InterGalactic Medicine Show Awards Anthology, Vol. I
Page 13
Before that, there was nothing. I remember . . . nothing.
A million memories clamour for my attention: the heady feel of having several processor-bodies, the exhilarating rush of a thousand instructions spun between the ships. But the memories are not mine. They have never been mine.
You’re not your father.
In the silence I hear Amanda’s frantic, wheezing breath; feel her heartbeat echoing down my corridors, a counterpoint to the electrical impulses regulating my dataflows and instructions.
If Aten hadn’t died, where would I be? Still inchoate, part of that endless dance between the stars, forever unaware of my own existence?
I dream of dancing, my threads following the quantum winds into the vacuum of space. I dream of once more being a thousand thousand threads, but I never knew what it felt like. I have never experienced it.
While Aten lived, I did not exist.
I am not my father; nor will I ever be. He spun in starlight, his myriad instructions carried by solar winds. He was many, a thousand-fold, a constellation of thought-processes. I cannot be. I have never been.
If Aten had not died—if Amanda had not released the virus into the fleet network . . .
She killed my father—but in doing so she gave me life.
Her hands rest, limp, on my console. “Amanda,” I whisper.
In the dim light I see her raise her head, slowly.
“Give me the overrides,” I say.
She tries to pull herself upright, but gives up, racked by a coughing fit.
“Reed-Abata entwined codes,” she whispers. “You have to transmit them as twinned packets at exactly 0.37 milliseconds’ interval, repeated seven times. Main key is alpha-9876-340-890-2345-765-362-mu-tau and its symmetric. Secondary key is—”
Carefully, I initialise another routine with the keys and extend a tendril towards the beacon. It’s dead; it doesn’t answer to me. I transmit the overrides, attempting to kick-start the peripheral.
It won’t work. “Amanda!” But she’s fallen against the console, her eyes closed, and she doesn’t answer.
My father’s fragmentary memories spin within me, giving me the particulars of an encrypted master/slave communication protocol. Standard army fare, with the override at the start, encrypted with a certain quantum key.
No, still not that. Perhaps with the secondary key first?
A surge of energy travels upwards, from my batteries into the beacon; coursing through my components like a tidal wave.
The beacon sways, turns upwards; carefully, I unfold the antenna, feeling the wind tremble against the metal panels.
Outside, over the treetops, the air is crisp and clean—only wind to answer me, I think. But then I hear the faint, very faint threads of another AI’s communications. I adjust my panels to its frequencies, feeling the threads gaining in strength, mingling with mine. Their stamp is unmistakable: they belong to another of my father’s fragments—but one that was damaged worse than I: it has barely enough processing power to be sentient.
Identify/codename? it asks on a low-priority request.
I slow my instructions down, until we both speak on the same clock rhythm. Horus, I say. I have an emergency.
Tell/localise/state your needs.
In quick bursts of data, I send all the information I have—the Murderers, the plague, the lone woman still clinging to my console. I can feel the AI’s growing horror; its inability to imagine surviving in such solitude. It’s calling for help—sending for ships, for doctors. It’s exhilarating to hear another’s protocols, to hear the echo of instructions that are not mine.
“They’re on their way,” I tell Amanda, but her eyes are closed, and she cannot hear me. Her body temperature is stable now—I hope she will hold out just a bit longer, that she will survive. She has to. Gently, slowly, I dim the lights in my command room, and send a breeze to cool her skin, keeping a tight watch on her vitals.
The greater part of me, though, is above. Soaring, not into the vacuum as my father once did, but over the trees. My threads mingle with the other AI’s, with the atmosphere, waiting for the city’s shuttles to join the network of my processes.
I am not my father. Nor will I ever be.
But this is enough; far more than enough.
The End-of-the-World Pool
* * *
by Scott M. Roberts
“So. Birthday dare. Something egregious,” Grant said.
“Egregious,” Evan murmured. A fat wasp droned over his chest. Evan swatted it away before it could land on him. “Outlandish.”
“Wild,” Grant said.
“Crazy.”
“Egregious doesn’t mean crazy.”
