Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (87 page)

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 72

Table of Contents

The Found Girl

by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

Robot

by Helena Bell

muo-ka's Child

by Indrapramit Das

Between a UFO and a Hard Place: The Real-Life Science Heroics of Dr. Omond Solandt

by Jason S. Ridler

The Satirist's Progress: A Discussion with Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Another Word: Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman: The New and Improved Magical Negro

by Chesya Burke

Editor's Desk: Professionally Speaking

by Neil Clarke

Awe at Thistledown

Art by Angel Nieves

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

The Found Girl

David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell

Melissa stalked a trash compactor in the Elemental Caverns deep in the depths below the Street, where steam hissed from newly regrown pipes and oversized dendrites spread across the ancient brick of the connective tunnels. The glowing moss that dripped brown water filled the air with a faint glow, enough to let Melissa squint her way through the Caverns.

The Street gave her the mission the usual way: pictographs glowing on the side of the steps leading up to the two storied, red brick building the Found Children called The Castle. She had puzzled for a moment as to what the “trashcan + clamp” had meant, but eventually she’d figured that the Street lost a compactor and needed it retrieved.

And of course, she knew the quartered circle that indicated the caverns.

The Found Children didn’t like the Caverns. They were haunted. With so few real people around anymore, ghosts and demons felt free to roam a world filled with buildings that moved and talked, where mysterious magics dusted the air and flitted around.

So Melissa accepted the Street’s request. She wouldn’t let any of the younger children risk waking the demons.

After all, La Llorona lurked this far under the Street. Melissa glimpsed her bedraggled hair and torn up clothes the last time she’d rescued a lost machine for the Street. Held her breath and hid as the demon ghost snuffled and tramped around the darks of the Caverns.

“Hello,” she whispered to herself. She stopped at the concrete edge of an ancient sewer and knelt to look into a puddle of muck collected in a depression. The telltale kinked track of the compactor looked fresh. The muck would dry out in six hours, maybe twelve on a humid day. He had been by here recently, then, headed deeper into the caverns. On tiptoes she headed deeper, swallowing hard and hoping she was being ghost-quiet.

Scuffling whispers echoed through the stale air from deeper in the caverns.

Melissa froze.

The sounds carried the scent of earth and water. She looked around a corner carefully. Somewhere, deep along one of the arrow-straight tubes, a faint fire flickered.

“La Llorona,” Melissa whispered to herself, the back of her neck prickling.

Melissa knew the stories from her days hiding in the Outskirts. Alien and incomprehensible the old demon stalked abandoned, wet sewers, snatching up wayward orphans, devouring those who had lost hope.

If La Llorona showed, she would tempt Melissa with her demonic tongue. Melissa shied away from the tunnel, keeping her hope, keeping her strength.

She looked down at the tracks. The trash compactor had been wooed by La Llorona’s voice and tricked into coming down here, no doubt. And the Street needed it rescued. And the Street was good to the Found Children. It had given them a safe building, and good food.

Melissa steeled herself and followed the tracks where they led, right down the tunnel toward La Llorona. The glow down that way was brighter, and the smell of smoke unmistakable.

“Infernal fire,” she said softly. The smells of rotting things and burned flesh overwhelmed the purer smells of earth and water.

Smoke should be sweeter, but no one told La Llorona that.

Halfway down, the trash compactor shuddered in spastic circles, twitching a half turn to the left, then backing to the right one full turn. Back and forth he stuttered in little circles, and Melissa could tell the machine was caught between the call of La Llorona and the freedom and sweet air of the Street.

Right now Melissa wanted nothing more than to call on the beautiful, angelic, and pure Blue Lady to come save her. The same Blue Lady that had appeared in the Outskirts, and given her food. Then told her and the Found Children about the Street, and the safe place.

But the Blue Lady didn’t always come when you screamed and prayed. And it was better to save your prayers for when you
really
needed them. So Melissa gritted her teeth and approached the wayward machine.

Fortunately, the Old Man on the Street had shown her what to do in cases like this. When the trash compactor paused to reevaluate its path she leapt onto its chassis, her muddy feet scrambling up and over its metallic arms and mouths. On top was a button covered by a clear plastic guard. She flipped up the guard and mashed the button down, then whispered, “I am lost, take me home.”

Immediately, the trash compactor stopped twitching, oriented itself back the way Melissa had come, and trundled off. She clung to it, her bony knees hooked into one of its bumpers, her fingers clutching the front edge, her slim body laid across the top. The little treads whirred and the compactor sped up with a flurry of dank water and mud as it carried them away from La Llorona, and then eventually with a burst of light, out of the Elemental Caverns entirely.

