“A lineup of the best writers of speculative fantasy from recent times! A perfect sampler of contemporary SF’s most exciting concerns.”
Michael Moorcock
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StarShipSofa Stories: Volume 2
Published by StarShipSofa at Smashwords
Copyright 2010 StarShipSofa
This book is available in print at lulu.com
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Edited By Tony C. Smith
Cover image by Skeet Scienski
Cover design, interior layout & design by Dee Cunniffe
www.StarShipSofa.com
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Contents
Tony C. Smith...Ed’s Letter
Ted Kosmatka...Bitterseed
John Kessel...Buddha Nostril Bird
Neil Gaiman...Conjunctions
Cory Doctorow...I, Robot
Jason Sanford...Into the Depths of Illuminated Seas
Jeff VanderMeer...Island Tales
Adam Roberts...The Mary Anna
Pat Cadigan...Jimmy
Lawrence Santoro...Then, Just a Dream
Paul Di Filippo...Personal Jesus
Nancy Kress...Art of War
Jeff Carlson...The Frozen Sky
Lucius Shepard...Stars Seen Through Stone
Mary Rosenblum...Skin Deep
Gwyneth Jones...The End of Oil; in three acts
Sean Williams...The Soap Bubble
Tobias S. Buckell...Tides
Stephen R. Donaldson...Unworthy of The Angel
China Miéville...Watching God
Amy H. Sturgis...StarShipSofa 2010 Hugo Award Win
Meet the Sofanauts
Tony C. Smith...Afterword
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Ed’s Letter
To Melanie, Elly and Reed – with love.
In putting together StarShipSofa Stories: Vol 2 we had time on our side, plenty of it. We made sure.
Creating StarShipSofa Stories: Vol 1 was such a rush that the book was on the shelves before we really knew it was finished. This time around both Dee and I wanted to take a more leisurely approach to putting together Vol 2, one that allowed us time to experiment with ideas and formats. We started the initial chatter via email in December 2009, and the first story was accepted in January 2010.
So has time helped? I think so. This time we’ve been able to make a truly great and unique anthology – one I am really proud of. That’s not to say I’m not proud of Vol 1. It’s just, with Vol 2 we had the opportunity to experiment with editions, ideas, and concepts, more than we ever could with Vol 1. Most of these ideas wouldn’t have been feasible had we followed the traditional publishing route. Putting out this anthology has confirmed my feelings towards print-on-demand ventures; they are exciting and stimulating, both for editor and reader alike. I hope you agree?
On April 4, 2010, StarShipSofa became the first podcast to ever be included on the Hugo Awards ballot, being nominated in the category Best Fanzine. On September 5, 2010 StarShipSofa became the first podcast ever to win a Hugo. I’m still struggling to believe those last couple of sentences. The whole reason StarShipSofa started, was to talk about writers who had won this award. And now we’ve went and got our own.
Tony C. Smith
Whitburn, September 2010
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BITTERSEED
Ted Kosmatka
The world was rivets.
Marc groaned as he lifted his face from the cold, steel deck and tried to focus his eyes. He knew he had to hurry but couldn’t remember why. Pain thudded in his skull, driving away articulate thought. So much blood, red on gray – a wet smear across the smooth metallic surface. Blood dripped from his head and pooled on the dimpled sheet metal.
He rolled onto his back and brought a hand to the side of his face where he found the familiar topography transformed into something loose and lumpy – something with two sharp angles where none had been before. He tried to move his mouth and the bones grated; his jaw was broken.
The field-skim thrummed beneath him, waking new pain along his left leg as the ship adjusted its flight course. He tried to sit but his ribs flared white-hot, and he collapsed, breathing hard up at the blue sky. Movement caught his eye and he concentrated the blurry figure into focus. Eli’s sun-creased face glared down over the railing of the sight deck twenty feet above.
There was no mistaking his expression. Marc blinked and the face was gone.
He remembered then why he had to hurry.
And he remembered why he’d jumped.
Ignoring the pain, he hauled himself to his knees and then to his feet. The deck heaved beneath him as the skim banked hard to port on its preprogrammed flight pattern across the crop glade. He clutched weakly at the railing for balance, trying not to faint while dots played across his vision. The field-skim was one of the corporation’s smaller ships—just under thirty meters in length—and it was designed to fly close to the crop surface. Beyond the railing, the spindly green maiza whisked by a few meters below. On this planet, maiza was the equatorial crop. It spread in a swaying carpet from the eastern horizon to the low mountains sixty kilometers to the west. It wasn’t just a sea of green; it was a vast, sweeping ocean. The individual plants were tall and thin, and the backwash of air from the skim made the stalks dance as they flashed by below.
Marc glanced around for a weapon, but the nose deck was empty. There was only the hard steel floor, the railing, wind, and a sea of green all around. Oh, and the ladder. Mustn’t forget the ladder.
Eli descended a rung at a time.
Marc felt the vibration when the man’s boots slapped heavily to the ship’s lowest deck. Though Eli stood a full three inches shorter than Marc, he outweighed him by fifty hard-won pounds of muscle. There were no guns on the agra-colonies, but Man’s indomitable spirit never lacked for improvisation: Eli still carried the iron tamping rod that had broken Marc’s jaw.
Marc backed against the rail. Eli followed with his dark eyes but did not move. The wind lifted his short, black hair off his forehead in buffeting spikes.
“There’s still time to take it back,” Marc said.
“I don’t want to take it back,” Eli said.
“Are you sure?” That was as close to begging as Marc would go.
“Very.”
Marc ducked the first swing and rolled across the deck. His head swam with the sudden movement, and colors blotted his vision again as he reached up for the railing. The swing had been just high enough to let him slip beneath. Eli was toying with him. Marc pulled himself to his feet, backing toward the far front of the skim.
