INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (9 page)

“I used to be a professor of engineering at Chulalongkhorn University,” he said.

“Chula…I’m sorry, I haven’t heard of that.”

“It closed five years ago. When the Chinese built their dams upstream of us, well, a country lives on water as much as a man or a woman does. We shrivelled up. We couldn’t afford all our universities.”

Angela sat down in the dusty road.
Farang
could never squat for very long.

“So you came here?”

The incredulity in her voice drew another look from him. Her head was tilted to one side and her brow was furrowed. She really didn’t understand.

“I grew up here. Of course it was greener then.”

“But it’s…” She waved her arm. “It’s so dry. It must be so hard. Is there nowhere else you could go?”

As if companies like hers were always taking on unemployed academics past retirement age. He’d applied all over the world when the department closed. He’d still had ambition then.

“It’s better than the slums in Bangkok,” he said.

Her expression didn’t change. For her, Bangkok meant air-conditioned hotels and restaurants on Sukhumvit Road. The new slums sprawling outside Bangkok’s dykes were as alien to her as the people of Ubon Ratchathani had been until the gearbox screamed. There was no point in trying to explain how the slums flooded every time it rained on a high tide, and how they would need to be abandoned altogether if the sea level kept rising over the next decade or two

He changed spanners.

“I used to work on monofilament dew collectors. When I came here, I set them up on every hillock we can get a barrow to,” he said. “They give us enough water to grow GM cassava, and a few other things.”

He felt the cadence of his voice slip into the turns of the spanner. “We’ll do
what
we can with what we
have
for as long as we
can
.”

It was a beautiful spanner.

“The longer we can keep our children away from the slums, the better. Do you have children,
Khun
Angela?”

“Two girls.” Perhaps her voice had known laughter after all. “It’s hard being away from them. Sometimes you have to do what the company says, you know?”

“I’m sure.”

“Their names are Jasmine and Rebecca. I haven’t even been able to call them for the last couple of days.”

Narong saw the anecdote he would become, the old peasant pushing a barrow who turned out to be a professor and rescued mother in the wilderness. Her eyes sparkled as she spoke of her girls, looking forward to telling them about him. He concentrated on the gearbox, giving the odd grunt when Angela paused for breath. It was as though Angela had been keeping all her talk behind a dam he’d breached when he mentioned her favourite subject. Narong smiled. Any thought that involved breaching dams was worth smiling at.

“I never married,” he said.

Neither of them had much to say after that. He worked in silence for the next half hour. When he pulled himself from under the truck, Gehng was in the driver’s seat with his feet dangling outside the cab. His disconsolate expression made him look very young. Angela paced up and down, her exposed skin already tinted pink.

She turned to him with a pleading look. “Could you fix it?”

“Partly,” said Narong. “It will run in first and second gear, but no higher. It should get you to Phnomh Penh. You’ll be able to get a proper repair there.”

Angela bit her lip. “It’ll take, what? Ten, twelve hours to get to Phnomh Penh in second gear?”

“At least. You are welcome to stay here if you wish. Gehng could send another vehicle when he gets there.”

Angela’s hair was lank with sweat. She wouldn’t know how to wash without using water as though it came from an unlimited reservoir. He would have regretted the offer if there was any chance she would accept it.

“That’s very kind of you,” she said, “but I need to stay with the load.”

She was determined to annihilate every kilometre between her and an air-conditioned room with a phone she could call her children on.

“Of course.”

Narong handed the toolbox to Gehng. He felt a morsel of pity as Gehng scrambled under the asteroid fragment. He wasn’t looking forward to the next ten to twelve hours.

He stood with Angela, watching Gehng replace the tarpaulin.

“You should keep the revs low,” he said in English. “I did what I could, but too much strain will drop it again.”

Gehng didn’t react, but Angela nodded. Her eyes wouldn’t leave the rev counter all the way to Phnomh Penh.

