Dead Astronauts

by Jeff VanderMeer

  It’s snowing all around as you walk into that vision. It’s snowing and you feel the soft, shadowy breath, the baleful stare of eye. But you are not afraid. You are not afraid. That, at least, the salamander has given you. Or you have taken it.

  You step into the tunnel, into the snow. A sense of a weight lifting from you and you’re through the tunnel, through the window, and come out gasping into a desert City, the snow still falling, like a miracle, except now you see it’s ash and the Company building is aflame and around you lies the shattered bulk of a vast leviathan.

  There’s a ravine of blackened trees that shouldn’t be there, a ruined City that shouldn’t be there. You stumble down to the polluted river past the Balcony Cliffs. You stumble down, falling, struggling in the mud. Pick yourself back up.

  And there shall be a wall of globes. And there shall be a man with mice in his throat. A dark bird about to take you apart and no one there to stop it. Only to watch. The strange man says your name, and the word is terrifying in his mouth. “You shouldn’t have done this. You shouldn’t have taken the journal.” Nods to dark birds. Nods to the men standing behind him. Swarming now. Merciless now.

  But the salamander’s there, too, at the edge of the river in your mind. And you give yourself over to him. And he envelops you and in that cool embrace, in that moment where his skin is breathing into you. Speaking to you in that unbearably beautiful language, that unknown, unknowable language. Unfathomable and fathoms deep.

  Such a great and abiding light and an orchestral majesty to the invisible molecules of the air.

  In that moment, the salamander takes everything from you, before they can. All of it. Every last thing. All the poison and the need, the imperfections and the want. The incurable wound, the things that make you human but hold you back. Gives them to the ones who are killing you now. To the ones who deserve it.

  Neither of you will be the same again. Neither can ever be the same again. Both are different and in different ways. And yet, in the moment, on the long journey ahead, recognized. Not alone. Never alone.

  You’ll never be part of history. But you’ll carry history with you. And even though you don’t really escape until much later. Even though you know what’s really happened to you, he’s there. Makes you free. Makes you ready.

  For the next thing.

  * * *

  <>

  v.5.09

  7. CORPSE

  Once, there had been no Company upon that desert plain. Once, there had been no City. Only a river running clear and clean. Only the fringe of green around its banks, the birds overhead, the creatures of the land that inhabited that place. A vast plain of reeds and grass, through which passed multitudes.

  The first fish of Behemoth’s kind had come out of that river. Had sat there on the mud flats breathing in and breathing out as the dawn light heated the ground, water rose through the mud. And from that first fish had come the next, and the next, and they had grown in size and number, eaten and been eaten. Herons had stalked them and they had stalked little frogs and crabs.

  Some of Behemoth’s kind grew leviathan-large and walked across the land in search of food before returning to the sanctuary of the river. The area of plains at the edge of what would become the City flooded and left behind bogs and ponds and this brought damselflies and other creatures that had not been there before. Reproduced. Lived long lives.

  Burst forth: from a clutch of soft transparent eggs. Burst forth: from tethering to the bottom of a reed in a swollen river. Behemoth burst forth and swam to the river’s bank and looked out upon the City in its infancy, across a field of holding ponds that would one day become a desert.

  Burst forth: What am I? What am I? How am I connected? What is my purpose? What is all of this, felt in the flesh? Why is it so beautiful? What is beautiful? Why do I not know? What else don’t I know? When will I know it? Will I ever know? Would knowing be too much?

  burst forth: behemoth tiny evaded toad and frog to scuttle-crawl between holding ponds / flop-plopped into water deft of fin / mud clear as bright sun / cavorted with others of his kind / until absent / devoured in clutches / in mid-dart solitary / until there was only behemoth / aquiver in the mud / alert for the crux / of enrapturing jaws / that one day behemoth would repeat

  throb on a cusp of reed, clutch water-lily stalks / cling hidden against / the drift warp / of swirling thick water / infinitesimal on the edge / of the infinite.

  sudden convulsion of faith, of belief / behemoth had never truly been alone / not with so many allies in earth, sky, and water / that was not emptiness / that was not the stars bounded by nothing / and below / across a dark plain / a building that burned and never turned to ash / a heart that beat and never died

  behemoth satisfied by the sun upon a muddy rock / watched the stitching of black damselflies over the bog / so little sound leaking from their wings / how the delicate tracery escaped / negated all behemoth would ever be / even small / even staring into a bridge tunnel, damselfly like a drone hovering in the air / hovering in the sky / hovering in dreams

  the last of the green

  Escaping from Behemoth as he lay wheezing or still, or both, across some length of broken expanse. The sky was now like staring up at the gray-silver surface of a holding pond from its depth. Escaping Behemoth. Out across the ground. Taking part of Behemoth away, leaving what it could.

  Taking all that she could, because one day there would be no Company building, no City.

  Burst forth: Did you ever need to live on as I needed you to live on? Did you ever have a need so great that the vestiges of your mission existed even if you weren’t sure you did? Did you ever believe you were a ghost? Did you ever reach a point when you weren’t sure purpose existed anymore? And yet, still, you were here.

