Clarkesworld: Year Three

by Genevieve Valentine

  Confusion. Uncertainty. “Your shame?”

  “It is not our way to force,” the Finder said.” The Rul-ta-Shan—the First Gift Given—was choice. The Lady gave of the fruit while you slept.”

  Tal nodded slowly. “I would have chosen so.”

  “We hope so. Still, the ages had robbed you of choice and so we made our own on your behalf, trusting our cousinhood to cover a multitude of transgressions. Thus we brought you to this place, your choice restored.”

  Love welled in Tal’s heart and brimmed his eyes. The power in it made his life with the People, his life as Go-on-all-fours, seem small and far away. Breeding. Hunting. Foraging. Starving. Led by appetite and instinct to survive. “I was an animal,” he whispered. “I was not of the People. Now I am of the People. You have made me— ” he struggled to find the word— “whole.”

  The mighty tree shook. “No. You were always of the People, Cousin. You were as whole as you could be.” Freedom. “And now you possess the First Gift Given. What will you choose, I wonder?”

  The grass at the base of the tree rustled, exposing thick roots that pulsed with life and possibility. Tal crawled forward. “I wish to know,” he said.

  “Then taste the root and know what you will.”

  He put his tongue to the root; it was bitter and sweet, the tang of earth and grass, and it swept through him, over him, into him. Tal collapsed inside himself, his eyes slamming shut as his brain pried open.

  Understanding. He saw. Loss. He knew. Endings. He wept. Beginnings. He slept.

  He awoke to the Lady cradling him against her warm body.

  “Lady,” he said. “How long?” But he knew that too.

  She offered a sad smile. “Years. But not many. The sun swells from its wound. Slowly, it swallows the Firsthome.”

  “And the People will end,” he said in a quiet voice.

  “No,” she said and he remembered. Beginnings. “You have a choice now if you will make it.”

  Her fingers lightly stroked his skin. The smoothness of her pressed against him and he was smooth now, too. The smell of her filled his nose, overpowering the scent of flowers and grass around them. He swallowed, sensations overwhelming him. “I choose.”

  “It is a great gift,” Jadylla said.

  He stretched out a nervous hand to touch her. “I am grateful.”

  She brought her face close to his. “No.” Her breath was warm. “You give the great gift, Cousin, and the giving of it heals the broken distance between the Peoples.” Her mouth touched his. Heat. Unity. “The life we make together will satisfy our deepest longing for Home.”

  He’d never mated face-to-face. He was nervous and awkward as his hands sought her out. Her own hands moved lower on his body and, learning from her, he imitated her caresses. Slowly, they touched one another with hands and mouths and when he could no longer wait, he gently crawled onto her and let her guide him into her. He pushed into her warmth and wetness and her eyes went wide for just a moment. Then she smiled and pushed back against him, moving her hips in time with his own.

  When they finished, he lay back in her arms. Her sweat and her scent mingled with his own. They were silent for a long time before he spoke.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  “What did they call you? Before the Finder found you?”

  “Go-on-all-fours-sometimes-upright,” he said.

  “Sometimes the past returns in small ways. Of your People, who else ever went upright?”

  He shook his head.

  “We watched for a year. We watched you hunt. We watched you mate. We watched you all and you were chosen.”

  He thought of the others. With no sky overhead, he’d lost all sense of time. He wondered if his mate slept or if she foraged to feed their young. He wondered if they wondered where he was, if perhaps they even searched for him.

  Thinking of them prompted a question. “Could they also be . . . recessed?”

  She shrugged. “We do not know. And we could not find out without further shame.”

  “But I am grateful. Wouldn’t they be grateful as well?”

  She rolled away from him. “It is not a matter for discussion.”

  Something sparked in Tal’s memory. “I have young. When they choose to crawl into the fire, I do not allow their choice. Does that shame the First Gift Given?”

  “It is not the same,” Jadylla said.

  “How is it not the same?”

  “It is not the same,” she said again. She disentangled herself from his arms. “You have honored me, Cousin, but I must leave you now.” She stood and touched her stomach. “This life must be nurtured at the root and my husband calls.”

