Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (106 page)

I can’t remember how it happened—it’s too far gone now and I could calculate the AU, but I don’t. I can’t remember how talk of charts and distances and shipwide pressures turned into talk of family, of things we had and would never have. We were loners—we had forgone marriage and children, we had never formed the bonds so many others do. I always wondered what that would be like, to find someone you could tolerate for such a long journey. There were near misses for you and me both, the glance of an asteroid off the port side, but no impact, no hard strike.

There
was
an asteroid, you say. Or rather, a meteor. All right, a micrometeor shower. Like rain on the hull. Did the ship incur damage? No, nothing like that. No shield fluctuation, no hull breach. It’s an explanation of a sound you can’t otherwise explain: the squirrel hadn’t been there, after all, and part of your rational mind knows this. It’s an explanation of a thing you can’t otherwise understand: one body moving through another, each with a different destination. I picture our ships, moving ever farther apart as they close in on their destinations.

Just interplanetary dust, you say. If you could wipe the ship’s windows clean, you would.

Query: What about the aliens?

I become well schooled in conversations, hearing you even when you aren’t there to reply. Is it that I know you so well by this point, or is it that you remain elusive and blank-slate, so any reply from my own mind will slot where your own would go? Is it that I am a similar slate, empty until you arrive with your words? You’re more distant now and I shouldn’t feel it, but I do. I mark the distance in logs, charts, tables. Soon, we will pass beyond all communication.

I wake in the night feeling hands on me. Insistent. These hands prove that the shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but that’s never the best route to take. Thumbs knead into flesh, pull open, feast. Canvas beneath fingers, painted in firm strokes. I wake, heavy with blood, startled it hasn’t boiled through my skin, left me in a puddle. I am alone, I should be beyond this point. Should never have come to this point.

The deck is solid beneath my feet when I run. Running gives me a focus, sets those concocted hands at a firm distance if only for a while. What I can reach of the corridors in four looping circuits amounts to ten kilometers. Just over six miles of corridors that can look like anything I want them to. I could run mountain trails, trees bleeding from gold to orange and back again. There could be birdsong, a breeze to cool the sweat on my skin, but there is only the black anthracite luster of the corridors I have come to prefer. I don’t look at the door with its LED lights.

I’m moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination. The cargo is quiet; compressed titanium never fusses, only rests in its countless cases (one million, four hundred thirty thousand—it’s my job to count the countless and that number is almost the distance from Saturn to Sol, almost).

Did you hear that?

I ask you, even though you are not there. But there is a thump before the machine whir swallows any other sound.

An emphatic no.

Response: Everyone asks about aliens. There is a clause in the Company contract about that too, about the distances involved—distances which you are about to experience should you agree to Company terms and sign your life away. Yes, alien life probably exists in the deep black, but these distances, the Company says, make any extraterrestrial contact unlikely.

Given the number of galaxies, the number of stars within those galaxies, the number of stars which support planetary systems, to presume life doesn’t exist somewhere is foolish, but you will likely not encounter it. Consider how difficult it is to haul the cargo you’re about to haul. Consider the distance involved, the communication depravation you are about to endure.

Of course, there are protocols one should follow, if the unlikely proves likely and one is not immediately killed or fucked or fucked to death. These are detailed in contract subsections which no one reads.

(A foolish presumption perhaps, but what if true? What if there’s a reason for all the silence? What if there is simply no one else? No one wants to dwell on that. Not even loners.)

“Are you awake? I hope you’re awake. Don’t get out of bed.”

If you are like me, and surely over these past months we have established that you are and I am, and we are—then you are awake most hours, even if in bed. Time ceases to matter really. The ship keeps time, but we don’t always follow along. In space, it’s always night beyond the windows, no matter the glow that fills the corridors.

My voice probably crackles and spits, fat dripping into a fire, echoing in reverse at times the way yours does now. I’m getting farther away. This message will be delayed—is it three months now? I could calculate it, but I don’t.

I can hear you say it’s fine and I picture you sitting bolt upright in bed, because it’s the way I came to your last message. It didn’t matter—it
was
fine—whenever the words came, whenever you came. It was the turning of one body into another in the tangle of the bed sheets, across countless (no) astronomical miles. It was that voice, welcome at any hour, because it managed to be a bridge in the distance we believed we needed. Distance from everything else, so we could find each other here. Deep impact.

Your room is wholly dark but for the hologram of me—the windows don’t let the white LEDs bleed through, there is no door, only this warm darkness that crackles with me. It won’t be bright, this hologram; distance precludes that now. Space tears at the message in transit. You quickly learn to gauge how close someone is to you by how much of them has been ravaged away. Next time, it will be only voice, and after that— I imagine the way you study me, hands reaching for sheets the way they once reached for field grass, the way they once reached for me and maybe still do. If you are anything like me.

Much like the last message you sent me, it doesn’t matter what I say. I tell you about the ship, I tell you about my days, which are quiet and filled with running. There are books to read, of course; so many books, carried as far as they’ve ever been carried. There is the occasional squirrel—you taught me how foolish they are and they aren’t there at all, but I’ve named them all, even though they are all the same, the same as every leaf that falls loose from Central Park’s autumn canvas. I erase every soul in the park with the slide of one finger, but for one figure I keep distant and shadowed with your name. The ship is good, the cargo is complacent, and I’ve not been killed, fucked, or fucked to death by aliens.

Status quo. Query: How are you?

You don’t dream, so I tell you all of mine, as if you will somehow understand and acquire the ability through me. Improbable, I think, if I cannot even press my hand to your hand, but I keep telling you what happens when I appear to be asleep. I dream about that door.