  Until in the thinning and the thrashing there came a silence, and Behemoth realized it was the silence. It was the silence. It was the stillness. Nothing moved but the wind. Nothing moved but the scavengers of the holding pond, come to observe, to take what could be taken. Peered scared. But all that was left was the stillness.

  Came to myself. Crawled, then walked, from the body of us both. Back into the City, to live my life, the life I never had before.

  The great carcass lay beside the Company building. It stank for days. The flesh crumbled in on itself. Flaked and rancid. Many fed for months. Even on the dried, weathered flesh. Even on the network of scars. Until even the scars were gone and then the bones and then all trace.

  Neither was the same again. Neither could ever be the same again. Both were different and in different ways. And, yet, in the moment, on the long journey ahead: Recognized. Not alone. Never alone.

  That blue and verdant lake of youth. The blazing, blinding blue reflects. Can’t remember. Can’t forget. Hops to the water’s surface, wary of herons. Peers out through the reeds once more and forever.

  Dives in.

  Gone.

  Not gone.

  v.4.2

  8. THE DARK BIRD

  Murder control not quite gone, through all the haze of sand and fog, the breath of wind and the breeze curling unruly over dead river, half-dead City. Murder control clicking like a switch flipped like a click like a cut like a blood-covered switch that clicked on, beckoned, beaconed off. Bodies, the memories of bodies all along that blasted plain, rendered down to coordinates, stashed away like caches, but only in memory or abandoned museums. Except memory was murder control.

  Faces limned by the beatific cowl of sea salt and crumbling fossils. The dried black and red of the dead, the flies, the maggots. The amnesia of the drunken father who lashes out and then subsides. Does not remember, so the dark bird is not allowed to remember. She must not remember.

  Murder control in the night upon a lonely promontory. Murder control in the stabbing and piercing and the sawing after. Murder control in the impulse, t
he pulse, of the black grasshoppers chirping and creeping across the sands. Feasting on whatever tiny limped or crawled or scuttled. Needling the dark bird’s mind with intel through their shells.

  An arm she did not remember ripping from a body. Murder control. Until the light and the subsiding in the dark bird of the impulse. Amnesia. Maniac. Dragging the broken wing in the stutter-start dance of the victim. Practice for the next time. Oracle of a future visited upon others. Dragging it as penance through the sweltering day. Under the stunning absence of judgment that was the eternal sky.

  The buzz-buzz-listing motion of the Company’s commands, counterweight to the broken wing, arrived less and less. That sudden creep become a lunge breaching the dark bird’s skull. Some soft creature become armored once inside her brain. Trapped by bone, vocal to get out, to manifest in a wing that twists into blade. Swift sharp beak, the demons of twinned talons.

  7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7

  3 3 3

  10, 0

  “We shall fight the 3, we shall live within the 7.”

  “We shall be the Company in both the 0 and the 10.”

  The battered journal with the numbers and so many words lay inside the dark bird’s nest, wherever it rested for the night. Nests hidden all over the City, and the comfort in that. But rest, not sleep. The dark bird never slept. The monster that lived inside the dark bird would never sleep. Would not let her sleep, and that stirred up rage.

  Words that sounded like numbers, too. Coordinates launched at her, lodged in the flesh of another life, hidden inside her. Gave away its position, became her position. They spewed like soft pebbles or maggots, spilled out onto the sand. By that time they had turned liquid, spat, coagulating in the sun. Nothing but blood. No pattern to discern. No pattern to discern. No task to impart but blood.

  10, 7, 3, 0.

  If the dark bird lingered too long on the numbers, strayed from the relentless patrol, the preset directives, the monster rose from within and the broken wing turned and turned ever-more frantic.

  To detect intruders. To be vigilant. To thwart the three whenever they might appear, encoded and included, a legion of want divined from need. For the Company building needed little now except to rest, to automate, to set boundaries, a sun perpetually setting. A shining scimitar. A beak dipped in gore.

  Murder control.

  Keeping the journal safe, but not knowing why, because no one knew why. Able to read from it without opening it. Because even a dark bird could be bored, waiting for the next murder control. Because the commands leaking out invisible from the Company came fewer and fewer, and the presets ground down in time, some of them nubs of suggestions for violence, so if she chose violence, she chose it. The dark bird chose it.

  Out across the night, a leviathan was dying near the holding ponds, killed by a flying monster. Out across the night, something emerged from the carcass in its last moments that the dark bird thought she recognized. A person. One of the three, yet not one of the three. But she had no edict from the Company to intervene, and knew this meant the flying monster had taken over her role. Which made the thing inside her furious.

  Murder control, read me a story. Murder control, read me a story so I can sleep. Or so the thing inside me can.

  Any story at all will do.

  ~ The Magical Garden ~

  I have a magic garden in a secret room. I have the voice of God in my head. I have the voice of my father in my head, too. But I have a magic garden in a secret room. It is there that I hide this journal for now, but not for later. There that I fix the mistakes. I pile the mistakes in the corner of the magic garden with so many beautiful animals and plants. My duck is there. I remember when she was a duckling. When she would be frightened when I entered the magic garden, although I had left her at the top, at the very top, where she could thrive. There was so much to eat, among my mistakes. It was a land of plenty and it was my secret.

