by Neil Clarke
Pele plays.
This is the chord that sounds.
They are a creature of the deep sea, of interstellar space.
They are a thought, and thought is matter.
The ship, the matter, is like a film above, a fluid, a lens on the surface of their sky, the division between fluid and gas.
They coalesce: they rise.
Arrayed around Pele at that moment is a human orchestra, potential symphonies, jazz rhapsodies, new musics for which new brains to hear must be invented. On new planets, they may whirl and dance, skipping through the universe like stones, breaking through the surface tension of the strange fugue of time in which they are embedded, and sink back into life.
“Oh,” she says, “oh.” She bends over, weeping.
First comes Bean, whose willowy arms surround but barely touch her. Then Ta’a’aeva’s rough embrace, her strong, gasping voice. Javail’s tall blond head bending down to touch hers, and then they are all in a huddle, embracing tightly, crying, swaying, and, finally, laughing as they break.
“We will find the place we need,” says Javail, his ever-adolescent voice breaking as he speaks, yet, as always, he sounds eminently reasonable. “As you can see, we have all the time in the world.”
“We may need more,” observes Pele, her voice harsh, and they break into applause that sounds, to Pele, like surf sounding at Kaena Point.
That is the last they see of her for a very long time.
There is music and frolic in the special time of Fairyland. No yesterday, and no tomorrow. Pipes call. Trumpets sound.
Nightingales, clear springs, the great rose-trees.
Magic. Some good, some bad, but uncaring of humans, rather like space.
Alcubierre eats Casimir Vacuums for breakfast, rips them out of a field with her big yellow teeth and chomps on them. The edges of the vacuums stick out of the sides of her mouth like gold straw and tiny blue flowers and move up and down as she chomps and snorts.
They are one speck of pollen on a single stamen of one small blue flower that bobs up and down in her mouth.
The Librarian carries a wooden clock.
It is chiefly oak. Framed by an oaken octagon a bit smaller than the main octagonal structure that holds the clock’s mechanics and chimes, the face is protected by a glass door ten inches in diameter that one can open with a small latch. The hours are Roman numerals, painted on a cream-colored metal face. In black, swirling copperplate, a single word: Excelsior.
It has a smaller glass door, below, that one can open to start the pendulum swinging.
The Librarian carries it cradled in her left arm, like a baby. Therefore, it does not tick, for the pendulum drops against the back of its compartment.
The hands of the clock are silver, their deliciously narrow, elongated arrows a final flourish, pointing at the hour, the minute, and the infinite in-betweens.
A key rattles inside its small, latched drawer at the bottom of the pendulum when she walks, and the three square holes in the face’s clock emit faint light. Sometimes she unlatches the drawer, opens it, and examines the key closely, with a look of wonder on her face. Then she returns it to its drawer and re-latches the tiny brass hook.
Every so often, she opens the door of the clock’s face, tilts her head, smiles, and moves first the long arrow to a place that seems random, and then the small hand. She beams at the clock, shuts the door, and goes about her business. She never inserts the key. She never winds the clock.
If she has to do something requiring the use of her left hand, she sets the clock carefully in a safe place and immediately retrieves it when done. She straps it in beside her when she sleeps.
This seems a burdensome practice, but it gives her pleasure. Laying bets regarding various aspects of what she does with the clock have become popular. It gives us something to do.
In one of the vacuums—there are many—I grew this voice that says we. I don’t know how, though I am trying to tell you.
I might have grown it when I was Nancy Drew, in her blue roadster, driving through dark space, past planets. One … two … three … ten thousand … it took a long time. Then there were white farmhouses just off a dusty dirt road, hidden behind summer trees, their big heads tossing in the hot wind as if they had something haughty to say.
Inside one house with open windows a planet mobile rotated in the breeze. A girl with long black braids, lying on a double wedding ring quilt made by her grandmother, pointed to them and said, “Strike Hypatia off the list. And Dulcinea, too.” They disappeared from the mobile, and others appeared.
I sped into the brain of the little girl and it was all myth, science, clockwork, precise, wires, pulses, blood, AI, luminous, expanding, nova, pressure, big bang, dust, and me, driving past on country lane in a blue roadster, hair streaming violently far, far, far out behind me, pushed by my own speed, seeing white snowball bushes in the front yard, and a cherry tree, and a woman gathering billowing white sheets from a clothesline, and a girl inside analyzing planetary composition.
You can see why I can’t tell you exactly how it happened.
Pele looks like Pele, except that her eyes are different. She won’t look at anyone. She does smile a lot. She calls herself The Librarian and says she would like to help us.
This is when the clock shows up. You know about that already.
We can’t really blame her for acting this way. She had many areas of expertise when we stole the Moku, like all the other adults on the ship, but she was uniquely special, so we stole her too.
She knew how to make our horse.
She thinks that she chose to help us by staying with us and saved all the other adults by sending them back to Earth. She thinks she is our savior.
We let her think that because whenever she realizes that we have control, she acts in ways that are not helpful to us.
