Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (88 page)

This road itself seemed to be a no-man’s land. “Her” street did not continue on the other side, there was just a blank wall, the side of what had been a large hospital that had declined rapidly in the last six months. There were hardly any patients any more. And those that needed help, she heard, got it from machines grown in their own homes.

“It’s nice out there,” the Old Man said from behind her. She turned back. He leaned against the sentry, but she hadn’t seen or heard him approach. He was wearing jeans and sneakers now, with a tie-dyed t-shirt. “The transcended are pitching in to help the people left behind in a big way. It’s relatively safe for a girl on her own, even one as young as you. Safer than it was before you came to join us in The Castle.”

“I like the Street,” she said, turning to face him now. A shiver ran down her spine as she stood in the middle of the road, knowing in that instinctual way that she should not be able to do this, to stand where cars had once whipped by, and more to stand outside the protection of the Street. Spirits were out here, demons and all the rest, like La Llorona. She looked around again and took in the vacant buildings, the closed off streets, the emptiness of it all. Far away, to the south, she could see figures moving across the road, dim outlines in the distance.

“The Street likes you,” the Old Man said.

“Are you the King of the Street?” Melissa asked. Or President. Or leader. She didn’t understand the new world.

She’d barely understood the old one. The busy streets, the cars, the busy and stressed people. Suits. Acrid air. Factories. Hunger. Steel buildings. Jobs and homes.

Planes. She wondered if she’d dreamed them. Like metal birds, filled with people, going here and there, far over head. She missed the contrails.

“No,” the Old Man said, “this is just a facet of the Street. This body was once an individual that lived here in one of the apartments. Now he is part of the Street, speaking to you with the voice of all of us. One of us.”

Melissa still didn’t get it. She looked off in the distance, away from the Street and asked the same question she asked every week, just to reassure herself that she wasn’t trapped. “Can I leave the Street?”

“If you want to,” the Old Man replied. “You’re not our prisoner. Or even our ward. Though we would have . . . concern for you. We would prefer you to stay.”

“Concern?”

“Accidents still happen. The world is safer, but not completely safe.”

Melissa thought about La Llorona hidden away beneath the Street, hiding in the caverns down there. Was the Street completely safe either?

She wondered if the Blue Lady would help her if she left the Street? She thought so. She had seen her, after all, in the Outskirts.

But if Melissa left the Street, she would leave the Found Children alone. And who would warn them about La Llorona? The Street did not seem interested.

“I’ll stay,” she said, and walked back through the sentry’s gates. “For now.”

“. . . La Llorona lost her children a long, long time ago. Some say she drowned them, and was cast back into the world after she killed herself. And that’s why we must fear her. She’s looking for lost children,” Melissa said, looking around at the other children.

Only ten of the thirty in The Castle sat and listened to her tales on the benches by the sidewalk, mostly the youngest ones. They sat with their lunch—provided, as always, by the Street—and listened in fascination edged with disbelief. Last week she had twelve listeners. More the month before.

“I saw her in the Elemental Caverns,” Melissa said, stomping a thinly-shod foot on the concrete sidewalk. “Right here. Right beneath our feet. She will take you and bind you and make you hers forever.”

That sent a shiver through them. “Stranger danger,” muttered one of the kids, repeating one of the old warding phrases they’d all learned and passed on to each other. Even though they stayed within the long block that made up the Street, the freedom within it was nearly unfathomable. To be able to run and play, beyond the tightly fenced playground behind their building . . . this was a freedom they had never known in their lives. Food. Warmth.

Melissa thought back to the lessons she had been taught. The stories she’d been told about the world. “There is evil and there is good, in the world,” she repeated. “Demons, like La Llorona, want to capture us and steal our energy. But there are angels out there. And they want us to be free, and to laugh and play. It makes them happy to see that.”

