Clarkesworld: Year Three

by Genevieve Valentine

  “I do not envy you when we get home,” said the blue voice.

  Maria withdrew her hand. They were going to take him away, back to something awful! She raced to the window to see if they were in the yard. There was a hint of something large and blue beneath a tree, but she couldn’t make it out.

  “No!” she yelled, turning and preparing to run to the door.

  And the statuette, suddenly more human—or at least humanoid in shape—raised a hand as if to tell her to stop.

  She froze, shocked, and the gentle voice spoke inside her head.

  “It’s all right, Maria.”

  She stared at the statuette, and its expression seemed to soften. Finally, after another minute, it lowered its hand.

  “Thank you for caring.”

  She walked to the window, and the blue shape was gone, and somehow she knew Mr. Valapoli was gone too. Forever.

  Sunlight streamed in through the single window of the bedroom, bathing the statuette in warm golden light as it sat on the dresser, the focal point of the small, uncluttered room.

  Still half asleep, Maria stretched languorously, thinking of all she had experienced over past few weeks. Ever since Mr. Valapoli left and she had brought the statuette home, it felt like it truly belonged with her, and she liked to imagine that the statuette itself felt comfortable on her dresser.

  Its shape had continued to change. Each morning she would wake up to see the magic that had been wrought overnight, and each day it became somehow less alien in its form and more distinct in its features, softening into the image of a man, with eyes as kind as Mr. Valapoli’s voice had been gentle.

  She no longer questioned how the statuette could change. She knew. Every time she touched it she could sense him. The connection was very faint, and growing fainter with each passing day, but she took comfort in the fact that it was there.

  Until the morning she touched it and didn’t feel anything but the cold contours of the statuette itself. Not sure of what was happening, she reached out to make contact with it again, but before she could, her eyes widened in wonder as she realized she was witnessing its very last change, her unseen friend’s final parting gift to her, the one that let her know he also cherished their strange connection.

  There upon the statuette’s face was a smile, and in her mind she clearly heard the echo of Mr. Valapoli’s voice for the last time.

  “Thank you for caring, Maria.”

  About the Authors

  Mike Resnick is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He had won 5 Hugos (from a record 36 nominations), a Nebula, and other major awards in the USA, France, Japan, Croatia, Spain and Poland, and has been short-listed in England, Italy, and Australia. He is the author of 71 novels, over 250 stories, and 3 screenplays, and the editor of more than 40 anthologies. His work has been translated into 25 languages. He was Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.

  Lezli Robyn is an Aussie Lass who loves writing sf, fantasy, horror, humor and even dabbles in steampunk every now and then. Since her first sale to Clarkesworld, she's made over twenty-five story sales to professional markets around the world, including Asimov’s and Analog, and her first short story collection will be published by Ticonderoga Press in late 2012. Lezli was also a finalist for the 2009 Aurealis Award (Aussie) for Best SF Story, the 2010 Ignotus Award (Spanish) for Best Foreign Short Story, and a 2010 Campbell Award Nominee for best new writer. In 2011, she won the Best Foreign Translation Ictineus Award (Catalan) for “Soulmates”, a novelette written with Mike Resnick, and first published in Asimov’s.

  From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7

  Nnedi Okorafor

  Translating . . .

  Appendix 820 of The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide

  This series of audio files was created by TreeFrog7

  It has been automatically translated into text

  ENTRY 1 (20:09 hours)

  Some clumsy beast has been stalking us. It only comes out at night and it moves with no regard for the bushes, plants and detritus on the jungle floor. It sounds big and is probably dangerous. And . . . I think it brings the smell of flowers with it. I can smell it now, like sweet lilacs. Does Morituri36 even notice? I wonder. Regardless of the creature’s presence, he continues to compile information and I put it together and upload the finished entries into the Greeny Jungle Field Guide. That’s our mission and our system.

  “Down with ignorance! Upload information!” We are true Great Explorers of Knowledge and Adventure. Joukoujou willing, we’ll survive this day, as we have the hundreds of others since choosing to dedicate our lives to informing the ignorant masses about this great jungle.

