The door snapped open from the inside and Chen raged out. Glistening in that dark light, possessed by a terrible spirit, a terrible impulse. Shining like a beacon of burning white light. Face torn apart by rictus. Eyes turned up in his head.
Nocturnalia.
Moss understood: The duck had turned him. Some part of Charlie X had turned him. Controlled him.
But she could not turn away soon enough. Chen-not reached out to her, and even as she tried to dissolve into flowers, into a hail of leaves, he swiped through her form, grazed her shoulder, and, as she briefly fell apart, scooped flowers from her chest. Before she gasped and became human again. Chen-not’s hand came away green, holding part of her.
While his other hand, with the blade, had stabbed Chen in the back.
Grayson shot Chen-not. A hole ripped through his throat, but he fell backward, hand catching the door latch from the inside, closing it again. Them still trapped on the outside, now Chen-not’s weight jammed against the door from the inside. Chen slumped against the door on the outside.
As the storm washed over them and they huddled there not knowing their futures until it had passed and all was still.
None of them ready.
Thought they were in the middle.
Not the end.
xvi.
for the price for the wonders
displayed within was too high
If you pulled out a globe from Chen’s side of the wall and peered into that empty space, you’d find Charlie X and his laboratory on the other side. Perhaps even replacing the missing globe with a new one, occupied by a new experiment. A serious expression on Charlie X’s face as he pushed the globe into place. Maybe you would even catch a hint of the hidden door leading to a secret room.
Sometimes the lighting made the globes look, against the black wall, as if they floated in defiance of gravity. Almost like large bubbles floating to the surface of the sea. Or, when the transfers were made and creatures disappeared somewhere else, like roiled, curving waves.
A pattern of rough circles with creatures caught within those eyes. As if they were in a sense extraterrestrial or other than terrestrial, and Charlie X would wonder aloud to Moss, who sat or lay or stood there behind him, on a chair or a bed or the floor … what would happen if aliens did come down to Earth and found the City. Found the Company. Found Charlie X’s wall of globes. Would they recognize its purpose? Would it trouble them? Would they welcome it? Would they have done anything about it?
Charlie X didn’t know what he wanted them to do about it, he told Moss, but he said he liked talking to Moss, which he thought of as talking to himself, since Moss was his creation. But Moss would tell Grayson and Chen later that she always knew he was wrong, that she was nothing like him. That, deep down, Charlie X might have known that—have planned it that way. Deep down.
Until later, the Moss that Charlie X talked to, that recorded his ramblings, was the green clotted “skin” over the wall of globes. The conduit, part and parcel of Charlie X’s genius. It could be said that transactions occurred through Moss. That time and space changed within her, if the globes could be understood as the body beneath the green skin. But this was only the roughest approximation.
The unfairness of it. The heedlessness of it. The awful sensation of being stretched thin in an organism that existed flat, whose texture was only an inch deep.
Charlie X liked to claim he put part of himself in almost everything he made. A hedgehog creature. A salamander. A duck with a broken wing. A scrim of moss.
All Moss could say later was she had the least part of him possible. That what was left had been quarantined and cleansed.
If that were possible.
* * *
What Moss knew, or thought she knew—she had come in late. And not across all Cities, where it applied and didn’t. How it varied more than it should in the beginning, and yet still not enough.
Charlie X at twenty-seven might have lived a lifetime already, had migrated to the Company building. Heading up a lab, experimenting with form and function, blurring the lines of art and product. Feeling so very powerful as an orchestrator and organizer and manipulator of life.
How, much later, as the practical concerns of the Company, in most Cities, fell away—the idea of someone, somewhere, who bought the product—and yet the Company in the context of the City still existed, as if some fundamental truth larger than either the Company or the City had been revealed … without clarity like the ghost white or bone white shining through the world.
The constraint of the practical fell away and the idea of “experiment” became instead the idea of “art form,” and as little morality attached to “product,” Moss and Chen had both discovered in their separate ways that “art” had even less.
It wasn’t Charlie X’s fault, in a way, even though it was all his fault. Charlie X just thought in the old way. Plants couldn’t feel pain, animals were objects to be manipulated as products or resources. Because he didn’t see the systems the way Moss came to see the systems. Because he thought soft tech should serve the same master as hard tech before it.
But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.
That was Charlie X at fifty, just before the end on most timelines. The end meaning the point at which the City began to encroach on the Company rather than the other way around. Or when the Company cast out Charlie X. When the fox began to appear. Or reappear.
Charlie X at fifty had lived too long within the Company, and even the prison of his youth no longer existed except as a husk and a series of ghosts. Suffered and deserved to suffer confusion of realities, pieces of him caught between, seduced and shot through with other times, other versions.
Charlie X by then did nothing but experiment. Charlie X who by then had long since reimagined Moss out of the resurrected and the residue. Who had found ways to subsume the human without taking away a human consciousness, and done all of this to Moss.
