by Jane Yolen
Frere-Jones reached out to her land’s grains, the laser pistol still in her right hand. The grains shivered and shook, resonating in shock at both what Frere-Jones had done and the dead anchors she’d killed.
Frere-Jones, detaching herself from the grains, walked over to Alexnya and her family. “Good luck to you,” she told Alexnya. “You can trust Chakatie’s advice. I suggest you listen to her.”
Alexnya looked overwhelmed, as if just realizing the life she’d stumbled into. Her family could stay only a few more days before they’d have to travel on. But aside from suggesting Alexnya trust Chakatie, there was no other advice Frere-Jones could give. Alexnya would have to sort through the lands’ memories on her own and determine which, if any, could be trusted.
Frere-Jones laughed to herself, knowing whose memories Alexnya would soon be experiencing.
“How can you say our daughter should trust that . . . woman?” Jun asked, outrage almost pouring out of her lips as she glared at Chakatie. “From what you’ve told me, she caused all this.”
“Chakatie didn’t trap your daughter,” Frere-Jones said. “If anyone did, it was me, by being so stubborn that the grains sought out a new anchor.”
“But she took advantage of all this. She played everyone. She . . .”
“Must I really listen to this right before I die?” Frere-Jones asked.
Jun fell silent. She bowed slightly in a mix of respect and mocking.
After speaking with Chakatie and asking her mother-in-law to pass a final message to Colton, Frere-Jones reached out to hold Alexnya’s hand. Together they accessed the grains.
“Do as we’ve agreed,” Frere-Jones told the grains. “Chakatie will ensure I hold up my end.”
“Do it,” Alexnya ordered, added her voice as the land’s new anchor.
The grains screamed but, unable to see any other option, complied. Across the land they deleted the memories of every anchor who’d lived before Frere-Jones. The memories flared and shrieked, as if begging Frere-Jones and Alexnya to save them. Then they were gone.
Except for Haoquin’s. Frere-Jones dropped the laser pistol and fell to her knees as Haoquin’s memories flooded into her. All the memories the grains had copied from his life. All of him.
So many memories. Memories of everything Haoquin had felt and seen and thought and experienced worked their way into Frere-Jones’s being. Her mind could barely contain all of him.
As Frere-Jones shook and spasmed on the cold ground, she looked across the new-spring grass. She could taste the grass. Could feel it growing and reaching for the sun.
Haoquin was within her. They now shared one life.
“I missed you Fre,” Haoquin whispered. Or maybe Frere-Jones said it to herself. Either way, she smiled.
“Life here was worth it,” they whispered to each other. “Too short, yes. But knowing you made it worthwhile.”
Frere-Jones and Haoquin saw Chakatie walk up to their body and pick up the laser pistol. Chakatie wiped at her eyes as she nodded, then she shot them in the head.
* * *
Alexnya stands silently over Frere-Jones’s burned body. The grains are still convulsing, still in chaos, but Frere-Jones’s death has calmed them.
Chakatie holds the laser pistol in both hands. Alexnya feels Chakatie’s grains powering up her body. A moment later powerful claws rip apart the pistol.
Chakatie throws the broken technology to the ground in disgust. “Your mother is right, you know,” she says. “I did manipulate all this. I knew Frere-Jones and my son would cause sparks. But I didn’t know all this would happen. I swear on the grains I didn’t know.”
Alexnya isn’t sure if she can trust Chakatie. Frere-Jones said to trust the anchor, but how can she truly know?
Yet Alexnya also understands that once her parents are forced to resume their travels, Chakatie and her family will be the only one for hundreds of leagues around who might support her.
Alexnya wants to scream at this situation. To curse at not knowing what to do. But before she does, she feels a gentle caress in her mind. She tastes memories—memories from Frere-Jones and Haoquin. She sees all the good things Chakatie has done. How Chakatie once cried over a family like hers.
“I think I’ll trust you,” Alexnya finally says. “Did you really . . . cry over a day-fellow family once?”
Chakatie nods, then waves for Alexnya’s parents to follow her to the sod-house to prepare an evening meal for everyone.
Alexnya stays behind and digs the grave for Frere-Jones’s body, the grains powering up her body so the shovel digs faster and deeper than she ever could have done before. She places Frere-Jones in the hole and covers her with fresh soil.
As Alexnya stands over the grave, she feels the grains churning in Frere-Jones’s body. Feels the grains already beginning to spread the memories of Frere-Jones and Haoquin across the land.
“Thank you, Fre,” Alexnya says, bowing to the grave. She then runs to the sod-house to spend time with her family before they’re forced to flee.
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
NOVELETTE
SOONER OR LATER
EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA
SARAH PINSKER
Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014 and a Nebula finalist for 2013. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, and Uncanny, and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, Accessing the Future, and numerous year’s bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages.
Sarah’s first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories will be published by Small Beer Press in 2019.
She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels (the third with her rock band, the Stalking Horses) and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter/sarahpinsker.