“You did good work with the trash compactor,” the Old Man said, walking beside her down the center of the asphalt strip, “that took a lot of courage. I know you don’t like being underground.” Melissa looked up at him. He wore a simple cream-colored suit with a pink tie. Sometimes he dressed differently—when she met him he had been wearing sandals, khakis, and a patterned shirt—but he otherwise always looked the same with his lined and careworn face and the shiny implants at his temples, forehead and base of his skull.

“I guess so,” she said, walking beside him. Her head came just above his elbow, and she wore the same long skirt and t-shirt that she had worn that morning into the caverns. The t-shirt had a stylized rocketship on the front with three colorful monkeys hanging off it as it shot into space.

“We appreciate it, nonetheless. Even if we lack courage ourselves anymore.”

“You mean you’re afraid?” she asked. “But you’re an adult.”

“No, we’re not afraid, either. Not afraid, not courageous. It doesn’t apply to us any more.”

“Because you . . . transcended?”

“Yes,” he said, steering her toward the front steps of the safe building. The Castle. The other kids, all younger than her, had finished playing for the day and were heading back toward The Castle. Most of them were dirty, a few nicked up from playing rough, but they were otherwise healthy and in good spirits. They had a freedom now that they had lacked before, and they reveled in it.

The only cost to that freedom was the occasional task laid on them by the Street. Most of the cleaning things she let them handle, but as the oldest, she took the difficult things like the trash compactor onto herself. She couldn’t let any of the younger ones risk themselves with La Llorona.

“Do you miss it?”

“Feeling afraid?” he asked. “Or courageous?”

“Yes.”

“Not yet,” he said. She imagined a smile further creasing his face, but it remained calm. “We still remember it, after all. We remember the fear and courage of all of us. And that’s enough, in a way. Though it’s nice to actively see yours. We take some pleasure in knowing these things are still around and still possible.”

“Is that why you like my art?”

“Well, we like neo-primativist compositions. And your color choice is fairly unique for someone of your age and background.”

“Thank you. I think.” She stopped at the base of the stairs, then turned to look up at him.

“What for?” he asked.

“For this,” she said, spreading her arms, indicating the Street as a whole. “You make it safe and clean and okay for us.”

“You make it clean, you and your friends.”

Melissa glanced up the stairs. Darkness was settling and the others had all gone inside. When she looked back, the Old Man was walking away, his hands in his pockets. Far beyond him, down at the east end of the Street, a ten foot tall block of walking metal, a checkpoint sentry, ambled forward awkwardly and then squatted to block that end off from unwanted guests. Another such sentry blocked the west end.

As she kept looking to the east, a bright light flared over the city. The silhouetted skyline was darker than it had been this time a year ago. A pillar of light grew, glowing blue and white, reaching for the heavens. Melissa wondered what it was.

An invocation for the Blue Lady lingered on Melissa’s tongue long after the pillar of light faded and vanished, but never passed her lips.

“What’s out there?” Melissa asked the sentry the next day, craning her head as she looked up at the strips of steel along its side. “Now, I mean. It’s all changed. I don’t understand it anymore.”

“You were out there before, weren’t you?” the sentry replied.

Parts of the steel block could change and move, revealing barriers, maybe weapons even, but she couldn’t be sure of that. It was doing that now, to talk to her. The booming voice coming from a new porthole opening up. Small machine irises bloomed and twisted to point themselves at her.

Nothing got past the sentry without the Street’s say-so. Except La Llorona.

Melissa guessed that only the Blue Lady could stop the demon. But she hadn’t seen the Blue Lady since she came to rescue the Found Children.

“Yes,” Melissa said. The sentry must know her story, she thought. But then, he hadn’t appeared until just after most of the adults in the city transcended. Maybe the sentry wasn’t like the rest of everything here on the Street, knowing what seemed like everything there was to know. “My mother and I lived on the streets for years, when I was little. She died four, maybe five years ago, I don’t know any more.”

“How did you fare on the street?” the sentry asked.

“Well enough,” she replied. “We sang songs for people on the streets, back when they were filled with people. Sometimes people put money in the cup. Sometimes we went to the shelters, but mom was scared of them.”

“You still tell stories, don’t you?”

“When the other children need them,” Melissa replied. “To explain the world.”

“How often does that happen?”

“All the time,” she said, flashing a smile at the sentry, and stepped across a steel ribbon in the road that marked the edge of the Street. Over to the other side. Nothing much happened, though she felt a tingle that told her the sentry had looked at her very closely. She turned her head and smiled again at the steel block and walked out into the north-south road. No vehicles used it any more, and outside of the Street, she could see weeds and grass had begun to sprout in the cracks.