“Caitlin,” Josh says, and then all at once his voice changes. He stops shining the flashlight on Caitlin and switches it off. She can still see his outline, gray against gray-green; dawn is beginning. “You're a smart girl, aren't you? All right, yes. They were walking a very narrow line here between losing you survivors and getting information out of you. Your minds somehow got altered when the bloom happened and nobody knows how. Too much memory and you collapse. Too little and they couldn't learn anything. It was a—”
“So you convince us we're all mentally ill and destroy us that way? In the name of science?”
“In the name of—”
Seena suddenly shrieks, “I'm nobody's lab rat!” and launches herself at Josh.
He's not expecting it; he was focused on Caitlin. Seena knees him in the balls and he shouts in pain. Her nails rake his face, and then she points two fingers and goes for his eyes.
Caitlin deflects her barely in time. Caitlin doesn't even think first; she just launches herself at Seena and her greater weight takes them both down, crashing into the wall of soft swaying vines. Josh is doubled over in pain. Seena scrambles off the ground before Caitlin can recover from the fall. She dives at Josh again.
All Caitlin has—all she has ever had—are her words, her mind. She says quickly, “I know what the jungle is, Seena! I know how to save ourselves!”
It works. Seena slows, glances back, kicks Josh once in the stomach, and turns toward Caitlin. “How?”
“Not in front of him.”
Seena nods. She jerks Caitlin upright—how can that skinny starved body be so strong?—and half-drags her away from Josh, bleeding and gasping on the ground. Caitlin says, “Will he—”
“He'll live, the asshole. Come on!”
Caitlin snatches up Josh's flashlight and lets Seena lead her on. The light brightens; the jungle seems less dense here, or at least walking is easier. Something glints through the trees, disappears, glints again. Abruptly they emerge on the banks of a river, vines trailing in the water and crowding a tiny island a hundred yards from shore, an island that is mostly exposed rock rising in three regularly spaced humps.
Seena gasps, “I know this place! That's Carson Island, this is where the Blackwater hits Suwaquahua Creek—we're in Suwaquahua! But where's the factory? Mallory's? The Old Blue? They're all gone—what the fuck happened here?”
She doesn't remember what she told Josh and Caitlin earlier, before Josh re-medicated her. But she will remember, and so will Caitlin, and then—how much time do they have? Time—it's all about time.
Caitlin goes still. She can't do this.
Yes. She can. She has to.
“Come on, Seena. Down to the river.”
“What the fuck—”
“Just do it!”
The river is still and gray, a dawn mirror. Caitlin lowers herself to the very edge and peers down. Different people are there, people she hasn't seen before, wandering in and out of the gray mist: black men in nothing but rough brown loin cloths, men in red or green British regimentals, an Indian in deerskin, one woman in a white muslin hoop skirt and another in a fringed knee-length dress with long ropes of beads. That one, laughing, waves a cigarette holder. Her lips are painted scarlet. She steps daintily away from the river, as if onto a dock, in her high heels.
“Seena, what do you see in the river?”
“Have you gone —”
“What? Tell me!”
“Nothing. No fish, no garbage, nothing. Just water.”
“Where did you see your people? Not the ones you made up for Jensen and Covell—the real ones?”
Seena squats beside her. Her tone is unexpectedly gentle. “You've flipped out, you know that?”
Caitlin hauls her gaze away from the river just as the boy in purple garbage bags shows up. She grasps Seena's bony wrist. “Please, Seena, it's important. Who did you see and where did you see them?”
Seena looks away, says, “Only in other people's eyes. The old lady in the rocking chair, the two kids dressed mega-retro, the guy with the shovel. And a few dudes in even weirder stuff ... why?”
“Dudes in weirder stuff ? Like purple garbage bags with lighted wires?”
“Yeah—how did you know?”
“Look in my eyes now. Tell me what you see.”
Seena clearly does not want to do this. But she doesn't pull her wrist away from Caitlin, and after a moment she leans close. She smells of sweat, sex, and the spicy mold of this new jungle.
“Oh my God!” Seena jerks away so fast she nearly tumbles into the river. The boy in purple garbage bags looks up, annoyed. And behind him, materializing from the mist, is what Caitlin knows Seena has just seen in Caitlin's eyes: the jungle-pale creature with pink eyes, no nose, and a horn on its head.