The rock star washed ashore at high tide. Earlier in the day, Bay had seen something bobbing far out in the water. Remnant of a rowboat, perhaps, or something better. She waited until the tide ebbed, checked her traps and tidal pools among the rocks before walking toward the inlet where debris usually beached.
All kinds of things washed up if Bay waited long enough: not just glass and plastic, but personal trainers and croupiers, entertainment directors and dance teachers. This was the first time Bay recognized the face of the new arrival. She always checked the face first if there was one, just in case, hoping it wasn’t Deb.
The rock star had an entire lifeboat to herself, complete with motor, though she’d used up the gas. She’d made it in better shape than many; certainly, in better shape than those with flotation vests but no boats. They arrived in tatters of uniform. Armless, legless, sometimes headless; ragged shark refuse.
“What was that one?” Deb would have asked, if she were there. She’d never paid attention to physical details, wouldn’t have recognized a dancer’s legs, a chef’s scarred hands and arms.
“Nothing anymore,” Bay would say of a bad one, putting it on her sled.
The rock star still had all her limbs. She had stayed in the boat. She’d found the stashed water and nutrition bars, easy to tell by the wrappers and bottles strewn around her. From her bloated belly and cracked lips, Bay guessed she had run out a day or two before, maybe tried drinking ocean water. Sunburn glowed through her dark skin. She was still alive.
Deb wasn’t there; she couldn’t ask questions. If she had been, Bay would have shown her the calloused fingers of the woman’s left hand and the thumb of her right.
“How do you know she came off the ships?” Deb would have asked. She’d been skeptical that the ships even existed, couldn’t believe that so many people would just pack up and leav
e their lives. The only proof Bay could have given was these derelict bodies.
* * *
Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.
Gabby Robbins: A scavenger woman dragged me from the ocean, pumped water from my lungs, spoke air into me. The old films they show on the ships would call that moment romantic, but it wasn’t. I gagged. Only barely managed to roll over to retch in the sand.
She didn’t know what a rock star was. It was only when I washed in half-dead, choking seawater that she learned there were such things in the world. Our first attempts at conversation didn’t go well. We had no language in common. But I warmed my hands by her fire, and when I saw an instrument hanging on its peg, I tuned it and began to play. That was the first language we spoke between us.
* * *
A truth: I don’t remember anything between falling off the ship and washing up in this place.
There’s a lie embedded in that truth.
Maybe a couple of them.
Another lie I’ve already told: We did have language in common, the scavenger woman and me.
She did put me on her sled, did take me back to her stone-walled cottage on the cliff above the beach. I warmed myself by her woodstove. She didn’t offer me a blanket or anything to replace the thin stage clothes I still wore, so I wrapped my own arms around me and drew my knees in tight, and sat close enough to the stove’s open belly that sparks hit me when the logs collapsed inward.
She heated a small pot of soup on the stovetop and poured it into a single bowl without laying a second one out for me. My stomach growled. I didn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I eyed her, eyed the bowl, eyed the pot.
“If you’re thinking about whether you could knock me out with the pot and take my food, it’s a bad idea. You’re taller than me, but you’re weaker than you think, and I’m stronger than I look.”
“I wouldn’t! I was just wondering if maybe you’d let me scrape whatever’s left from the pot. Please.”
She nodded after a moment. I stood over the stove and ate the few mouthfuls she had left me from the wooden stirring spoon. I tasted potatoes and seaweed, salt and land and ocean. It burned my throat going down; heated from the inside, I felt almost warm.
I looked around the room for the first time. An oar with “Home Sweet Home” burnt into it adorned the wall behind the stove. Some chipped dishes on an upturned plastic milk crate, a wall stacked high with home-canned food, clothing on pegs. A slightly warped-looking classical guitar hung on another peg by a leather strap; if I’d had any strength I’d have gone to investigate it. A double bed piled with blankets. Beside the bed, a nightstand with a framed photo of two women on a hiking trail, and a tall stack of paperback books. I had an urge to walk over and read the titles; my father used to say you could judge a person by the books on their shelves. A stronger urge to dive under the covers on the bed, but I resisted and settled back onto the ground near the stove. My energy went into shivering.
I kept my eyes on the stove, as if I could direct more heat to me with enough concentration. The woman puttered around her cabin. She might have been any age between forty and sixty; her movement was easy, but her skin was weathered and lined, her black hair streaked with gray. After a while, she climbed into bed and turned her back to me. Another moment passed before I realized she intended to leave me there for the night.
“Please, before you go to sleep. Don’t let it go out,” I said. “The fire.”
She didn’t turn. “Can’t keep it going forever. Fuel has to last all winter.”
“It’s winter?” I’d lost track of seasons on the ship. The scavenger woman wore two layers, a ragged jeans jacket over a hooded sweatshirt.
“Will be soon enough.”
“I’ll freeze to death without a fire. Can I pay you to keep it going?”
“What do you have to pay me with?”
“I have an account on the Hollywood Line. A big one.” As I said that, I realized I shouldn’t have. On multiple levels. Didn’t matter if it sounded like a brag or desperation. I was at her mercy, and it wasn’t in my interest to come across as if I thought I was any better than her.