For instance, when the prince arrives to kiss her (and is the prince us, and what we did? it seems possible) she pushes him down, kicks him in the side three times (once or twice is not enough, while four or more is overdoing it), and strides off down a long, winding road, over hill and dale, hands in her pockets, whistling, looking at everything with a keen and watchful eye.
She walks through rain, hail, sleet, and snow, singing about it, all bundled up, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young maiden, and then through summer meadows that climb the flanks of mountains, her clock in a bag that she throws over her shoulder. She wears loose, purple linen pants with large pockets, which she fills with things that seem useless.
She sees beautiful, glowing stones by the side of the path—one gray, one gold, and one rainbowed with layers of minerals. She picks them up and examines each, a large smile on her face. She puts them in her right-hand pants pocket.
To us they look like dull old rocks, but then somehow, like magic, we see them through her eyes, and know what they are. The stones and the power of stones are stories. She is gathering all the stories everyone has ever told, and our stories, and keeping them safe in her pocket until we know how to tell them. There are so many stories in that pocket that you would think her pants would fall down, but though the stories are endless, and the stones are all different, they do not, for the stones are magic stones; the pants magic pants.
Only if we sit around a fire that lights our faces and dances to the dark treetops whenever one of us throws on branches scavenged from the woods, throwing sparks into the night, does she consent to pull out a stone and tell us a story. We have to beg and yell at her. She says that only then are our brains receptive, when we are parched of stories.
She says this is a way to go back to the beginning, to break down our brains to a place we had bypassed in our speed to understand, and that was during the time that we were supposed to look at other faces and wonder what they were thinking. We were supposed to learn to understand when they were sad, when they were happy, and when they had feelings that were more complex, like a flavor or scent or a sound that comes out of the deep dark
forest that is a sweet, mysterious music that calls you to come. She says this is the beginning of love.
When she talks like that, when she tells us stories, her voice is rich and deep, her face fluid, when often it is flat, like some of ours.
Her stories change our brains. We can even measure where and how much.
It’s something to do.
Her eyes get very wide, or narrow to slits. Her mouth assumes strange shapes. Sometimes she opens it wide and screams, reaches to the sky and grabs at it, her hands open, then grasps as she suddenly! in an instant! catches something and pulls it to her chest, and bows her head over it, and her long white hair veils her mysterious face, pale in the moonlight, silent as one of her stones, and we cry without knowing why, feeling helpless and at the same time knowing that she will help.
It is the age of stories. We suck them down like nectar.
We search for our new home. We move like a sea creature through the dark, generating our own electricity. Fluid, ever-changing, Ship translucent or solid-seeming, as we wish.
We grow no older. Why? Biological processes continue; of course. We live. We do the things we need to do, but our horse is wise, and knows much more than we.
Pele is still there, though they don’t know it. Or they do, sometimes. She fears a foray through some other kind of spacetime weather in which they will all age to telomerase endgame and die in what seems minutes. Who knows.
The instant that divides life and death. We must learn to skip it.
Periods of waking like cards constantly shuffled, the deck and game continually changing—the rules, the faces, the very basis of the numbers and what they mean.
“This one is too cold,” says Isho, who is Goldilocks. “And this one is too hot.”
“And none is just right, and none will ever be,” screams Ta’a’aeva, who is always the biggest bear. She storms away from the cottage. Isho and Kevin, the middle-sized bear, drop into tiny green chairs, sobbing.
“That’s not how it goes!” says Alouette, kneeling and holding Isho and Kevin in a skinny-armed embrace. “You know the story. Happy ending, and all that.”
“No,” says Kevin, his voice wild. “No! None of them are right. None of them ever will be right! There is no place for us in any universe except Earth. And it is gone!” He flings himself at Pele and tries to hit her in a flurry of punches. “My mother is gone! My father is gone! My sisters and brothers are gone! All these stories are lies!”
Pele holds him back for a moment, and just at the right time, she lets him collapse against her. She grabs him, holds him, rocks him back and forth. “I know, Kevin. Except this is not the end of the story. It’s not the end at all.”
Kevin fights free and runs.
Pele drops to the tiny stairs of the cottage and drops her head to her hands. It no longer matters whether she did the right thing or the wrong thing. Those words have no meaning. Here they are.
Ta’a’aeva returns from wherever she went, and stands next to Pele. “Sit up straight.” Pele feels the girl’s sure fingers dance against her scalp, hears the swift thush thush of braiding. “We are Wayfaring. We need to watch the sky, the birds, the waves. Kevin,” she shouts. “Check out the signature of the star we found yesterday.”
Kevin’s sullen voice, muffled by tears, issues from the forest. “There is no signature. There is no star.” A rock bounces off the side of the cottage. “Liar.”
Pele hears Ta’a’aeva’s low chuckle. “Yesterday we grew new eyes. I just found out. Go and see. It’s true.”
Kevin hurries away.
Xia, the big organdy bow on her dress untied and trailing behind her, says, “Pele, none of us believe in these stories, you know. They’re all a bunch of hooey. An artificial organization that gathers reality together like a bouquet of flowers, just picking the prettiest ones and ignoring everything that has turned brown already. And that organized bouquet still dies the next day and gets thrown in the trash. We pretend to make you happy.”