“What's that?” Seena demands. “Caitie...”
“I think it's part of this jungle. Or will be.” She can hardly believe she is saying this.
“Make sense!” Seena, who always becomes angry when she's frightened, is getting furious now. Caitlin doesn't want that anger turned against her. Seena's hands are balled into spiny fists.
“I think we see the past, Seena. Ever since the ... since Before ended. That's why all the hoop skirts and slaves and British soldiers and 1940's dress and all of it. Whatever destroyed the human city also changed the minds of everybody left alive, everybody underground at the time—it changed the electrical field or something....” This sounds totally inadequate, but Caitlin has no time to relate to Seena her analogy of consciousness folding and warping, the way spacetime folds and warps in physics. “Anyway, we see the past that lived on this spot. This place was probably a river town for a long time.”
“You're full of shit! That's impossible!”
“In physics I once learned ... no, please, Seena, don't go, just listen to me for a minute ... spacetime is like a loaf of bread.” At the mere mention of bread Caitlin's stomach growls, but at least Seena is listening. The river shines silvery as the sun rises.
“You can think of each minute as we experience it like a slice of bread. Everything that happens at, say, six in the morning on February 10 is on one slice. But the whole loaf is there all the time, past and present and future. Now imagine slicing the loaf at an angle.” Caitlin illustrates this with gestures in the air. Her stomach growls again. “The slices are all different. Our six in the morning on February 10 is on the same slice as, maybe, 1784 or 1942.”
Seena says suddenly, “Suwaquahua was founded in 1787.”
Caitlin hadn't expected Seena to know anything like that. “Yeah. And Mr. Armstead—” the name jumps out of nowhere into her mind “—my physics teacher, he said there might be other dimensions, too, and time might run even more different there.”
“So I'm seeing people from other times and other dimensions just fucking popping up in your eyes? Get real, Caitlin!”
“Well, you come up with a better explanation!” Caitlin shouts.
“I can't! Shit...” Seena sinks onto the riverbank. “What if you're right? Then what's that thing I just saw?”
“I don't know.”
“But what do you think it is? You're the brain, I'm just a dumb ho that—”
“No, you're not.” All at once Caitlin starts to cry. It's too much, and she's so scared, and hunger gnaws at her insides like a rat. She unscrews the end of Josh's flashlight to see the tiny flask of yellow powder. That's all that kept Seena from going catatonic when she remembered Suwaquahua crumbling into powder. And memory was now returning to them both. How much powder to keep their minds here, in the present? And how long would the flask last?
“Stop crying,” Seena says, “or I'll pound you to jelly. I mean it.”
She does mean it. Caitlin checks her sobs. The sun rises above the far end of the river.
“So aliens are slicing our bread differently,” Seena says. Her voice has the high, rapid breathiness of someone fighting panic. “And after they did this jungle-shit to Suwaquahua, we can see that. Shi
t, that's why we were in the Institute ... the government wants to know what we see and why we see it. To figure out the future. But why not just ask us? Why the drugs and ‘Cathcart Syndrome’ and all those lies?”
“I don't know,” Caitlin says.
“I know. Because the doctors are shithead assholes.” This answer satisfies Seena, who moves on to her next anger. “But the aliens—why did they do it? Why wreck Suwaquahua and make this creepy jungle? No, don't tell me—they want to live here themselves. This is their idea of, say, a luxury condo, and the hell with humans. Hey!” she suddenly screams at the top of her voice, “Hey, shitheads, we were here first! It's our place! Ours!”
“Not like that,” Caitlin says, and gets to her feet. All at once she understands, and gasps aloud. “Not like that.”
“Not like what? Caitlin, what are you—”
“They don't know.”
Caitlin wades into the river. For a moment she thinks her legs won't hold up, but they have to, just as she has to finally take the risk of action instead of thought. The water is warm as a bathtub. Ripples move away from her in concentric circles but they settle as she stands very still, waist deep. Overhead, a helicopter drones into view.
Seena says, “They're looking for us!”
More likely, Caitlin realizes, belatedly, they're responding to some sort of tracker on Josh's flashlight. But she has no time for that.
