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 20 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 100 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 100. 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 20 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 20 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 20 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.
I sob, and sob, until sleep finds me.
I wake to a hand on my shoulder. It is a young man, but I do not know him. He is dressed in the clothes of a Bell captain. He has long dark hair, pale skin, and such a yearning in his eyes.
“Do you know Temetry?” I ask him.
He shakes his head slowly. He is sad, I feel that much.
“No,” he says. “But I can help you find it.”
I sit up. In his eyes is a desire burning as deep as my own.
“How?”
He steps back, and gestures to the involution hall around us. I rub the tears from my eyes, and see there on every dimple, at every one of the 100 stations, a Bell captain looking back at me.
It is impossible. There is only one captain to a Bell. My jaw drops slack.
“They want to help,” he says. “All of us, we want to help.”
I look around at them, back to the young man, and feel something cinch tight in my chest. There is a weight there, it has been there for such a long time, too much for me to bear. Perhaps now I will have the strength.
“Why?”
He smiles. It is sad, but laced with quiet strength.
“Because you give us hope.”
He does not wait. He moves to my side, where he takes up the one remaining dimple. I look around once more. The hall is full, as it has not been since I was a girl.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
And the involutions begin.
It is more than it ever was before.
Where it was a torrent before, now it is an inferno. It is chaos incarnate, blazing through our minds, a violent tsunami of impossibilities to be ordered and stacked.
And we stack them. Beneath the torrent, we stand. From its burning and furious heart we hundred Bell-captains forge the pure and startling music of the branes, each sounding a perfect note that entwines perfectly with the others. As the brutal force of the anthropic plane blasts across us, our notes rise and interweave like pillars into the sky, glissandoing harmonies I never heard before, chords that should ring false but now, under the combined force of our involutions, ring true. Our symphony swells through the chaos, growing into a thing larger than any one of us, larger than the sum of us, larger than Subsidence itself ever thought possible.
I soar on it. I feel it propelling me from behind, feel the will of the others beneath me, lifting me above the inferno, giving me the strength to do what I must.
I toll the clapper with their strength, and the Bell roars across the empty gulf of space faster than it ever flew before. I trawl the anthropic plane with their will, gathering up the long-faded remnants of my Brilliance, tracking the distant branic echoes that were once the word Temetr
y, sung out into nothing.
Faster, further, we hurtle back through the long years of my lonely voyage, and I feel the captains trembling around me. The inferno is too furious, the task too vast, and one by one they reach their limits. The anthopic flow overcomes them, and they slip beneath the Bell.
But we do not stop, nor slow. Less than ten remain, but we have been honed to incandescent perfection by the raging of the branes. I stand at the cutting edge of our Brilliance and hack into the decayed trail I left as a child, fusing the many parts together until the path emerges, and leads back, and back, and back.
The young man by my side shudders and drops limp. Somewhere far off simulacra carry him away, but I cannot stop. I am roaring now, tearing into the meat of the fabric of all things, forcing entropy to reform, meshing light from dead stars with the frequencies of interstellar dust blown on solar winds, building a tapestry of all chaos, of all order, pounding it in the furnace of this collective mind, smashing it until I totter under its weight, forging from it the single molten trail that I must follow.
Explosions, as the world begins again. Light floods out. Subsidence is born on a far-gone planet, and grows out into the galaxy. They spread, and spread, until their Empire is stretched so thin there is no union remaining, and entropy consumes them. All that remains is the Bells, their last vestige of civilization, ferrying their memory to worlds slowly sinking back into isolation and simplicity.
I read the history of all the Bell captains in the diffuse echoes of their Brilliance, and I understand why they have followed me here. Without Temetry, I would be just like them; as empty as Subsidence, as empty as their Bells, left orbiting like hollow moons about dead and dying planets.
The inferno rises, and rises, and at last, breaks.
Involutions rendered a hundred-minds strong finally crash as spume all about me. Everything is rewritten. Everything is under the Bell. We collapse, and around us this vast ship finally comes to a long, lone toll, as we snuff down upon a dry world, a grey desert planet, stocked with heat sinks and Gideon bores.
I stagger to the glass to look out over the world that was once mine. It is all craters. I fall in the corridor, struggling to hold on to what I am, as the sands billow up around us.
Simulacra wake me with water. The corridors are empty. I remember the long search, but there is no sign of the other captains. Perhaps they have already gone out, to my world, to find Temetry. Perhaps they all fell under the Bell.
I look out and see this planet’s atmosphere sparkling like corolla borealis, flecks of mist catching the reflections off my Bell’s sloping sides. I feel the branes thrumming around me, through my mind, filling me with possibilities.
I exit with nothing but the captain’s clothes on my back. This place is a desert, and the air is hot and dry. I feel the heat from their sinks radiating up from the grey sand. I walk a little way, past the silver Gideon bores, past the crowds of people watching and waiting. I see the 100, hastily turned out and waiting for admittance, flanked by their parents, grand and fierce expressions lashed across their faces.
They watch in confusion as I climb a dune and sit at the top. The vast weight of my Bell towers above me, shadows everything. I am yet its captain.
A man walks from the crowd to join me. He is perhaps as old as me, dressed in simple brown smocks. He sits by my side, but says nothing, only looks at me as though he knows me, with sorrow, with love.
He holds something out to me, on the palm of his hand. It is a speckled white sand-hopper. It is a pretty thing, its long legs stretched out to skein it over the hot desert surface. I reach out, thinking to touch it, expecting it to flee, but it does not move. I touch its back, its side.