Eli followed, changing his grip on the long iron cylinder and widening his stance. The second swing was calculated to be more damaging, and Marc sacrificed an arm to save his skull. The bar careened off his forearm with a crunch of bone, missing the top of his head by an inch.
Marc staggered back against the railing, clutching his arm. He turned and Eli was two steps away, poised, a smile on his face. Marc realized this wouldn’t just be a beating. Eli was really going to kill him.
Marc considered rushing him, but then what? He wouldn’t have a chance. Instead Marc looked him in the eye. “Don’t get caught for this,” he said. “It would kill Mom to lose both of us.”
“I’ve already thought of that.”
Eli raised the iron rod. Marc slid backward over the handrail just ahead of his brother’s final blow. His feet followed him into the spinning sky, and then the wind yanked at his clothes and the stalks were crunching like bones breaking. Silence.
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Marc opened his eyes to darkness. Pain and the sweet smell of growing things told him he was not dead. For a long time he just breathed, and that was miracle enough – to ask for more seemed presumptuous. The fall should have killed him and he knew it.
Wind blew high up through the stalks, making rasping whispers of the shadows that moved there. It was a sound he’d grown familiar with in his four years on Tristan-3, and it brought him a strange species of comfort.
When he tried to sit, pain quaked through him, too diffuse and all encompassing to isolate in any single body part. Everything hurt. Slowly, by degrees, he managed to roll out of the crater he’d made in the soft black dirt. The fall had embedded him well into the moist soil, and he left a perfect imprint of himself behind. He rolled against the row of maiza and let himself feel the hard vertical shafts against his back and legs. He raised up on an elbow.
One of the moons was rising, and Marc caught glimpses of it through the swaying leaves. It looked like Bromb, the larger moon, but he couldn’t be sure. He thought of his brother and knew he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
His good arm climbed the stalk, and he pulled himself to his feet. He leaned against the plant, feeling the slow sway. Even with all that had happened, he couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride at the touch. This year’s maiza crop was the healthiest yet. As a geneticist for Pinyon Seed Co, he’d worked long and hard toward that goal. It was likely now to be his only legacy.
Down the row to his left, he saw the leaning, shattered shafts that had slowed his descent and saved his life. The plants lay skewed across the narrow gap between the rows, their leaves crumpled beneath the weight of the stalks. To the right, the row disappeared into the distance. What direction had the skim been going when he jumped? East? North? He couldn’t remember.
He put his shoulder against one of the plants and pushed with all his weight, but it was already too late in the season. He wasn’t strong enough to bring one down. He counted the broken stalks: four. Would that be enough for them to find him – four broken stalks among a continent of maiza? Perhaps, but Eli would direct the search parties away from any evidence. He would say that Marc fell near the river thirty kilometers to the East, or at the edge of the mountains. The satellites might be able to pick out four broken stalks, but Eli wouldn’t have them looking for that.
The energy drained out of Marc’s legs as he considered his situation. There would be no rescue. His knees folded, and he collapsed to the dirt, sending a fresh jolt of pain through his jaw. Mother would take this hard. By now Eli would have told her. A fresh rush of anger welled up in him. She was too old to deal with this; she’d lost so much already.
When he laid his face on the warm ground, the soil was as soft as any pillow. He breathed in the smells of life and slipped into darkness.
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He woke to roaring sunshine. An early morning wind drove the leaves into a kind of applause as he sat and wiped the crusted dirt from the side of his face. Something in his broken jaw shifted, and he screamed. His mouth was cotton dry, his tongue coated in grit.
As he sat, he considered his options. He could sit here and die, or he could walk and probably still die. He looked down at the little crater he’d made and decided it looked too much like a grave.
Marc stood. Looking up at the sun through the long, narrow leaves, he decided which way was north and set off down the row to the right, pushing aside the leaves as he walked.
Maiza was an amazing plant. The roots of its cultivation could be traced back a thousand years on Earth to aboriginal Central American populations. Later, in the twentieth century, it became a staple throughout the world for both animal feed and human consumption. But the leafy green field he walked through now hardly resembled what twentieth century farmers would call corn. Agricultural geneticists had stopped using that term more than a hundred years ago.
Maiza now clung to the equatorial continent of Tristan-3 in an ecological monoculture, dominating the landscape to the complete exclusion of endemic flora. The local plants simply couldn’t compete with a thousand years of selective breeding. It was midseason now, and the plants were already fifteen feet tall. Upon harvesting, each would produce a variety of usable products for export to fringe colonies. The stalks were mulched into a biodegradable lubricating oil; the cobs provided food for people and livestock; and the leathery leaf fiber was used to make heavy, durable rope.
The enormous continental basin was divided into a corrugated pattern of male and female plants: two female rows for every male. The sexes were of different strains, designed to be of slightly differing heights so that the male reproductive tassels were close to the female cobs. This helped diminish the instances of self-fertilization, and subsequent inbreeding depression in seed product.
Marc trudged on, and when the sun was middle high, he stopped and turned. The world behind was indistinguishable from the one in front. The air moved not at all, and the light lent a soft green cast to everything beneath the leafy canopy. He took his shirt off and continued walking.
In the early evening, the rain began. It fell as a gentle haze that clung to everything, soaking his clothes and turning the soil to glop. It rained most days on the central continent, but the rain was always like this: weak and misty. Marc tried to lick the droplets of moisture off the leaves and stalks, and although his tongue got wet, there was little he could actually swallow. He continued walking and after another hour the rain stopped. The sun set behind a bank of clouds, and darkness fell quickly beneath the leaves.
He lost energy as the moons rose, and when he could walk no more, he slept where he fell.
In the morning the leaves were dry again, and his legs were stiff and sore as he climbed to his feet. During the night his thirst had grown into something burning in the middle of him. How long could a man live without water? Three days? Four?
