Maybe my father didn’t take Roland’s suggestion. Maybe I’m fleeing for no reason.
Maybe no one is searching for me at all.
That thought makes me stop. I bend over, trying to catch my breath. Little spots dance in front of my eyes. I stand, brace a hand against a tree trunk, and blink, hoping I don’t pass out.
The crashing, ever so faint. I have heard it since yesterday.
The dogs bay when they tree a fox. They bark when they get close, letting their masters know that the fox is within sight.
This part of the forest is too dense for horseback riding. My father, Roland, my brother, they would have to come on foot.
I cannot hear them, either.
The idea that they would not come hurts more than the idea that they’re chasing me. It merely confirms that I have no value. That I am nothing to my father, my brother, and a man I once thought my beloved.
I am nothing.
The huffing gets even closer, and I see something white through the trees. White, yet filled with the colors of the rainbow.
My breath catches. I blink, wondering if I am so exhausted that I’m seeing visions.
Then the unicorn steps into the patch of trees. Its flank is scratched, its mane filled with leaves and burrs. It stares at me, the blue eyes filled with knowledge.
Stop running. Please.
The voice in my head is not my own. I lean against the tree, using it to hold me up.
I am so sorry. I didn’t know turning away would make them abandon you.
“How can you speak?” I whisper.
I don’t speak. I have thoughts. I can share them with women like you. It’s part of the magic.
The unicorn bows its head. The horn—which is not flaring with light—nearly hits a tree branch.
I didn’t want them to hurt you. I thought if they let you go, you would be safe. I didn’t realize until too late you belonged to them.
“Not any more.” My voice is weak, even though I’m no longer trying to whisper.
It’s better this way. You have no idea how cruel they are.
Because I closed my eyes. I did not want to see. They were part of my home.
But I wanted to get away. I wanted a perfect, happy life with Roland.
“How did you escape?”
They didn’t close the door. I followed you. They didn’t even realize I had left.
But they would. My father guards his possessions, at least the ones he values. The ones he doesn’t value get lost.
Like my sister.
“They’ll come for you.”
Yes.
Unlike me. They won’t come for me.
But they won’t catch me if I don’t want them to. We can stay together.
“Why would I stay with you?” I ask, then wince at the cruelty in my speech. Cruelty that hides some truth. Why would I stay with this thing? I don’t even know what it is.
I don’t know what I am either. Except that I do not fit there. Neither do you. We are of a kind, and we are alone. Let us stay together. I will help you travel, and you will help me learn. And somehow, we will stay away from them.
A shiver runs through me. “You read my thoughts.”
When they’re powerful enough.
“Only mine?”
Yes.
The unicorn raises its head. Our gazes meet. Its blue eyes are gentle.
It has never ever been cruel to me. In fact, it is the only one in my life who has ever heard me or done as I asked.
I step forward, hand extended. “May I touch you?”
Yes.
I do. The hair on its nose is rough beneath my fingers, like horsehair. The horn does not flare with light, but looks very solid.
The unicorn watches me, its body trembling.
Except for our breathing, the woods are silent. Not even a bird chirps. And no dogs bark, no humans crash through the bushes.
No one knows where we are.
“Have you ever seen the sea?” I ask.
I do not even know what a sea is. It continues to watch me, its mane shifting from red to pink to white to blue.
“It’s where my mother’s people live.” Where everyone laughs with joy, and doesn’t judge, where they marry not in front of a priest, but by clasping hands and vowing eternal love.
I believe in love, it says.
“So do I.” I smile. That’s enough, at least for a beginning.
I put my hand on its flank.
Together, the unicorn and I walk through the forest, away from my father’s land, across Roland’s, all the way to the sea.