  Tal lay back and watched her leave. He thought about his mate and his young at home. “When my young crawl into the fire, I do not allow their choice,” he said to himself. Because, he thought, the parent chooses for the child until the child can do so for themselves.

  An unhealthy line of thought. Aver-ka-na scuttled towards him, its naked belly dragging the ground, its eight legs moving slowly.

  “Not unhealthy,” Tal said, his brain spun to bring down exactly the right word. “Love.”

  Not love, it said, mandibles clacking. Love respects the First Gift Given.

  “Love,” Tal said slowly, “pulls young from the fire.”

  The Builder Warrior chittered, its eyes rolling.

  Tal stood, stretching himself fully upright and raising his fist. “I will return with fruit for my People.” No answer dropped into his mind or drifted into his ears. He started walking and kept walking until he saw the tree, heavy with its purple fruit.

  Anger. Sadness. The Finder stirred. I can not permit it.

  The ground at the foot of the tree peeled back, exposing Jadylla where she lay wrapped in roots. Her eyes opened. She was different towards him now, her voice cold and far away. “We came for you. Not them.”

  Tal swallowed. He felt anger building. Falseness. “You did not come for me. You came to take life from me.”

  Neither answered.

  “I will take life, too. Life for my people.” He paused. “It is my choice.”

  The Firsthome Finder’s Lady looked at the Firsthome Finder. Her tongue slipped from her mouth, touching the root, moving over its surface. Finally, she nodded. The tree shuddered and fruit fell like rain.

  Jadylla’s eyes were narrow. “You may take what you can carry. We will not wait long for you.”

  Tal picked up a piece of fruit. “And you will take us all with you.”

  Only those who choose, the Finder said into his mind.

  Tal picked up more fruit, cradling it in his arms. “Only those who choose,” he repeated.

  Light swallowed him and sent him spinning away.

  Tal stood on the rise overlooking the fires and the caves. He watched Best-maker-of-fire argue with No-child-in-stick. Young played around the fire, moving quickly on all fours in a game that imitated hunting and mating behavior. He saw his own young among them. His mate, Soft-voice-sharp-bite, sat with the other females, grooming one another.

  Compassion, he sent. No fear.

  They looked up quickly as if struck, all wide-eyed.

  He lifted a piece of fruit. Watch. Learn. He bit into it, letting the juice spill onto his naked skin. He took a step forward, extending the fruit though he was still two throws away.

  They moved, scrambling back toward the caves. “Don’t go,” he said. “It’s me—Go-on-all-fours-sometimes-upright. I’ve come back for you.”

  “Not People,” No-child-in-stick growled. “Upright walker eater of People.” His eyes rolled wide and wild.

  Peace. “No,” Tal said.

  Abandoning their fire, they fled into the caves.

  He spent the night trying to coax them out. He fed the fire for them, hoping somehow it would show he meant no harm. He placed a piece of fruit outside each cave entrance. He called to them. He waited.

  As the sky reddened and the swollen sun crawled out, he heard
his young whimpering in the dark.

  Come. Eat.

  Deep in the back of the caves, they growled and moaned.

  Finally, he took a piece of fruit and went into the cave that used to be his own. His mate yelped and hissed as he moved quickly toward her. She clawed and kicked at him as he grabbed her, biting at his hands as he tried to force the fruit into her mouth. She shrieked, her nails and teeth drawing blood, her eyes wide in terror. He shoved her away from him, turning toward his children.

  She fell on him before he could take a step and he went down beneath her, the air knocked from him as her thrashing feet connected with his testicles and her gnashing mouth found his ear.

  “Not People,” she screamed. “Eater of People.”

  Tal wanted to fight back but couldn’t. Suddenly he knew that it didn’t matter anymore. He yelled again and again. His young were fleeing now and other forms were moving into the cave waving piercers and hefting rocks.

  He heard his own bones breaking and smelled his own blood on the air, the tang of iron mingled with the sweetness of nectar.

  He closed his eyes and waited for the end.