He started walking again, and now he felt each leaf as pain on his exposed skin. Both arms were swollen and red from the microscopic nettles on the surface of the leaves. After all these years of working with the plant, he’d thought himself intimate with it, but this was something he’d never dealt with before. You don’t feel the nettles if you’re only in the fields for a few hours.
When the rains came again, Marc threw himself into the task of hydrating himself. He licked the surface of the plants again, running his tongue up and down the leaves, trying to get enough moisture to swallow. He opened his mouth to the sky and kicked at the base of the stalks to shake droplets loose. He worked vigorously for more than an hour, losing his shoe to the muck. He went from plant to plant until his tongue swelled, and his lips split.
When the rain stopped, his thirst seemed stronger than before.
Because there was nothing else to do, he continued walking. When night fell, he slept.
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The field applauded him again. He looked up into the green-tinted light and licked his chapped lips. Golden patterns of sun played across the dark soil – such good soil, the geologists had said. Perfect for growing things. It had taken the company a long time to find a place like Tristan-3.
There were discrepancies, of course. There would always be discrepancies. After all, you couldn’t just transplant life from one planet to another and expect it to thrive immediately. There were little problems that had to be dealt with first, little things that had to be fixed.
That first year, the crop and been stunted and pathetic. Too little nitrogen in the soil, too much sodium chloride. Even the sunlight was slightly wrong – bright enough, but skewed into a slightly higher spectrum than earthly chloroplasts were evolved for. They could photosynthesize, but at a diminished efficiency. That’s why Pinyon needed Marc. It was always so much simpler to change the plant than to change the planet. A year later, Marc pulled some strings and had his brother brought to the outpost colony as his assistant. Marc, Eli, and their mother – one big happy family again.
The second year’s crop showed a forty-percent yield increase. Not great, but definitely a step in the right direction.
It was during the winter before the third growing season that Marc made the breakthrough. That third year, the company finally turned a profit on its investment.
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Marc pulled himself from the dirt. Hunger swept through him. Was Eli eating a big hearty breakfast? Was he taking a shower and letting all that precious, precious water cascade over his skin and down a drain? Was he looking into a mirror and thinking of what he’d done? Marc knew his brother well. He knew Eli told himself that his motives had been purely financial. Maybe Eli even believed it – there was a lot of money in agra patents. But Marc knew better. Money had nothing to do with it.
Marc looked up at the husks just out of reach overhead. He grabbed a plant and shook it in frustration, but the husks were hugged tightly into their leafy blankets against the stalks, and he knew he’d never shake them down.
After a moment’s thought, he un-cinched his belt and flipped it into a loop. He bent his knees, eyed the spot carefully, and jumped into the air, hooking the belt around the top of the husk. He pulled. It came down with a crackle and landed at his feet.
At first he almost couldn’t believe it had worked so easily. Then he bent and snatched the leafy coverings aside and pulled away the yellow, straw-like filaments. The cob beneath was white and pebbly, and his stomach growled in anticipation as he ran a finger slowly across the hard rows of kernels.
He raised it to his mouth and bit – and something unhinged in his jaw. Marc screamed in pain, and then the pain turned to rage, and he threw the cob as far as he could. Tears sprang to his eyes, and though he tried, he could not hold them back. He collapsed into the mud, holding a hand to the side of his face, and he wept bitterly up at the swaying plants that would feed millions.
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Though Marc and Eli were born four months apart, they were identical twins. At least in theory. Circumstance had stepped in and changed all that. The same explosion that killed their father began the process that would so starkly divide them.
The Pagas mine colony was in shambles, and it took nearly an hour for help to burrow through. By that time, their mother’s pre-term labor had progressed too far, and Eli was born unfinished onto a bloody miner’s jacket amongst the rubble. The doctors managed to halt the labor, and Marc was saved from his brother’s fate. The doctors didn’t expect Eli to live, but after the pneumonias and the seizures, after the surgeries and the transfusions, he did.
Months later, when Marc, the second twin, was finally laid next to the first, he was twice the size of Eli. But the differences went deeper than that.
Although Eli had come first into the world, it was Marc who crawled first, Marc who said the first word, Marc who first learned to pee into the toilet standing up.
As the babies grew into children, Eli developed severe asthma and couldn’t play rough with the other boys from the work zones. There was always a sense of difference about him – made only more starkly visible by the presence of his brother to whom he bore such a striking resemblance. To anyone with eyes, Eli was Marc, only less.
And Marc never let him forget it.
Perhaps it was guilt that drove the taunting. Marc looked at Eli as what he easily could have been had chance only positioned his body nearer the mouth of his mother’s womb. Eli was a constant reminder of the gift he’d been given, the debt he owed fate. Marc grew to resent his brother almost as much as Eli grew silently to hate him.
Once, when their mother caught Marc bullying, she jerked him into another room by his arm, leaving great red welts on his bicep.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” she asked him. He only looked up at her mutely, shaken by her sudden, unexpected rage.
“Why do you do these things to him?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Marc said.
“You reap what you sew, Marc. It’s going to be a bitter harvest.”
He hadn’t understood what that meant.
He understood now.
Marc stopped sobbing and picked himself up from the dirt. He picked his way between the shafts to where he’d thrown the cob. He picked it up and turned it slowly in his hand. He brushed off the clinging chunks of mud. Opening his mouth, he carefully placed the cob against his upper teeth and pressed. His incisors sank into the hard flesh, and when he turned the cob, a scatter of kernels popped free onto his tongue. He swallowed them down greedily without chewing. When the cob was bare, he used his belt to pull down another and repeated the process.
He didn’t walk anymore that day, and when night fell, he lay down in the mud and slept with a full belly.
