by Paul Hughes
He ratcheted his wingtips, his nacelles forward, struggling against the gravity and drag of his descent.
And they collided.
West flickered to life and snapped to grid, a stumbling, confused landing. He was even more confused by the fact that Reynald and Hank were standing next to him, before a lifeboat’s glass, and Alina, and—
“Jud?”
Reynald’s hand went to West’s shoulder. His head shook an uncertain negative. His eyes directed a heartbroken look to the glass, and West followed just in time to see
Maire smashed through Paul’s central hub, a brilliant spray of fragmented armor and hemorrhaging silver racing after her exit wound. The vast planetship dived, Maire and Enemy vessels caught in its wake. As the imprisoned singularity at his center went critical, Maire and her horde tore at the air, attempting to escape the pull of his horizon. One by ten by thousands, the scrabbling silver forms collapsed into Paul, his edges red, melting away, great chapters of him rending away and bursting from existence.
He fell, the expanse of wailing souls spiraling after him.
The lifeboat was far enough away to pull stubbornly from the collapse, but the vessel veered a spinning retreat, its contents shifting savagely.
“We need a lock on his pattern,” Reynald barked.
“I’m on it.” Jud stood before the glass, her voice a whisper.
Alina touched the display, shaking. “Please, Paul. Don’t—”
All of Puget Sound was erased from existence as Paul impacted, the field of vision instantly blinded, a stark assault of silver light boiling across the planet’s surface. The cataclysmic deluge of liquid metal erupted from his savaged superstructure, dusting the sky, then drifting lazily down to blanket the world with argent. The Enemy forces not caught in his wake, neatly clipped from Maire’s mind essence, stippled the new surface in craters of shattered phase. All across the barren scar, new oceans of silver coalesced.
Paul’s chassis shuddered, grappled with its new foundation. Then stillness.
Alina screamed. She sobbed, throwing herself against the display until her tiny hands wilted. West heard flesh split, fingers crack. She kept beating against the glass, kept beating, kept screaming, even as he pulled her away, the stubs of fingers smearing that image with bloody letters; hers was a language written in despair.
West held her tightly, but she still struggled, her crumpled hands pressing against him only jarring loose more of that loss; she seeped through his shirt, and he felt warm copper run down through the hair on his chest, pause to circumvent his navel. She eventually relented, slumped into him, allowed herself to bury her eyes under his jawbone, anything to force away the screen, to erase that image.
West watched it all, even as he held Alina so she couldn’t.
Inhale: no lung, no mouth, but why the sensation of drowning, of choking, the scent of burning flesh when there was no nose, no body?
All around him, silver. Waves still came back to slap at his shallow corpse, near-corpse. It burned; it froze.
He struggled to sit up and remembered that things were no longer attached to him in the way he remembered. His starboard nacelle lazily rose, slammed back into the silver ocean, stirring the metal again, angering what sensors he had left operational.
The nacelle crawled through half-crystallized mercury slurry until it met his main chassis. He was disturbed but not surprised to find that his pelvic fin had been shattered on the impact, and his caudal fin was twisted into an array of broken metallish.
s
paul hughes((?))
come here ((?))
cover my feet ((?))
rupture rend rive split cleave
Maire had pierced through his chest, heavy silver armor cracking and splintering before it. Reflex forced his head back; agony kept it there as spasms wracked his entire form. The hole in his hub was slick with his blood, mechanicals, the shimmer of venting containment chamber exhaust. He finally settled in the shallow silver, nacelles digging into the flooding ground.
Too tired to move his port nacelle. Too broken.
Starboard nacelle feels around the hole. The wingtip snaps off, falls to his belly, slides into the silver.
Focus, but
It’s flooding, that alien, that lifeblood. Choking, gasping. Somewhere, a line of code reminds him that there’s a human buried inside that ruined sculpture of metal.
i’m sorry
i’m
His nacelle falls back into the ocean, the wingblades now useless.
i’m
Paul finds her in the exile city. He finds her sitting in the street, a young woman again, covering her face with clawless hands. A few tears have spilled between her fingers. She snuffles a few more to the back of her throat.
