Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (17 page)

From her body come the fragrances of myriad flowers and herbs, layer after layer, like gossamer. Her hair floats up into the air like a flame, fluttering without cease. I stand and listen to her sing, my face full of tears, until the whole house begins to shake.

From on top of the roof, I hear the sound of steel clanging, blunt objects striking against each other, heavy footsteps, and then Yan Chixia’s shouting.

Suddenly, the roof caves in, bringing with it a rain of shingles and letting in a bright patch of grey sky full of fluttering snowflakes. I push Xiao Qian into a dark corner, out of the way of the light.

I run outside the house. Yan Chixia is standing on the roof, holding his sword in front of him. The cold wind stretches his robe taut like a grey flag.

He jumps onto the back of a spider, and stabs at its eyes with his sword. The spider struggles hard and throws Yan off its back. Then the spider grabs Yan with two sharp claws and pulls him into its sharp, metallic, grinding mandibles. It chews and chews, like a man chewing kimchee, until pieces of Yan Chixia’s body are falling out of its mandibles onto the shingles of the roof. Finally, Yan’s head falls off the roof and rolls to a stop next to my feet, like a hard-boiled egg.

I pick up his head. He stares at me with his dead eyes. There are no tears in them, only anger and regret. Then with the last of his strength, Yan closes his eyes, as though he cannot bear to watch any more.

The spider continues to chew and grind up the rest of Yan Chixia’s body. Then it leaps down from the roof, and, rumbling, crawls towards me. Its eyes glow with a deep blue light.

Xiao Qian jumps from behind me and grabs me by the waist, pulling me back. I pry her hands off of me and push her back into the dark room. Then I pick up Yan Chixia’s sword and rush towards the spider.

The cold blue light of a steel claw flashes before my eyes. Then my head strikes the ground with a muffled
thump
. Blood spills everywhere.

The world is now tilted: tilted sky, tilted street, tilted snow falling diagonally. With every bit of my strength, I turn my eyes to follow the spider. I see that it’s chewing on my body. A stream of dark red fluid drips out of its beak, bubbling, warm, the droplets slowly spreading in the snow.

As the spider chews, it slows down gradually. Then it stops moving, the blue light in its eyes dim and then go out.

As though they have received some signal, all the other spiders also stop one by one. The rumbling thunder stops, plunging the world into silence.

The wind stops too. Snow begins to stick to the spiders’ steel bodies.

I want to laugh, but I can’t. My head is now separated from my body, so there’s no way to get air into the lungs and then out to my vocal cords. So I crack my lips open until the smile is frozen on my face.

The spiders believed that I was alive, a real person. They chewed my body and tasted flesh and saw blood. But they aren’t allowed to harm real people. If they do they must destroy themselves. That’s also part of the rules. Ghosts, spiders, it doesn’t matter. Everyone has to follow the rules.

I never imagined that the spiders would be so stupid. They’re even easier to fool than ghosts.

The scene in my eyes grows indistinct, fades, as though a veil is falling from the sky, covering my head. I remember the words of the crows. So it’s true. When your head is cut off, you really die.

I grew up on this street; I ran along this street. Now I’m finally going to die on this street, just like a real person.

A pair of pale, cold hands reaches over, stroking my face.

The wind blows and covers my face with a few pale pink peach petals. But I know they’re not peach petals. They’re Xiao Qian’s tears, mixed with snow.

About the Author

As an undergraduate, Ms. Xia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “The Representation of Women in Science Fiction Films.” Currently, she’s pursuing a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature and World Culture at Peking University. She has been publishing science fiction and fantasy since 2004 in a variety of venues, including
Science Fiction World
and
Jiuzhou Fantasy.
Several of her stories have won the Milky Way, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. Besides writing and translating science fiction stories, she also writes film scripts.
(In accordance with Chinese custom, Ms Xia’s surname is listed first on this story.)

All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

Helena Bell

2249 A.D.

All the young Kirks in Riverside Public High School are assigned to the same Homeroom class. They sit together in the back corner on the far side from the door. They speak only to each other.

