by Clarke, Neil
Not love, it said, mandibles clacking. Love respects the First Gift Given.
“Love,” Tal said slowly, “pulls young from the fire.”
The Builder Warrior chittered, its eyes rolling.
Tal stood, stretching himself fully upright and raising his fist. “I will return with fruit for my People.” No answer dropped into his mind or drifted into his ears. He started walking and kept walking until he saw the tree, heavy with its purple fruit.
Anger. Sadness. The Finder stirred. I can not permit it.
The ground at the foot of the tree peeled back, exposing Jadylla where she lay wrapped in roots. Her eyes opened. She was different towards him now, her voice cold and far away. “We came for you. Not them.”
Tal swallowed. He felt anger building. Falseness.“You did not come for me. You came to take life from me.”
Neither answered.
“I will take life, too. Life for my people.” He paused. “It is my choice.”
The Firsthome Finder’s Lady looked at the Firsthome Finder. Her tongue slipped from her mouth, touching the root, moving over its surface. Finally, she nodded. The tree shuddered and fruit fell like rain.
Jadylla’s eyes were narrow. “You may take what you can carry. We will not wait long for you.”
Tal picked up a piece of fruit. “And you will take us all with you.”
Only those who choose, the Finder said into his mind.
Tal picked up more fruit, cradling it in his arms. “Only those who choose,” he repeated.
Light swallowed him and sent him spinning away.
Tal stood on the rise overlooking the fires and the caves. He watched Best-maker-of-fire argue with No-child-in-stick. Young played around the fire, moving quickly on all fours in a game that imitated hunting and mating behavior. He saw his own young among them. His mate, Soft-voice-sharp-bite, sat with the other females, grooming one another.
Compassion, he sent. No fear.
They looked up quickly as if struck, all wide-eyed.
He lifted a piece of fruit. Watch. Learn. He bit into it, letting the juice spill onto his naked skin. He took a step forward, extending the fruit though he was still two throws away.
They moved, scrambling back toward the caves. ”Don’t go,” he said. “It’s me — Go-on-all-fours-sometimes-upright. I’ve come back for you.”
“Not People,” No-child-in-stick growled. ”Upright walker eater of People.” His eyes rolled wide and wild.
Peace. ”No,” Tal said.
Abandoning their fire, they fled into the caves.
He spent the night trying to coax them out. He fed the fire for them, hoping somehow it would show he meant no harm. He placed a piece of fruit outside each cave entrance. He called to them. He waited.
As the sky reddened and the swollen sun crawled out, he heard his young whimpering in the dark.
Come. Eat.
Deep in the back of the caves, they growled and moaned.
Finally, he took a piece of fruit and went into the cave that used to be his own. His mate yelped and hissed as he moved quickly toward her. She clawed and kicked at him as he grabbed her, biting at his hands as he tried to force the fruit into her mouth. She shrieked, her nails and teeth drawing blood, her eyes wide in terror. He shoved her away from him, turning toward his children.
She fell on him before he could take a step and he went down beneath her, the air knocked from him as her thrashing feet connected with his testicles and her gnashing mouth found his ear.
“Not People,” she screamed. “Eater of People.”
Tal wanted to fight back but couldn’t. Suddenly he knew that it didn’t matter anymore. He yelled again and again. His young were fleeing now and other forms were moving into the cave waving piercers and hefting rocks.
He heard his own bones breaking and smelled his own blood on the air, the tang of iron mingled with the sweetness of nectar.
He closed his eyes and waited for the end.
Not love, the Lady’s voice in his mind said, heavy with sorrow.
Tal’s eyes opened. He lay wrapped in the ground, tangled in the Finder’s roots. “No, not love.”
“You are well now.”
He nodded. “I am grateful.”
She touched his arm. He still felt the distance but no longer cold. He saw now that her belly curved slightly outward, his child growing there quickly, nourished by the Finder’s sap.
Come to Newhome with us, Ra-sha-kor the Firsthome Finder said. Come, cousin, and meet your Other People.
Tal twisted himself free from the roots, goosebumps forming on his skin as he remembered the stones and fists and fire-sharpened sticks. “What would I do at the Newhome?”