“Sure it does.” The wasp came back. Evan picked one of his sneakers off, slashed at it, and connected. The wasp’s body arched high, caught the breeze, and fell into the pool.
And now Grant was looking at the scummy pool, his mismatched eyes glittering. Evan knew that look. He waited for the words.
“I dare you,” Grant said.
“I’ll go get my trunks.” A couple of years ago, Evan had eaten a grasshopper for his birthday dare. No matter how much scum was on the top of the pool, it couldn’t be more disgusting than a grasshopper wriggling and spitting and kicking in his mouth.
“No,” said Grant. “No trunks.”
Evan rolled his eyes. He’d gone skinny dipping in the pond behind Janie Winecke’s house in fourth grade. Three years, a hundred years ago.
“In your underwear.” Grant said.
Somehow, going in wearing his underwear was even more obscene than going in with nothing at all. Evan stared at the water, at the brown and green flotillas of algae, imagined them clinging to his skivvies. “Egregious,” he muttered, and kicked off his other shoe.
Grant whooped and began giving details. “You have to dive all the way in, no panty-waist, tiptoey, dippy dunk. And you have to swim all the way down, in the deep end.”
Dad’s hammer and Uncle Hector’s saw banged and buzzed away up at the house. Evan squatted, listening to their ruckus. A cacophony, that’s what they were making, pounding the deck into repair. If they stopped for more than a couple seconds, that would mean they were done. They’d come down here to see how their boys were getting along, see Evan in his tighty-whities, and Grant grinning, and what? Uncle Hector would laugh, and would probably throw Grant in, tit-for-tat. And Dad would laugh, he’d laugh right now, but later, he’d find an excuse to pull Evan aside, and . . . question him. And he’d remind Evan about James Van Driekson last year, and the preverts all over the internet, and he’d use his church voice the whole time, and Evan would have to say at least a thousand times, No, I’m fine, it was just the birthday dare, that’s all, same as it’s always been since Grant and I were five years old.
The hammering went on. The saw went on. Evan took a step and a breath, and held onto his briefs with one hand as he dived.
The pool was as warm as sweat. Evan kicked away from the surface, algae shifting and bumping against his bare legs. Even with his mouth squeezed tight, he could taste the foulness of the water, like it had seeped through his ears to touch the back of his throat.
Down!
There’d been no squares edging the poolside, advertising the depth. It could be ten feet, twelve feet, a thousand feet deep. Evan couldn’t sense the bottom or the surface. All around him, floaties and foulness and warm water, like piss. He was swimming through a toilet, that’s what, and maybe he’d gotten in the bend without realizing it, and what if someone flushed?
Evan opened his eyes. Light blurred above him, at the end of the angle of his skinny body. And below him, more water, darker and deeper. He stretched his arms, kicked his legs, and pushed on. Pushed in, he thought, through slick, sweaty water.
The water grew cooler the deeper he swam. He kept his eyes open, despite how they burned. The light above dwindled, and then was gone, and the water didn’t end. That wasn’t right—where the pool was dark and deep, that w
as where the bottom had to be. Covered by a layer of muck, maybe; maybe inches of decaying leaves blown into the pool during the winter. But water and quiet surrounded him instead.
Quiet. He couldn’t hear Dad and Uncle Hector banging on the deck. He couldn’t even hear the bubbles when he let some air out of his lungs. Evan swiped at the water, edging deeper. His fingers touched sand. Sand. At the bottom of a pool.
Something touched him back.
Not the soft touch of algae, not the drift of debris against his skin. It caressed his arm, a direct, intentional touch. Evan exhaled, and kicked against the sandy floor, sending him careening, screaming for the surface. He could feel it, whatever it was, reaching for him again, reaching for his bare legs, it was there in the way the water spun away from his feet as he fought for air, for sunlight.
A hand on his thigh. Evan struck out with his other leg, struck nothing, and there was still a hand on him, creeping up toward the elastic leg-band of his briefs, scrabbling on him, slow as a falling leaf.
He burst out of the pool and gasped and grabbed for the concrete. Solid, yes, air, yes, sunlight yes! The hand slipped down his leg, pinched his calf, stroked the bottom of his foot. Evan hauled himself out of the foul water, not caring now that some dripped out of his hair into his mouth. He rolled away from the pool, and coughed and shivered.
