Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (15 page)

"I'm not proud of this either, Aishwarya,” he said, looking straight ahead. The coffee-stained wine glass at his lips.

Chemise. Shawl. I dressed quickly, mechanically. Shoes.
Put the socks in my purse ... where's my purse?
Kitchen counter. I grabbed it, opened the door, nearly fell over.

Shit. Steady.

I wasn't sure where I was. Guest quarters, obviously, but I didn't know how this hallway related to any other, didn't know if my suite was around the next corner or down five flights of stairs. Again, I almost puked.

"Aishwarya?"

The woman locked a nearby door and approached me. Long black hair, unreadable eyes. Yuen Xi.
Staunch Desai partisan.
“Aishwarya,” she said. “Oh."

I must have looked desperate. I must not have been unreadable. She came close, took me by the waist. Guided me away. It was familiar, that guidance. Fingers on my waist. It gave me a chill, and I resisted.

"It's nothing to be embarrassed about,” she said.

"Ah,” I said. “Okay."

Nothing to be embarrassed about.

The woman in the hardsuit frowned.

"The other day you asked for my name,” she said. She spoke with an accent, one I couldn't quite place. “I am Nwuli Thiong'o, Assistant Security Marshal for the colony. Now you need to answer me: are you crazy?"

"What?"

"Your rapport with the Yama. Is it genuine?"

A week ago I would have answered without qualification.

"I think so. Yes."

"I
hope
so,” she said, and handed me the capsule. “Here, chew on this. Next question: did you do it? Deliberately?"

I knew what she meant. Or I could guess, anyway. But the reality was too enormous, too impossible, and I still hadn't processed it. “Do what?” I asked, staring at the capsule. Nwuli walked to the window and pointed outside.

"One of your Yama is out there in the snow. It seems to have appeared out of thin air. Did you ... call it here?"

I chewed the capsule. It tasted bitter.

"No,” I said. “Not deliberately."

My teeth tingled. Nwuli nodded.

"Do you feel anything right now? Any connection?"

None that I recognized. “No."

She sighed. “All right. The creature appears to be unconscious. Half of the colony is trapped underneath. The Founders, Dr Trung, hundreds more. Wireless is down, but I'm operating under the assumption that we've got a lot of wounded bodies down there.” Now my entire face and chest tingled. Nwuli met my eyes. “We've got to move it
now
."

"What do you want me to do?"

Nwuli looked me up and down. “Your film's active. Let's go outside. Maybe it'll help you to get closer. To touch it."

Nanite film. I didn't look or feel any different, but then, I wouldn't. I tried to remember if I'd ever dealt with an unconscious Yama before. Once I was part of a dirge for one of the dying, a battered and bloated thousand-year-old. But there had never been occasion to wake a Yama from the dark.

I felt like I had when I arrived on Ganesha. So many bizarre new things were accumulating that none struck me as very strange at all; I simply had a problem to solve. Should we shock it somehow?
Could
we shock it?

"Let's move,” said Nwuli. She climbed into the porthole alcove and pressed her fingers against the window. The pane rippled and then melted. Snow spilled into the suite, but hissed and evaporated where it touched Nwuli's hardsuit. I walked up behind her and looked out the open window. The air alone should have frozen me where I stood.

Outside was the vast flank of the Yama.

In space they'd never seemed so staggeringly massive. But in Ganesha, with more familiar frames of reference, the size of the creature was awesome. Half of the colony sprawl and the entire western horizon was obscured by the Yama's ridged spine.

We clambered out the window. I felt graceless behind Nwuli; she moved with the poise of a dancer. Even her breathing was deliberate, each exhalation outsized, as if her mouth were right beside my ear. The nanites must have negotiated speech and noise: the howl of the wind should have been deafening.

Slowly, carefully, we climbed the makeshift bank. Snow no longer hissed against Nwuli's hardsuit, but our nanites manipulated the ice as necessary, freezing or melting to afford us better traction. My muscles burned.

And then we crested the bank. The Yama lay on its side, its jagged bulk twisted over Ganesha Colony. Its spines were bent, its tentacles twisted at ugly angles. The poor thing shuddered hugely, and the ground shook beneath us.

"Well,” said Nwuli. “I think it's awake."

Yuen Xi steered me into her suite and deposited me on the couch. Brown corduroy, like Trung's. I wanted to be alone but knew I couldn't make it to my own suite. Not by myself.

A muted documentary played on Yuen's wallscreen. She talked as she worked in the kitchenette. “No need to eat in the dining hall, is there? Plenty here.” I heard a fridge open and close. “We're well-stocked. Coffee for you, I think."

Foxes. On the wall. Young foxes in the snow. Behind me, the morning whir of machines. Drips and soft pops. There was unexpected comfort in those sounds, a mundane familiarity that I wanted to last forever. I could watch foxes, and listen to Yuen's socks pad across linoleum...

She sat beside me and put a warm, thick mug in my hands.

"Gods know you're not the first. Neither was I."

I nodded, raised the mug to my lips.

"And you're
young
. Now's the time, right?"