Jadylla smiled and rubbed her stomach. “You would care for your daughter. With me and with the Firsthome Finder.”
He saw that the Builder Warrior hung from his legs in the tree branches, weaving three silk hammocks. His mind told him that these were to let them sleep for the long voyage.
“My daughter will not need me.” Tal bent, placed his lips to the root, letting knowledge and emotion wash through him. “She will be cared for.”
Understanding. Acceptance.
Love, he thought.
Tal stood on the edge of the big waters in the cool of the night. Far above, a fleck of light moved away, crisp and clear among the pulsing stars. He waved though he knew they could not see him.
He picked up the thrower and the pouch of little piercers they had left with him. He tested the string and calculated in his mind exactly what he would need to make more of them. He also thought about ways to go out onto the big waters to find the swimmers and ways to capture the three-horns and breed them for food. Ways to plant the good berries and tubers and to dig them at his leisure. He even thought about ways to take his People to a new place — far to the north or south — where life could be better for them until there could be no life and the sun finally swallowed the world.
Perhaps someday they would let him do these things for them…with them. Certainly not now, but maybe with time.
For now, he would hunt. For now, he would keep what little he needed to survive and leave the rest where his People could find it. He would do this every day for as long as it took because he knew that if choice was the First Gift Given, love must indeed be the second.
Sha-Re-Tal, the Firstfound Cousin and Healer of the Broken Distance, found the three-horn spoor and broke into an easy run. He ran upright, his feet steady and sure beneath him, his eyes and nose and ears remembering their work very well.
A silver moon rose over the big waters.
He howled at it and dared it to chase him.
About the Author
Ken Scholes’ quirky, speculative short fiction has been showing up over the last eight years in publications like Clarkesworld, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales and Writers of the Future Volume XXI.
Ken’s first novel, Lamentation, debuts from Tor in February 2009. It is the first of five volumes in the Psalms of Isaak series. The second, Canticle, is in production for an October 2009 publication. Ken’s first short story collection, Long Walks, Last Flights and Other Strange Journeys, is available from Fairwood Press.
Ken lives near Portland, Oregon, with his amazing wonder-wife Jen West Scholes. He invites folks to look him up through his website.
“The Jisei of Mark VIII”
by Berrien C. Henderson
Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit. Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit.
These were the most consistent sounds Mark Edward VIII had heard each day for the past thirteen years and five months of Sophia Loggia’s declining days. The dampened noises of his own servos provided counterpoint to the deliberate tedium of each day.
Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit. Sss-uuunnn. Cha-kit.
They might come to him through the wireless pings of the house’s com-system or via the audiBELL embedded in his synthetic cortex or in the stale yet otherwise antiseptic air of Madame’s upstairs bedroom. Companions, though quite unwelc
ome.
6:40 p.m.
He read the blinking notice on a free-floating screen, some phantom display ghosting through the air.
Mark VIII, upon expiration of primary employer, return to Clockwork Corp. home office for de-servicing, upgrade, and re-assignment per Section 912.579, Directive 31518.
He pressed the air and disrupted the holographic waves, and the notice dissipated. He shook his gleaming mimetic alloy head. All Mark VIII models came with loyalty A-Life programming, just the thing for a proper butler (or botler in the argot of the consumer) or an eldercare bot, yet that same programming had to be de-commissioned for that selfsame model to be perpetually useful. So, loyalty was for terms of service, and those ended.
Marcus went to a bookshelf. Madame Sophia had always insisted, even when her arms wouldn’t work right, that a good dead-tree book, dense though it was with information, was worth all the digitization in the world. He even admired the precision grandfather clock in the foyer; he had to wind it ever so often, and its Old English script on that old analogue face reminded him of the clockwork mechanical past — the golden age of the nineteenth century. Halcyon years, some might say. Madame Sophia even had the most antique of entertainment systems — an old-style stereophonic system complete with record turntable, fully serviceable for the collection of vinyl records she had amassed before her waning years caught up to her. The machine even contained a transistor radio, but that only crackled in obtuse protest of its own impotence.