The young Kirk on the Moon goes to school with no one. Each of the colonists has a job and he or she is responsible only to the duties of that job. The others call him Fisher instead of James since he spends his days knee deep in the trout pond, allowing the fish to glide between his legs. When the fish become completely inured to his presence, he thrusts his hands into the water and grasps one around the belly. It fights and Fisher holds on. He is supposed to take it out of the water, to throw it into the white bucket by the shore, but Fisher never does. He lets the fish go and when he comes home, with nothing to show for it, his mother expresses her irrevocable disappointment and sends him to bed.

Jamie

All the young Kirks in Riverside are in love with Jamie. She wears tight green skirts and impractical shoes. When she crosses and uncrosses her legs all the Kirks, even the girls, turn their heads ever so slightly to watch. Jamie does not have a boyfriend as none of the Kirks are so bold as to admit their feelings to another. Sometimes, when the teacher lectures on the sixth extinction and flashes slides of West African frogs and fungal diseases, Jamie slides the heel of her shoe off and lets it dangle from her toes. She enjoys being wanted, but sometimes imagines instead that she is a girl named Lucy who is allowed to love whomever she chooses without upsetting the balance.

Jamie Kirk has a plan. Every year they send the best and brightest students to the moon to join the colony. She hears there are animals there long dead on earth, and everyone is beautiful and kind and exotic. There will be no other Kirks there to demand she talk and act in a certain way. She will be free.

The moon colony is very selective, only one couple from Riverside has ever gone, but Jamie knows she alone of the Kirks will be selected as she is the best, the brightest, the most adored. The other Kirks will beg her to bring them too as her one true love and companion. They will fight amongst themselves to see which of them is the most worthy, and Captain, or perhaps Jimmy, or Tiberia of the surreptitious movements, will win. When she is about to consent, a gleaming stranger with skin brighter than fresh fallen snow will appear as there is always a twist in these kinds of dreams.

Jamie is in love with the Challenger. She has been in love with him/her since the first night she climbed to the top of her parents’ barn and saw him/her walking on the road leading away from the river. Jamie believes the Challenger must a creature of magic: the embodiment of hope and freedom and walks the roads alone because he/she is unafraid of the night time creatures, of the illnesses which travel on the air. Jamie suspects The Challenger is an alien, an unknown race who wanders the dark roads for someone worthy of his/her company. Jamie is worthy. Jamie is worthy of all.

But Jamie cannot tell any of the others about the stranger as they are all in love with her and she must pretend to not be in love with them all equally. To balance between the sharp edges of desire and duty to her companions is a very Kirk-like thing to do. And so she waits.

T

All the young Kirks ride their bicycles to the Wal-Mart parking lot after school. They draw straws to see which of them will go inside and attempt to buy a case of beer. Though he does not know how, T’s straw is always the shortest. Captain hands him a wad of sweaty, five dollar bills and wishes him luck. With a confidence which is not his own, T walks in and slams the beer and the money on the counter.

“Go home,” the cashier says.

“Please,” T says. “Just once.”

The cashier shakes his head.

When T comes out, empty handed, Captain sighs and goes in himself.

“You just have to know how to talk to them,” Captain says.

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “It’s all in the attitude.”

Captain hands the cans out in order of his favorites. T is always last, and he always refuses to take it. “I don’t drink shit.”

Captain smiles. “Now I see. You’re
choosing
not to buy it each time. Making an executive decision, saving us from this foul tasting beverage.”

T shrugs. “Think what you want.”

T suspects that the cashier and Captain have a secret arrangement designed to humiliate T in front of Jamie and everyone else. He fears that one day Captain will kick him out of the group entirely unless he can find a way to be useful. One night, as they ride home, T tells Captain that there’s a tree on T’s property from which, with a telescope, one can see into Jamie’s bedroom window.

“I know,” Captain says. “You can see into Red’s too,” and with a grin, rides off.