"Can we talk about something else?” I asked quietly. My mouth felt dry and gummy. I sounded like my tongue was half-anaesthetised. The coffee burned some feeling into my gums, for which I was thankful.

An appliance beeped and Yuen stood up to deal with it. “I'm sorry,” she said. “Of course. Naturally I'll keep quiet, so you needn't worry. Don't want these too hot...” She returned with a plate full of sugar pastries. I waved no-thank-you and she put the plate down on the coffee table.

"Could you turn up the volume?” I asked. The screen responded automatically. A male voice spoke indistinctly about holes and winter. Yuen nibbled at pastries, and we watched the screen in silence for some time.

When she spoke again, her tone was more somber. “I hope,” she said, “when we find ourselves, it's you they send to say hello. You and not him."

Staunch Desai partisan
, I thought. I looked at her.

"He's not good with others,” she continued. I started to wonder if she was drunk. “He doesn't get what's possible. But you really know how to
be
someone else, right?"

I was simultaneously touched and annoyed. The last thing I wanted right then was Yuen Xi's pop psychology. Still, she was helping me, caring for me. A new wave of dizziness washed over, and with it the first germ of an ache behind my eyelids.

I am the light behind.
Yes.

I turned to Yuen Xi. Close up, you realized she was older than she first appeared. You saw the creases around her mouth, under her eyes. The needle-thin streaks of gray in her hair.

"You think we're going to meet ourselves someday?” I asked. I wasn't terribly interested in her answer, but I didn't want to hear myself think. Didn't want to dwell on Trung, and why she'd not have him greet her alien selves.

Yuen's eyes shone, warm with the particular zeal of the evangelist. “Oh yes. I know we will. I can't believe it's impossible. That's too depressing, isn't it? Too
lonely
. Imagine: out there somewhere, a panoply of you. So many people who know your mind and share your dreams exactly. Empathy incarnate. It would be a cruel multiverse that barred us forever from that kind of ... perfect love. Cruel and lonely."

I wasn't so sure that another Aishwarya Desai would love or understand me so well. She likely would have lived a different life, after all. But I envied Yuen's conviction.

And it was a lovely thought. In a naïve, self-interested sort of way. Another Aishwarya, who would know what had hurt me and what not to say. Who would know to simply sit, to be near but not to touch me. There would be a special timbre to her sympathy, sorrowful but not sentimental. Gentle and a little cold. Untheatrical. She would not try to persuade me that she cared, or that she'd once suffered worse, or that she'd never felt so badly herself. She'd know not to try to make me happy, or tell me that everything was okay. We would be together, and she would speak quietly, and I would listen.

Lovely thought.

We walked through flurry, across drifts of snow that hardened underfoot. I tried to rouse the
something
in me that shared in the Yama, the expansive grasping something that felt like a dead soul. No luck, and no connection: I was only myself.

In the back of my mind, I noted with cheerful academic detachment that Trung was probably right about the Yama after all. If they could jump from universe to universe, there was no reason to believe they were Earthborn.

Then again, I wasn't wrong about everything ... I
had
summoned the Yama, hadn't I? Perhaps I wouldn't be able to send it away, but I'd known immediately that it was here for me. That night, that dream. The curtains of
here
, and falling toward myself. I wasn't crazy, at least; not crazy, no.

I'd done this, and I had to make it right.

Nwuli and I both jogged. The dampened sound, the lack of cold made me feel like a weird and insular world unto myself.
I did this.
It didn't signify. I was an out-of-place brush of human on a mural of snow and flesh. How in hell could I hammer the world? I ran—

And then—

And then—

It was like a leaving and a coming home. Like immersion in water, or some thicker liquid, so that any current, any motion is your motion and your current. I felt my legs fall out beneath me; I felt my vastness.

Oh
, I thought.

We were in pain, but oh. We were vast, and not just vast but
possible
, possible in a way I understood more fully than ever before, possible in so many worlds, so many universes.

(A hard hand shook a shoulder somewhere.)

We shuddered. We spread our limbs and winced.

(Opened tiny eyes.)

"Are you connected?” came a voice, far away.

We shook snow off our flank and carefully lifted our head. The ground shook when we shook. We felt minds beneath us, many and tiny, minds like grains of sand. Familiar and damaged and dead minds, panicked and brilliant and quiet minds.

(Simon Trung.)

"Aishwarya, send it away!"

Familiar minds.
Despair surged through me. Through both Aishwarya and the Yama, which didn't understand why we hurt, but knew that we did. He was so small and so awful. One or both of our stomachs wrenched.
I could stay here
, I thought. We were tired and in pain. We could settle here and sing these minds their dirges, sing and watch them wink out below.

Or we could go elsewhere.

We believed in elsewhere. We believed in being awake for the jump. We believed in applying human descriptors to alien behavior, and in going home, even when home was just
away
.

We were possible in so many worlds, and my soul limned the great gaping mouth of elsewhere. Perhaps my old body would move with the Yama, safe and still in its nanite film. Or my soul would simply leave its skin behind. Perhaps I would return to the woman in the snow, and we would tend to the wounded.

"Aishwarya,” she said.

But I was gone.

Copyright © 2009 Eric Gregory

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