by Zack Jordan
“What was my mother called?” asked the Daughter in a voice like rain.
The crowd of Widows stirred to hear a Daughter speak at such a young age. Finally the eldest [literally: the most heavily scarred] stepped forward. “Her name was Sarya the Widow,”*4 said she.
“Had she no other title?” asked the daughter.
The covenant conferred among themselves uneasily, for they had not intended to honor her in this way. Still, they did not wish to anger such a fine young Daughter. “We have decided,” said they at last, “that she shall be remembered as Sarya the Protector.”
“Very good,” said the Daughter. “I shall take her name as well. But instead of Protector, I shall be known as Destroyer. And now, I shall extend to you the same mercy that you extended to my mother.”
And those, my Daughters, were the last words that covenant ever heard. But that is a story for another night.
No further data available.
*1 Though the exact physiological details are jealously guarded, statements such as these give us unpleasant glimpses into the nature of Widow reproduction.
*2 The significance of this unusually short battle would not be lost on any Widow. As a multi-day struggle between siblings is nearly universal even in Widow legends, this is our first hint that the new hatchling must be fearsome indeed.
*3 Evolution’s most popular strategy for preventing species from killing/devouring/etc. their progeny is to make the young of the species particularly attractive, i.e., cute, to the mature specimens. Since mature Widows are known to occasionally consume one another, the prevailing theory is simply that the young are poisonous and the mature are not.
*4 Here we find another hint that would be obvious to any Widow reader: by denying Sarya the title of Mother, the spokeswidow is insulting her even in death. Note that the storyteller did not make the same mistake earlier in the story.
The little girl is naked.
She is standing, up to her knees, in a pool of water. Her mother is there, up to mid-calf, and she is dragging something small and blue through the water. Those are the little girl’s clothes, and they have mud on them because she was chasing the animals again. There are others around her mother: her mother’s friends. One makes a joke, and the little girl knows it’s a joke because everyone laughs, so she laughs too—loudly—even though she doesn’t understand it.
And then the joke is over and she is back to wading and looking for interesting rocks. She has found one rock today, but there’s always the chance of a better one. She looks out into the river with longing eyes. She is not allowed to go out there, only to stand in this pool where the water is not so fast. She has always been fascinated with the water, with how it sparkles and hisses and splashes and how it shoots through her village and cleans their clothes. She wonders, often, how it leaves the village dirty but comes back again clean on the other side…
They are on the clean side now. She follows the water with her eyes, watches how it leaves here and travels through the village, and how on the far side it begins to bend upward. It curves uphill, into the forest, until it is flowing straight up. It doesn’t stop there, though. No, it continues upside down, stuck to the green ceiling of the world, until it runs above her on the other side of the sun. She can’t see it right now because the sun is there, and tonight when it turns into the moon it will be too dark to see more than a few gleams on the water on the other side of the world. But she knows it continues on the other side because she is standing in it. It makes a perfect and endless circle. Here, up to there, back down to here, back up to there…And if she were up there, she could look up and see her own village on the ceiling, and that is how things should be because that is how the world works—
And then she is underwater.
She is pulled to the surface, gasping. She clings to the brown arm that has seized her; she is shivering, her eyes wide. Her mother’s friends are laughing because she looked up too far and she fell down, and she is angry because they are laughing and now she is crying because she is angry and she hates that, she hates when her body does the wrong thing even once, let alone twice in a row: first falling over, and then crying when she doesn’t want to cry.
Stop it, she shouts at them, and they quiet. They give each other looks that she hates too, but she doesn’t know how to tell them to stop doing that so she buries her face in her mother’s clothes, and it’s not because she’s crying but if her tears get wiped off her face with the river water then that’s what happens.
You must keep your eyes on your side of the world, says her mother.
She makes a sound instead of replying, an angry sound.
I love you, says her mother.
She makes an angry sound again, but this time it’s in the grudging rhythm of the words. I. Love. You. And then she sighs into her mother’s damp clothing. It’s becoming more work to stay angry than to calm down, the way it always is when her mother holds her.
Behold, says her mother into her ear. The universe.
The little girl sits back in her mother’s arms to look at the rock she found under the water. It glistens as it shatters the sunlight into a thousand colors. Its round shape fits her hand perfectly, and she finds she has an almost uncontrollable desire to throw it. But no, it is her only rock. It is too precious to throw.
You imagine, says her mother, in your excruciatingly vague way, a galaxy that works differently than mine. You handwave the hard parts—making millions of species play nice for half a billion years, for example—and you pick two or three things that you, who are so gentle and wise, would change about it. Do you know the ramifications of such changes?
The little girl sighs. She plays with the thing in her hand. She flips it over and over, rubbing the smooth surface.
I am not commanding, says her mother. We are not bargaining. I am beyond that; I have formed your very nature. You are prepared, honed, and amplified, which means that I am merely telling you what you will do.