It is folded paper. I lift it from his hand, turn it over in my hands. The folds and twists of its craftsmanship are stunning. All of its limbs, its sinewy body, its whip-thin antenna, are folded from a single sheet of paper. It has been twisted into a single side, like a simple Möbius strip, non-orientable.
I have never seen anything like it. It is beautiful. In all my travels, in all my years upon the Bell, I have never seen anything so alive brought out of the folding.
I turn to the mute man, look into his eyes.
“Temetry?”
About the Author
Michael John Grist is a science fiction & fantasy author and ruins photographer who lives in Tokyo, Japan. His stories can be found in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Ideomancer, and Andromeda Spaceways, and he is currently writing an epic fantasy novel. He runs a website featuring his writing and photographs of the ruins or ‘haikyo’ of Japan; filled with dark short stories and matching images of abandoned theme parks and ghost towns. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/michaelgrist.
From Their Paws, We Shall Inherit
Gary Kloster
Monkey waited until the sky over the Gulf had gone all black and empty except for a billion stars before he pulled himself back onto the sailboat.
“Ceegee’s roughed your stuff,” he said, perched dripping on the rail. “They rough you too, Cesar?”
I spit in the ocean. When the cutter caught me, the ceegee boys had swarmed aboard and slammed me down so that some officer, all pretty in her white and brass, could question me.
Who’re you, where you going, where you been? Where’s the sugar? Over and over she’d asked, while her boys tore the boat apart. She hadn’t liked my answers. She knew I was lying, even when they couldn’t find anything. Finally, she had her boys rip my shorts off and gave me to her machines.
The ceegee robots had tentacles, reeking of rubber and lube. Those thin limbs had pushed between my teeth and down my throat, burrowed up my nose and shoved themselves deep into my ass. Searching all my hidden places.
They had wrecked my boat, and then they wrecked me. Those slick machines had left me choking, shitting, bleeding, puking. Sobbing. For all that wreckage and pain though, they hadn’t found one speck of sugar.
Because a little monkey I’d found floating in the middle of the gulf days before had looked at the empty horizon and told me the Coast Guard was coming.
“Ceegee assholes,” I said. “Course they’d rough a South Padre boy.”
“You want to rough them back?” Monkey’s eyes, glittering with starlight, met mine.
“How?”
Monkey curled his tail in and untied a thin white rope from it. “Haul this up.”
“The sugar?”
“Yes. Plus something I took from their boat while they were busy with you.”
“A gun?”
“Gun’ll just get you killed,” Monkey said. “Got you something better.”
The rope ended in my drybag, and I opened it up. Three sealed boxes of sugar. Illegal pharma, or nano, or data or who-knows. South Padre pirates just called it all sugar, and gave dumbasses like me boats and money to haul it. Something else nestled between the boxes, a thin tablet of glass and aluminum.
“What am I suppose to do with a ceegee computer?” I could feel the rawness in my throat, in my ass, the ache deep inside me from being helpless and naked and violated while that ceegee officer and her boys had watched. A gun seemed like a better gift.
“Rough them,” Monkey said. “I can teach you.”
I frowned, turning the thing in my hands, not sure. Just a computer, encoded, locked, useless to me, but Monkey gave me a grin.
Why should I argue with the magic talking monkey? He’d saved me from either being sent to a work camp by the ceegees or being crucified by the pirates back home. So I held the computer and listened to him talk, and slowly the hurt and fear curled up inside me into a knot tight enough to ignore.
Excerpted from the astronomy site, Constellation Prize:
Really? Unexplained astronomical phenomena? Possible supernova? Really?
Worst. Cover up. Ever.
Sure, most of the sheep don’t know. They’re too busy sucking off the media streams to notice anything, even lights in the fucking sky. But they’ll know soon enough. We’
ll force those apes to look up for once.
We’ve got pictures of the flare, and the tracking data before and after. So what if the gubmint has shut the hell up? We don’t need their fancy toys for this. We’ve already plotted the flight paths for Bogies 1 and 2. We can watch them ourselves — Big Brother gets my telescope when he takes it from my cold, dead hands.
We just have to agree on the narrative. We know what’s happening — a ship is tearing ass through our system right now, and last night it fired something off in our direction.
We know that. We can’t be mealy-mouthed. Maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that, can’t be sure, yadda yadda fuck you. We know. Second guessing now is just helping the cover-up. (Yeah, and I know some of you guys in the comments are plants. Eat shit and die, federal sockpuppets!)
Possible supernova. Unexplained phenomena.
ALIENS, MOTHERFUCKERS!
We know.
How stupid do they think we are?
Well, I guess we did vote for them.
“Can I pet your monkey?” my sister Sophie asked, sitting on the balcony next to me, her back against the rust-rotted rail.
“He doesn’t like kids,” I said, but Monkey scampered down from my shoulder into her lap.
She smirked and ran her fingers through his fur. “See? He knows I’m not a kid, Cesar.”
I tapped the tablet in my hands, marking my place in the trojan wiki Monkey had me reading and set it down to stare at my sister. Thirteen, and scary tall all of a sudden, with unexpected girl curves rounding her skinny body. No, she wasn’t a kid anymore. That’s why she spent so much time in our rooms now, so the pirates down below wouldn’t notice her.
Hurricane Mindy had torn the south Texas coast to shreds, and only the newest and toughest of the resorts and condos on our barrier island had survived, broken teeth jutting from sandy gums that shifted and bled with every new storm. The mainlanders had given them up, and now they belonged to the squatters who’d refused to leave, like my mother, and to the pirates. With broken ships and garbage they had built a raft city between the towers, a port for the sugar trade, a rat hole where they could hide from the ceegee patrols circling out in the gulf.
Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 Page 18