But, again, they always had the bookshelves.
“There will always be time for books and music and such,” came her words. “Do understand and humor an old woman, won’t you, Marcus?” His mimetics conformed to his A-Life mood — a silvered smile, though bittersweet, cut itself in the alloy.
Marcus. Not Mark. Not VIII.
Just Marcus.
The first book she’d asked him to read her was Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
6:58 p.m.
He found the book he needed to read to her, that he thought she might have enjoyed.
He dreaded the idea of leaving; there had been thirteen good years with Sophia Loggia. These last several months, though, had challenged his programming to say the least. All his memories would be wiped in a trice. All combinations of 0’s and 1’s that became them — became him — would drizzle to naught.
A soft, whining alarm went off, and Marcus hurried into the bedroom. His pistons and actuators whispered urgency with his strides. The alarm faded. He surveyed the computer array keeping Sophia Loggia alive: nothing but flat lines and any of a dozen redundant warning chimes.
He placed a gloved titanium hand on her shoulder, then smoothed back her hair (all original, even at 129 years old).
7:12 p.m.
In eighteen minutes, the paramedics would arrive to confirm her death. Around that same time, a pair of human Clockwork Corp. handlers would come.
Damn them, thought the robot.
“I am sorry I do not have anything witty or sentimental to say,” said Marcus, indulging himself an extrapolation. Do humans experience beyond death as suggested by many of the religious tomes he‘d read and researched? Like another operating system upgrade? An opportunity for a patch?
“Thank you for this opportunity to serve.” He had been serving her and reading to her for these past months even when she was too far gone to know another presence other than the shadowy one slithering closer each passing day.
He went to the entertainment holo-grid and reached out to begin a spot of music, then shook his head. He instead went to the stereophonic system and fwip-fwip-fwipped through the record albums until he found the one he desired and shucked it ever-so-gently from its sleeve. Record to hub. Needle to record. Flip ON. The turntable spun and noise scritchle-scratchled from the speakers for a few seconds until the strains of Moonlight Sonata began playing as he went to the bathroom and studied his smooth alloy face, the mimetics making him appear appropriately sad although that wasn’t quite right, was it? There was sad, yet there was a sense of no longer.
Off came the gloves. He wiggled the cleanly articulated fingers, ran them over the antique marble lavatory countertop. His tactile input stream coded “smooth” and “imported” and then metalinked through associative content tags “Italy” and “custom-ordered” and “dense.” Mark VIII went out, came back in, and placed a thin, clothbound hardcover book on the edge of the countertop. He traced his fingerpads over the cover and whispered, “Tsunetomo Yamamoto.”
7:22 p.m.
He entered a code in the blue-lit strip on the wall near the linen closet. Now water poured into the tub, just in time for one last bath. He methodically unplugged all wires and removed all tubes from the Sophia’s corpse back in the master bedroom. There were tugs and wet sounds as though the body refused to surrender these accoutrements of medically assisted living and hospice — of the once-living.
Marcus picked up Sophia’s body.
Promptly at 7:30 p.m., Ms. Sophia always had a bath up until her frailty made it no longer feasible.
It was 7:24 p.m.
He still had time before the paramedics came. And the handlers.
He disabled the auto-assist medi-tentacles in their wall sockets. Gleaming cool fluorescent light belayed a soft halo effect to the crown of his head. His servos whined and sssshhhhed under the added weight. Already the Madame’s clothes, robes, slippers, towel, washcloth, and soap stood watch by a platter-sized goferit bot. It looked up at Marcus with its dumb, ovoid, blank face as it skittered forward on thin, insectile legs, then back-crawled like a crab and scuttled into a far corner to observe.
7:26 p.m.
The fount of hot water, steaming as it rippled halfway up the inside of the tub, turned off automatically. He had never actually washed her; he could and couldn’t. His model came specific for inside purposes, basic service functions sans limited exposure to water. That’s what the goferit bots and medi-tentacles were for, not botler models. Surely not a Model Mark VIII.
Sophia had never felt heavy until now the life was gone.