“That’s quite wonderful of you,” Pele says. “I appreciate it.” She does not point out that in another of their flashes, their realities, their lives—whatever you might call it, when they wake, and wake again, resume their lives like nodes of blinking light in the depths of the deepest sea, none of them would have even understood that Pele could be happy or sad, and if they had, it would not have mattered to them.
Her clock is on the wall of the tiny bedroom upstairs. We wonder if she knows it.
Kevin is right.
We might have missed the news. It might have failed to penetrate to where we were. It would have been better if we had never known. Instead, it is a scream of deepest sorrow that runs through the ship, penetrates to our very core.
We are now, evermore, and henceforth alone.
The Earth, and all its life, is gone.
There was a nuclear war. All their painstaking and careful safeguards could not hold against a handful of people who did not care for life.
Unknowable flashes, garbled pictures, sick-making nightmares, and mornings of waking in our own beds as the sweet birds sing. There is no way to measure that time.
We wonder if the Librarian’s clock has anything to do with this. But she will not say.
Ta’a’aeva keeps telling Pele that she had no choice, that they had sussed her out from the beginning. Pele knows that isn’t true. They had no idea why she did it. They didn’t know because neither did she. It is a big fat tragic mystery.
She makes that mystery into a vase that she keeps on her kitchen window. She fills the vase with starlight as the memory-threads holding her to Earth stretch, and finally snap, leaving her weightless.
She needs weight to live.
We read the stars, their signatures and histories, and calculate the planets they may have spawned. There are gas giants, dead rocks too cold or too dark for what we might call life, and some don’t spin, but some of them have water and it is toward them that we navigate until we are close enough for searing disappointment.
During our navigation, we turn into ourselves again. We remember that our personalities are formed by the languages of genes, not stories, but that our actions can be influenced by the stories we learn. It’s actually very scary. When we are lucky enough to grow up with stories of love, and not meanness and hate, then we can love. Love makes us happy. Stories of hate teach us only how to be victorious and to hurt others. What is most scary is how many ways we can hurt each other without even knowing that we have, or how hard it is to learn to act in ways that do not hurt others the next time. That is because there is never a same next time, so something has to be constant and at the same time fluid inside of you in the place that acts. Sometimes it is easy to think that there isn’t anything anyone can do about this. Sometimes sadness teaches lessons that lead to more sadness, but sometimes it can lead to changed behavior. Sometimes happiness cannot figure out how to give itself to others. Sometimes joy can only be lived, a lucky chance that one takes, a risk that says damn the consequences. But sometimes the consequences can lead to all kinds of bad places. One must keep air inside a bladder and shoot back to the sun.
Not everyone knows how to do this.
Not everyone has a bladder, air, a sea, or a sun.
We are lucky.
We wake from another coldsleep. Sometimes we are in cocoons; other times, in coffins and kissed to consciousness by the prince-of-allgood-dreams; sometimes we pass the time as equations or as prime numbers: one unique majestic mountain peak after another. That’s infinity. That’s real fun. And, of course, it takes a very long time. Or so it seems.
We incorporate ourselves and grow ourselves and enhance ourselves with the genes of other species. We invent new species. We discard them, and sometimes they discard us. Then we bloom again, but different, somewhat. Still, we keep the memory of Life, rich Life, towards which we long with all our hearts. And the palette of a planet which we will change. Which will change us.
Life.
We fire
the forest, stand back from the searing heat, retreat behind a clear panel and watch the blaze.
Though they live longer than anything else, bristlecone pines eventually need fire for regenesis. On Earth, lightning performed that function.
Yes, it has been that long. And longer.
Alcubierre has no colors, or more colors than we can know. She is immense; invisible.
Some of us grow new senses that we use to pat Alcubierre on her withers, even though it looks as if we are making the bed or splitting firewood or watching ants have wars. These are things no one has to do any longer, but some of us think it is helpful to believe they are doing them, so we make work for ourselves and say it keeps us sane.
Alcubierre is so huge that we will never see the beginning or end of her. In fact, the only way to think about her is with other kinds of symbols, not words.
That accounts for how the story keeps changing. Who we are and how we tell it.
We look at Pele’s vase. “What is that?” asks Xia.
Pele says, “It is sadness too strong to bear. But it is something I need to feel. If we cannot understand how our actions impact others, we will bring nothing to the place we are going.”
Kevin frowns. “That makes no sense at all.”
It does to me.
The Librarian has been in the library for a very, very long time. Through two coldsleeps at least. Now she sits, smiling at the clock.
Amelia, who has been lying on her back, thinking, jumps up, smiling. “I have an idea!”
She gently lifts the clock from the Librarian’s hands.
The Librarian stands, stiffly. She moves her arms forward a few inches but no farther. She stares at the clock, her mouth slightly open, distress in her eyes.
Amelia opens the little door holding the rattling key, and then the door to the face that contains the keyholes.
“That won’t work,” says Ta’a’aeva.
“We must keep trying,” says Amelia. She winds, winds, winds each mechanism. “Hold this,” she says, handing the key to Jaques. She opens the door for the pendulum, and sets it ticking.