  When my father brought me to the Company for good and all, I did not at first hear from God or the Company. I heard only from my father, and he put me in charge of extinguishing the broken things, the discards. I did this faithful for several years as his apprentice. I would extinguish the broken things. I would put them in the wood chopper or I would drown them or I would poison them. Each to its own passing. Whatever seemed to make sense, and not because I wanted to. No, I wanted to fix them. But I wasn’t allowed to, because the Company didn’t want them fixed and so my father didn’t want them fixed either.

  Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first. I could not escape the voice of God, the voice of the Company. It would boom through like God. Like the Company. And who could say which was better or best? I could not. If it was not God, then it was the Company, and if it was not the Company, then it must be the ghost of my father, curled up inside of my brain, my mind, my skull. I could not get it out if I drilled a hundred holes in there all at once. I could only get it out if I did what the voice said.

  The voice of God. The voice of the Company. Which both came later, but came loud like blaring horns and after my father had put me to sleep for some time, and when I woke I ran my hand across rough sutures on the back of my skull. The voice rang true enough, then. It could not be escaped, any more than I could escape my father, and yet, still, there was no person other than my father to respond to.

  And the voice of the Company, IT said, EXPAND AND MULTIPLY. And IT said, FIX YOUR MISTAKES. (But that is what my father said, too, but my father was not the Company.)

  And the voice of the Company, IT said, TAKE THE OTHER AND REMAKE IT AS YOURSELF.

  And the voice of the Company, IT said, IF YOU FAIL, WE WILL REMAKE YOU.

  But this I giggled at through my tears, for my father remade me every day. He slapped me and kicked me and shouted when I made mistakes, and I made so many mistakes because I didn’t know how to do anything. And he would stave in my skull and I would wake up on the slab. And he would drive a kitchen knife into my heart and I would wake up on the slab. And he would break my legs with a steel pipe and then break my neck and I would wake up on the slab. All of this away from the others, to whom he would talk in a calm voice while consulting ancient tomes and, perhaps, taking off his glasses that he might bite upon the edge of them, in deep thought.

  “We’ll fix you, we’ll fix you. Mind not the pain, son, it’s the price of the fixing. Everything dead can be brought back to life, so who minds a little pain, son.” As he suffocated me with a plastic bag because the creature had three legs, not four.

  I cannot pretend this was not agony, but agony repeated so many times is a different kind of suffering.

  “I made you so I’ll fix you,” he said, matter-of-fact, but I knew my mother had made me too, and if we were dead and merciful, it was not because this was false. But because it was true, and my father could not bear the sharing of the credit. For the mistake that he would fix.

  So my father removed any memory of my mother from me—from every part of me. I could not tell you now the color of her eyes or what she wore or what her voice sounded like or what she smelled like. Did she hug me or keep me at arm’s length? Did she feed me breakfast, or toss a pail full of parts in my direction across a dirty floor? There is none of that left.

  So my father fixed me and kept fixing me and at some point I was fixed enough for him, perhaps because I had grown larger, perhaps because he was bored. And I did not have to die every day but was put to work making things die. And because I knew what it was to die, and because I knew how it was to come back, I tried to make it pleasant, to make it count. Things should be fixed and pinned and certain, like the numbers the Company found so important, the 10 and the 0, the 3 and the 7. They should not be the opposite of that. Thus, my father, I realized later, was so frightened of the Company that he fixed me out of fear that he was not doing right by the Company and had no control over that distant entity or even the numbers but only over me.

  Or it could be that he liked to hurt
me and there was no one to stop him.

  * * *

  Listen:

  Once there was a boy-man who had a magical garden. He hid it behind the laboratory, at first nothing more than a large storage closet that no one else used, that was where his father made him sleep after his mother died. The boy-man who we will call Charlie, and leave off the X for now, took all of his mistakes that he could hide there. In part, to avoid the dying all over again. In part, because Charlie did believe he could save them. Just not in the laboratory, not at the wall of globes, and not at the holding ponds (which did not fix anything but simply let the unfixed escape to pollute the world).

  Charlie remade his mistakes into good things and found his bones less cracked the more he restored in the magical garden and the less he tried to fix in the laboratory. Everyone was happy in that place. Charlie made them happy, and even, perhaps, taught some of them to smile who would not, ordinarily, be wont to smile. Charlie was glad when they weren’t sad, because if they were sad, he would have to make them glad.

  There grew in that sacred space a tiny empire of wonders, of creatures spliced together, each to save the other, and things that hobbled but still yearned for life not snuffed. There were plants that formed miniature cathedrals for the row of faces Charlie could not reattach to torsos and benches of tough vegetal life glowing red, green, purple upon which lay the torsos Charlie kept alive with their brains embedded within them. There grew up in this weed-filled garden of all that was possible, birds stuck to the end of leaves and flapping wings in midair. There thrived lizards emerging snake-tongue-like from the midst of poppy blooms, an eviscerated green to the arterial red of the flowers.