Dead Astronauts

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “For fun.”

  “Team sport.”

  Grayson zipped the Frisbee to Moss, who threw it straight up in the air like it was made of heat.

  Yet somehow it came down and leveled out and sped right into Chen’s hand. He liked the grooved feel of it, yet the smoothness. His hand was always cataloging new textures. He kept squares of linen paper to write on, for the lines across it that felt like connection, like it had already been written on.

  They backed up into a proper triangle.

  Chen threw the Frisbee to Grayson, who caught it, held it a moment, tried not to laugh at the quizzical, worried look on Moss’s face.

  “They really did have teams,” Grayson said.

  “When?”

  “Ages ago. Long ago. I don’t remember when.” It was too painful to think of her childhood, because she could remember when none of this could be thought of as real.

  Chen thought he could remember when, too, but how could he be sure?

  “What else like this did they have?” Moss asked.

  Grayson ignored her, ambushed her instead with “Why did you go off on your own? Why didn’t you let us go with?” Deft like that—wanting to come at Moss sideways. But Moss knew it was just a reminder not to do it again, ignored her.

  Grayson sailed the Frisbee Moss’s way, but too high, but then Moss was too high, and smoldering green in a way that made Grayson lustful and in awe, and the Frisbee was caught, but not in the normal way—as if bouncing off a wall that fell away in the next moment, and there was an explosion of mint scent and the Frisbee, which had flickered out, appeared in Chen’s outstretched hand so quick he dropped it and, cursing, retrieved it from the ground.

  Then he froze.

  “How do we know it’s the same Frisbee?”

  They couldn’t, Grayson knew.

  “Are we playing Frisbee in another place too?”

  Grayson leapt as she caught the Frisbee from Chen.

  “No,” Moss said. “Somewhere else we kick a ball with our feet.”

  “We already did that,” Grayson said, passing the Frisbee back to Chen, Chen back to Grayson. “Remember? Many Companies ago.”

  “They do that now in the City. This City,” Moss said. “Give me the Frisbee.”

  Grayson and Chen both chuckled. “No,” they said, and moved so Moss was between them.

  “But not in teams—kicking the ball,” Chen said.

  The Frisbee passing around Moss, tricking Moss, or she was letting herself be tricked, as she leapt for it but they were swift too and Chen had his hand tricks and looked her off, made her grow tall in the wrong direction, then ducked under and around.

  “Give me the Frisbee!” Moss shouted.

  “You’ll just do something weird with it,” Grayson said.

  “But you love that.”

  It was true. Grayson did love that. But they had a sweat on. They were competitive, Grayson and Chen both, in a way Moss was not. She was competitive, but not in the singular.

  So they kept it away from Moss for a while and then she tired of their trickery.

  Moss became a wall between them and intercepted the Frisbee. It went from Chen through Moss and out the other side came thrown at Grayson a ball the size of her head instead and Grayson ducked and fell and Moss, again herself, whatever that meant, laughed in the liquid, vegetal way she had and Chen smiled and radiated his love to them both while Grayson feigned outrage.

  “You’ve changed the future,” Chen said, to change the subject, just in case. “I can feel it. We can go home now.”

  Moss and Grayson just stared at Chen.

  Which home?

  * * *

  The Frisbee did not return and they did not return to the Frisbee. Inside the Balcony Cliffs, they sprawled across the same worn bed. Falling into another type of exploration and of play. The sense of completeness that was being overwhelmed, of being held tight and surrounded by Moss. Of how Chen rose like a mountain no matter what he did. How Grayson’s sharpness reduced under her clothes to a softness, a vulnerability, and she allowed herself to relax in their embrace.

  “What would you have done if not for this?” Moss asked Grayson. If the Earth had not been so wounded. If the Company hadn’t destroyed so much.

  “I would have come searching for you at the tidal pools.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t know to. You wouldn’t know me. You wouldn’t stumble on me by chance.”

  “Somehow, I would have.”

  The three knew they were disposable and finite and vulnerable. But they also knew they were rare and precious. Had never appeared at the outskirts of the City and strode across the desert sands to meet their doubles, stare into their eyes as if into a mirror, and see, naked there, a similar intent.

  “And you, Moss?” asked Chen.

  “I would have lived out my days by the sea. I would have been alone in my thoughts. I would have cut myself off from everyone or anyone.”

  Grayson was glad, for she knew that if she ever died, Moss might go back to her tidal pools.

  “And you, Chen?” Grayson asked.

  “It doesn’t matter what I would have done. Only what I did,” Chen said. But they knew he didn’t mean it, just that Chen did not want to have a future that did not include Grayson, Moss, their purpose.

  Limbs that couldn’t be separated, didn’t want to be separated, were not always human but more right because of it. How Moss’s kisses came from everywhere. How Chen became so giddy and silly. How Grayson’s urgency became their urgency. Held by so many and so much and never being alone, separate again, and the loss in the withdrawal of the tide, and how they would long for the next time, and how it made a mockery of the communion mind-to-mind that they always shared. How you could never trade the physical for the intimacy of thought. How this might be the last time.

  Moss would tell them in the morning, would explain in the morning. As they stood outside, looking down at the Company building.