© 2012 Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has won a couple of Hugos, a few more Asimov’s Readers Choice Awards, an AnLab award, and a couple Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice awards—and that’s just in the last few years. Her novels have hit the USA Today bestseller list, the Wall Street Journal and Publisher’s Weekly lists, and the extended list of the New York Times (before anyone was allowed to say the extended list was important). She’s also had bestsellers in Great Britain and France. WMG Publishing has just reissued all of her fantasy novels, including the seven volumes of the extremely popular Fey series (with more to come). She’s also writing two science fiction series—one in the Retrieval Artist universe and one in the Diving universe—two mystery series under the name Kris Nelscott, two goofy fantasy romance series as Kristine Grayson, and one really strange futuristic romance series as Kris DeLake. And that doesn’t count editing the new anthology series, Fiction River. No wonder she never leaves her house.
The Sounds of Old Earth
Matthew Kressel
Earth has grown quiet since everyone’s shipped off to the new one. I walk New Paltz’s empty streets with an ox-mask tight about my face. An acidic rain mists my body, and a thick fog obscures the vac-sealed storefronts. Last week they hauled the Pyramids of Giza to New Earth. The week before, Stonehenge. The week before that, Versailles and a good chunk of the Great Wall. But the minor landmarks are too expensive to move, the NEU says, and so New Paltz’s Huguenot Street, seven centuries old, will remain here, to be sliced to pieces in a few months when the planetary lasers begin to cut the Earth apart.
I pump nano into my bloodstream to alleviate my creeping osteoarthritis and nod to a few fellow holdouts. We take our strolls through these dusty streets at ten every morning, our little act of rebellion against the mandatory evacuation orders. I wave hello to Marta, ninety-six, in her stylishly pink ox-mask. I shake hands with Dr. Wu, who performed the op to insert my cranial when I was a boy. I smile at Cordelia, one hundred and thirty-three, as she trots by on her quad servo-legs. All of us have lived in New Paltz our entire lives and all of us plan to die here.
Someone laughs behind me, a sound I haven’t heard in a long time. A group of teenage boys and girls ride ancient turbocycles over the cracked pavement toward me. They skid to a halt and their eager, flushed faces take me in. None wear ox-masks, which is against the law. I like them already.
“Hey shinhun!” a boy says. “Do you know where the frogs are?”
Before I can answer, an attractive girl with a techplant on her cheek blows a dreadlock of green hair from her eyes and says, “We heard some wankuzidi has an old house where he keeps a gose-load of frogs.” A boy pops a wheelie and another takes a hit of braino from an orange inhaler. A third puffs a cigalectric and exhales fluorescent smoke.
“Behind my house I have a pond with a few frogs still alive,” I say.
“Xin!” she exclaims. “How ’bout you ride with us? I’m Lin.”
These kids are as high as orbitals, but it’s not as if I have much left to lose. “Abner,” I say.
And just like that I’m hanging on to her waist as we speed toward my house over broken roads no ground vehicle has used in decades. The wind in my face feels exhilarating.
“We’re from Albany,” Lin says, “We tried taking the old Interstate down, but after Juan got tossed when he hit a cheeda crack, we
decided to go local. Took us yungyeh!”
The stascreen around my property makes my fifty acres of forest flicker like water in sunlight. It’s a matter of pride that I keep it functioning at high efficiency; after all, I designed the damn technology. When we pass through the screen’s charged threshold, I take off my ox-mask, and breathe deep. The kids smile when they smell the fertile earth, the decaying leaves.
“It don’t smell like this in Albany,” Lin says.
We park the cycles on the overgrown grass and I lead them into the woods behind my house. The kids stare up at the huge maples and birches and fall quiet.
“The frogs croak loudest at sunset and before it rains,” I say. “That’s when the males are trying to attract a mate.” The kids giggle as they leap over branches. “If you really want to hear them, you should stay until it gets dark.”
“You got anything to eat?” a boy says. “We haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
I search inside the house and return with some readimades, pretty much all you can buy on Earth these days, while the kids shudder and wobble as they inhale braino. The green-haired Lin wanders off to vomit in the trees.
“Is she going to be all right?” I ask a boy.
