Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3

by Paul Evan Hughes

  “Then what’s the point of this?” Alina looked up from troubled brows.

  “Killing time.” Reynald cleared his throat. “We’re just killing time.”

  “Lights.”

  West’s whisper echoed out across the liquid expanse, his bootsteps following not far behind. The chamber door snicked shut behind him, adding to the building bounce of sound. He tried to walk quietly, but doubted it really mattered.

  He sat down on the pool’s elevated lip, triple-checking his seals before making any contact. His atmosphere chilled; he could see his breath attempting to fog his lookers.

  They’d started harvesting as much silver as they could filter from the combat zones. Paul hadn’t been taking many trips out of Judith ME. A lot of people had died to bring him his silver in drips and dots at a time. He thought there was an answer in the machine ocean; West thought it was a pointless indulgence.

  Paul’s nose was the only thing breaking the surface of the pool. He didn’t appear to be breathing, but upon closer inspection, West saw the faint ripples of exhalations. More and more often, he’d find the young man here in the silver pool, his patented hawking Hughes Nose the only indication that he was there.

  West knew Paul knew he was there. He needed no words; the tug and release was enough.

  Paul lifted himself to a sitting position, swung forward to a crouch, the silver sliming from his nude form. When he stood, the fluid pool solidified under his feet, a mirror field. Trailing rivulets of the invasive metal dripped down from Paul’s ears, nose, eyes.

  He always scared West after his swims.

  “How’s the meeting?” His eyes were silver, were motion, were mud hazel. The last of the silver evaporated (absorbed) from (into) the tangles of his chest hair, pubic hair.

  West shrugged, popped his seals and removed his helmet after the silver was gone. “Not a lot of faith.”

  “Fuck faith.” Clothes over flesh. “Give me time.”

  “That’s the thing, boy. We don’t have time.”

  “We—”

  “You’ve been in here more and more often. People are starting to talk. They think that shit’s getting into your head. They think—”

  “It’s already in my head. Where do they think it came from in the first—”

  “We’re ready to strike. With Reynald in now, good leads on Zero-Four and the Windhams—”

  “That’s the wrong way to approach this.”

  “That’s the only way we can approach this.”

  “I just need more time.”

  “I know.” A tender, fatherly gesture: a reassuring grip of Paul’s shoulder. “But—”

  “Tell them I’ll be out soon. Rest up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Paul grinned. “Don’t call me that, old man.”

  Alina shifted in the sling from right to left, from sleep to wake. Sandwiching her, the West twins inhaled in unison, a slow, tentative feeler into consciousness quickly overruled by collapse back into dream.

  She didn’t know why the girls were so drawn to her.

  Their extraction had been unpleasant. The Mara had been deep within a fleet of shredded and disabled Judas vessels, a horde of Enemy projections flashing in and out and through them. Jade had been a simple grab from the exterior; Phire had had to be pried from the can with Arik Mandela’s deft touch.

  Paul hadn’t helped on that run. He was taking a silver bath again.

  Alina wondered if he

  and stopped.

  She guessed they liked her because she was the only really approachable human female operating in the inner circle of Judith ME. Jud certainly wasn’t nice to kids, and that’s what they were, a decade younger than her twenty-five standards, a year younger than their respective enemy line deaths, Jade uploaded into Program Seven, Phire taking her own life just before the first Jag war. They couldn’t have known, so she never told them.

  They were both so skinny. Pale. Children of the space between stars and times.

  Alina was losing her Ft. Myers sunwindburn.

  Each night, they’d cuddle with her in Sam’s command chamber, away from the cold halls of the ME, the sterile rooms and flayed god, the birthing fields, the libraries upon libraries of catalogued nevers.

  They’d never known West. Although he tried at first to communicate with them, he was nothing more than an alternate to the father they’d left behind with their silver mother in a swarmed When. He eventually gave up; he’d never known their West, their Patra. His yesterdays were Abigail and the farm and the war, a different war, silver skies and children.