“The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things—”
As the water returns to glassy smoothness, the people reappear. There are a surprising number of them to have ever stood in or on three feet of water; maybe the river has shifted over time. Caitlin ignores them, as they once ignored her, until the alien form again appears out of the mist. She fixes her gaze on it, says, “I'm here. I'm here. I'm here.”
Nothing.
She gazes harder, silent now but bending her mind forward, concentrating it on that one spot in the water, that one point on a slice of time that includes both her and this strange creature who wants her planet.
No response.
“Seena, get in here and look in my eyes!”
Seena does. Something about Caitlin has compelled her, although Caitlin cannot imagine what. She has never been compelling. But here Seena is, and after the water settles she squats down to look up into Caitlin's eyes as Caitlin looks down into the water. Now there are two of them taking action.
Seena makes a soft noise, undecipherable.
I'm here, I'm here, I'm here....
Slowly the creature mirrored in the river turns its head. Its eyes move in some strange way, and the horn on its head waves in some unknowable pattern, and then it is standing on the river bank not five feet from them and Caitlin can feel its astonishment as if it were her own.
I'm here.
We didn't know.
No, not that, because there were no words. But Caitlin feels it, even as she feels her body start to go rigid and her mind slide away from her. She fumbles for Josh's flashlight but it's gone, maybe dropped into the river. But that's okay. The creature does something and there are more of them on the bank. Something is lifting Caitlin and pulling her gently, invisibly, to the shore. The helicopter sounds closer. Seena is thrashing in the river, screaming, “Caitlin! Caitlin!”
But she is not Caitlin. Her name is Amanda, and she was visiting aunt Jane in Suwaquahua when—but none of that matters. Amanda knows she will be all right. She knows because nothing is what she thought, not Josh nor herself nor the future. But there will be humans in the future, in Suwaquahua, because nobody in the past or present dresses in purple garbage bags wired with tiny lights. That boy will stand on this place one day, alongside whoever else will be/is/was there, alien or human. And with them will be/was/is Amanda, because that bad-tempered boy in purple has—except for his artificially blue eyes— her face, her gestures, her lank hair the same color as Amanda's when she was his age. Son, grandson, clone ... it doesn't matter. He will stand on the banks of the Suwaquahua along with—
“Time heals all wounds...”
—the aliens who have remade it, and—
“Hot time in the old town tonight....”
—so will she, because she saw it in the mirror, timeless, the same place she saw the image of Caitlin/Amanda. Herself, who can do whatever she has to.
Copyright (c) 2008 Nancy Kress
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* * *
Poetry: FIREFLIES
by Geoffrey A. Landis
flashing in a summer field against twilight sky-dark. Drifting shifting sparkle flashes, ever-changing patterns of writing in some unknowable language of streaks and flashes, constellations blinking on and off. Fireflies dance below us, fireflies behind us, fireflies above us; their silent mating calls a symphony of light. A million flashes a minute, we are immersed in a sea of flickering light.
Just so, the immortals look out across the universe, as stars and galaxies
flick into life
fade into dark.
—Geoffrey A. Landis
Copyright (c) 2008 Geoffrey A. Landis
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* * *
Short Story: SURPRISE PARTY
by James Patrick Kelly
This issue marks two milestones for frequent contributor James Patrick Kelly. “Surprise Party” is his twenty-fifth June story and his column “Son of Gallimaufry” comes on the tenth anniversary of the start of his “On The Net” column. Jim has a new short story collection coming out in August from Golden Gryphon Press. The Wreck of the Godspeed will include his five most recent June stories.
Surprise Party
When Mercedes Nunez woke up on the morning of her fifty-first birthday, there was a man in her head. At least she thought it was a man; his beam barely tickled her neurons. Her mindedness of him was as vague as that of some blurry loser in the back row of her high school class picture. Was this an underage fanboy with a taste for fallen celebs? A sleep-deprived college kid writing a paper on the pioneers of neurality? No—Mercedes's fan base had been skewing geriatric. So, some fossil too feeble to spark enough mindedness to make her blink. He probably remembered her from when she'd been a randy glamgirl pumping neuros onto main menus. That was before her audience passed her by. Before Rake died.