Her mom had made angels out of bits of wire and bottles that she found. Twisted metal wings wrapped onto the bottles, with bottle cap faces. When they’d stayed in the tent on the Outskirts, her mother had made hundreds of them. “They protect us,” her mother had said. “From the government. They hide us from the bad people who’ll take you away from me.”

But then she’d died. Killed by the demon that ripped her up from the inside and made her cough blood. And Melissa had been left alone to sing on the street, to beg for food.

Alone while people started to fade away, and the city got silent.

Alone until the beautiful Blue Lady came out to the Outskirts and talked to her. Invited her to come to the Street.

A little boy with braided hair raised his hand and broke through Melissa’s memories. “Is the Street an angel?”

Melissa opened her mouth. And didn’t have an answer.

The others scattered as they realized she was done, their lunches finished, their attention waning. She didn’t blame them, but she hoped they would take what she said to heart. Many of them didn’t believe in La Llorona the way she did, they hadn’t smelled her fire, heard her strange and demonic language. Some of them had been reading things, learning history from the Street.

Even some of the other children who’d hunkered in the Outskirts, near that abandoned factory that Melissa had hid in after her mom died, had stopped believing.

The Old Man was standing there, watching her. Today he had gone back to the cream-colored suit, but with a peach-colored tie.

“We really enjoy your stories,” he said to her, “the way you teach the children what you know about the world.”

“They need to know,” she said. “And no one else wants to do it, I think. Is that why you want me to stay?”

“We want you to stay for many reasons,” he said, “but your stories are a part of it.”

“What do you mean? You must know far more than I do,” she replied. “You transcended.”

That was why everyone left. She hadn’t understood, not talking to other people. Hiding in the parks. Begging.

Did you ever use your mother’s old phone? the Blue Lady had asked. Or play with a computer? They get faster and faster. And better. And some people use mind interfaces. Or speak to them.

Technology got faster. Better. And then technology started designing technology. Evolving. What used to take a lifetime took a decade, then years. And then last year, months. Weeks. Days.

People transcended. Became other things. Many other things. Some were still here. Some had left. Some were different.

Some stayed the same.

The Found Children had been left behind.

“Transcending was the problem,” the Old Man said. “In some ways, we’re only the sum of our parts. The collective that is the Street is made up of only so many individuals, with so much life experience, with so much knowledge, or emotion, or wisdom. If we do not take care to find more, to cultivate more, we could easily stagnate and die. Believe it or not, it has happened to collectives already, others elsewhere have encountered this. It took one such collective in Switzerland just a week, in your time.”

“In my time? Isn’t my time the same as yours?” Melissa asked, walking along the sidewalk, watching the other children run and play. Some of them were playing tag, others had a more complicated game of make-believe going on. A couple of the others had started a painting project early, only they did not seem to be doing quite the nice, even job the Street had suggested. The Old Man took that in as well, but smiled with approval.

“Machine intelligence has multiplied us, in a way. Everything happens faster, your experiences seem exponentially slower. We can make very complex decisions in the blink of your eye.”

“That changed you,” she said.

“You could say that.”

“I don’t want to change,” she replied, not sure where the defensiveness had come from, suddenly. She didn’t want to become a robot body for some larger entity like the Street. Even if the Street was made of all the minds of people who had lived in these buildings a year ago. “I want to be me, forever.”

“Indeed,” the Old Man said, and that was all on that subject.

The next night, a tribe of adults entered through the western checkpoint and set up camp on the opposite side of the Street from The Castle. They rolled up in a small caravan of vehicles, including one large truck with tarp-covered objects on the back. Much to her excitement the people seemed mostly normal to Melissa, though they greeted her with a deference that surprised her. The other kids stayed away, mostly, only peering-through-the-windows curious right now. They had had so few visitors through the Street in the months since the transcendence, since the neighborhood became the Street.

“They’re heading to the spaceport,” the Old Man had explained to her. “We’re giving them freeway and a camping spot in exchange for some things they will make for us in space, in zero gravity.”

