No, the umiak was not there. Only the smaller boats lay on the beach. Kelarjik had not returned. Four days earlier, with the big skin boat loaded and ready, he had embraced her just once, but fiercely.
“My mother, we will find the place where the seals still breed. But if they are truly gone, we will return before the day of the long sun.”
Then he had joined the others in the umiak. She had listened to their singing, the sound of the paddles dipping, until the sea swallowed even that and she knew they had passed out of the cove.
Whether his quest had been successful or not, he was gone now. There would be no seal fat for her to chew here. The ones who had stayed behind were not part of her son’s family. Her time had come.
The third planet is a moisture-shrouded sphere, a great round eye, looking outward, seeing and being seen. Its satellite, dry as death, a stopping place for those drawn onward toward water.
The ship sank slowly toward the Sea of Dreams, its great shining ovoid mass settling silently into the lunar dust. As internal mechanisms shifted from stasis into flow, fourteen cephalopods emerged, swimming into the observation bubble to join their comrades.
Long ages ago, on a water planet light-years distant, they had risen to full consciousness, neural nets spreading to unite many thousands of polyps, then expanding outward, toward new points of light. After their home planet had been encompassed, forms protected by a water-resistant skin evolved to move outward into space, linked by simultaneous neural resonance.
So the polyps of the planet Tthys yearned starward, seeking other places endowed with the liquid element. Individuals were adapted for the long crossing, selected and placed in stasis. These were the ones chosen for this delicate assignment, impeccably selected and trained for planet seeking. Over the centuries, they had expanded, passing from star to star, planet to planet, moving outward along the galactic arm.
Within the ship’s observation bubble fourteen Tthyans gathered. Twining multiple eyestalks upward, they swayed in agreement that all was ready. Their surge of joy was felt simultaneously by ten billion others scattered across a thousand star systems.
The blue green planet that loomed above them was perfect, ready for colonization. With liquid water in abundance and no signs of intelligent life, it was ready for settlement. Only about a third of the surface was blemished by rock and ice. Soon this would be eliminated, clearing the entire planet to prepare it for their coming.
This would indeed be a celebrated feat of planet forming, they agreed in one sinuous wave. Great sensory reward would await them. The chosen navigators separated themselves from the mass of living tissue, reasserted their outer coverings then made their way toward the entry pods.
With the efficiency for which they had been raised, each pod navigator checked fuel requirements, drive units and landing vanes. It had been more than three hundred cycles since this equipment had been used, and even longer since the disrupters had been armed. For the planet’s land masses to be uniformly redistributed, and all lower life forms eliminated, the disrupters would have to fire in exact sequence, blanketing the planet’s surface in flame. After only a short time they were ready.
Seven slender silver pods emerged from the shadow of the great rippling oval ship then rose from the moon’s surface, speeding toward rendezvous with the third planet.
Larlaluk slowly made her way upslope, judging from the softness beneath her feet that she had left the path the people used when they went for water. She followed the slope of the land, breathing hard, smelling heather and hearing the swell of bird song.
For years she had come this way daily, to sit at the top of the sea bluff above the mouth of the little harbour, where she could, in the past, look out over the grey, wrinkled surface of the water and learn those songs that only the ocean knows.
Larlaluk knew it was time to give the songs back. They were like the shapes made by a hunter when the storm kept him inside for many days. Carved from bone or tusk, so alive it seemed the polar bear would leap from your hand, they were made to please only the hunter, in tribute to the animal’s spirit. No one would think of keeping such an object. They would be found discarded in the place where the hunter’s tent had been, beside a pile of rocks.
She reached the crest of the hill. The wind, fresh with salt, began to tickle her skin. Her face crinkled into a smile as she sat upon the low flat rock that she knew would be waiting.
Her hand brushed along the ground, remembering the many times she had sat here over the years, the times she had come to this place to find songs, or to think about the needs of the people. How fine it had all been. Her hand encountered some small round shapes. Ah, she thought, blueberries. She gathered several and brought them up to her mouth, her tongue already watering. They were hardly a mouthful, not enough to sustain a person, but they were very good.
She knew that the sea was open and empty. No great mountains of ice had come this year. That is why the seals had moved north, needing ice on which to rear their young. The sun began to break through. The warmth felt good, but what good was warmth without food? Larlaluk had not eaten in many days, but had settled into the lightness of fasting, feeling herself almost free, light as one of those small white birds that dip and wheel above the beach. Ready to fly.
Drum in hand she waited, breathing in the mist that rose from the wave-washed rocks far below, waited for the sun to break through and warm her face.
Pod seven approached planetary orbit and banked steeply in a descending spiral. As the planet’s surface drew nearer, Nzmbktlth watched a rough coastline appear, grey ocean alternating with pastel tones of land.