  They inhaled as one, exhaled as one. Al had never before seen a twin bond so tangible, such a blessing. Such a curse? She could tell them of histories of loss, of ruin.

  It was better that she just hold them both in the sleeping egg until morning came, bringing with it new insertions, new faces.

  They were safer in her warmth, in what little comfort and solace she could provide, knowing what they’d been extracted to do, knowing what tomorrows would bring to shatter that gentle breath of dream.

  Alina fell back into sleep.

  If the Self is defined in its interactions and oppositions to and through external stimuli, and those stimuli are grouped in contextual accordance to the shifting nature of existence, we can define the Self as the opposition to environmental stasis.

  How can we delineate and nominate that particular stasis? What collection of sensations and memory compose a being? How do we define Home? Is it the place where one exhales and doesn’t fear for the next breath? Is it indeed easier when nowhere and no one feels like home? Is home a place, a collection of interactions, a veil of memory constructed solely within?

  To Maire, the concepts of home and pain were one. When something such as the concept of home, something so traditionally regarded with quiet desire, respect, even reverence becomes intrinsically linked with a deep, inherent negativity, things happen. As we now know, things happened to Maire.

  It wasn’t that her planet was a bad home, but in the vast scheme of intergalactic destiny and solar-systemic politics, bad things happened there.

  Sometimes a species outgrows its collection of rocks.

  Would she have defined home as I did, as a loose collection of images and sensations, centered on those who inhabited that same space? In the sterile cool of the ME, I tried not to think about home. Tried. Hard. Didn’t work.

  Home was unappreciated farmers, those sixty- and seventy-year olds still working eighteen-hour days, permanent sun across noses and cheeks, burst vessels beneath the skin, white whiskers poking through until the weekly shave before going into town: a new fencer, ten rolls of sisal twine, doses of Today and Tomorrow, defined not as divisors of time, but by the product names of dry cow and fresh cow treatments, slow visits by neighbors, sharing forecasts and anecdotes, busting through frozen bolts, tearing flesh on rust, the scent of sweat and hay and milk spoiling from where it spilled on ancient jeans ten hours before, then exposed those ten hours to sunlight, to humidity, to manual labor. Grease guns and kittens, hay hooks and goldenrod and vetch.

  Home was the desolation of a post-industrial world, abandoned paper mills, a population displaced from suburban hold by the necessity of the commute in too-big pickup trucks, status-symbol sports utility vehicles, the embarrassment of the family mini-van, the occasional Freudian commentary that was the convertible, men who’d drive to service jobs, mill work in other towns, re-education as a mid-life crisis when plants closed, environmental regulations tightened, their wives taking jobs, nurses and day care providers, pathetic local politics of heightened local importance.

  Home was hick bars and dirt tracks, girls knocked up before high school graduation, sexual assaults in the nearby barracks, Canadian dance clubs, the polarization and fragmentation that the adolescent clique system embedded: some spoke with accents, some struggled to excel in sports, some wore only black, fancied themselves gangs, just white kids with access to drugs and knives. Four had s
tabbed a middle-school friend half a hundred times; I’d sat at the other end of their lunch table: the outcasts, and later, some would embrace the mythos of bisexuality, homosexuality, painted nails and dabbling in their own sex, as if it were the popular thing to do, anything to distance themselves from tradition: jocks and cheerleaders, band geeks, farmer’s kids, racecar drivers and those who chewed tobacco in the parking lot, spitting brown into the previous weekend’s collection of floormat beer cans, the cheapest yellow shit marketed widely, and there were the sneakers, by brand they judged worth. I wore Voits.

  Home was bonfires in the woods, cool kids fucking in Daddy’s sedan; they never escaped those early designations, and as such became a part of home: unchanging, stagnant, dead already, those who never wished to escape, those who never tried.

  Maire’s home? Interwoven with that particular brand of revision that torture induces in the tortured, it came to me in razor-edged shards, horrible images, many without a suitable vocabulary with which to describe them.