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The cramps came around midday. When he looked down at his stool, his heart sank. He’d known something was wrong. Instead of getting stronger after yesterday’s meal, his strength had continued to ebb.
The corn lay in a mushy pile where he’d squatted. For all the hours it had run through his digestive tract, it had hardly changed at all. The kernels were perfect.
It probably cost more energy to move through his gut than the meal had provided.
He sat and leaned back against a stalk, shutting his eyes. The wind made shuffling noises overhead, and this time, it wasn’t applause he heard; it was laughter.
He was hot. He ran a hand across his forehead, and his brow was strangely dry. Even his tongue was dry. His lips were cracked. If he didn’t get water today, he would die tomorrow.
He thought of standing and walking again but couldn’t make himself do it. Instead, he took his clothes off and laid them flat across the ground. Then he looked up at the sky and willed it to rain.
An hour later it did.
His clothes dampened slowly in the drizzle, and when they were finally wet enough, he wrung the moisture into his mouth. It came slow but steady – a trickle really – but he let the water fill his mouth completely before swallowing. It burned like ice going down his ragged throat, but it was the best water he’d ever tasted. He swallowed again and again. By the time the rain had stopped, his stomach was cramping with moisture. He mopped the clothes up and down the maiza plants, gathering extra water. Then he carefully wadded up the shirt and pants and continued walking.
As night neared, he stopped, un-balled the wet fabric, and wrung out every ounce of liquid into his mouth. Afterward, he slept.
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It rained on the next three days and Marc drank himself full. He gradually came to realize that he wouldn’t die of thirst, but food was an altogether different problem. When the hunger became too much to bear, he would hook down a cob and fill his belly with the worthless kernels. It took the edge off his aching emptiness, but it did little to sustain him. The kernels left him in the same condition they entered.
Marc had never been fat, even as a child. But as he’d approached early middle age, a certain thickening had developed around his mid-section that he was never able to fully eliminate. He couldn’t find the extra hours in the day to work out, and he lacked the motivation to push away second helpings at the dinner table. His mother had laughed when he’d complained about it one afternoon at the family meal. She patted him lovingly on the little gut that puffed above his belt line and said, “It’s a sign of health.”
“It’s a sign of too many of your dinners,” he’d said.
That gut was gone now.
Eli had spent many hours in the gym turning that same soft thickening into something hard and strong. Eli didn’t have his brother’s length of bone, and it was as if he could make up for it in muscle. Marc had seen the hypodermic needles in the trash, but he’d never said a word.
Marc no longer felt the scrape of the leaves on his bare flesh as he walked. His nerves had either gone dead beneath the bands of red welts, or his skin was callused to the nettles. He couldn’t bring himself to care which.
It was on the morning of his eighth day among the stalks that Marc found the grub. It revealed itself in a slight yellowing of leaves. Marc stopped and considered the miaza plant carefully. He blinked, looked again, and the plant was still a slightly different shade than its neighbors. The scientific part of his mind ran through the list of possibilities: mutation, disease, parasite. He noticed the hole then. It was small, slightly larger than his finger, and it descended into the soil at the base of the yellowing plant. A root parasite?
Marc fell to his knees and dug. The grub pulled free from the soil in a writhing mass of ciliated legs. It was pale and mushy, approximately the circumference of his wrist, and about half a foot long. Marc didn’t hesitate, didn’t pretend there was a choice to make. He bit into the thing where he thought the head might be and swallowed down an oily chunk of flesh. It tasted like vinegar, but he bit again. The thing never stopped moving as he ate.
He meant to save some for later, but his hunger prevented it. When the last of the animal was down his throat, he ran his slimy hands through the dirt to clean them off. Then he stood and continued on, waiting to die of poisoning, or not.
By nightfall he felt a measure of his strength returning and knew his body had been able to breakdown at least some of the alien compounds. The native fauna had most of the same amino acids as terrestrial organisms, but those small differences had been known to be fatal on other worlds. The rule of thumb was this: don’t eat anything native. Considering his options, Marc thought it was time to suspend the rules.
The days blurred into one another. He drank when it rained; he ate every few days when he came across a yellowing maiza plant. The grubs grew larger as the season progressed, and the canopy of leaves grew thicker and higher, eventually closing off the rest of the world until Marc could see only a half-dozen feet in any direction.
Some nights he dreamed of harvest and giant steel machines. Some nights he woke screaming.
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The labor camps weren’t the kind of places you raised children if you had any other choice, and Marc’s mother worked hard to keep her boys alive from month to month. Twelve-hour shifts, six days a week, kept them in the kind of poverty that was only just this side of starvation. The system was different then, less kind. A lot of people died inside their equipment rigs, and a father’s absence wasn’t such a rare thing among the throng of children that crowded the edge of industrial zones. The companies moved them from one outpost to the next, providing the living quarters and a small stipend—but the paychecks always went back to the company for food.
Family was all-important to his Mother. What else did they have? She never brought another man home in front of her children like many lonely women. She made her boys her world and her cause. Marc and Eli saw how hard their mother worked, and sometimes when they lay in bed together at night, they talked of how they would save her. They whispered of the life that they would give her, where she’d never want for anything, where she would have peace.
It wasn’t until Sepselan-16 that Marc and Eli were introduced to formal education. Marc’s natural aptitude earned him entry into the special operations program, and afterward, his Mother was transferred into housekeeping. They didn’t pretend the two events weren’t connected. Even Eli was given special educational dispensation – they began training him as a cook. Later, Pinyon Seed Co. picked Marc up as apprentice geneticist, and the family was transferred to an agricultural colony. Although Eli’s scores didn’t merit it, Marc was able to get him enrolled in a tech program.