The little girl looks up from her rock. In the shadows of her mother’s hair, there is no face. There is only a tangled nest of glowing threads, each one finer and more delicate than anything she has ever seen.
Go, little Daughter, says her mother. Observer is waiting.
Sarya sneezes.
It’s a sudden and violent explosion, and uncomfortably biological. It results, a second later, in a disturbing mist upon her upturned face. She twitches that face, disgusted, but does not open her eyes. Reality is out there, and she doesn’t feel like dealing with it. As long as she keeps her eyes shut, the universe is no bigger than the inside of her own skull.
“I guess that means she’s alive?” whispers a familiar voice.
“The boss wouldn’t have left her with us if she was dead,” says the same voice from a different direction.
“Are you sure?”
“Now that you mention it…no.”
Something has happened. Something big, in a way that very few things are big. Something has died, or something has been born. The galaxy is different today than it was yesterday—or whenever she was last conscious—and she had something to do with it. But it’s hard to think about big things when you’re small, and that is what she is. She’s small.
And it feels amazing.
“Her fingers are moving.”
“So she is alive.”
“I thought that was already established.”
“I would have called it a working theory.”
Being small is incredible. Being small means you can focus on the small things. You can feel warm light glowing red through your eyelids, a breeze whispering across your face and through your matted hair. You can appreciate the ground you’re lying on, even if it’s rough and uneven and painful in spots. You can take pleasure in the simple drawing of a breath, like this—
Goddess. She did not expect that.
&n
bsp; This is memory. This is the hard stuff, the undiluted primal substance that makes Memory Vault shadows seem gray and tasteless. This is a deluge of impressions she never dreamed were locked away somewhere in her brain: flashes of damp green and brilliant yellow, of trickling water and roaring heat, of a vast range of smells and tastes that cannot be classified into the one hundred forty-four categories of Category F food bars, of hands the same shape and color as hers plaiting her hair—
“She’s leaking,” says the voice. “Look at her eyes.”
“She’s Human. They leak from everywhere.”
“That doesn’t sound right.”
“It’s true. The boss told me.”
And then something crawls up Sarya’s right nostril.
She is up like she’s been launched, yelping and slapping at her own face. It’s in there, whatever it is, moving around like it owns the place. She goes in after it with Roche’s finger, thinking that this may very well be the most awful sensation she’s ever experienced—which is really saying something after the last few days—and then with a final explosion of breath it’s gone. Sarya stands, eyes wide open, hands on her nose and salt tracks on her face, in the middle of a forest.
And five meters from the end of the universe.
She stares for a long moment, hands still cupped protectively over a nose that may never be the same. Here, in the green abundance of the forest, reality gives way to utter blackness. Whatever this thing is, it’s blacker than the void. In fact, she is rapidly realizing that she has never even conceived of black before. The path she stands on—the entire forest, maybe the entire universe—ends here, in a wall of black so deep it’s hard to look away. It soars above her as well, but there is no way to tell how high it goes. She is suddenly seized with the impression that this thing goes up for lightyears; there are no visual clues to tell her otherwise.
Behind her comes the sound of what could only be a small throat being cleared. “Sarya the Daughter!” says the voice, more loudly. “Welcome!”
And now Sarya turns, pulling her eyes from the end of the universe to see two almost-familiar figures standing behind her. At this point, she has seen hundreds of thousands of Observers, from multiple points of view, across decades, in locations spread across untold lightyears, and she has never seen any kind of variation—until now. These two are different. They wear what looks like handmade clothing instead of Observer’s identical tunics, and their hair is…well, unique is one way to put it. One is shaved shiny bald, and the other has the wildest explosion of white hair that Sarya has ever seen.
“What’s wrong with her nose?” asks the hairy one out of the side of its mouth.
She drops her hands. “Observer?” she says.
“That’s your first question?” asks the bald one. “Not…why am I alive? How am I here? Whatever happened to the Network? That kind of thing?”
Come to think of it, those are also excellent questions. “Okay,” she says. “So…all of those things too.”
“You’re alive because the boss saved you,” says the hairy one, smiling kindly. “And the boss saved you because you eviscerated the Network—”
“In all the systems connected to that Blackstar up there, at least,” says the bald one, pointing upward.
“But that’s a lot,” says the bald one, its smile growing. “So…good job on that.”
She feels herself begin to smile. Eviscerated the Network, they said. Multiple systems, even. Not bad for the little Human from Watertower.
“As for your first question,” says the hairy one, still smiling, “we are…well, whatever you want to call us. We’re not old enough to join the collective, so we’re not Observer yet. That’s why we’re here. We’re your welcoming committee.”
“Right,” says the bald one without expression. “Welcome.”
Sarya stares at them, intrigued. Two individuals, with individual personalities, soon to join the mind of Observer. “Do you want to become Observer?” she asks.
The two glance at each other. The bald one flicks its eyes toward the treetops.
“Of course,” they say together.
“Okay…” Sarya says, resisting the urge to glance into the treetops herself. “But right now you’re not Observer. So do I just call you…Hairy and Baldy?”