  Maybe they would understand.

  Somewhere, in another City, a Frisbee had clattered on rock, come to soft scrunch on sand. Somewhere, a child’s ball, kicked, had disappeared in midair.

  The child changed forever. Believing in spirits or miracles or in loss or transformation. Or maybe believing in nothing at all.

  Then the door closed and Moss was just in one place, one time, again. Sprawled there on the bed.

  Rebel and traitor both.

  xiv.

  the sickness found

  in the midst of beauty

  What had Chen done for the Company? Before he betrayed the Company? Before he stole Charlie X’s journal and sent it and the salamander through the wall of globes to another place?

  Chen-conscripted disposed of dying biotech at the holding ponds. Chen-volunteer checked the Company’s products for signs of illness, so that the sick could be sent to the holding ponds. Or given over to Charlie X.

  Conscripted or volunteer, Chen told himself that he worked hard for an absent family, a wife, two children, and a grandmother that Grayson’s Chen had come to think of as far-distant stars, as remote as anything in the night sky. Perhaps corrupted by the idea that they didn’t really exist, had never really existed. But also because Chen-now knew it didn’t matter: He would never see them again; they lay so many realities behind and whatever copies lived here belonged to the Chen they had imprisoned. The one that periodically used it for freedom.

  Chen-that-was lived in his Balcony Cliffs apartment and came to the Company to work weeklong shifts, sleeping in a cubicle bed among the others. All day long, Chen mostly saw the biotech. Shoveled it into the holding ponds, to be preyed upon—floating, struggling, drowning—by the creatures that already lived there, that had refused to die as predicted or desired. Good, the Company said. They can serve a purpose. And so they did.

  The people Chen worked with faded and shrank into a landscape of slow-moving shadows in his mind. The globes they worked with a form of contamination, like radi
ation and mercury poisoning, but different because biological and temporal.

  Chen wore special clothing to protect him from the wall of globes when he worked there. Localized fields leading to other places once the “product” was complete. Areas of temporal contamination near the Company building. Most of the time, it just made people sick. Sometimes it corrupted the body in a way that the body became unstable, could not decide whether to live here or there, then or now.

  There was only Charlie X’s voice, coming through from the secret room on the other side of the wall of globes, the side Chen wasn’t allowed to see. The place where Charlie X kept his journal. Except, if you looked at the reflections in the globes … you could see the distorted face of Charlie X. See the journal, on the corner of the desk. How often Charlie X referred to it. How he depended on it. Perhaps, too, the green tracery that was evidence of Moss, but how was Chen to have read that? There, so close to Moss, never knowing Moss. Not then. (Or as Chen clarified, “A Chen knew about a Moss.” Somewhere/when. “Just not me.”)

  But Moss did exist there, on the other side. But Moss did see Chen, observed Chen. Knew Chen’s equations helped stabilize and rationalize horrors. That Chen’s equations even rationalized horrors Charlie X perpetrated upon her. In the way mosses experience the world, could “see” or “hear” or “know.”

  So, in time, Moss knew that there were Chens who could not cope with what they had been asked to do, when Grayson asked her for conscripts or volunteers who might help their cause.

  People who might turn into monsters briefly, but must become human again, no matter what the cost.

  What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss’s experience, but a kind of demon.

  * * *

  Chen, volunteer, donned the gloves and special clothes to inspect the biotech contained in the wall of globes. The wall was where he spent most of his time. The wall was what, in the end, broke Grayson’s Chen. Broke more than him. And why not? There was no weakness in that. You looked into a face unlike yours that was still too familiar. A face destined for and destroyed by servitude or entertainment at best, and might now serve a lower task still: As protein for some other creature made for servitude or entertainment that had failed the test and waited in the holding ponds.

  At one point, indoctrinated, it must have seemed a good job, a noble task. Something beautiful to take such raw material and make it purposeful. But this faded soon enough.

  Chen learned to recognize the glint behind the dull sheen of eyes: the understanding and resentment that fate, that chance, had placed their particular form of consciousness in such a context.

  Whether housed in the brilliant red-and-white spines of an animal like a lionfish but made to walk on land, lemur eyes staring from the body of a coiled green lizard, or the amorphous quiver of a converted sea anemone strobing green and purple.

  How did any Chen endure it past the first days to pass the boundary of a week, a month, one year, five years. To don the gloves, to push hands through the viscous membrane of a particular globe lodged in the wall, to palpitate and push, to knead, and to judge while applying the sensors. Perhaps to find the false richness of sickness, which so often manifested as a brightness or even, initially, an augmented talent, an intelligence beyond the required parameters or a skill that had never been intended for this particular product.

  Some pretended sickness, the more clever of the animals, and he had learned over time that cleverness existed as much among those with inhuman faces as those with bodies that in some manner mimicked the human. For even embedded within that wall like bizarre floating jewels, some of those he inspected must have heard the myths surrounding the holding ponds. That if you made it to the holding ponds, you might die brutally and of the instant, but also that you might become free, or have a chance at freedom.