He sits down next to her.
The Cafe Bellona is a ruin, the detritus of the fire still smoldering. He can see bones under blackened beams. Maybe the bones are broken coffee cups. Tarnished metal stems poke up, twisted stools crushed under the collapsed roof. There is no wind. The city is silent except for popping knots and the slow burning deep down.
He thinks of cigarettes and inhales the smoke from one, passes it to Maire. She takes it. Her arms rest on her knees. Her body stretches toward the Bellona waste as her hair flops down, obscuring her face from him. Her eyes are blue now, and he looks away.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” Her brow works over the question, her face torn between thin probabilities of rage and despair. She shakes with it, a fading question, a veiled surrender.
“Tu crois être le doute et tu n’es que raison. Tu es le grand soleil qui me monte à la tête quand je suis sûr de moi,” he says.
“Comme on oublie,” she says.
“Je t’aime contre tout ce qui n’est qu’illusion.”
“I know.” She exhales smoke. She extends her hand. She offers him the three silver marbles rolling the folds of her palm.
He closes her fingers around them.
We are machines of a horrible beauty, and life is a collection of moments. Fundamental redefinitions of trust. The suffocating intersections of coincidence. Rejection mechanisms. We are forgotten as easily as the quiet desperations of our madness.
And it’s okay.
In the lifeboat’s command chamber, Reynald swiveled the targeting laser of the lesioning probe to a new position over Paul’s skull. They’d successfully downloaded his pattern from the dissolving devastation of his superstructure, but the final tendrils of silver had entrenched themselves in his mind, lacing, consuming.
“I—I can’t.” Reynald stepped away, kneading his temple. The code burns were gone.
“Please,” Alina sobbed. “Help him.”
“There’s too much of it. I can’t separate the silver from his brain without damaging him.”
West turned from the display. “There’s no sign of Maire. And the Enemy... They aren’t moving.”
“That’s good. Right?” Hank searched their faces.
“She’s not gone.” Jud said from the corner into which she’d hidden herself. Her eyes no longer glowed. “She’s in there.” She motioned at Paul, then tapped her head. “They’re together, somewhere in there.”
Alina held her arms tightly, shook her head.
“Better believe it, baby.” Jud stood and walked to the motionless author. “They’ve merged.”
“He wouldn’t—”
“It’s what he always fucking wanted.” Jud said through gritted teeth. “Can’t you see that?”
“But—He hated her.”
“And he loved you?” One side of Jud’s mouth upturned. “Life isn’t that simple, kid.”
Reynald cleared his throat. “If the silver spreads through his mind again—”
“That’s not gonna happen.” Jud swung the targeting laser into place above Paul’s forehead, the barrel’s glow intensifying.
A veil of surrender obscured the room.
“Do it, then,” West choked out, his growl stumbling over resigna
tion. “If we’re going to ruin this, let’s ruin it forever.”
Reynald’s hand joined Jud’s on the barrel. “It’s been an honor.”
Hank crumpled his hat in his callused hands, spit tobacco to the floor. “Yeah, a real fuckin’ hoot.”
Alina bent to the author, kissed his cheek. Took his hand. She tried to smile, her freckles shifting to new constellations.
Jud met each gaze. Histories and universes collapsed behind her eyes.
“Okay.” She grinned through tears. “Let’s go home.”
She pulled the trigger.
Flatline.
They walked, the streets shifting beneath their feet, sometimes cobble, sometimes pavement, sometimes the wooden planks of the pier. The buildings were different and all the same. People came and went around them, between them, through them. Sometimes she held his hand.
They took a left.
“You know where we’re going?”
He laughed. “Does it matter?”
She shrugged.
They stopped in front of a coffee house.
A heavy wooden door to a nameless, dark place. He held the door for her.
He didn’t recognize anyone. There were two stools empty at the counter. Ashtrays. The server was busy placing steaming cups in front of other customers, her hands balancing coins and receipts. They sat.
“What would you recommend?” She couldn’t read the menu.
“What do you like?”
“I’ve never had coffee.”
He felt an emotion for her, and it wasn’t fear.