There, rising up to meet him, Nzmbktlth saw the site for the final disrupter, a ledge high on the rocks above the wide expanse of water. Beside the narrow opening where the inlet cut deeply into the land he saw strange rounded grey lumps along the shore. Those grey curves must be some primitive organism, sucking up sustenance from the rock. He knew the survey crew had done their work well. Other than a few abnormal geometric structures found in dry areas, there was no sign of intelligence here, no hint of resonance. Only the convoluted configurations of land and sea, the variations of temperate and warmer vegetation to be found on planets with an excess of land mass.
Nzmbktlth guided the pod to a perfect landing, then prepared for land locomotion. After inflating a protective bubble with water, he began rolling uphill, toward the designated coordinates for the final disrupter. But something waited there, something unexpected.
As Larlaluk felt the sun burning through the mist, she raised her drum. In her mind’s eyes she could still see her uncle stretching the softened circle of tanned leather, her father’s face on the day she received her name, her mother’s hands sewing her first pair of shoes, and then she thought of her two sons, Lemlatik, who had been lost to the bear, that day out on the sea ice, and Kelarjik, sitting in the umiak with her grandson and granddaughter. All that remained now were her songs.
And Larlaluk sang,
May the sun rise well
May the sun rise well
May the earth appear
May the earth appear
Brightly shone upon.
Nzmbktlth had reached the crest of the land when a strange sensation caused him to slow, then stop. Up ahead, something jointed was moving. As he strained his eyestalks forward to observe it, his aural cavities noted a strong, steady rhythm.
Instantly he opened a direct communication channel to the great ship waiting on the lunar surface. The command crew gathered to listen in awe to the strange, unknown vibrational pattern. It was utterly unlike anything previously encountered. Obviously a work of pattern and intelligence, the overlapping sounds rose, swelled, gradually stopped.
As the sun shredded the mist, Larlaluk felt it warming the deep wrinkles of her face, felt it reaching into her, touching her heart. With each song she gave
back to the sea, something grew lighter in her then lifted away. In this lightness she felt as if the sun itself had joined her, as if a great shining globe lay just before her. She felt herself lifting, preparing to fly away.
And she sang,
Like a bird I fly
Like a bird I fly
Always toward you
Always toward the sun.
And Larlaluk knew that this was all there was. Just light and sea, rock and moss and sun. Nothing more.
It took only a short time for Nzmbktlth to install observation posts and seven cycles for him to return to the mother ship. The crew was in complete resonance about what he had found. Nothing like this had ever been encountered in all the one thousand ninety two known planets of the galactic arm. This pattern would be recorded, protected, cherished and studied.
The Tthyans made only one stop on their way out of the planetary system. On the far side of the outermost planet they positioned a repeater, broadcasting the pattern on all known frequencies, enshrining forever the beautiful sounds they had found in this unexpected place. There they left it, calling out through all time:
May the sun rise well
May the sun rise well
May the earth appear
May the earth appear
Brightly shone upon.
Our Lady of The Snows
by Nancy Kilpatrick
Warmth erupted in Marielle’s heart and slid through her limbs and she wondered if she was having a heart attack or something. Her voice sounded to her own ears laced with both hope and fear when she said, “You wanna get rid of that?”
The waif-girl crouched on the curved metal staircase sucked on a thin black cigarette that stank of marijuana, not that Marielle hadn’t tried it in her mis-spent youth, but life was too hard for such pleasures now when you had to be alert, what with crazy drivers in the summer and ice-slicked sidewalks in the winter. The girl’s Huskie-pale eyes flickered with recognition, and a hair-second later those orbs flashed sympathy and distaste, back and forth one after the other, like the two eyes together couldn’t figure out which way to go. Marielle had got used to such looks. Most people on the island of Montréal didn’t mind street kids, but old street people, well, that was too sad a story to interrupt your cell phone call with. When time eroded the glamour and the wildness of personal independence, it left behind a slippery despair that wouldn’t be grasped, so you couldn’t do anything much about it, and most people wouldn’t try to cope with the helpless feeling someone like Marielle inadvertently created in them, not while they had to work enough hours to pay their mortgages. What do you do with a thin old woman with white hair who isn’t playing poor but really is? Most turned away, but some tossed coins at her when she stood or sat at the spot she staked out on the corner of boulevard St. Laurent and Duluth, south east side, near the optician’s, at least spring, summer and fall. Her favourite spot by far was at the door of Schwartz’s except she had to beat that other guy there, and he was crazy-glued to the sidewalk. Winter, well, you couldn’t trust the weather from hour to hour, but you could bank on the snow. One girl brought her a sandwich, or some soup or a muffin or something a couple times a week on her way home from work. At least that was human, although Marielle wasn’t quite sure what being human meant anymore, now that she’d turned into a crone.
Old age hit far worse than she’d imagined, although nobody’d ever mentioned how it would really be, joints aching all the time, a bit light-headed now and again, and feeling frail like she had the bones of a bird. Then, too, she hadn’t figured when she was twenty that she’d be so poor and lonely at sixty, but life’s full of surprises, like maybe some trickster up in the sky was working overtime just to get a few extra jollies from the human puppets he dangled.