When Marc was given his first assignment, he gave the tickets to his mother on her birthday and asked her to quit her job and follow him to Maldron for the five-month term. When she hugged him tightly, tears of pride brimming in her eyes, he’d caught a glimpse of his brother from over her shoulder, and what he saw shocked him. Looking back, he’d known then. He’d seen it written on his brother’s face. The bitter harvest was coming.
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Marc counted his footsteps as he trudged through the green. At the end of the day, he calculated the distance of each step and ascertained that in more than two months he’d walked a little less than a hundred kilometers. Not quite halfway back to the colony. He looked up at the ripe cobs and knew he wouldn’t make it. The season was over. Harvest was upon him.
That night a sound woke him from his sleep. It was the sound from his nightmares, and for a while he lay in the dirt unsure whether he was really awake or not. But the metallic grinding grew louder and he knew the big machines had come. He jerked to his feet, heart pounding in his chest. Which way was it coming from? The closed space around him confused the sound, spreading it evenly through the stalks. He held his breath, concentrating, and then, suddenly, he knew.
He sprinted blindly down the row away from the sound, tearing at the leaves as he ran. The combines had no lights; they didn’t need them. The enormous machines were navigated by satellite guidance as they moved quickly over the flat terrain of the continental basin.
The sound was nearly deafening now. He stopped. Did he expect to outrun them?
He dropped to his knees and tore at the moist soil with his hands. He dug feverishly, scooping out chunks of dirt. Behind him the din continued louder, closer. He put his back into the work, using both hands together. The trench widened gradually, deepened. Now the noise was a roar banging against the stalks, and when he chanced a backward look, the combine towered into view above him. He threw himself into the trench face-first, imbedding his hands deeply into the soil for purchase. The noise became something bigger than he was, and then a great wind tore at his bare flesh, threatening to lift him from the dirt while a thousand tiny nettles scoured his backside. He screamed into the blackness and the sound was torn away, lost in the tumult.
Silence.
He raised his head and stars blinked down across an open expanse of land. He could see the hulking, metallic shape moving into the distance, growing a mile-wide swath of stubbled dirt behind it. The vastness around him was disorienting after his long mobile confinement within a visual space of a few meters.
He stood and felt likely to fall sideways into the sky. Only the dirt and six inches of stalk remained of the world he had spent every moment of the last two months in. His clothes were gone. He was naked and empty-handed.
A breath of wind caressed his flesh and he shivered. He walked and that felt familiar.
In the morning he learned of a new enemy. The sun climbed burning onto his shoulders, weighing him into the hot dirt. His skin had gone pale beneath the leaves, and now it burned and blistered in the glare. When the rains came at midday, he lay on the ground and covered himself with mud so that he was afforded some protection when sun renewed its assault in the afternoon. He walked on.
When night fell, he shivered in the wind and got a few hours sleep. At dawn he continued.
They would never find his body, and that was pleasing to him. His mother would have no grave to fret over. And she would have Eli there to remind her of what he’d been like as a living being. Perhaps she would weather this – or, actually, had weathered it already. After all, she’d probably thought him dead for two months now.
When the rain came again it washed some of the mud loose from his body, but he dared not stop to renew his supply. Something in his head whispered that if he stopped walking, even for an instant, he would never start again. Night fell, and he walked on.
At some point, he became aware of lights. In the distance at first, but nearing slowly from his left. And then the lights were on him and he was blinking up into brilliance. He let himself sit then, and hung his head to his chest. The field-skim landed nearby, and in the next instant arms were lifting him to his feet.
“Marc, is that really you?” A man asked.
The face belonged to John Miller, a close friend in another lifetime.
Marc only nodded and let the arms drag him to the skim.
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“My mother?” His words were slow and canted; the jaw didn’t want to move right.
“Not good,” his old friend answered. “She still thinks you’re alive. Well, you are alive, but she was the only one who believed… Marc, what the hell happened?”
Marc lifted his head from the pilot’s cot and took another sip of water. At this speed, skims tended to ride rough, and he had to be careful not to spill. “Why not good?”
“I try to stop by and visit her when I can, but it’s hard to see her this way. Her health hasn’t been good lately.”
“And Eli?”
“He’s in charge of the seed program now. Your mother won’t let him out of sight, follows him around everywhere because she’s so afraid of losing another son. Marc, there were a lot of people who never bought Eli’s story about what happened. A company prosecutor was brought in to investigate.”
“All the way out here?”
“A possible death penalty case, Marc. Fratercide.”
“What did he find?”
“Same as us, suspicious as hell but no proof one way or the other. What happened?”
Marc rolled over in the cot and put his face to the wall. He felt a hand on his shoulder for a moment; then the hand was gone. He slipped into unconsciousness.
Marc woke as the field-skim settled into dock. He rose to his feet and stepped into the bathroom. He didn’t recognize the bearded, crook-jawed man staring back at him from the mirror. He urinated and washed his hands. John was waiting outside the door.
“I thought you—
Marc held up his hand. “Hurts to talk, so don’t make me. Who knows about me?”
“Everybody, I radioed it in. The special investigator wants to talk to you.”
“He’s still here?” Marc closed his eyes. Would his mother gain one son and lose the other? “I need a minute to clear my head.”
The latch opened from the outside.
“Doesn’t look like you’re going to get it, Marc.”
A tall man in a company suite walked through the door. “Welcome back from the dead,” he said, extending a hand. “I’m Special Investigator Tom Brennen. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”
“Do we?” Mark asked.
-------------------------------------------
Twenty minutes later, Marc walked through the door of his old office. Matching dark eyes moved to his.
Eli didn’t move. He sat stiffly behind the desk. His face looked different. Older. He’d lost weight.
“Brother,” Marc said, and then he shut the door.
####
BUDDHA NOSTRIL BIRD
John Kessel
After we killed the guard, Glaucon and I ran down the corridor away from the Well. Glaucon had been seriously aged in the fight. He limped and cursed, a piece of dying meat and he knew it. I brushed my hand along the wall looking for a door.