“I’ll order,” he said, bringing the server over with a motion. “Hi, I’ll just have coffee, black, and she’ll—” He turned to Maire.
And she was gone.
Paul slowly turned back to the counter, struggling against the sudden stillness of the place. Took a Marlboro from the hardpack in his pocket, lit it. Inhaled, and the smoke tore at his eyes.
“Will that be all, sir? Just the coffee?” The server’s pencil hesitated over an order book she really didn’t need. There was a flicker of recognition that could not be. There was a system of desire that was fundamentally flawed.
And Paul felt decades older, the empty stool next to him only deepening that sensation of age and loss. He surveyed the shop, the people sitting together, engaged in important conversations that meant nothing, sipping and slurping and spilling, laughing, falling in and out of love. The stool remained empty.
Something’s wrong.
The server faded, the customers, the tang of bitter coffee and the jostle of cell phones, the tables and chairs, the street outside. He inhaled smoke. No more neon or important books, no more pastries or expensive soups, no more undercurrent of conversation. He was at the end of the pier. He was looking at the lightning over the gulf. His pockets were empty, the marble gone, the jigsaw Michigan. His wrist was bare, the silver bracelet lost. His hair danced in the wind and sand eroded the planes of his face. He couldn’t remember. He was lost. He exhaled, closed his eyes to the midnight winds. He could still see the lightning out in the gulf, still feel her touch.
He opens his eyes and finds himself at his kitchen table, the cat stalking a fly around the linoleum. The coffeemaker sputters its completion. He stands on grating knee. Stacks of newspapers. Boxes of memory. Photographs hidden away upstairs. An empty inbox. And he can’t remember what made him. Can’t remember the faces of the lost, the tastes of the dead. Can’t remember their songs or the textures of them, the warmth of skin or the secrets between them. Forever poised in the moment before a first kiss, the phantom scents of cheap beer and cigarettes and something rich and hidden, something fading from him no matter how he claws to hold it, something rending and beautiful hiding behind blue eyes.
He reaches into his chest and feels nothing at all. He’s hidden the artifacts, or someone’s stolen them. There are pictures on his walls of people he doesn’t know.
He has coffee. Another cigarette.
January cuts a deeper distance.
He stands at the window and watches the snow fill in the morning’s tracks. He loses something in that.
Love is the farthest unsteady light.
He knows they’ll all go eventually, leaving behind an unfinished equation, an unwritten song, a fragile calculus in which nothing is integral. Forevers are redefined in departures. He doesn’t have to do anything at all to deserve nothing. He can travel around the world to end up where he began. He can search a lifetime to find the one who will ruin him. He can fall to the floor, stumbling through bent physics, hands searching for the ineffable past, sobbing for the war dead, the faces he can’t remember, the whispers, the gasps: Paul Hughes, come here? Paul Hughes, I love you.
Because suddenly he’s looking back and a week is gone, a month or a year, five, a decade, a lifetime, and it feels like a lifetime, a decade, five, a year or a month, a week, a day, hours, minutes, she’s there, seconds, she’s there and they’re together, instants, she’s there, moments, there, now, she’s there, now, there forever, there, walking together down thin paths into broken futures and todays, and they contain multitudes, lifetimes of stillness hovering in the air between them.
And they’re running down those ancient streets, hands held, eyes open, laughing and whispering and knowing.
Staring, but not seeing.
Thinking of the thought [itself].
Breathing, but not living.
In the struggling light, the snow looks silver.
He inhales.
I don’t know who I am anymore.
He exhales.
Bracketing those dead to us, delineating the forms and histories of our desires, in a breath, in tears, in the pattern two opposing collections of striation compose in the catalytic reaction of palm to palm, all physics are bent, and all probabilities, all convenient presuppositions and extrapolations of futures not yet lived are erased: all we have is now, this moment, this beautiful, fragile moment, and
Ω
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Evan Hughes is the seven-time Independent Publisher Book Award-winning writer and editor of Silverthought Press. His work includes the novels Enemy, An End, and Broken: A Plague Journal and the short fiction collection Certain Devastations. He lives in Evans Mills, NY with his wife and sons.