  Not love, the Lady’s voice in his mind said, heavy with sorrow.

  Tal’s eyes opened. He lay wrapped in the ground, tangled in the Finder’s roots. “No, not love.”

  “You are well now.”

  He nodded. “I am grateful.”

  She touched his arm. He still felt the distance but no longer cold. He saw now that her belly curved slightly outward, his child growing there quickly, nourished by the Finder’s sap.

  Come to Newhome with us, Ra-sha-kor the Firsthome Finder said. Come, cousin, and meet your Other People.

  Tal twisted himself free from the roots, goose bumps forming on his skin as he remembered the stones and fists and fire-sharpened sticks. “What would I do at the Newhome?”

  Jadylla smiled and rubbed her stomach. “You would care for your daughter. With me and with the Firsthome Finder.”

  He saw that the Builder Warrior hung from his legs in the tree branches, weaving three silk hammocks. His mind told him that these were to let them sleep for the long voyage.

  “My daughter will not need me.” Tal bent, placed his lips to the root, letting knowledge and emotion wash through him. “She will be cared for.”

  Understanding. Acceptance.

  Love, he thought.

  Tal stood on the edge of the big waters in the cool of the night. Far above, a fleck of light moved away, crisp and clear among the pulsing stars. He waved though he knew they could not see him.

  He picked up the thrower and the pouch of little piercers they had left with him. He tested the string and calculated in his mind exactly what he would need to make more of them. He also thought about ways to go out onto the big waters to find the swimmers and ways to capture the three-horns and breed them for food. Ways to plant the good berries and tubers and to dig them at his leisure. He even thought about ways to take his People to a new place—far to the north or south—where life could be better for them until there could be no life and the sun finally swallowed the world.

  Perhaps someday they would let him do these things for them . . . with them. Certainly not now, but maybe with time.

  For now, he would hunt. For now, he would keep what little he needed to survive and leave the rest where his People could find it. He would do this every day for as long as it took because he knew that if choice was the First Gift Given, love must indeed be the second.

  Sha-Re-Tal, the Firstfound Cousin and Healer of the Broken Distance, found the three-horn spoor and broke into an easy run. He ran upright, his feet steady and sure beneath him, his eyes and nose and ears remembering their work very well.

  A silver moon rose over the big waters.

  He howled at it and dared it to chase him.

  About the Author

  Ken Scholes is the author of the internationally acclaimed Psalms of Isaak series, published in the US by Tor. His short fiction has appeared in various magazines and anthologies for the last decade and is now collected in two volumes, Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Strange Journeys and Diving Mimes, Weeping Czars and Other Unusual Suspects, both published by Fairwood Press.

  Scholes is a native of the Pacific Northwest and makes his home in Saint Helens, Oregon, with his wife and twin daughters. He invites readers to learn more about him and his work at www.kenscholes.com

  Walking with a Ghost

  Nick Mamatas

  Chakravarty spent at least three months making the same joke about how the AI was going to start spouting, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh C’thulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” and then all hell would break loose—a Singularity with tentacles. Sometimes he’d even run to the bank of light switches and flick the lights on and off. It was funny the first time to Melanie, and she squeezed a bit more mirth out of Chakravarty’s inability to pronounce the prayer to Cthulhu the same way twice. Making the Lovecraft AI had been Melanie’s idea, but it was Chakravarty who tried to keep the mood whimsical. Both worried that Lovecraft would just wake up screaming.

  “ —and he does scream, occasionally,” Melanie explained. Her advisor and a few other grad students were at the presentation, in the front rows, but as these presentations were theoretically open to the public, the Lovecraftians had come out in force, squeezing themselves in the tiny desk-chairs. They looked a lot like grad students themselves, but even paler and more poorly dressed in ill-fitting T-shirts and unusual garments—one even wore a fedora—plus they kept interrupting.

  “Can we hear it talk?” one asked, and then he raised his hand, as if remembering that he had to. “Ask it questions?”

  “Please, leave all questions—for us—until after the presentation. We’re not going to expose the AI to haphazard stimuli during this presentation.” Chakravarty said.