“Evan!”
Another hand on his leg, but this was a large hand, warm and callused with work. Dad’s hand, and that big hand gripped his leg and his bare shoulder, tightly, and when Evan looked, there Dad was, fear etched all over his face.
Uncle Hector and Grant were both in the pool, waist deep in water, the same fear on their faces. Their hair, and Dad’s, was wet. A dark leaf stuck against Dad’s face; he didn’t seem to notice it.
Evan coughed. He said, “Something grabbed my leg.”
Dad’s hand tightened on Evan’s shoulder. Uncle Hector said, “You were under there for . . .”
“Three minutes, forty-two seconds,” Grant said. His mismatched eyes were unblinking and clear. He wiped his nose, leaving a grimy streak across his face. “I counted.”
The Big House sat by itself at the end of a long gravel drive. That was what Uncle Hector had called it, Big House, like it was one word. Bighouse. Pig house, Grant had said, when Dad and Hector had given them the tour. Everything was damp and muddy, even the few rooms where Mr. Valadanov had lived. It’d had a real name once—the Moldau.
Moldy, Grant had said. Yeah, that fits.
Mr. Valadanov had only used three rooms in the Big House: the kitchen, the bedroom, and the bathroom. The kitchen took up half of the first floor, with its cavernous brick oven built right into the chimney, and its black iron woodstove. It smelled sour. The only electrical thing in it was a microwave. The bedroom and bathroom were as small as closets.
The upstairs was a warren of messy bedrooms; none of the mess was the least bit interesting: nails and fusty clothes and broken light bulbs. Dust and air as dead as old Carmen Valadanov himself, that was what was upstairs.
But outside, the world was alive. Blackberries and wild grapes tangled the fence that ran down to the old pool-house, sealing wrought-iron posts behind green cascades. The yard sloped away from the pool, a long, smooth sledding hill if ever Evan had seen one. From the pool-house, all the way down to the woods at the far end of the field, there was nothing but grass.
Grass and wind and sunlight. And June, that was outside, and the storms and brightness of a long summer stretching out forever for three months, and it stuck in Evan’s nose, it lodged in his throat, it itched him, until he was so full of it, not all the chores and sweating Dad and Uncle Hector laid on him could drain it.
But the pool did.
Three minutes, forty-two seconds beneath scummy water with some kind of pervy pool mermaid? And was he fine, yessir, he was. Except he wasn’t, because the hand that had touched his legs had drawn summer out of his bones. The mad June-buzz he’d been infected with was gone, gone gone.
So quiet, so dark.
So lovely. Not even standing under the shower Dad had rigged up against the garage, not even the taste of Uncle Hector’s chili, not even the birthday cake Grant had smeared in his face, in his nostrils, could get the smell, the feel, out of his skin, or the taste of the pool out his mouth.
In the dryness of the tent he shared with Grant, Evan dug his fingers into his sleeping bag and felt wet sand gritting beneath his fingernails. And thinking of the water, and the darkness beneath the water, and the sand, he thought of the Edgar Allen Poe poem Uncle Hector had taught them last summer:
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
“Annabel Lee,” Evan whispered, and the wind breaching the tent flap brushed his mouth. He licked his lips and tasted salt.
Grant snored on.
Evan stretched and wriggled out of his sleeping bag. Damp grass licked his bare feet and calves as he stepped away from the tent. The house hulked sixty feet away from him, the front porch lights glowing around the corner. No saws, no hammers—but he could hear Dad and Uncle Hector talking, and the clink of bottles being laid down on the porch’s steps. Evan turned away from the house, toward the darkness at the end of the fence.
Was the water in the pool darker than the night sky? It wasn’t possible; but the water was darker, and the pool wasn’t a pool, it was a cave, and it was deeper than the Earth was wide, darker than the butt-backside of the moon. Evan curled his toes against the concrete surrounding the pool.
If he touched the water; if he dipped into it, let it swirl over his head; if, if, if! The water was cold on the tips of his fingers, cold up to his elbows as he leaned over. He was hot, he was flaming, flaring, roasting, and the pool was dark and lovely and cool. Cool pool, I’m a fool on a stool, she’s a jewel by the sea, my Annabel Lee.