  Maire’s home? Just a rock, far out from One, far enough so that the first machine wars had barely scratched its surface, but close enough to experience the desolation of the century-long Silence during which the victors re-engineered the inner worlds to suit their desires, abandoning the outer worlds to their own devices: the horrors of famine, drought, pollution, a cultural and political isolation so devastating that planets burned out there, their own squabbles raging into limited conquests, subjugated populations put to the sword, the light, the dinner table. Taboo became norm in that vast starvation, that vast cesspool of decaying genes, mutation and stench, moons spun out of orbit in desperate gambits to win wars the underlying flashpoints of which no one any longer remembered.

  Hunger has a special memory of its own.

  Home to her was the taste of livers. Her own baby sister, dead just hours, put to the carving knife. What precious little flesh left hanging from the emaciated form roasting over one of the encampment fires, the smell and sting of bubbling fat giving voice to her empty stomach, rumbles inaudible under the night sky of combat. When the fuels ran out, even that fell to uneasy silence.

  Fuels and missiles, bullets, poisons: none were renewable there, the planet just a mining outpost, the only ore of value shiny and gray. Craftsmen had worked it into jewelry once.

  Tender and juiced, an arm pulls from torso, skin splitting and black. Chewing and swallowing: a denial of that child she’d held when her mother had died, attempted to nurse from pre-adolescent breast buds. The animal farms had been raided long before.

  Those base desires in times of hunger and blood become base realities. She’d been a viable replacement fuck for her father and brothers after her mother’s death. She’d killed them each eventually, wondering what of her was left on them, in them, of the four babies she’d given them, the last a screaming mistake that had entered the world just long enough to exit in blessed suffocation. She’d wrapped its umbilicus around its neck and killed it to stop the noise. She tossed the lump of flesh to the eager onlookers, even helped them coax the afterbirth from her; some lapped blood from her lips and thighs.

  After she’d first bled at age ten, she’d never stopped.

  Home? For Maire, it was pain.

  They knew he’d see them. It didn’t matter which he; he did. They all did.

  The bell on the door rang from behind to signal their entrance. The patrons of the Cafe Bellona went about their business of coffeehouse intellectual discourse. There were so many of them. All blended and faded, became distinct, swam back into the moments. People overlapped.

  Berg was the first to release the necksnap of his hardsuit. Leif and Roman followed his example, followed him to an empty table at first, then populated by two, three, seven for an instant. They sat and ghosts flickered. They became the sole customers of that table.

  “We’re locked in. ME tether’s steady.”

  Roman was the first by a blink to notice his new apparel: white lab coat, thick glasses. Clipboard on the table before him. Is this really how they looked to him?

  “It’s amazing.” Leif, the youngest by a decade, let the eagerness and wonder of his age leak through.

  “Not amazing.” Berg grumbled the words out. “Just a merge. Let’s get to work.”

  Berg, Leif and Roman were the three best quantum-X physicists Judith had left. They’d been promoted and pressed into service after Benton’s death. They’d been kept a secret from the author because of the what and how of their inquiry.

  The answer was, of course, Seattle.

  “It’s true.” Leif poured over data presented to him on the papers bound by his clipboard. “It’s right here, right now, all of it, converging.”

  Rumble from the sky; Paul, Benton and West ran past the front entrance of the coffee shop. The phase flak needled from the sky. They were just blocks from Helen Windham’s small apartment that she shared with her son and his teddy bear.

  “Let’s get some samples.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.

  “Sorry, didn’t notice you come in. What can I—”

  Leif grabbed her forearm and stabbed it through with a metallish instrument he’d withdrawn from his lab coat. She gasped and exhaled, built up to a scream and

  “Got it. Checking for—”

  “Let’s get some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.

  “Sorry, didn’t notice you boys come in. What can I get for you?”

  “Three coffees, please.” Berg’s eyes met hers. She was warm; her smile caused a bullet-hole dimple. “Worked here long?”