  Whatever is stalking us, we’ll deal with it when the time comes.

  Field guide entry (uploaded at 14:26 hours)

  God Bug:

  The God Bug is an insect of the taxonic order Ahuhu-ebe, which includes all beetles. It is common in the Greeny Jungle. Usually blue, sometimes green. When it feels the urge, it spontaneously multiplies, becoming two independent god bugs. As it multiplies it may make a soft popping or giggling sound. There have been rare cases where one has multiplied into four or five. They are docile, almost playful insects. Diurnal.

  — written and entered by: TreeFrog7/ Morituri36

  *note: For some reason, this common insect has not previously been listed in the Greeny Jungle Field Guide. This may be because the god bug is also found in the city. Or maybe this is another example of the field guide’s incompleteness.

  ENTRY 2 (18:55 hours)

  Disgusting.

  Everything here is disgusting. It rains constantly. The ground is always ankle-deep red-brown mud. There are a thousand types of biting and stinging insects. We have to sleep in the trees but the trees, bushes, and plants are noisy with buzzes, growls, snorts, screeches, clicks, whistles, too. Especially at night. The air reeks of moss, the syrupy scent of flowers, ripe palm nuts and rotting mangoes. And the jungle traps heat like a sealed glass tube held over a fire. The Greeny Jungle is a tough place to be while pregnant.

  The heat leaves me light-headed. I vomit at least three times a day because of the strong smells. Yes, still, even in my eighth month. But though my sensitive nose makes for great discomfort, it makes for even greater documentation. You’d be amazed at how many floral and faunal specimens show themselves first and foremost with scent.

  Yesterday, my nose led me to a tree full of those hairy pink spiders with striped orange legs. A year and half ago, Morituri36 and I uploaded a field guide entry on these creatures. We named them treebeards. They were our hundredth entry. Their bites paralyze your fingers and cause an intense headache. If these spiders ever became common back home they’d cause society to break down within a week. Imagine people unable to type on their computers!

  Unfortunately, yesterday, I forgot that treebeards give off a strong smell that is very similar to figs. I thought I’d found a fig tree. I love figs, especially since becoming pregnant. The sky was cloudy. Any other day, I’d have seen all those webs. Instead, I walked right into them and the spiders descended on me like rain. Understandably, they thought I was attacking their home. Not good.

  Morituri36 happened to be in the middle of one of his bouts when it happened. I had to save myself by running from the tree, throwing myself in the mud and dead leaves and rolling like crazy, the roots of some tree grinding into my back. Then I just lay there looking up . . . into the leaves and ripe fruit of a giant fig tree. The smell of real figs was all around me. treebeards and figs, can you believe it?!

  Only my left hand was stung. I have to type with my right. I’m left-handed so this has been very very annoying. I’ll be better in a few days.

  What a husband I have. He cannot even save his wife from bush spiders. What has this place made us into? But can I blame him for having dulled senses due to his junglemyelitis? Maybe. I have been exploring this jungle right beside him all these years. He has been the on
ly human face I’ve had to look at, too. Yet the trees do not “close in” on me. I do not need to have the sun and moonlight wash over my face for at least four hours a day. My brain isn’t muddled with an irrational fear of shadows that makes me rant and rave once in a while. And I’d have yelled stop before he walked under a tree full of treebeards. Idiot.

  The sun is setting and I can hear and smell it again—the creature following us. It’s definitely nocturnal.

  ENTRY 3 (13:20 hours)

  There is a reason I’ve decided to break science-speak and enter this journal appendix in the field guide. My name is Treefrog7 and my husband is Morituri36. We are from a village in southwest, Ọnaghị agba nahịa, the people of the impossible beads. Of course out here in the Greeny Jungle, we cannot wear our traditional beaded attire. Far too heavy. Instead we wear plain light clothing (northern attire). But we never take off our beaded bracelets and marriage earrings. And there is always the bead of the soul. So that is us and that is all I will say on the subject.

  I’ve begun uploading this audio series because after three months of exploration, we are closing in on something big. Very big. The very process of finding it should be documented along with the scientific information.