  “He’s . . . fairly calm so far,” Melanie said. “Which is to be expected. We know a lot about Lovecraft. He recorded almost everything he did or thought in his letters, after all, and we have nearly all of them. What ice cream he liked, how it felt to catch the last train out of South Station how he saw the colors scarlet and purple when he thought the word evil. He was fairly phlegmatic, for all the crazy prose and ideas so he’s okay.”

  “How do we know that this is really an artificial intelligence, and not just a bunch of programmed responses?” This one, huge and bearded, wore a fedora.

  Chakravarty opened his mouth to speak, his face hard, but Melanie answered with an upturned palm. “It’s fine,” she said to him. Most of these talks are total snoozers. Nobody ever has any questions.” Then, to the audience: “I’d argue that we can’t know it’s a bunch of programmed responses, except that we didn’t program all the responses we’ve seen so far. Of course, I don’t know that you, sir,” she said, pointing to the Lovecraftian, “aren’t also just a bunch of programmed responses that are just the physical manifestation of the reactions going on in the bag of chemicals you keep in your skull?”

  “I don’t feel like I am!”

  “Do you believe everything you feel; do you not believe in anything you haven’t?”

  “No, and no true Lovecraftian would,” he said.

  “Right. So you don’t believe in the female orgasm,” Melanie said. The room erupted in hoots and applause. Then Chakravarty got up shouted that everyone who doesn’t understand what’s going on should just go home, Google “Chinese room,” and stop asking stupid questions. “Ooh, Chinese—Lovecraft wouldn’t like that room,” someone said. Then the classroom was quiet again.

  “Uh, thanks for that, Chakravarty,” Melanie said. She adjusted her watch, thick and blocky on her wrist. “I’ve been walking around the city with him. He likes Boston and Cambridge, it helped ease him in to his, uh, existence. And he knew things, how roads crossed and bits of history, that I didn’t know, that we didn’t program into him. But we did program a lot into him. Everything we had access to, both locally and up at Brown.” Behind her, a ghostly i
mage of the author, chin like a bucket, eyes wide and a bit wild, flickered into existence. He sat in an overstuffed chair in the swirling null-space of a factory-present screensaver image.

  “Well, if there are no more questions”—Melanie glanced about the classroom and there were no questions, just some leftover giggles— “why don’t we have him say hello?”

  The room went silent “And none of that ftang ftang stuff,” Melanie added. Somebody giggled, high-pitched like a fife.

  Chakravarty leaned down into a microphone that snaked out from the laptop. “Lovecraft, can you hear me? Can you see us? Many people here have read your stories.”

  The image blinked. “Hello,” it said, its voice tinny and distant.

  “How are you?” Chakravarty asked. A simple question, one with only a couple of socially acceptable answers. A kid could program the word “Fine,” into an AIM buddy chat.

  “I do not quite know,” Lovecraft said. “I . . . ” he trailed off, then looked out into the room, as if peering into the distance. “Why have you people done this to me?”

  Chakravarty giggled, all nerves. Melanie opened her mouth, but was interrupted by one of the professors, who waved a gnarled hand. Chakravarty clicked off the mic. On the screen, Lovecraft started as if he sensed something, and he began to peer into the distance, as if seeing past the other side of the screen upon which he was projected.

  “What sort of internal state does this AI supposedly have?” the professor asked.

  “Well, as one of the major problems with developing strong AI is embodiment— ” Melanie stopped herself, and added for the fans and cops, “the idea that learning takes place because we have bodies and live in a social world . . . well, some of us do. Anyway, Lovecraft, in addition to having left behind enough personal correspondence to reconstruct much of his day-to-day life, was also rather repulsed by the body, by the idea of flesh. Many of his stories involve a brain trapped in a metal cylinder, or a consciousness stranded millions of years in the past. So we decided to tell him that we have a ghost. No body, no problem.”

  “Where’s he going?” asked the guy in the fedora.

  Chakravarty tapped on the keys of the laptop. Melanie wiggled the projector cable. The chair was empty. Lovecraft had gotten up and walked right off the edge of the screen.