“We’ll be careful,” she said. “I really appreciate your help, sir.” She hadn’t caught his name. “How much do I owe you?”

“There is no charge. It cost me nothing.”

She
had
made his day more interesting. It would cheapen the memory if it became a transaction.

“There must be something I can do. You saved our lives.”

Narong managed not to laugh at the dramatic statement. He watched her watching him, wanting to pay off her sense of obligation. Her body was already poised as if to run for the cab. From some dark corner of his mind, the idea of asking for another look down her top jumped into his consciousness.

“Next time you lose a rock, could you drop it on one of the dams blocking the Mekong?”

She laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He’d given her the punchline to the story she’d tell her daughters.

Gehng finished his idea of tying down the tarpaulin. He made a
wai
in Narong’s direction. Angela was oblivious to the disrespect in the minimal dip of his shoulders. Narong sent them on their way with a straight back and a smile that would be a friendly parting for Angela and an insult to Gehng.

The note of the truck’s engine rose, fell as Gehng engaged second gear, rose again and fell abruptly. Narong laughed aloud, imagining Angela ordering Gehng to keep the revs down and Gehng’s stifled sigh.

He picked up the socket set and spanner he’d left under the truck. An old man should not be a slave to temptation, but it could be years before anyone even looked in the toolbox again. He put the tools on top of the water barrow and pushed it toward the dew collectors on the hillock.

•••••

D.J. Cockburn hase been publishing occasional stories for several years now, in between receiving a long monologue of rejections and earning a living through medical research on various parts of the African continent. Other phases of his life have included teaching unfortunate children and experimenting on unfortunate fish. His website is at
cockburndj.wordpress.com
.

E. CATHERINE TOBLER

You don’t remember, but this is where we began. (I think this is both true and not – just listen.)

This sepia waste of a place, just you and me, and all those wind storms. You wished for rain – eventually it came, flooding
Valles Marineris
the way you flooded me. You don’t remember, but right now I do, and I will show you again.

•••

You wanted to know what he would have made of this place – though he made many things in his fictions, you pictured him here, actually on the planet, crafting things that no one else could ever think of, or would ever dare. Surely we had dared amazing things – we were here after all, but there was something special about him, whether young or old, dead or alive, bound to Earth or elsewhere.

Your gloved hands cradled rocks we brought from the surface and you wondered what Ray would have made of them. They were only rocks after all, but of course they weren’t. They were somehow special on this planet, just as every other thing was, just as every other thing became. Ordinary things took on new meanings – clocks were different here, showers were different, and always there was the lack of rain. My lips would grow dry until your thumb brushed over them – papery prelude to a kiss which restored them. Restored me.

I kiss you now and there is an echo within your lips. Your chin tips up. This silent pressure you remember.

•••

The first time wasn’t sweet. It shouldn’t have happened at all.

You suppose they should have known – in the end you know they did, and they wanted this specific pair (us, oh us) for this specific reason. They knew how it would go, what we would bring to this place, the child (children) we would create on this new world. How many years before others came? Before they joined our family unit? Too many. Not enough. There were others already, but flung so distant across this planet that they didn’t matter. Not here and now.

But, the first time.

Valles Marineris
stretches farther than anyone can rightly imagine; Ray knew, you said, when we stood on the edge of the abyss and looked until we could look no more. Ray looked up and imagined this very place, the people it once held, the ghosts it still did. Four thousand three hundred and twenty-two kilometers, that was how far we had measured across. Twenty three thousand feet down? Twenty three thousand and two. We would go down there – not this time – but we would love it at the bottom, in the sepia-black where all things became possible. Where one of the worst things happened.