How long had it been since she'd had a beamer? Years. She wasn't sure she wanted one now. She would certainly spend the fee, if it came to that. But at her age she didn't need the hassle of editing her perceptions on the fly. She was used to being all by herself in her head. So she parked him in a blind before she pulled back the covers of her bed. Maybe he'd just signed on for a quick peep show.
Mercedes still slept naked; she only wore anything in bed when she was having sex. How long had it been since she'd had sex? Too long. Mercedes had never really been into porn, although pointy men with thin lips had accused her of it. But in her glory days, she refused to park the beamers when the lights went out. Dai-rinin, her agent, claimed that she had hundreds of them in her head back when she was sleeping with Rake and Kai Lingyu and John Dark and the other stars who had brought neurality to the masses. John Dark used to tease that she was turned on by the idea of all those beamers watching while he licked her nipples. But he was wrong. Part of her felt dirty having them in bed with her and part of her was getting back at her mother for being a slut and yes, part of her liked shocking her audience with her carnality, but the biggest part of her was gloating over what a brave and brilliant career move it was to have public sex in mindspace. She laughed at the memory as she stepped into her slippers, wrapped herself in a robe and scuffed into the bathroom. She had been a girl of many parts. Too bad none of them had quite fit together.
Mercedes took a very hot shower, brushed her wet hair flat and sprayed on a face that made her look twenty years younger. For her beamer; ordinarily she wouldn't have bothered. She slipped into her bra and panties before she let him out of the blind. At first she thought that he might have given up on he
r, but if she concentrated, she could pick out his pale beam from the dazzle of her thoughts.
She posed in front of the mirror, knowing that he would be watching through her eyes. =Enjoy the view.= she thought at him. Mercedes could recognize her younger self in the reflection. Was her belly still taut? It was, and she still had the indoor pallor that made cubicle rats drool. Neurality appealed most of all to people with lives lit by wallscreens and fluorescents. The cosmetic spray had filled in her wrinkles nicely.
=Like what you see?= She turned, gave her ass a slap and leered into the mirror. =Oh, I forgot. You can't think back at me.= She liked taunting beamers with questions they couldn't answer. They had no way to communicate with her in mindspace and were forbidden by the DayScan contract from contacting her in meatspace. =Know what they used to call people who couldn't speak?= At first, insults had helped relieve her unease at having strangers in her head. =Dumb.= She imagined them shouting back at her in frustration. She found out later that many beamers actually liked having their celeb acknowledge their existence.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” she said aloud, accepting a black clingy from the copier in her closet, “but if you want full frontal, you'll have to stick around for the evening show.” She draped it over her shoulders and it slithered onto her, cutting a demure boat neckline and hemming its skirt just below the knees. =Let's go,= she thought. =We've got things to do.=
* * * *
There were six messages twinkling on the wall in her living room. She went through them while she crunched on an English muffin and sipped her first cup of neutriceutical coffee. There was a birthday greeting from her younger sister, Laia, who sent vids of Mercedes's niece and nephew. Rafael loved his famous auntie. When was she coming to visit? Luisana peered into the camera and emitted a sound that might have been Say-say or just baby burbling. They were cute, no doubt about that. But did Mercedes miss having kids? Not really. Besides, who would have been the father? Rake had been too sick, Kai too busy, and John Dark too damn promiscuous. The feeds said Dark was with Zoe Zanzibar these days. Or was it Kim Barbour? But just because she still followed his antics didn't mean she missed him. There was bad news again from the stockbroker. Mercedes had never figured out Rake's portfolio and had managed it badly since he'd died. If her luck didn't change, she'd be broke before she turned sixty. Ricky Morgan from the library said that the book she wanted was in and if she picked it up around noonish, maybe they could do lunch at Copper? She told Dai-rinin to send a yes and put a smile on it. Someone named Deddy Suryochondro from Surabaya, Indonesia, wanted to remake Finger in the Sky as a worldscape. Mercedes thought worldscapes were plotless and boring but asked Dai-rinin to find out how much Mr. Suryochondro was offering. The last was from Coco Akita, who said that her housebot was in the shop and that she'd be a little late for the lunch at Copper and that Mercedes should save her a seat. She frowned. Save a seat? When had she made plans with Coco?
Asimov's SF, June 2008 Page 5