They look at each other without speaking.
“Okay, I can do better,” says Sarya. “How about…” She points to the hairy one on her left. “How about…Left?”
“Why not!” says Left, all smiles.
“Let me guess,” says the other. “I’m still Baldy.”
Left grins at its partner, hair waving in the forest breeze. “Hey, you’re Right!”
“No,” says Right. “I’m pretty sure I’m— Wait a minute.”
“He’s a little slow,” says Left in a theatrical whisper.
“Listen, you hairy little—”
“Hey,” says Sarya, butting in before her spur-of-the-moment inspiration turns to blood. “So…you’re the welcoming committee, you said?”
“We are!” says Left with a wide smile. It’s the same expression that Sarya has seen on countless Observer faces, and yet somehow this one is different. There’s individuality here, and that’s something she has never seen on an Observer.
There is no smile on Right’s small face, but its stern look is equally individual. “Yeah,” it says. “We’re supposed to keep you from being overwhelmed. The boss is the biggest He’s ever been right now—”
“Trillions of minds!” says Left. “All drawn together for the first time!”
“—and He didn’t want you to…panic.”
And now Sarya does glance upward, into the glowing backlit leaves of the forest. “Oh, please,” she calls upward. As if she can’t handle a little conversation with an oversize mind.
“But He did want you to be impressed,” Left says. “He wanted your wake-up experience to be dramatic, but not heart-attack-dramatic, and also not disappointing-dramatic. We thought this would be a good spot. What did you think?”
Its little face looks so hopeful that Sarya can’t help but reassure it. “It was…great,” she says. “Very dramatic. I like the, um—” She hitches a thumb over her shoulder.
“The terrifying wall of darkness?” asks Right. “My idea.”
“It was both of our idea,” says Left. “Anyway. The boss said you’d have questions, and He told us we should try to answer them. So go ahead. Any question you can think of.”
It takes about a quarter second for Sarya to come up with her first question. She may have a million of them in her head, but they all boil down to one: the question at the very foundation of her existence. She swallows, almost afraid to ask.
“No,” says Right, before she can say a word.
Sarya blinks. “No?”
Its partner elbows it in the side. “She didn’t even—”
“She was going to ask if she was in the Human colony,” says Right, scratching its bald head. “And she’s not. The colony’s up there somewhere,” it says, pointing straight up. “Nearby. But there are no Humans here, except you. For now, at least.”
“Don’t give too much away,” whispers Left. “You don’t want to steal the boss’s thunder.”
“No,” says Right, quickly shifting its gaze to the ground. “I don’t.”
Sarya, meanwhile, can barely breathe. Nearby. That could mean lightyears, or it could mean right above the bright blue ceiling of this arboretum. Nearby.
Goddess.
“Okay,” she says, dragging her aching eyes back down from the blue ceiling. “Fine. If this isn’t the Human colony…” Then why does it look so goddess-damned familiar? “Then where am I?”
Now Left smiles again. “Easy one,” it says. “You’re in the middle of Observer’s brain.”
Sarya stares out into the
forest, at the browns and greens and the quick flashes of blue up through the canopy. She listens to the hiss of wind through the foliage, to the calls of animals she can neither see nor picture. “I…see,” she says. “Should I understand that?”
“Probably not,” says Right.
So this is the type of answer she’s going to get. Fine. Moving on. “So…this, um—” She hitches a thumb over her shoulder, toward the end of the universe.
“Giant terrifying wall of darkness?” says Left with a smile.
“Yeah,” she says. “What’s that?”
“Sarya the Daughter,” says Right, taking a step forward. “You are standing in front of the only Human to survive from the Human wars.” It glances back at its partner. “How’s that for dramatic?”
Left answers, launching the two into another argument, but Sarya is no longer paying attention—because she is standing in front of a real live honest-to-goddess Human ship. She turns, feeling her jaw drop on the trip around. This black wall, this object that is darker than anything she’s ever seen—this is the real thing. Her people are nearby, and this is their handiwork. She is closer to her species, at this moment, than she has ever been. She takes a step forward, irresistibly drawn, and then another. The darkness swallows everything reality can throw at it, every single photon. “It’s so…black,” she murmurs, reaching out. “I can’t even tell if—am I touching it?”
And then she falls over backward when the ship shouts at her.
“Oh yeah,” says one of the non-Observers as the throbbing voice dies away. “It does that.”
“It’s grouchy,” says the other. “I’ve always said so.”
“Goddess,” whispers Sarya from the ground. That was an actual Human voice, it had to be. “That must be—” She swallows. “Was that a Human language?”
“Network Standard detected,” grinds the ship in the same voice. “Message repeats: Welcome, Human.”
Sarya stares. She would be the first to admit: she is a mess of a being. She is Human and Widow and who knows what else. She is memories that cut and desires that burn, she is every word that has ever been said to her. And never, in her entire life, has she heard those two words in that order.