Charlie X had thought Moss could be a kind of incubator to supplement the wall of globes, even if in this reality the wall’s mechanism had failed and most of the globes were dark and dead, and in some other realities even the Company building itself had fallen away so that it was just Charlie X laboring in the open air, shoving into a dead wall creatures that, deprived of sustenance, expired almost immediately.
While Charlie X didn’t even notice but continued on to the next thing, until he ran out of supplies and equipment and the next thing was just a tangle of twigs attached to clay and the eyes he jabbed into the clay with his thumbs and with a rasping cry of triumph he smashed yet one more creation into the dusty jagged hole where a globe had been many years ago.
“Nothing lasts! Nothing ever lasts!” he would rant to the tortured souls still alive in that place, captive and unhearing. “Nothing is made of what it needs to be!” Sounding like a child.
Then he would retreat to his secret room, where even Moss couldn’t see him.
* * *
Moss did not lead to repetition. Moss, over time, learned skills Charlie X had not intended, hardly noticed. Sometimes Charlie X even placed parts of Moss in the wall. She could be broken down just as she could be built up, but each time a part of her returned, was not consigned to the holding ponds, she learned something, too.
Grayson’s Moss escaped the Company when her Charlie X was thirty-nine, at a time when the holding ponds rose in rebellion and slaughtered everyone inside, even Charlie X. She had fled across the sands, occurred somewhere else, without Charlie X’s control over her.
Grayson found Moss on the coast of a different reality three years later. Charlie X would have been forty-two, if he had lived. But he lived
across most other timelines, and the first time the three encountered him, Charlie X was already beyond repair.
Charlie X did not really remember Moss. But she would never forget him.
xvii.
across the divide
that could not really be crossed
The storm blustered, subsided. Fell away. The world returned to normal, dark presence subsumed. The door was still closed to the three. Grayson, arm slack at her side. Chen still slumped there. The blood had stopped, but he was delirious. Equations skewed.
Chen mumbling, “It’s all right. You already told me what to do. I know what to do.”
Could look upon Moss, Grayson peppered with shrapnel, the arm the worst of it, and see how Chen-not’s touch had damaged her. A disease had spread. How parts of all of Moss had gone dark, while patches of light shone through like fireflies against a black night with no moon.
“We made it out. We were supposed to. We should’ve. We know we are home. By these signs…” Chen rambling, hugging himself tight to hold himself together.
Inside his head the colors changed from green to red and back again. Inside his head, he could see himself as puzzle pieces beginning to pull apart. “We can still get away.” There was a pulse in his ears. A pulse that was calling to him from far, far away. From a polluted river, where a creature turned long enough to call his name and then slipped into the water, disappeared.
Grayson thankful that her eye was damaged, could not diagnose Chen’s damage, Moss’s distress. It was too much. Welcomed the beaded pain of the sharp bits of rock debris embedded in her arm.
Moss knew. From her own diagnosis. From how the double at the holding ponds had been diminished by the storm, reduced almost to nothing. Or even just from the anguished look on Grayson’s face. And, dying fall: Grayson experiencing for a moment Moss looking up at her. Then: No connection. Just the pulse of other creatures all around, watching. Moss shutting her out, shutting Chen out. For their own protection.
“There will be nothing left of me soon, Grayson. I’m sorry. Careless.”
But had it? Been carelessness? Grayson thought. The ravine opening up beneath their position like a swallowing mouth. Of Moss there, on her mission to Botch. Unable to think through to the right conclusions.
The question they’d never thought would need to be asked. Grayson, in a voice torn apart: “Can you give me nothing?”
Can some part of you become some part of me.
Not the part that knows you best, that you know the least.
“You’d die,” Moss said. “You’d die as I am dying.”
“I don’t care,” Grayson said.
“Yes, you do. If you love me, you care.”
Grayson reached out with her injured arm, that the pain might shield her from the other thing. Moss flinched away.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t. Please.”
Last hope: “Can you save any part of yourself?” For Grayson couldn’t bring herself to put the real question to Moss. “What have you done?”
“It’s everywhere at once. Anything I quarantined…”
The human form of Moss had blurred, become indistinct, and then sharp in other ways: the edges of lichen and leaf, spore and loam. Blackening into clarity and out again, dulled and blackened more, drying out.
Grayson knew that Chen knew—numbers leaking out of him now, seeking comfort in his equations, or maybe just counting the tiny lives he would become.
10 7 3 0. 0 3 7 10.
10 7 3 0. 0 3 7 10.
They had always known, but it had never been real before. Without Moss there was no path out. No escape. To another time. To another City. They would stand or fall here, in this place. Grayson would stand or fall. Chen already was his own escape plan.
Moss reached out a deep green hand to Grayson, to comfort her, not to touch, but the arm was already falling back into the darkness of the rest of her as she extended it. Moss breathing easy, breathing hard, not needing to breathe at all, but having gotten in the habit. Knowing what it would mean to Grayson if she stopped breathing.