  Altogether, we’ve uploaded two hundred eighty-eight new entries to the field guide. Our fellow explorers are proud. What we explorers do is dangerous work. Many of us die for the information we gather. Many of us return to civilization with only half our bodies, or half our minds, or ill in a thousand ways. Many of us are lost. Morituri36 and I are not lost. We know exactly where we are and we know exactly what we seek. We will find it. And human civilization will be changed forever.

  I’ll explain what “it” is when I’m in a less difficult place. The mud is deep here. My back aches. I need all my faculties for the time being. I wish Morituri36 would stop singing that song. “World of Our Own.” It reminds me of home. He has such a beautiful voice. I wish he’d shut up. I wish my body would stop aching. I’m sick of being pregnant.

  ENTRY 4 (19:21 hours)

  I was bitten by a clack beetle today. Their venom is itchy and the white spot it left on my skin is about the size of my fingernail. It shows up on me a lot more than it showed up on Morituri36 when he was bitten last year. I’m a much darker shade of brown than he is. Which means, yes, I get to complain about it. I don’t mind cuts, scratches, bites, etc. But something about a mark on my skin of temporarily-neutralized melanin really bothers me. No matter. It should be gone in a few days.

  Last night, as we looked for a tree to sleep in, we heard the creature. How long is it going to follow us? What does it want?

  ENTRY 5 (12:03 hours)

  Shh. I have to whisper quietly. Morituri36 is beside me, too. Something just screeched very very loudly. An elgort? As soon as we can climb down, I need to find a certain seed . . . just in case. Morituri36 is too clumsy to handle them. He’s looking at me, annoyed, but he knows I’m right.

  We’re still on the trail of what we seek and I believe that whatever has been following us is still on our trail, too. Maybe the elgort will scare it away, or better yet, eat it.

  ENTRY 6 (21:12 hours)

  We’re at the very top of a baobab tree. Morituri36 and his cursed junglemyelitis. If I fall out and die, our unborn child and I will haunt him until he joins us in death. Right now I can hear it below. Why is it following us? What’s it after? And what is it? It’s not violent, fast, huge or destructive enough to be an elgort. I’m glad it’s nocturnal. Come morning, we’ll be able to leave this tree and continue on our way.

  We are searching for a mature CPU plant, so mature that we can actually download its hard drive. We call them M-CPUs. Acquiring a copy of an M-CPU’s hard drive has never been done in all the history of exploration. BushBaby42, a close friend of mine, found one three months ago but she disappeared before she could download anything. She happened to send us the coordinates of her location just before she stopped responding to us, so here we are. We’ve come hundreds of miles.

  It is hard for me to speak of BushBaby42.

  I don’t wonder what happened to her. She is an explorer which means it could have been anything. It is very often our fate.

  On the M-CPU’s hard drive will be unimaginable information, the result of centuries of gathering. Legend has it that these plants connect to networks from worlds beyond. Imagine what it knows, what it has documented. We will not kill or harm it, of course. That would be blasphemy. We won’t even clip a leaf or scrape some cells. We’ll only make a copy of what it knows. Our storage drives should easily adapt to fit the plant’s port. Though our drive is most likely a different species of plant, they’d have to at least be of the same genus.

  The CPU plant’s entry does it no justice. The entry is a human perspective, ascribing significance to the plant because it is cultivated and used as a tool for humans, a personal computer. The true CPU plant grows in the wild, neither touched nor manipulated by humans. And this plant takes hundreds of years to mature.

  Many of us have seen young CPU plants with their glowing monitor flower-heads that light up nights and sleep during the day. They plug into the network and do whatever they do. But an M-CPU? Nearly legend. What must BushBaby42 have felt gazing upon it all alone as she was? What must she have seen on its screen? And what happened to her? She could take on a man-eating whip scorpion with nothing but a stick!

  Incidentally, the creature we heard screeching this afternoon was an elgort. Big as a house, with tight-black skin that shined in the daylight, beady yellow eyes, fast as the speed of sound, irrational and food-minded.