“We’ll make it,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. He held his arm against his side.
We ran past a series of ontological windows: a forest fire, a sun in space, a factory refashioning children into flowers. I worried that the corridor might be a loop. For all I knew the sole purpose of such corridors was to confuse and recapture escapees. Or maybe they were just for fun. The Relativists delight in such absurdities.
More windows: a snowstorm, a cloudy seascape, a corridor exactly like the one we were in, in which two men wearing yellow robes – prison kosodes exactly like ours – searched for a way out. Glaucon stopped. The hand of his double reached out to meet his. The face of mine stared at me angrily; a strong face, an intelligent one. “It’s just a mirror,” I said.
“Mirror?”
“A mirror,” a voice said. Protagoras appeared ahead of us in the corridor. “Like sex, it reproduces human beings.”
An old joke, and typical of Protagoras to quote it without attribution.
Glaucon raised his clock. In the face of Protagoras’ infinite mutability it was less than useless: there was no way Glaucon would even get a shot off. My spirit sank as I watched the change come over him. Protagoras dripped fellowship. Glaucon liked him. Nobody but a maniac could dislike Protagoras.
It took all my will to block the endorphin assault, but Glaucon was never as strong as I. A lot of talk about brotherhood had passed between us, but if I’d had my freedom I would have crisped him on the spot. Instead I hid myself from Protagoras’ blue eyes, as cold as chips of aquamarine in a mosaic.
“Where are you going?” Protagoras said.
“We were going – ” Glaucon started.
“ – nowhere,” I said.
“A hard place to get to,” said Protagoras.
Glaucon’s head bobbed like a dog’s.
“I know a short way,” Protagoras said. “Come along with me.”
“Sure,” said Glaucon.
I struggled to maintain control. If you had asked him, Protagoras would have denied controlling anyone: “The Superior Man rules by humility.” Another sophistry.
We turned back down the corridor. If I stayed with them until we got to the center, there would be no way I could escape. Desperation forced me to test the reality of one of the windows. As we passed the ocean scene I pushed Glaucon into Protagoras and threw my shoulder against the glass.
The window shattered; I was falling. My kosode flapped like the melting wings of Icarus as sky and sea whirled around me, and I hit the water. My breath exploded from me. I flailed and tumbled. At last I found the surface. I sputtered and gasped, my right arm in agony; my ribs ached. I kicked off my slippers and leaned onto my back. The waves rolled me up and down. The sky was low and dark. At the top of each swell I could see to the storm-clouded horizon, flat as a psychotic’s affect – but in the other direction was a beach.
I swam. The bad shoulder and the kosode made it hard, but at that moment I would not have traded places with Glaucon for all the enlightenment of the ancients.
-------------------------------------------
When they sent me to the penal colony they told me, “Prisons ought to be places where people are lodged only temporarily, as guests are. They must not become dwelling places.”
Their idea of temporary is not mine. Temporary doesn’t mean long enough for your skin to crack like the dry lakebed outside your window, for the memory of your lover’s touch to recede until it’s only a torment in your dreams, as distant as the mountains that surround the penal colony. These distinctions are lost on Relativists, as are all distinctions. Which, I suppose, is why I was sent there.
They keep you alone, mostly. I didn’t mind the isolation – it gave me time to understand exactly how many ways I had been betrayed. I spent hours thinking of Arete, etching her ideal features in my mind. I remembered how they’d ripped me away from her. I wondered if she still lived, and if I would ever see her again. Eventually, when memory had faded, I conquered the passage of time itself: I reconstructed her image from incorruptible ideas and planned the revenge I would take once I was free again, so that the past and the future became more real to me than the endless, featureless present. Such is the power of idea over reality. To the guards I must have looked properly meditative. Inside I burned.
Each day at dawn we would be awakened by the rapping of sticks on our iron bedsteads. In the first hour we drew water from the Well of Changes. In the second we were encouraged to drink (I refused). In the third we washed floors with the water. From the fourth through the seventh we performed every other function that was necessary to maintain the prison. In the eighth we were tortured. At the ninth we were fed. At night, exhausted, we slept.
The torture chamber is made of ribbed concrete. It is a cold room, without windows. In its center is a chair, and beside the chair a small table, and on the table the hood. The hood is black and appears to be made of ordinary fabric, but it is not. The first time I held it, despite the evidence of my eyes I thought it had slipped through my fingers. The hood is not a material object: you cannot feel it, and it has no texture, and although it absorbs all light it is neither warm nor cold.
Your inquisitor invites you to sit in the chair and slip the hood over your head. You do so. He speaks to you. The room disappears. Your body melts away and you are made into something else. You are an animal. You are one of the ancients. You are a stone, a drop of rain in a storm, a planet. You are in another time and place. This may sound intriguing, and the first twenty times it is. But it never ends. The sessions are indiscriminate. They are deliberately pointless. They continue to the verge of insanity.
I recall one of these sessions, in which I lived in an ancient city and worked a hopeless routine in a store called the “World of Values.” The values we sold were merchandise. I married, had children, grew old, lost my health and spirit. I worked forty years. Some days were happy, others sad; most were neither. The last thing I remembered was lying in a hospital bed, unable to see, dying, and hearing my wife talk with my son about what they should have for dinner. When I came out from under the hood Protagoras yanked me from the chair and told me this poem:
Out from the nostrils of the Great Buddha
Flew a pair of nesting swallows.
I could still hear my phantom wife’s cracking voice. I was in no mood for riddles. “Tell me what it means, or shut up.”
“Drink from the Well and I’ll tell you.”
I turned my back on him.