They would come, yes. Come for him after the paramedics came to confirm death. They would arrive and take all good things she had shown him, and within seconds his synthetic cortex ripped through entire libraries and museums and theaters — linking and associating and superimposing. Hyperimposing beyond anything he’d ever allowed himself to do. A fugue state. Wanderlust knowledge for Clockwork Corp. Model Mark VIII Eldercare Robot.
Tennyson . . . In Memoriam
Manet . . . Olympia
Monet . . . Argenteuil
Moonlight Sonata . . . Beethoven
Homer . . . “Sing in me, O Muse, the anger of Achilles . . .”
Upanishads . . . OM
Musashi Miyamoto . . . Book of Five Rings
Rembrandt . . . contrast
Vitruvian Man . . . da Vinci notebook hidden away upon Bill Gates’s death
Rosetta Stone . . . Linear A
Analects of Confucius
Gilgamesh
The Renaissance canon
The Old Man and the Sea
Mayan calendar
Hagakure
All. All. All in that meta-Alexandrian library of his memory. Thousands of years in seconds down quantum hallways and Heisenberg shelves.
He got in the tub. He lowered himself and her waif-like corpse. Although he had no tactile sense of temperature per se, his shell knew it was a pleasing 44 C, just as Madame Sophia always had requested.
7:28 p.m.
He switched off A-Life schema warning him of his circuits’ being inundated. He reached over and took the washcloth, dipped it, daubed Sophia’s forehead, cheeks, chin.
The goferit bot tic-tic-ticked to the edge of the tub and twittered.
“Yes. I am well aware. Thank you for reminding me,” said Marcus.
7:30 p.m.
His decentralized servos and actuators began a cascade of failures up to his waist. He did not remember any of the other contract
s he’d helped fulfill; not after a handful of services’ worth of decommissions. He would never know. That bothered him. He would never remember, but Sophia Loggia had shown him more of humanity with her arts and conversation (while she still could) than thousands upon thousands of downloads could have accomplished. It was her lifetime. Her life. A life.
And they would not take it from him.
A door opened. Startled human faces. “What in the world are you doing? Stand down!”
Marcus said, “Just read it.” He pointed to the book perched on the edge of the marble lavatory and forced a plasticene smile.
With Madame Sophia arched across his legs, he simply took his arms and eased himself down the slope of the tub, helped his own dense body succumb to the water. Ozone crackles and wisps of electric smoke found Marcus.
“Model Mark VIII, stop! You’re ruining your—”
Yes, he thought, the ruin of it all, as basic input programming stalled and faltered, then the internal imaging, until at last he saw only a thin line of 0’s and 1’s and began composing it before utter system decay ate him like technorganic cancer.
Such a thin . . .
. . . ruin . . .
FOCUS — Just this last . . .
The westering sun
My eyes blinded
Only this tiny shadow of bird or angel
Yet only this: hidden by the leaves
That seesaw earthward —
Stray thoughts in the caress
Of autumn’s whisper.
01000101 01010010 01010010 01001111 01010010
About the Author
Berrien C. Henderson lives in the deepest, darkest wilds of southeast Georgia with his wife and two children. He teaches high school English, is a long-time martial artist, and has a big geeky spot in his heart for literature, speculative fiction, and comic books.
“An Interview with Jeff VanderMeer”
by Neddal Ayal
Jeff VanderMeer is all over the place. In the best possible way. When he’s not kicking people in the head with the novels in his Ambergris Cycle; City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch, he’s editing anthologies; The Leviathan series (w/various co-editors), The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, Steampunk (w/Ann VanderMeer), The New Weird (w/Ann VanderMeer). Forthcoming books include Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for 21st Century Writers and (w/Ann VanderMeer) TheKosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. When he’s not writing or editing fiction he’s laying down science on various aspects of writing on his blog, Ecstatic Days, interviewing people for this fine publication, amongst others, and writing reviews for The Washing Post Book World. When he’s not doing that he’s teaching workshops. When he’s not doing that he’s traveling. When he’s not traveling…you get the idea. I caught up with Jeff via email and pinned him down long enough to talk about the genesis of Shriek: An Afterword, the PR grind, and plushies.