The girl on the step pulled on her blonde dreads and sucked on the stainless steel ring in her lower lip, caught between wanting to give up the statue for free out of some misplaced guilt or sense of duty, and asking for payment, since she was, after all, selling junk — post her July 1st move — hoping to make some cash probably for some entertainment to get her through the turmoil of a new apartment that didn’t look quite as good now that she was in it. Marielle helped her out. She reached deep into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a coin. “This enough?” she asked.
The girl looked relieved. “Sure,” she said, and took the dollar. “It’s yours.”
Marielle bent to pick up the statue of the Madonna. She turned it over and over in her hands. Plaster, hollow inside, the bust went from the cloth-draped head to about mid-chest where a chalk heart was embossed and Madonna-like hands hovered protectively close by. N-9 had been carved into her back, at the base, and Marielle thought: the number when it’s all over, before anything new has begun, like death, before rebirth is underway, if there is a rebirth or an afterlife or whatever those New Age people have come to call the white light. Ideas that’d made sense before but now that life wasn’t an endless ocean voyage and the land of death had come into sight, somehow she couldn’t quite make those visions fly. The best she could figure was “everything recycles”, which didn’t have much cachet to it, but at least it could be proved.
This Madonna started life as an altar piece but somebody along the way had painted her glossy black, though the insides were still white. Marielle remembered seeing ones like her in their original state in niches in the churches of her youth. Now, what with abandoned cathedrals being sold and turned into the high-priced condos that littered the city core and bumped up the cost of housing so much nobody could afford the rents, such relics of a softer, gentler age were available to the general public for a song, or at least a loonie. Of course, Marielle hadn’t set foot in a church in years for anything more than the central heating when she was caught too far from home and the temperature plummeted. Or the annual Basilica Notre Dame gift basket with a frozen turkey for Christmas. Too bad she didn’t have a stove, just a hotplate, but you could always exchange the big cold bird for cookable food at the foodbank.
“Our Lady of the Snows,” Marielle said, pulling the black statue close to her face and stared into the hollows of her carved eyes, which didn’t give back any sign of recognition.
The girl on the step shifted uneasily, then smiled falsely before looking away. Just another mad old lady, Marielle figured she was thinking, but if this young thing lived long enough there was a possibility she would be stepping into Marielle’s worn shoes someday. Happened a lot here, the result, Marielle believed, of living on an island where everybody struggled to be independent.
Marielle returned to her one and a half small rooms in the building of one and a half room apartments that housed retired people with only the government pension, transient drug dealers, single moms loaded down with a bunch of kids, and crazies, one of which she had been branded on more occasions than she could remember. Like everybody else in the building, she lived on Bien-être Social-Welfare — if you could call it living, $450 a month, not enough, since the room cost $415 of that. Even with the food banks, she had to work the corner most days just to get enough for things like toilet paper, and the occasional luxury of bus tickets, in case she wanted to go anywhere, like to lug home the free food on the days she was exhausted, or to the Musée des Beaux-Arts on the no-ticket nights — she did love good artwork. Sometimes she thought that maybe she should have gone on the meds they wanted her to take for depression. Then she could have got the medical welfare — an extra $100 a month! — but then she’d have to buy the meds, so it was all the same, and this way she wouldn’t have to be dull and stupid, although some days when the depression got like a powerful black hole sucking her in before she could think about it, turning zombified seemed like it might be a blessing.
She placed the plaster black Madonna on the windowsill, next to the hotplate. Maybe later she’d turn her so she could look out onto Avenue des Pins and the continuous-motion vehicular a
nd pedestrian traffic, mostly students from the university who couldn’t find housing closer to school. For now, though, Mary faced the room, all nine by twelve feet of it. Not one of the prettier virgins Marielle’d seen. Still, this one had something going for her, maybe the lips, almost turned up at the corners, so she wasn’t quite as unhappy as others. The Virgin’s funny hollow black eyes seemed to scan the place, not that there was much to see, the refrigerator, which was as small as a good-size cardboard box and a ratty old sofa that opened to a bed but Marielle didn’t usually open it, since it seemed pointless. There was that scarred coffee table she’d found in the trash and hauled home, and the milk crates she’d swiped from some depanneur and used for books and what-nots. The lighting was from one bare bulb in the ceiling. The first narrow door led to a closet the size of a coffin, the next to the corridor, the last to a washroom with just a shower stall and toilet no sink, jammed so close together there was barely space, as her friend Jean said, to turn and piss. If the Madonna had an opinion about Marielle’s humble dwelling, she didn’t offer it up. Just as well. There was nothing to be done about it anyway, and God knew she was lucky to have a place to park herself at night when so many didn’t, more and more every year, what with fires in the city leaving people homeless, and skyrocketing rents. Just yesterday the idiot box — the only other piece of furniture in the room — went on and on about the booming economy, more jobs, more housing starts, more of everything. “How come,” she asked Mary, for whom she was named in the diminutive, “if there’s more of everything, I got less and less all the time?”
Over the next months the Madonna took on a focus. Marielle found herself reverting to some long-buried habit from childhood and turning to the new arrival now and again for advice, or just somebody to talk to.
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 18