We wondered if this valley were related to another, to the Mariana Trench which stabs its way into Earth’s gut. You told me
Marineris
and Mariana weren’t related at all –
Marineris
was Latin for a long-ago spacecraft that had visited this place. How deep was the trench on Earth? We couldn’t remember, had to pore through computers and tablets when we got back to our base – but that didn’t stop us from guessing. Deeper than
Valles Marineris
, you said. Surely not, I argued. One could fit inside the other, you said, and showed me, cradling my hand inside your own. Maybe it was less long, you said as your long gloved fingers enclosed mine; maybe it was deeper – and here your hand cupped around mine, flesh sucking to flesh despite these gloves – and that was when we knew.

Maybe rather when I knew. You said you knew weeks (months? You would never confess such) before on the flight, because you watched the way I slept, the way I went boneless there and nowhere else. You said you wanted to follow me into that abyss, wanted to see all the things I saw (because my eyes, you said, they never stopped moving even in sleep). Your hand moved around mine and I could only stare, picturing canyons fitting inside canyons, all rocks and hard edges, and yet not. Reveling in scrape and landslide.

Inside, where you kissed me, your lips missed my whole mouth, taking only the bottom lip between your own. Scrape and landslide.

•••

How does a person sleep with that gaping canyon outside the door? It grows even now, constantly pulled apart by a still-restless planet, eventually deepened by erosional forces. They all wondered – everyone we had left behind on Earth. Wasn’t it like a monstrous, gaping mouth ready to swallow us, they asked. Yes, we said. They were vexed by our lack of elaboration. They wanted to know what it looked like in moonslight, in sunlight, in eclipse – and the moons did eclipse, beautifully so, swallowed by shadows in space as they circled, spat out when the shadow had its fill. What did
Valles Marineris
look like in complete blackness? It looked black, we said. Wasn’t that terrifying? they demanded to know.

We supposed it should have been, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t that Ray had mapped it so well, or that Earth’s own spacecraft had; it wasn’t that we knew every centimeter of every rock, every turn of every offshoot. That yawning trench was familiar to us. It wasn’t like being one hundred and forty million miles from home; we were finally home here, on the edge of this canyon, ready to set down proper roots the way we hadn’t on Earth.

Some people are like that. You can’t explain it. It’s why we went; it’s why they knew we were perfect. They can’t explain the people who go into deep space; once upon a time, they couldn’t explain the people who left England to cross the ocean. Wherever we were didn’t satisfy; there was always new land to leave footprints on. Ray would have understood, you told the people back on Earth; he would have known what
Valles Marineris
looked like without explanation.

It looked, often, like your mouth.

•••

I come back to this: the moons were melting.

Your eyes widen a little when I tell you that, because you remember that piece. Melting is inexact, you say, because that word still pricks you.

They surely looked like they were melting, I say, and your fingers enfold mine again. There is a slant to your smile.

Sodium atoms, you say, a trail thousands of miles long, so faint we cannot see them with ordinary means, though Ray probably knew they were there. Earth’s moon does this, too—

Melting, I say.

—solar radiation pressure accelerating the faint particles into a long tail that might look like a comet, so if you insist on being poetic—

I insist.

—it could be likened to…glitter.

You flinch even at that word, pricked deep down, but there’s that slant to your mouth again.

For a long while, there is no talking, only my papery lips moving against that slant. You remember this, too, still. You melt, though this is also inexact.

•••

There comes a day in a month – months used to have names? – when I don’t know you.

I am startled to see you in the kitchen with my daughter. Your hand fits perfectly against the curve of her skull, as though it has been there countless times, and her eyes are your eyes, but I still don’t know you. This day, you remember the way I take my coffee, and you remember I don’t like eggs even as I touch the cold oval of one. They aren’t actually eggs is my problem with them. I don’t know what they are.

This feels like the longest day of my life, even though there was one longer. This day, I can’t even remember that one, but it comes back. Eventually.

•••

I shouldn’t have gone, but I couldn’t stay away. You understood even as you screamed at me. (You never screamed, it wasn’t your way, but here in the depths of
Valles Marineris
, you did. I heard that silent agony ripping from your body the way it did mine.)