She rolled over. “Your money doesn’t count for anything off your ships and islands. Nor credit. If you’ve got paper money, I’m happy to throw it in to keep the fire going a little longer.”
I didn’t. “I can work it off.”
“There’s nothing you can work off. Fuel is in finite supply. I use it now, I don’t get more, I freeze two months down the line.”
“Why did you save me if you’re going to let me die?”
“Pulling you from the water made sense. It’s your business now whether you live or not.”
“Can I borrow something warmer to wear at least? Or a blanket?” I sounded whiny even to my own ears.
She sighed, climbed out of bed, rummaged in a corner, and pulled out a down vest. It had a tear in the back where some stuffing had spilled out, and smelled like brine. I put it on, trying not to scream when the fabric touched my sunburned arms.
“Thank you. I’m truly grateful.”
She grunted a response and retreated to her bed again. I tucked my elbows into the vest, my hands into my armpits. It helped a little, though I still shivered. I waited a few minutes, then spoke again. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but it kept me warm. Reassured me that I was still here. Awake, alive.
“If I didn’t say so already, thank you for pulling me out of the water. My name is Gabby.”
“Fitting.”
“Are you going to ask me how I ended up in the water?”
“None of my business.”
Just as well. Anything I told her would’ve been made up.
“Do you have a name?” I asked.
“I do, but I don’t see much point in sharing it with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m going to kill you if you don’t shut up and let me sleep.”
I shut up.
* * *
Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.
Gabby Robbins: I remember getting drunk during a set on the Elizabeth Taylor. Making out with a bartender in the lifeboat, since neither of us had private bunks. I must have passed out there. I don’t know how it ended up adrift.
* * *
I survived the night on the floor but woke with a cough building deep in my chest. At least I didn’t have to sing. I followed the scavenger as she went about her morning, like a dog hoping for scraps. Outside, a large picked-over garden spread around two sides of the cottage. The few green plants grew low and ragged. Root vegetables, maybe.
“If you have to piss, there’s an outhouse over there,” she said, motioning toward a stand of twisted trees.
We made our way down the footpath from her cottage to the beach, a series of switchbacks trod into the cliffside. I was amazed she had managed to tow me up such an incline. Then again, if I’d rolled off the sled and fallen to my death, she probably would’ve scraped me out of my clothes and left my body to be picked clean by gulls.
“Where are we?” I had managed not to say anything since waking up, not a word since her threat the night before, so I hoped the statute of limitations had expired.
“Forty kilometers from the nearest city, last I checked.”
Better than nothing. “When was that?”
“When I walked here.”
“And that was?”
“A while ago.”
It must have been, given the lived-in look of her cabin and garden. “What city?”
“Portage.”
“Portage what?”
“Portage. Population I don’t know. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t make it any less a city.” She glanced back at me like I was stupid.
“I mean, what state? Or what country? I don’t even know what country this is.”
She snorted. “How long were you on that ship?”
“A long time. I didn’t really pay attention.”
“T
oo rich to care.”
“No! It’s not what you think.” I didn’t know why it mattered what she thought of me, but it did. “I wasn’t on the ship because I’m rich. I’m an entertainer. I share a staff bunk with five other people.”
“You told me last night you were rich.”
I paused to hack and spit over the cliff’s edge. “I have money, it’s true. But not enough to matter. I’ll never be rich enough to be a passenger instead of entertainment. I’ll never even afford a private stateroom. So, I spend a little and let the rest build up in my account.”
Talking made me cough more. I was thirsty, too, but waited to be offered something to drink.
“What’s your name?” I knew I should shut up, but the more uncomfortable I am, the more I talk.
She didn’t answer for a minute, so by the time she did, I wasn’t even sure if it was the answer to my question at all. “Bay.”
“That’s your name? It’s lovely. Unusual.”
“How would you know? You don’t even know what country this is. Who are you to say what’s unusual here?”
“Good point. Sorry.”
“You’re lucky we even speak the same language.”
“Very.”
She pointed at a trickle of water that cut a small path down the cliff wall. “Cup your hands there. It’s potable.”
“A spring?”
She gave me a look.
“Sorry. Thank you.” I did as she said. The water was cold and clear. If there was some bacterium in it that was going to kill me, at least I wouldn’t die thirsty.
I showed my gratitude through silence and concentrated on the descent. The path was narrow, just wide enough for the sled she pulled, and the edge crumbled away to nothing. I put my feet where she put hers, squared my shoulders as she did. She drew her sweatshirt hood over her head, another discouragement to conversation.
We made it all the way down to the beach without another question busting through my chapped lips. She left the sled at the foot of the cliff and picked up a blue plastic cooler from behind a rock, the kind with cup holders built into the top. She looked in and frowned, then dumped the whole thing on the rocks. A cascade of water, two small dead fish. I realized those had probably been meant to be her dinner the day before; she had chosen to haul me up the cliff instead.