  We dealt with it. Maneuver 23, specifically for the elgort. We lured the crazed beast to a tall strong hardwood tree. That’s the most dangerous part, luring it in. We had to climb very very fast as soon as it smelled us. Once in the tree, as it reared up below trying to snatch us down with its tooth-filled trunk (a terrible sight in itself), Morituri36 dropped a bursting seed (which I picked this afternoon, thank goodness) into its maw. BLAM! Its entire head exploded. We now have meat for many days. elgort meat doesn’t need salt or to be preserved and it’s naturally spicy; some say this is due to the creature’s anger and intensity in life.

  We thank Joukoujou and the Invisible forces for giving us the skill to protect ourselves. Unfortunately, The Forces of the Soil also protected from the elgort whatever creature is stalking us.

  ENTRY 7 (21:34 hours)

  Today was all pain. In my back and lower belly. The stretching of ligaments. My belly feels like a great calabash of water. This baby will come soon. Really soon. I hope we find the plant first. The trees here are spaced apart, allowing the sun to shine down, so Morituri36 had a good day. He carried both our packs and even prepared breakfast and lunch—mangoes, roasted tree clams, elgort meat, figs and root tea both times. It is days like this where I remember why I married him.

  It is night now and we are in a large but low tree with one wide branch to hold us both. We can see the sky. It’s been a long time since we had a night like this. I think the last time was the day that our child was conceived. Not long afterwards was when he started coming down with the junglemyelitis. His ailment will pass; he’s a strong man.

  My gut tells me this is the calm before the storm. But maybe I’m just being melodramatic.

  ENTRY 8 (04:39 hours)

  Dragonflies! Swarms of them. BushBaby42 described these just before she found the plant. We’re close. But the creature is still on our trail. This morning, it left its muddy smelly droppings right at the foot of the tree, as if it wanted us to step right into it. I almost did. It was covered with flies and the mound smelled like the vomit of demons. It was so strong that I nearly fainted with nausea. Morituri36 had to carry me away from the mess. Just thinking about it makes me shudder.

  Cursed beast, whatever it is. No matter how we try to glimpse it at night, it keeps out of sight as it blasts its angry flowery scent. Biding its time, I suspect. But when the fight comes, it will be shocked
when instead of running we turn to meet it. We haven’t survived the jungle solely because of luck.

  But Morituri36 needs to remember that he is a human being, and that I am a human being, too. When he gets in his moods, he speaks to me as if I’m a piece of meat. As if I’m lower than his servant. He speaks to me the way the Ooni chief speaks to his wives. How dare him. I am carrying our child. I have done as much work as he has. And junglemyelitis or not, we are in this together. There is no need for insult.

  “It dies well beforehand!” he snapped at me earlier today as we inspected a morta. We’d caught it this morning. A morta is a beautiful red bird with a long thin beak. When it dies, its dead body keeps flying aimlessly for days. Strange creatures but not the strangest in the jungle. Morituri36 seemed to think that their carcasses also rotted as they flew.

  “Look at it,” I calmly said, despite my rising anger at his tone. The dead morta was still trying to flap its wings. “This is the fifth one we’ve caught! No rot anywhere!”

  He just huffed and puffed the way he always does when he knows I’m right. The entry someone uploaded to the field guide was simply wrong and needed to be changed. The fact is that morta probably don’t fly for that long after they die. Maybe a few hours and that’s it. Certainly not days. If it was days, it would be infested with rot and maggots. But that wasn’t what I wanted to find out most about the morta. I wanted to know what made it fly as a dead creature. Morituri36 and I agreed it had to be some sort of parasite with strange faculties. We just needed to run some tests.

  But he wasn’t so interested in answers today. He threw the bird corpse to the ground. “It is because it is freshly dead,” he muttered. “Stupid stupid woman.” Immediately, the dead bird hopped up and took off. I cursed, watching it go, wondering what microscopic organisms were working the bird’s muscles and how intelligent they could be to do so. They were obviously using the morta carcass to search for food or a special place to procreate.