(We were not in our bedroom – I tell myself this, and so tell you too, so you will remember it the way it must be remembered – so we were not in the room that sheltered us from the fatal nights outside, the room where we created such beautiful things inside each other.)

There were no hard suits that day, no soft suits, but ice clouds drifted high above which meant aphelion, you whispered, the farthest point away, even as your hands slid over the rounded mound of my belly, perihelion. There was life for a little while yet, and I watched the clouds, thin and ephemeral, so fast across the dome of that sepia sky even though they were frozen. How did they move? What wind pushed them?

Blood smells different here. Painfully hot across my thighs and over your hands, and—

Brief life, small,
so
small. Two bundles, swaddled tight, carried up and up, closer to those ice clouds, but never quite there. Two bundles, but of the sudden four of us, one silent and still. There is a square in the yard still, marked in hard sepia clay, that not even the winds can blow away. They might if I let them, but I finger the drifted sand from these small borders so the farthest point away is not so far at all.

•••

We talk about the loss without saying anything. There is a voice in the way your body moves with and against my own. I think I should be broken, but I’m not; my body heals the way it should, becomes a whole and strong voice again. I think that my voice should lean away from yours, but it is drawn hard into that gravity well, knowing there is solace to be found in the shadow of all of you have to say.

You draw tentative words down the length of my spine and back up. These words sound the same, but never are. Fingers slide questions over my ribs and whispering breath remarks over my shoulder, and yes it’s all right and it will never be all right again, but we want what we want, and this— Always this. The blood of you buried inside me to erase this awful thing. The hard suckle of her mouth against me to blot from the clouded sky his pale eyes.

•••

They told us things no other could know. They were so tall, drawn in the colors of old photographs, grown in this gravity and not that which had harbored us – not grown in pods or incubators, but bodies of flesh and bone. Mothers, they had mothers, but there were no families – they did not stay together the way we did. They roamed, needing to stay in constant motion. They found their own kind in time, whether old or young (these things did not matter, because they did not exist), and mated as they do. It was beautiful – they showed us, two bodies becoming one, one swallowed by the other and back again; we knew that dance, could say oh yes, we know.

They walked us from one end of
Valles Marineris
to the other (they did not, but I’m telling you this happened, so it happened), and told us how they named each branch of stone and sand.
Noctis Labyrinthus
was nothing so grand in their language – they didn’t have Latin (they would not have, I reason). They called it The Quake. They showed us the fractured stones, how they had been split yet found home at the bottom of this nook. The quake was a terrible thing for them. We are made to understand how it felt as if the entire planet would cleave into pieces unrepairable. One body split into two separate bodies – and you would tell me that is not a word, better you say the world was
melting
, but no – unrepairable.

They showed us all the places the world had slid, one side into another, where it bulged, where it shot from its core in black tentacled spirals. They showed us every single way this place had been broken and how it lived on. How the world continued in its orbit – they showed us how they marked such, how they used our own world as a guide to where their own stood among the stars. They told us all the names of those stars – the closest word in English for Earth for them was probably “folly,” because so many of them didn’t believe it existed at all. It was a blue glimmer and then gone. Gone. How could such a thing hold anything as wondrous as them?

The canals were in shambles when they showed us. They took us on some still standing, showing us how water would run again when the rains came. When was the rainy season, you asked them, and the sound they made could have been laughter or tears or maybe it was equal parts of both. This world was the color of a rusted oil can that had never held oil. They never knew water. Some of them said they remembered. You still wished for rain.

•••

They – scientists and doctors and countless astrobiologists – said this might happen. That our kind (humankind) were not made for the depths of space or the rigors of traveling through it. Rigors is what they called them. Said we were best suited for our own blue sphere, because even when we spent time in its orbit, we decayed. Deep inside, our bodies ate our bones away and turned us into bird-like creatures if we stayed long enough. What would radiation do to our minds, our memories? What would this iron planet do to us when we returned? We didn’t plan on a return, so this was never an issue for us. Why would you go to such a place only to leave it?