It was always like that. Protagoras had made a career out of tormenting me. I had known him for too many years. He put faith in nothing, was totally without honor, yet he had power. His intellect was available for any use. He wasted years on banalities. He would argue any side of a case, not because he sought advantage, but because he did not care about right or wrong. He was intolerably lucky. Irresponsible as a child. Inconstant as the wind. His opaque blue gaze could be as witless as a scientist’s.
And he had been my first teacher. He had introduced me to Arete, offered me useless advice throughout our stormy relationship, given ambiguous testimony at my trial, and upon the verdict abandoned the university in order to come to the prison and become my inquisitor. The thought that I had once idolized him tormented me more than any session under the hood.
After my plunge through the window into the sea, I fought my way through the surf to the beach. For an unknown time I lay gasping on the wet sand. When I opened my eyes I saw a flock of gulls had waddled up to me. An arm’s length away the lead gull, a great bull whose ragged feathers stood out from his neck in a ruff, watched me with beady black eye. Others, of various sizes and markings, stood in a wedge behind him. I raised my head; the gulls retreated a few steps, still holding formation. I understood immediately that they were ranked according to their stations in the flock. Thus does nature shadow forth fundamental truth: the rule of the strong over the weak, the relation of one to the many in hierarchical order.
Off to the side stood a single scrawny gull, quicker than the rest, but separate, aloof. I supposed him to be a gullish philosopher. I saluted him, my brother.
A sandpiper scuttled along the edge of the surf. Dipping a handful of seawater, I washed sand and pieces of shell from my cheek. Up the slope, sawgrass and sea oats held the dunes against the tides. The scene was familiar. With wonder and some disquiet I understood that the window had dumped me into the Great Water quite near the Imperial City.
I stumbled up the sand to the crest of the dunes. In the east, beneath piled thunderheads, lighting flashed over the dark water. To the west, against the sunset’s glare, the sand and scrub turned into fields. I started inland. Night fell swiftly. From behind me came clouds, strong winds, then rain. I trudged on, singing into the downpour. The thunder sang back. Water streamed down the creases of my face, the wet kosode weighed on my chest and shoulders, the rough grass cut my feet. In the profound darkness I could continue only by memorizing the landscape revealed by flashes of lightning. Exhilirated, I hurried toward my lover. I shouted at the raindrops, any one of which might be one of my fellow prisoners under the hood. “I’m free!” I told them. I forded the swollen River of Indifference. I stumbled through Iron Tree Forest. Throughout the night I put one foot before the other, and some hours before dawn, in a melancholy drizzle, passed through the Heron’s Gate into the city.
In the Processor’s Quarter I found a doorway whose overhang kept out the worst of the rain. Above hung the illuminated sign of the Rat. In the corner of this doorway, under this sign, I slept.
-------------------------------------------
I was awakened by the arrival of the owner of the communications shop in whose doorway I had slept.
“I am looking for the old fox,” I said. “Do you know where I can find him?”
“Who are you?”
“You may call me the little fox.”
He pushed open the door. “Well, Mr. Fox, I can put you in touch with him instantly. Just step into one of our booths.”
He must have known I had no money. “I don’t want to communicate. I want to see him.”
“Communication is much better,” the shopowner said. He took a towel, a copper basin and an ornamental blade from the cupboard beneath his terminal. “No chance of physical violence. No distress other than psychological. Completely accurate reproduction. Sensory enhancement: olfactory, visual, auditory.” He opened a cage set into the wall and seized a docile black rat by the scruff of the neck. “Recordability. Access to a network of supporting information services. For slight additional charge we offer intelligence augmentation and instant semiotic analysis. We make the short man tall. Physical presence has nothing to compare.”
“I want to speak with him in private.”
Not looking at me, he took the rat to the stone block. “We are bonded.”
“I don’t question your integrity.”
“You have religious prejudices against communication? You are a Traveler?”
He would not rest until he forced me to admit I was penniless. I refrained from noting that, if he was such a devout communicator, he could easily have stayed home. Yet he had walked to his shop in person. Swallowing my rage, I said, “I have no money.”
He sliced the rat’s neck open. The animal made no sound.
After he had drained the blood and put the carcass into the display case, he washed his hands and turned to me. He seemed quite pleased with himself. He took a small object from a drawer. “He is to be found at the University. Here is a map of the maze.” He slipped it into my hand.
For this act of gratuitous charity, I vowed that one day I would have revenge. I left.
The streets were crowded. Dusty gold light filtered down between the ranks of ancient buildings. Too short to use the moving Ways, I walked. Orange-robed messengers threaded their way through the crowd. Sweating drivers in loincloths pulled pedicabs; I imagined the perfumed lottery winners who reclined behind the opaqued glass of their passenger compartments. In the Medical Quarter, streetside surgeons hawked their services in front of racks of breasts and penises of prodigious size. As before, the names of the streets changed hourly to mark the progress of the sun across the sky. All streets but one, and I held my breath when I came to it: the Way of Enlightenment, which ran between the Reform Temple and the Imperial Palace. As before, metamorphs entertained the faithful on the stage outside the Temple. One of them changed shape as I watched, from a dog-faced man wearing the leather skirt of an athlete to a tattooed ceo in powered suit. “Come drink from the Well of Changes!” he called ecstatically to passersby. “Be Reformed!”
The Well he spoke of is both literal and symbolic. The prison Well was its brother; the preachers of the Temple claim that all the Wells are one Well. Its water has the power to transform both body and mind. A scientist could tell you how it is done: viruses, brain chemistry, hypnosis, some insane combination of the three. But that is all a scientist could tell you. Unlike a scientist, I could tell you why its use is morally wrong. I could explain that some truths are eternal and ought to be held inviolate, and why a culture that accepts change indiscriminately is rotten at its heart. I could demonstrate, with inescapable logic, that reason is better than emotion. That spirit is greater than flesh. That Relativism is the road to hell.