“Oh, Lin always pukes after her first hit. Want some?” He offers a red inhaler, but I decline.
We sit beside the pond, all of us squeezed on a log. Lin sits next to me, and I pop up the straw of the readimade for her. “You okay?” I say.
“Yeah, I always get all shunbeen when I deepen.”
“It’s probably none of my business,” I say, “but shouldn’t you kids be in school or something?”
“School closed four months ago,” she says. “Not enough teachers.”
“So what do you do all day?”
She wipes saliva from her cheek and shrugs. “I don’t know. This.”
Another boy goes off to puke in the woods.
“What about you?” she says. “You live here all by yourself?”
I nod.
“And what do you do all day? Hang out with the frogs?”
“Most of my time I just try to keep the stascreen working.”
“That your job or something?”
“Used to be. I was a stascreen engineer for fifty-one years. I designed the nanofilters that keep ecosystems like this free of envirotoxins. But the NRDC laid me off four years back.”
“Why? This place is xin!”
I smile wanly. “Because toxfiltering’s a dead business now. People are only interested in making new life, not preserving the old.”
She seems to take me in for the first time. “And how old is this place, Abner? These trees look cheeda ancient.”
“I know that when my ancestor built this house four hundred years ago, the frog pond was already here.”
She sighs. “Fucking NEU making you leave this place?”
“They’re making everyone leave.”
She throws a rock into the pond, and a dozen frogs squeak away in fright.
“Please,” I say, gently touching her arm. “You’ll scare them off.”
“How long?” she says, giving me a tender look, and I’m not sure if she means the frogs or my eviction.
“Soon.”
The kids grow hungry again. I had been saving some hard-to-find vegisteaks for my grandkids, but they haven’t visited in ages. As I grill them on the deck the smoke rises through the trees, and the dipping sun sends girders of light through the branches.
The kids inhale more braino, howl with laughter, and Lin pukes again. And when they tire, I glimpse something desperate in their bloodshot eyes, something I’ve seen in the expressions of Cordelia and Dr. Wu and Marta and the other holdouts. Regret doesn’t spare you just because you’re young.
“You cycled all the way from Albany for this?” I ask Lin.
“Nothing but dust and skyscrapers there,” she says. “No real trees. We heard this was xin. Do you have kids, Abner?”
The question catches me off-guard. “Yeah, a son and daughter. And two grandkids. You sort of remind me of my granddaughter, Rachael.”
She pauses to consider this. “They come here lots?”
“Not anymore.”
“Why not? I’d be here every day.”
“They’ve moved.” I point to the sky.
She frowns, and her body sags like an old tree. “We’re moving too.”
“New Earth?”
She harrumphs. “Nah, that’s only for rich kids. We’re going to Wal-Mart Toyota.”
“Haven’t heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t. It’s like cheeda ancient, one of the first orbitals. But you gotta go where they send you, or else, you know?”
“I know,” I say, staring at the upside-down trees reflected in the water.
Night creeps over the forest and the frogs begin their mating calls in earnest. The croaking rises to a din, and the kids pause and listen. The glorious stars emerge, and I’m not sure if it’s my imagination, but the frogs seem to plead to them, over and over again, “Save us, save us, save us!”
We listen for a while, until the frogs tire. “It’s late,” I say. “It’s a long way back to Albany. Why don’t you kids stay? There are plenty of beds.”
So we head inside. I set them up with fresh linen I haven’t used in years, and during the night I hear fucking and shuffling and laughing as I pour myself tumbler after tumbler of rye whiskey until I pass out. Late in the night, I hear someone whimpering outside my door, and I rise groggily from bed. Lin sits in the hallway, her eyes as red as cinders as she looks up at me.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wiping away tears. “I didn’t know that was your bedroom.”
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she says as she climbs to her feet.
“You okay?”
“I was just thinking. You don’t know us, Abner, but you welcomed us into your home.”
I shrug. “This place was made for guests.”