  “About a year. Have I seen you here before?”

  “I don’t think so. Are you a student near here?”

  “Yeah. Art major at Cornish, just down—”

  “Sample confirms. Let’s get some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air, a signal to the proprietress. She smiled and walked to their table.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see you come in. What can I—”

  “Know any authors?”

  Her smile dropped. “Excuse me?” Exquisitely sculpted eyebrows furrowed.

  Leif looked over the people in the shop. An older version of the proprietress came out from the back room with a small package wrapped in gift paper. The man sitting at the counter unwrapped it: Marlboro 100s, now banned decades.

  “Don’t look around, boy.” Berg shook Leif from his voyeurism. “Bad for business.”

  “Let’s order some coffee.” Roman’s hand went into the air. A spectrum of proprietresses smiled and walked to the table, smiled and wiped the counter, frowned and ignored him, walked toward him, walked toward him and tripped, tripped and laughed, tripped and died, walked out the door, started screaming, aging, dying right there, then and then, a spectrum of everyones.

  “Want some coffee?” The young blonde with the dimple put pencil to her pad and anticipated.

  Paul saw them. He realized that Judith would assemble a crew of quantum-X kids to figure out that great hole in his thought.

  He didn’t know why the Cafe Bellona had forced itself into everything of substance he’d ever written. Now that Judith had brought him in to repair the forevers he’d broken, he’d had to sit down and think it over, which is what he was doing right there, a cup of black coffee on the table, an unread newspaper and two packs of smokes in need of an ashtray.

  He knew Berg, Leif and Roman from the hidden chapters of his existences. They were the team who’d eventually unraveled the silverthought lattice. Far in the future, they’d been able to crack the deadlocked omni-DNA code residue left behind in a ship named Gary after the second War of the Jaguar. A beautiful young brown man named Michael Balfour had based his forevership design on the Berg/Leif/Roman Lattice.

  Paul watched them, all of them, across that dive. At the counter, older versions of himself and the coffee shop owner held hands. A mid-twenties future-ve
rsion of the waitress served BLR coffee. Joseph Windham got down on one knee to propose to his Helen. Maggie Flynn and Simon Hayes talked shop over Demian and Deus ex Machina. Judith and god talked shit over Formica. There were others, so many others, but they were hidden to him, just blurs, all a spectrum of silver. He averted his eyes from the brilliance of that overlap.

  The door jangled and he saw the enemy, in present form, a scruffy drummer with corduroy pants, Kente cloth sewn up the seams. Paul swallowed hard, scrambled for a smoke. The enemy kissed the young waitress. Paul smoked, looked out the door into the rain, into the sunset over the still water, over the lances of phase flak and the sight of himself and West and Benton running.

  It was that moment, that moment, that moment forever, all moments in one, all thoughts pressed together into a tangible damnation. He reached into his pocket and didn’t find a marble. He did find some cash, which he placed on the table. He found a handful of silver coins, which he placed on the table. He found a wooden puzzle piece in the shape of Michigan. He found a pin: World’s Best Wife! He found absolutely nothing at all.

  He had had enough of the Bellona Merge. He waved half-heartedly to BLR. They returned the gesture with guilt. They knew he hated being watched.

  As he opened the door, she called to him from behind the counter: young again, standing alone, wiping dry a coffee cup. He saw paint stains on her hands, knew that on one finger he’d find a scar from when they’d removed a tumor from her bone, knew her scent from across the cafe, mixed with rain and smoke and blood, that spectrum, that spectrum, and for an instant, he remembered the way she tasted. Then it was gone.

  “Come again!” Her smile widened to be polite, fell from her face when she realized who he—

  Paul shut the door behind him and

  threw the door open to Jud’s chamber.

  “Stay out of my fucking head.”

  The twins were there, Alina, the bear: a symmetrical arrangement: Alina flanked by the girls, the bear on her lap. Jud Indian-legged on her chaise; her words ended upon his entry.