Instead of relief at being home, I felt distress. The street’s muddle upset me, but it was not simply that: the city was exactly as I had left it. The wet morning that dawned on me in the doorway might have been the morning after I was sent away. My absence had made no discernible difference. The tyranny of the Relativists that I and my friends had struggled against had not culminated in the universal misery we had predicted. Though everything changed minute to minute, it remained the same. The one thing that ought to remain constant, Truth, was to them as chimerical as the gene-changers of the Temple.
They might have done better, had they had teachers to tell them good from bad.
Looking down the boulevard, in the distance, at the heart of the city, I could see the walls of the palace. By midday I had reached it. Vendors of spiced cakes pushed their carts among the petitioners gathered beneath the great red lacquered doors. One, whose cakes each contained a free password, did a superior business. That the passwords were patent frauds was evident by the fact that the gatekeeper ignored those petitioners who tried using them. But that did not hurt sales. Most of the petitioners were halflings, and a dimwitted rabbit could best them in a deal.
I wept for my people, their ignorance and illogic. I discovered that I was clutching the map in my fist so tightly that the point of it had pierced my skin. I turned from the palace and walked away, and did not feel any relief until I saw the towers of the university rising above Scholars’ Park. I remembered my first sight of them, a young boy down from the hills, the smell of cattle still about me, come to study under the great Protagoras. The meticulously kept park, the calm proportions of the buildings, spoke to the soul of that innocent boy: Here you’ll be safe from blood and passion. Here you can lose yourself in the world of the mind.
The years had worn the polish off that dream, but I can’t say that, seeing it now, once more a fugitive from a dangerous world, I did not feel some of the same joy. I thought of my father, a loutish farmer who would whip me for reading; of my gentle mother, brutalized by him, trying to keep the flame of truth alive in her boy.
On the quadrangle I approached a young woman wearing the topknot and scarlet robe of a humanist. Her head bounced to some inner rhythm, and as I imagined she was pursuing some notion of the Ideal, my heart went out to her. I was about to ask her what she studied when I saw the pin in her temple. She was listening to transtemporal music: her mind eaten by puerile improvisations played on signals picked up from the death agonies of the cosmos. Generations of researchers had devoted their lives to uncovering these secrets, only to have their efforts used by “artists” to erode people’s connections with reality. I spat on the walk at her feet; she passed by, oblivious.
At the entrance to the Humanities maze I turned on the map and followed it into the gloom. Fifteen minutes later it guided me into the Department of Philosophy. It was the last place I expected to find the fox – the nest of our enemies, the place we had plotted against tirelessly. The secretary greeted me pleasantly.
“I’m looking for a man named Socrates,” I said. “Some call him ‘the old fox.’”
“Universe of Discourse 3,” she said.
I walked down the hall, wishing I had Glaucon’s clock. The door to the hall stood open. In the center of the cavelike room, in a massive support chair, sat Socrates. At last I had found a significant change: he was grossly obese. The ferretlike features I remembered were folded in fat. Only the acute eyes remained. I was profoundly shaken. As I approached, his eyes followed me.
“Socrates.”
“Blume.”
“What happened to you?”
Socrates lifted his dimpled hand, as if to wave away a triviality. “I won.”
“You used to revile this place.”
“I reviled its usurpers. Now I run it.”
“You run it?”
“I’m the dean.”
I should have known Socrates had turned against our cause, and perhaps at some level I had. If he had remained true he would have ended up in a cell next to mine. “You used to be a great teacher,” I said.
“Right. Let me tell what happens when a man starts claiming he’s a great teacher. First he starts wearing a brocade robe. Then he puts lifts in his sandals. The next thing you know the department’s got a nasty paternity suit on its hands.”
His senile chuckle was like the bubbling of water in an opium pipe.
“How did you get to be dean?”
“I performed a service for the Emperor.”
“You sold out!”
“Blume the dagger,” he said. Some of the old anger shaded his voice. “So sharp. So rigid. You always were a prig.”
“And you used to have principles.”
“Ah, principles,” he said. “I’ll tell you what happened to my principles. You heard about Philomena the Bandit?”
“No. I’ve been somewhat out of touch.”
Socrates ignored the jab. “It was after you left. Philomena invaded the system, established her camp on the moon, and made her living raiding the empire. The city was at her mercy. I saw my opportunity. I announced that I would reform her. My students outfitted a small ship, and Arete and I launched for the moon.”
“Arete!”
“We landed in a lush valley near the camp. Arete negotiated an audience for me. I went, alone. I described to Philomena the advantages of politic behavior. The nature of truth. The costs of living in the world of shadows and the glory of moving into the world of light. How, if she should turn to Good, her story would be told for generations. Her fame would spread throughout the world and her honor outlast her lifetime by a thousand years.
“Philomena listened. When I was finished she drew a knife and asked me, ‘How long is a thousand years?’”
“Her men stood all around, waiting for me to slip. I started to speak, but before I could she pulled me close and pushed the blade against my throat.
“’A thousand years,’ Philomena said, ‘is shorter than the exposure of a neutrino passing through a world. How long is life?’”
“I was petrified. She smiled. ‘Life,’ she said, ‘is shorter than this blade.’
“I begged for mercy. She threw me out. I ran to the ship, in fear for my life. Arete asked what happened: I said nothing. We set sail for home.
“We landed amid great tumult. I first thought it was riot but soon found it celebration. During our voyage back Philomena had left the moon. People assumed I had convinced her. The Emperor spoke. Our enemies in philosophy were shortened, and the regents stretched me into Dean.
“Since then,” Socrates said, “I have had trouble with principles.”
“You’re a coward,” I said.
Despite the mask of suet, I could read the ruefelness in Socrates’ eyes. “You don’t know me,” he said.
“What happened to Arete?”
“I have not seen her since.”