Cargo Observation. Why do crates (one million, four hundred thirty thousand) of compressed titanium require observation? Were these ships used for something else before we hauled such trouble-free cargo? I don’t know, but in the dream I go to that door and press my hand against its flat surface. It’s as cold as anything you can imagine—we are in the depths of space, we know cold and can imagine plenty. The door doesn’t so much open as it disappears and I’m not sure what I expect to find on the other side, but it isn’t the familiar anthracite corridors I encounter.

I am running then, moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination, but my destination is not the command module—not mine, because this one is just that much different. It’s cleaner, colder, and it has a scent of salt. Of another body. Aliens, I think, and for a moment panic wells up, but then— Then.

You stride through the access hatch and your rough palm notches against mine and if I could teach you how to dream it would be in this moment, when we know the warmth of each other’s fingers in the dead cold of space. It would be when we realize that we are not alone, that we have never been alone, that we have been travelling on this vessel together all the while. You were only ever through a doorway and I was only ever through a doorway, and perhaps this is noted in the Company contract—perhaps we agreed to it, felt a wariness for the door because of strings attached, because if we knew we were not alone—

Not loners at all. And we know what happens to not-loners, so my hand slides from yours and we step back, as if performing a dance, and there is a hard flicker—a burst of energy through the interface, and your pale face illuminates, as bright as the sun we have not seen in years, and you tell me I’m glowing, I’m glowing.

Close your eyes. I want you to remember me this way.

About the Author

E. Catherine Tobler
lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in
SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones,
and
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at
Shimmer Magazine.

Aquatica

Maggie Clark

When Host laughed, her esca wriggled, and the gills behind her pectoral fins vented hard enough to stir up the silt. Organ tumbled in the waste-stream’s wake, but kept one tiny black eye fixed on her bobbing, bioluminescent beacon—the first he had seen in six turns of the current along the foreign reef.

“I almost ate you, little one,” said Host. “Are you not too big to be wandering around on your lonesome? Does your gut not grow stunted, your digestion weak? Come, latch on—there is always room for one more.”

Organ’s gaze darted about the glow of her scattered bone spikes. Sure enough, two others were already fused to Host’s underside—the first recent enough that one dull eye still gazed back; the other reduced to little more than his seed, a dangling pair of gonads with no speech, no sight, no mind. In his hunger, Organ felt a muscle-cramping urgency to bite into Host’s skin. The proximity of her pheromones did not help.

“No, thank you,” said Organ, faintly, as he began to swim away. “I’m fine.”

Host at first said nothing, but when even the most furious pumping of his caudal fin brought no relief from her scent, Organ knew he was being followed. He could only keep up such a pace for so long, though, and in his exhaustion eventually dropped close to the silt, picking feebly at motes of dubious sustenance. Her long, sharp teeth soon lit the way.

“You will die out here, little one.”

Organ felt grains of sand sit poorly in his gullet—the beginning, he knew, of that very end, unless a serpent sensed him sooner, or one of the scuttling shelled creatures with long, snapping pincers that lurked in the crevices of rocks. He turned an eye Host’s way and worked the shiver of his body-length as if to say—“And I will die with you as well.”

But Host did not snap him up at once, as for a moment Organ feared she would. He knew her kind to be fiercely competitive among its own—one Host even feeding off another’s drifting egg sacks when territory was at stake—but whether the protectiveness he watched them extend to others of his kind would survive a refusal to merge as firm as his, he had no way of knowing for sure. The size difference alone gave him to fear the worst.

“But you will live, too, will you not?” said Host instead. “I will carry you into the next generation and your vitality will not go to waste.”

Organ shook with weak amusement, enough to make him brave. “Come now,” he said. “I have heard your kind sing greater virtues of the merge than that. Why, some promise knowledge far beyond what you say our minds can manage on their own—all of Host-kind’s wisdom coursing through our blood streams, if only we would take a bite! Still others invite us to ride with them, to witness distant wonders not one of us could ever visit on his own. Never mind that we will have ceased to be ourselves by the time we arrived.”

Host eyed him awhile, her long maw twitching just inches over the murk. “Would you rather I promised you such things? Told you I can still hear the other two? That their bodies may move less and less of their own volition, but inside me, their thoughts remain just as strong—or, no, even stronger—as when they first felt the calling to my flesh?”

“No.” Organ paused to choose his words carefully, conscious of how tremulous and small his breathing and body movements now seemed beside her sturdy boom, the heavier gestures of her fins. “But I am surprised that you do not lie like the rest. So many do.”

Host laughed again, her whole spine twisting in the act. Still her movements did not seem to Organ hostile. “We are not all of us users by intention, little one,” said Host. “By design, perhaps, but—come now, surely you understand. This has always been the way of things. What is to be gained by running from it? From dying alone, from hunger or predation? From giving nothing back to the circle of life that gave you life at all?”

Organ’s small pucker of a mouth opened and then closed. His gills flared but took little in.
What life?
he thought but dared not ask,
What life have I been given?
“Oh, never mind,” he said, and started down the reef again. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“No, please—try me,” said Host, easily keeping pace. Organ struggled to keep her scent from overwhelming all his other thoughts.

“It’s something I heard once, in the sweet waters of my nursery,” he said after a while, and at first only to distract himself from his hunger and her pheromones. “I heard it from the Hosts who lined the edges of the stream where I was born and reared. The ones who guarded us from all other dangers as we matured.”

“I have not done that good work yet myself,” said Host, watching Organ closely with one great big eye. “But I hope to give rest to an egg sack soon, and see it fully hatched and grown. Such talk there is, too, among the elders at the nursery!”