“What would you have done if not for us? Would it have been better?” Moss asked Grayson. She was gray and black, the black fading the gray, the green succumbing to black.
“I would come searching for you at the tidal pools,” Grayson said. “I always would do that.” Grayson was constant like that. This Grayson, that Grayson.
There was a smell like mint and honeysuckle and periwinkle. There was such a richness lost into the air. That Moss had always carried within her. Last to leave her would be the salt, the brine, the scent of water.
“How long?” Chen, trembling from the effort of holding himself together, there with the other Chen mirroring him on the other side of the door. Except Chen-not would just die.
“A little longer,” Moss managed, although her face had lost its form. A wraith of wreathes. An impression in a now barren field where once wildflowers had grown. She’d taught Chen how to die, the progressions, but had never taught herself.
In the look Grayson gave her, the silence, Moss could feel Grayson’s bereavement intense, burning away her own pain like a heated surgeon’s knife.
“Better than nothing,” Moss said. “Always better than nothing. Remember that. Don’t forget.”
Moss reached out. With what was safe. Across the divide that could not really be crossed, across the void that was the space between minds. Reached out.
But it was the memory of Moss that Grayson always held within.
Limbs that couldn’t be separated, didn’t want to be separated. Held by so many and so much and never being alone, separate again.
Then the door closed and Grayson was left there, unable to touch the one she loved most in the world.
All the things. All the things Moss had taught her. All the things Grayson would never have been.
There was nothing left to say that had not been said.
The skies were clear. Out on the plain, her eye recovering, she could see the dot that was Charlie X, motionless, straining to hear something that could not be heard. A child. A nothing.
All was still. All was silent.
xviii.
reentry like death
found in flame
A century coming home, for Grayson. The warp and weft of time like a scythe swung effortless. No resistance. Caught you no matter how you tried to evade. A lethal cut that bled backward, started as a scar, became a wound, fountained red, then was nothing at all.
The moment of weightlessness and awe. Grayson, in the life pod, so long ago. The plunge toward the glowing orb of Earth become half-circle and then even more enveloping. The limitlessness contained. The universe reduced to part of a world. The broken, redrawn lines of continents, oceans dull glazed blue or salt white, and her instruments unable to divine the countries upon them or she even to remember what they had been. Or why. The sun revealing the vast catafalques of sprawled dead Cities against dry brown rockscapes.
Dead astronauts were no different than living astronauts. Neither could shed their skin. Neither could ever become part of what they journeyed through. Suits were premade coffins. Space was the grave. Better to think of yourself as dead already. There was freedom in that; liberated the mind to roam quadrants farther than the body.
Pod descending in flame and friction. The lurch and shudder of it. The way that figured in her bones, lived there even when she was still again. How she could sit quiet in a chair and her bones vibrated, never free of space or the journey. It accumulated, kept hold.
She was old, encased in an astronaut’s suit that made her seem new. She was traveling across a wasteland. She was naked by the tidal pools. Grayson lying on the beach in the cool sand, above and beyond her the ruined arches of another time, another world. The tide a chorus of tiny voices at her feet. Moss the shape of Grayson, all around Grayson, covering Grayson like a second skin. Showing, kiss by kiss, the beauty of Grayson to Grayson, who had never thought herself beautiful. That she was beaut
iful. All of Moss kissing all of her and Grayson seeing herself through Moss’s eyes. Reborn in that moment.
This green dust and Moss in reverie, giving up the body. Becoming what she’d been before Charlie X.
And the green glowing dust settled over the land and although the land was no less barren, it was more aware. The questing, the questing of that dust over the landscape, the way it had intentionality even as it faded into the wind at dusk.
As the life pod, burning, reentered the atmosphere. The friction and the shaking rattle.
Why should it hurt so much? After all she had seen. The slowness and yet the speed of space. Slow because it was so vast that speed could not get the better of it. The desolation and violence of that, and yet the grim elation, too. The way it beckoned, rejected. The stars, once charted with such human precision, backing away, reduced again to the twinkling lights in some psychotic god’s cosmology.
Ten count to reentry. To reenter another world. But she preferred just the lucky number, and the end.
I’m coming for you, Moss. I don’t know you yet. But maybe I’ve always known you.
Wait for me.
But now Moss was dead.
xix.
when i am weak
then i am strong
v.7.0
The desert foxes, snapping their jaws and joyous, ate up what was left of Moss. They gamboled and leapt across the mist and meadow of her corpse and devoured her bit by bit.
v.6.9
There was in their feral appetite a reverie beyond judgment.
v.6.8
The poison meant nothing to their physiology, had not been meant for them.
v.6.7
They were the antidote.
v.6.6
As they gorged, one by one, they would:
v.6.5
Wink out:
Dead Astronauts Page 7