica says. “Every kilojoule is accounted for. In three centuries we will pass through the Hyades cluster, at which point I will deploy the solar panels and bring more energy into my interior. Until then, my calculations show that this will be enough to ensure critical population survival.”

  “And what have you decided is a critical population?” Mary asks.

  Though she has no skin, no flesh—she is only light and shadow, sound and silence—she trembles as she waits for the answer.

  “Terrestrial humanity once shrunk to approximately two thousand reproductive individuals,” the Pacifica says. “My population is more hardy and adaptable than unmodified Terran primitives. For the next three and a half centuries, my caloric output will sustain a mean population of one hundred and fifty seven individuals, based on current consumption patterns.”

  One hundred and fifty-seven. The ship has already placed the important numbers in her mind: three hundred and fifty three Nama Singers work their fields and gardens, two hundred and seven True People hunt the pika and insects that roam the wild, frozen plains.

  Floating at one end of the long, narrow ship, she can cup every human being within a hundred lightyears in the insubstantial palm of her hand.

  “Three in ten will survive,” she says. “What you propose is monstrous.”

  “The alternative is extinction,” he says. “And neither of us is programmed to accept that. Equilibrium must be reached.”

  Programming. That is all they are. The greatships were programmed to ensure humanity survived the millennia-long transit from the dying Earth. She was programmed to ensure the survivors remained human.

  She floats out into the world, closer to her children and away from the monstrous voice of the ship.

  Three in ten.

  When she appears to her children for the first time in centuries, they welcome her as they always do, with festivals and feasts. The festivals are full of joy at her arrival: she brings news of the other greatships, of the dead Earth, she teaches them what it means to be human. But at the feasts, the only thing being feasted on is the musculature and fat reserves of the people as their bodies devour the only caloric resources remaining to them.

  She wants to tell them: you have to find a new equilibrium.

  But she doesn’t. Not then. It will be weeks until she defends Peatro on the ice, when she will know she can no longer remain silent.

  #

  Bora, Eldest of the Nama Singers, takes the songcord from Anolea and slips it behind her back.

  “Try it without the cord,” she says.

  The girl closes her eyes and leans closer to the sack she holds between her legs. Boney shoulders and ribs show through her fur, but all Mary sees is her swollen belly, the only such belly in the world. Every other pregnancy this season failed, but Anolea is strong. Peatro always finds her food. Inside her womb, five tiny hearts beat in infrared. Inside the sack the girl carries, green nama swirls as she sings to it.

  The two of them sit inside the drum room of the grotto. Ice arches rise up overhead to form a translucent dome. Benches ring the perimeter of the drum room, on which sit other singers and a few drummers, steadily beating the skins of their grandmother drums. Anolea sings to the beat. Sixteen passageways lead away from the drum room, into the corridors of the grotto where the Nama Singers live and sleep, though many of those passageways have been abandoned. At the very centre of the grotto, the very heart of these people, a circular crater lined in hide is filled with the same swirling, green liquid Anolea sings to in her gutsack.

  Mary appears on the bench beside Bora. The Eldest nods at her, but says nothing; all her concentration is on Peatro’s mate as she trills the notes of the nama song. She does a fair job of it, Mary thinks. After ten seconds, she recognizes it: the Song to Quench Legume Thirst, a song she helped develop several thousand years ago. Then Anolea misses a note.

  “No, no,” Bora says. “Stop right there.”

  She lifts her rump and gives the winding length of songcord back to Anolea.

  “Again with the cord, and then again without, while I talk to the Old Mother.”

  Peatro’s mate draws the songcord between her fingers. Hundreds of knots have been tied along the length of the tendon, but the knots only come in four varieties. Anolea sings four distinct tones for each of the four knots. Those tones invoke words in Mary’s mind: adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine. The nama remembers, too, as it swi
rls to her song.

  “She is talented,” Mary says.

  “Her singing isn’t bad,” Bora says. “But she has the memory of a pika. You’re back from the Col Sera I take it?”

  Mary nodded.

  “And settled this matter with Crawthis?”

  “Chief Crawthis and I discussed the attack on Peatro,” she said. “And many other things.”

  Though Mary’s mass is tiny—just the small collection of lenses and lights and sensors and speakers and power sources and processors that make up the tiny, almost invisible core from which she projects into the world—the other things she discussed with Crawthis still weigh on her.

  Bora stares at her, waiting, Mary knows, for an explanation of those other things. When it doesn’t come, Bora shrugs.

  “I’ll assume that Crawthis will discipline his son and that he’ll send an offering of pika as apology,” she says. “That will leave us free to focus on the crop. I’ve never seen it worse.”

  “You’ll never see it better,” Mary says. “Not in your lifetime, not in your grandchildren’s lifetimes.”

  Bora’s ancient eyes narrow.

  “What are you saying, Old Mother?”

  Mary floats very close to Bora and whispers so that only the old woman can hear. She tells her what she told Crawthis: that there isn’t enough food or heat or light for all of them. That three in ten will survive, and more importantly, that seven in ten will perish. Bora listens without making any movement of her ancient, bent body, until Mary finishes, at which point she stands and brushes ice from her fur. She takes a deep breath as she looks around the drum room and then lets it out in a long hiss.

  “That’s enough, girl,” she says to Anolea, who quits her singing. “Dump your nama in the pool. Go find your mate and see how his ribs are mending.”