She stares at the walls. “Must have been beautiful, when it was full of people.”
I nod. “It was.”
She stands there, and again she reminds me of my granddaughter who I never see. I want to hug her and tell her the future will be xin, that everything will work out, eventually. But I’m too drunk to lie. “It’s late, Lin. Go to bed.”
A tear rolls down her cheek. She nods and turns away. I close the door, feeling as if I’ve missed something important. It takes me forever to fall back asleep.
The next morning, the kids are gone. The house looks as if a tornado has blown through. But one bedroom has been tidied, and there’s a note on the nightstand.
“The frogs are beautiful. You are beautiful. Thank you for a perfect day. —Lin.”
I hold the note in my hand and stare out the window into the empty yard. I already miss their laughter.
Several months before I received the evac order, I visited New Earth for the first time. My son Josef played the guide and took me to the Ishibuto-Mori preserve, a dense rainforest on the northern hemisphere. Giant sequoias planted a few years ago had already grown hundreds of feet tall, carrion flowers had been gengineered to smell like cotton candy, and the rains came precisely at 2:00 p.m. every day.
Clear plexi walls kept us safe on a paved path that led us, like Dorothy to Oz, to John Muir Mall. It was a palatial marketplace where they seemed to have anticipated every human need. Food, clothing, jewelry, a pub, an immersion cinema, a spa. All was here, square in the middle of the rainforest. A holohost welcomed us to the mall’s courtyard and carefully explained, as if he were speaking to children, how Old Earth had become uninhabitable, how humanity’s first home was ruined forever because Those Before had no appreciation for the natural world. But the Ishibuto-Mori Corporation, along with dozens of other companies, were hard at work ensuring that New Earth avoided this fate.
As my son and I ate oversized burgers in the courtyard of Pfizer’s McDonald’s, I noticed that no one looked up when Earth rose a
bove the forest canopy. Before the next scheduled rain we left for home.
Josef’s family lived in a spacious and many-windowed apartment on the ninety-seventh floor of a three-hundred-story tower. Luxury condos like these, Josef said, were popping up all over New Earth. My heart warmed when I saw my grandkids, Rachael and Pim. It had been several years since I’d seen them in person—they didn’t visit Earth anymore. Today was Pim’s twelfth birthday.
My grandson blew out his candles and we all shared papaya cake. On cues from my daughter-in-law, a shining mahogany andro poured coffee, brought out cookies, and cleared the dirty dishes. I felt like a princely CEO. On Earth natural grain was absurdly expensive and hard to come by, but on New Earth it seemed as plentiful as the scheduled rain.
“Pim’s not the only one celebrating today,” Josef said, in between sips of coffee. “Tell Grandpa the good news, Rach.”
My granddaughter beamed and said, “I got a full scholarship to GE Sinopec!”
“GE Sinopec?” I said.
“An orbital university!”
“Oh, wa!” I said. “A full scholarship? That’s xin!”
“As a reward,” Josef said, “Esther and I have decided to buy Rach a small lobber. You’d be surprised at how affordable they’ve become.”
“I can visit Mom and Dad on weekends,” Rachael said, “and fly back to school on Sundays. And Grandpa, there’s this low-fuel maneuver called a Hohmann Transfer that lets you fly over to Old Earth in a couple hours. Me and Leva are definitely headed there when they start dismantling it, to get a closer view.”
“Rachael,” Esther said with an admonishing tone. “Why don’t you see if Grandpa wants more coffee?”
“He’s got coffee. And isn’t that what you bought the andro for?”
“Rachael, don’t be rude!”
“But, Mom, his cup is full!”
“Rachael Kopperfeld!”
“Please!” I said. “Yes, yes, they’re dismantling Old Earth. It’s no gaise secret. Why does everyone avoid that subject around me?”
“Because every time we bring it up,” Josef said, “you go on a rant about how they’re tearing down your home.”
I stared at my son. “It was once your home too, if you remember.”
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32 Page 21