Melissa looked up as she crossed the Street, at the stars overhead, thinking about his words. What kind of people would want to go there? She was meet-them curious, so she approached a small group gathered around a grill. There were only a few others that she had seen, beside these three, and they were busy with tasks she could not see.

Once they had finished the greetings, and Melissa explained who and what she was—careful to emphasize that they were in the Street’s safekeeping—she asked what they were doing, where they were going.

“To space,” one of them replied, light in his eyes. His curiosity and passion lit a small fire in her. “We’re going to be adapted to life in zero-gee, and we’re going to explore the solar system. Maybe beyond, if we can figure it out. The transcended are making huge strides toward that, now.”

“So you’re not transcended?” she asked.

“No, but we’re going to be modified, enhanced,” said one of the women, a similar light in her eyes. “In those,” she said and jerked a thumb toward the tarp-covered objects. “Some of our friends are already undergoing the changes.”

“Changed? Enhanced?”

“Do you want to see?” said another of the women. And without waiting for Melissa’s response, she climbed up on the back of the truck and started undoing one of the tarps. She lifted the edge, and Melissa could then see underneath. Machinery, wrapped around a green glowing tank, beeped and blinked at her. Inside, she could dimly make out a human form, only it wasn’t quite so human any more. The body was changing, slowly, very slowly. Elongating here and there, widening in the limbs, flattening. New lumps on the body showed implanted machinery, perhaps, or new organs grown to perform whole new tasks the human body could never have evolved to perform.

“Are you still you?” she asked the woman holding the tarp.

“We’re still individuals,” she said. “Linked, by technology in our heads, some of the same technology that allows people to transcend. But we use it differently.”

That night, Melissa stood on the rooftop of The Castle, looking up at the sky. Lights moved across the stars now, something she had never noticed before. Were they angels, going about a heavenly mission? Or more like these people, exploring the worlds beyond hers? Perhaps both, now that she thought about it.

But as she watched, shrill cries broke the night. She looked down at the visiting tribe, but they were all asleep, and undisturbed.

The cries went on for a full minute, and then trailed away. Melissa hurried inside. They had come from somewhere on the Street. They had to have been caused, she knew, by La Llorona.

Only La Llorona could sound that sad and scared.

The next day, the tribe readied to depart. Some of the orphans ran around, their hesitancy overcome, and they were now doing tasks for the visitors, little things that earned them treats or simple pats on the head. Melissa walked back and forth along the Street, almost like a nervous hen, keeping an eye on her chicks. Surely, La Llorona slipped up onto the surface with the tribe?

No, the Street would have noticed, she felt. It would not have allowed that. No, besides, La Llorona came from the depths, from the caverns, coming up from under the Street.

Once the tribe had moved on, she was joined by the Old Man again, walking the length of the Street. He asked her what she had thought of the visitors, if she wanted to go with them, what she had been working on artistically.

But she could also sense that he wasn’t quite as engaged with the questions as he usually was. Something was missing in his attitude, and as they neared the western end of the Street, he guided her down an alley. It ended, a hundred feet down, in a blank wall erected since the transcendence, physically blocking the Street off and helping make it more of an enclave.

Between the street and the wall lay a boy’s body, bloody and tattered, surrounded by sparkling shards of glass. She looked up at once, instinctively, but there were no windows on the buildings that formed the alley. She looked back down and whispered, “La Llorona. I heard the screams last night. I’ve warned you. Why don’t you listen to me?”

She wiped tears from her cheeks.

“You think she did this?” the Old Man asked, walking close to look at the boy. He was not one of the Found Children. He was an outsider, from a nearby neighborhood. She had seen him before, a little younger than her, but at the time imperious, walking like he owned the world and smiling at the Found Children, but not talking to them. Now he was dead, the life gone from his body.

She looked up and met the Old Man’s eyes, looking into them for what she thought must truly be the first time. She found herself falling into them, as though under a spell, seeing in him time and space, the stars of eternity, the soul of hundreds, maybe thousands. How many were dead now, like this boy?