Red

Red has a job at the local Wal-Mart. She is the only one of the Riverside Kirks to have dropped out of school and seek employment elsewhere. She saves every cent and one day will buy a steamboat ticket to anywhere out of Iowa. She does not care about the moon or space or destiny. She loves her family and cheers for the local team at football games, but there is a deep restlessness in her feet. Each night she wakes from her dreams to find herself knee deep in the English River with her nightgown and underclothes floating away downstream. She doesn’t tell anyone of her plan to escape, least of all her brother T who will see it as yet another rejection. She suspects her presence is the only thing which protects him from the other Kirks. One day they will discover his birthday is not March 22, but 2 minutes past. She does not know what will happen then, but does not trust the calculated laziness in Captain’s eyes, or the pounding of Jimmy’s fists, or Jamie’s nonchalance, or any of the others whose only concern is moving in perfect synchronization with what is expected of them.

It must be the thought of her brother, the need to protect him which wakes her before she can dive into the deep part of the river and float away forever.

Walking back on the long dirt road Red feels her skin tingling in the moonlight and she knows that any boy looking out from his window will think she is a white stag or changeling or star. She hopes he falls in love with her so one day, when she is gone from this place, there will be an idea of her that takes root and grows. Perhaps in this way enough of her spirit will remain behind to cocoon her brother. Perhaps when she is gone he will fill into some of her Kirkness, enough to belong. Enough that the others will not push him away.

Water is always the problem, Red thinks. It moves and carries where it will. Red caresses the open sores on her legs, and the infections taking root therein. She wishes her sleeping brain had the sense to put on waders before stepping out the door but knows that contagion is an inevitable condition. If not the river, then the rain, then the tap, then the bottled water they import from the Delta in exchange for organic crops. At Wal-Mart she prepares the sleeping lofts where the outlying farmers will come to live when the river floods. No one builds for permanence anymore and she marvels at the other Kirks insistence on pattern.

Every day her brother comes in attempting to buy beer. Every day he fails.

“Why,” she asks T.

“If I don’t, they’ll kick me out.”

“Why,” she later asks the cashier.

“Have you seen the crap floating around in one of those cans?”

“But Captain?”

“Little prick deserves whatever salmonella he catches.”

In the winter months, Red returns to school and sits with the other Kirks in the back corner but she is ever so slightly out of step. While the others gaze longingly at the mauve pump dangling inches away from Jamie’s instep, Red is leaning back to examine the topographic maps on the walls. The Mississippi stretches from floor to ceiling, its many tributaries and old beds undulating in multi-colored bands. The teacher watches her and after class guides her hand up one stream and down the other.

“This is where we lined it with concrete to save the port, this is where it jumped its banks. This is where we think it may go, and where we now try to guide it.”

His hand on her wrist and the inside of her arm is insistent and imploring. “You can’t control a river forever. It goes where it wants. Or goes where it does not want, just to spite you.”

Red pulls back, the backs of her legs tingling with flashes of hot then cold. In the bathroom she pulls up her pant leg and dabs at the cracked scabs. She considers telling the nurse, but there’s not much to be done. She will be dead by summer, like so many others before her.

During her evening shift, Red tells the cashier she’ll make out with him if he agrees to sell T the beer.

“Just once,” she adds.

The cashier shrugs. “You’re not my type, but if it means that much to you.”

T

T’s mother says names have power. They are invasive, like a white fungus, a vine, a jumping carp. Names can take hold, changing the host and adapting it to become the perfect carrier. Why name your son and daughter after an ordinary person: Martha, George, John, Abigail when you can name your children something which will inspire them to a greatness which is not their own, but could be?

T suspects his mother failed him by having twins. If names have power, then surely that power can be diluted. Not all the Kirks are equal. Jamie is the one with whom they are all in love. Captain is the one who can charm. James is particularly good with guns. Jimmy is the bully, but he is strong and fair when it comes to the other Kirks, most of the time. Tiberius and Tiberia are lithe as willow branches and quick as rabbits. Once they claimed to have seen a falcon swooping down upon the highway, and if anyone has eyes fast enough to catch an extinct bird, they do. Jimmy K and Kirkland don’t speak much, but when they do it is measured and wise. What weaknesses he has identified in himself, T sees converted into strengths in others. They are like wandering palms in some ancient forest, constantly moving into the light. He alone feels himself slowly falling down. What space he used to occupy shall be trod over by many soft, green leaved feet.