  But it was the one that spoke to Chen that took him finally, even though once he no longer lived within a space that the Company might approve of, once he had moved past the point on the map where he might still know where he was … he knew that it should have come earlier, at any other time, on any other subject.

  The agony that was the speech, a human attribute issuing forth from a nonhuman mouth, that he responded to, that had value to him. Or woke him from a trance, from a state of being asleep while standing, while going about the rituals of his day.

  The way it was said to Chen, as he had one glove through the membrane and was holding the creature, which presented as a thistle-bright hedgehog face erupting from something with too many legs, all of it bathed in plush golden fur. Holding it in such a way that he could have crushed it as the creature spoke, so that he did not have to hear that voice. A brave voice, a voice that sounded like no other because this creature had never existed before and so he could not describe the voice to another person. Except to say it was like the thrushing of a beating of soft wings that had been doused in calm waters.

  After, Chen had stumbled out of the Company building, walked past the holding ponds, staggered lost and bereft across the sand, first to the wooded ravine and then to a southern entrance of the Balcony Cliffs. But he could not enter, as if a wall of force held him in check, as if there were a physical barrier, but it was just the trauma in his mind. He stopped, bent over, breathing heavily, outside the Balcony Cliffs. He knelt in the gravel, staring unfocused back at the distant Company building.

  It was there that Moss and Grayson found him. Eventually. In time. The Chen they needed. The Chen who knew the Company. The Chen who knew the wall of globes and their terrible cargo.

  But Chen never told them what the thistle-bright hedgehog creature had said to him. There, in the globe, as it died in his hands from whatever had been done to it on the other side of the wall, what it could not recover from. What Chen could not recover from.

  His nightmares he would never burden Grayson and Moss with. But in Chen’s dreams the ceiling of the Company building fell away and the globes in the wall floated off into the night sky, leaving behind the Company and all categories of hurt, of injury.

  Sometimes, Chen confessed to Moss, he followed them, floated off into the heavens and never came back. And when this happened in the dream, Chen wept, for he had a sense of contentment such as he had never experienced before.

  But in truth, their Chen had walked back into the Company building, had worked there for months more before leaving. Waiting for the moment. Sabotaging what he could.

  Saw the salamander, large and constrained, curled in the globe. The piercing way it looked at him, the autonomy there, and knew he could not fail that gaze a second time. Not and live.

  If the hedgehog creature broke Chen, perhaps the salamander saved him. Or, at least, that was how Chen’s equations told the story. Part of the story.

  And so Chen had sent the salamander through the wall of globes into another world. One where the Company had a foothold, but hadn’t conquered yet. Where the salamander might have a chance.

  And, in a moment of opportunity, sent Charlie X’s precious journal after, tumbling down, there one moment.

  Gone the next.

  xv.

  there was no path out

  no escape

  Then, it was too late. Now, it was too late.

  The morning of the next day, as they stood outside the Balcony Cliffs, ready for the next phase. The duck risen up before them as a storm. Vast and dark and deranged: An apparition that dried up the air around it, burned the oxygen so that they were gasping for breath outside the door leading into the Balcony Cliffs. An apparition that blotted out the sky and singed their skin, scalded their senses so they did not want to see or hear or smell or taste or feel. Made the air thick with red dust and dried blood and tiny flaps of metal that cut their faces.

  The darkness beneath the duck, sensed by Moss, had escaped, or been let loose or deployed for the first time. It welled up, oozed, and rose, to spread across the horizon and within their minds as a high, black wall. The scr
abbling, terrible presence, demanding to be let in. Knew, three as one, that once it locked into place, they would be lost. You are broken; let me fix you.

  Moss could feel it. An enclosure. A capture or containment, her doppelgänger locked in place. A sensation that made her gasp.

  The past always waited. To wound, to rend, to tear.

  “My double is compromised,” she said to Chen, to Grayson.

  Grayson staring at her sharp with that all-revealing eye. “Your double?”

  Her doppelgänger was in the prison that was Botch. No longer in control. Small in the tidal pools. Useless. Nothing they did from afar could help. Nothing from close by. Yet she could sense particles of her other self in the air around them, in the dissipated image of the duck. What did this mean?

  The southern door would not open. Chen put his shoulder against it. Moss pried at the seams. Grayson faced the storm, gun drawn, feeling helpless. There was no path out, no escape.

  The shape rammed into the Balcony Cliffs, lost its form, became a chaos of loose particles in the air and the wind shoving and smashing into them. In the high keening they heard the sound of part of the ruined roof coming free and walls creaking with the stress, trying to withstand what could not be withstood.

  The scrabbling, terrible presence, demanding to be let in. Knew, three as one, that once it locked in place, once it splintered their skulls, broke into their minds, they would be lost.

  Rocks and branches smashed against the wall around them.

  But still the southern door would not open.

  “Stand aside,” Grayson shouted.

  She shot, four times. The bullets wedged in the metal. But the door would not open.

  “Moss should take us out of here!” Chen shouted.

  “I can’t. The storm’s in the way,” Moss shouted back.

  The storm didn’t just exist in this space, in this time. It was obscuring her internal map, her compass. It was muffling the information, closing down the escape routes. Particles of her other self used to confuse her uncanny senses.