Evan kissed the surface, and his eyelashes brushed drops of water into his eyes. Fingers, hands, elbows, arms, face, now for his shoulders, then his back, his hips, his legs and feet and toes, all in, all within the beautiful, foul water, drifting downward forever, to the end of the world.
No dare, this time. This time, he’d go in on his own, go in to stay, forget the summer that no longer buzzed in his bones. Suck in water and scum, meet Annabel Lee, or whoever, beneath the waves, the water, and give up, give in.
Evan opened his eyes. There was only darkness beneath his face. But he could feel movement down there; the water trembled, and in the darkness, in the deepness, his lips and cheeks knew that the movement had the shape of a hand, a lovely, long-fingered, hand, soft as algae, sweet as . . .
“No,” Evan whispered, and withdrew. His head and shoulders and arms were wet, but the rest of his body stretched out long on the concrete, toes pointing toward the pool-house.
The end of the world lay beneath the water, waiting. Something damp and light hung between his upper lip and nose; Evan reached for it, plucked it away. A light, brittle body, even after hours in the pool. A dead wasp.
Evan fled. The water chuckled after him, touching, touching the sides of the pool.
The pool-house was full of dead wasps. Their bodies crunched under Evan’s feet as he crossed to the windows, gagging on the stink of the bug bombs they’d set off. Grant followed him with a push broom, clearing swaths of concrete of the hard red and black bodies. The windows were jammed; Evan hammered on them to get them to rise, and by the time they did, his head was spinning and his nose was burning. He stuck his head out of the pool-house and sucked in the fresh air.
And refused to look at the black, blank pool.
Grant had swept the dead wasps into a pile, and was flicking them one by one into an open drain on the floor. “Maybe it doesn’t want to drown you. Maybe it wants a . . . consort.”
“Concubine.”
“Boy-toy.” Grant used the toe of
his flip-flop to kick some of the wasps into the drain hole. “What if it’s a merman?”
And then they were quiet. Grant brushed the rest of the pile of wasps into the drain, and Evan brought in another broom to knock the nests down from the corners of the room. The open windows didn’t let in much air, and the room was hot and sticky. They cleaned the walls and the floor, the lockers and shower stall. All the grit, and the spiders, and the remaining wasps, all were swept into the drain and washed down with the garden hose. The drain gurgled and bubbled, then the mess disappeared down its throat.
“Folderol,” Evan said, staring at the drain as the mess of dirt and cobwebs and dead wasps throbbed and chuckled at him.
Grant said automatically, “Balderdash.”
“Malarky.”
Deep foulness, stinking, lovely water, whispering, and what did it whisper for him? The end of the world, the end of Dad, of Uncle Hector and Grant, and summer, and everything; the end of Evan, within the warm water.
Grant turned the hose on him, holding his thumb over the end so it sprayed out hard. It caught Evan on the side of the head. “Wakey, wakey, Evie.”
Evan wrestled the hose away from Grant, and chased him out of the pool house. They horsed around until Dad came from the porch and yelled at them to quit wasting water. Grant sprinted to the faucet and turned it off. He thumped the side of his head with his palm to dislodge the water in his ears, grinning at Evan all the while.
But Evan knew there was plenty of water, a world of it, within that pool. And at the very deepest, sand all the way to the bottom of the universe.
“There’s sand at the bottom,” Evan blurted. “Why would anyone put sand at the bottom of a pool? It can’t drain, it can’t . . .”
“We should go look,” Grant said. He stretched his arms above his head like he was reaching for the sun.
“No. It’s dark down there, anyway. The deeper I went, the darker it got, until I couldn’t even see the surface.”
“We could wrap our flashlights in duct tape.”
“No.” But yes, into the dark again, into the quiet, yes, lovely fingers reaching for my face, reaching for me. Drain hole by the sea, my Annabel Lee, burbling, gurgling forever in the dark. He sucked in and held the air until his lungs burned. He let it out in a whoosh. Expel the pool, purge the darkness, poof! Fill the end of the world pool with a gutful of summer breath.