by Neil Clarke
The deeper we went, the colder and damper it became, and I began to shiver in my shirt. The walls were slick with algae and fungus, and the halls we passed through at the end were so narrow that we could only shove ourselves forward single-file, sideways.
Then finally the pathway opened onto a round reservoir; the walls were brick, the roof was arched, and after the tallow-lamp-lit darkness of the halls, harsh sunlight fell in through a row of narrow embrasures on one side. A catwalk the width of a man ran along the circumference of the reservoir, and at regular intervals in the walls were set brick-lined niches where rations, weapons, blankets, clothing, filter screens, buckets, poles, brooms, and other equipment waited to be called into service.
The waterwatcher received us in front of the reservoir’s opposite exit. His niche was furnished with a large sack laid flat stuffed with sand and rags, a couple of blankets, and a mule-grease lamp smoldering in its glass cylinder. Overhead was a leather cord that disappeared into a hole in the wall.
“The alarm pull,” the watcher explained, brusque, and I nodded.
As he gathered up his personal belongings, he threw suspicious glances at me as if I might attack him from behind and cut off his head without a sound, as we did on our missions. Then he climbed back up into the stronghold with both of my escorts. Only now did I notice the bars of sturdy bone which they pulled closed behind them. I was alone.
Sunlight reflections painted swarming snakes on the walls. Unable to think clearly, I watched them until they faded. Only then did I fill the oil lamp out of a leather bucket and set about taking a closer look at my new home.
The second exit I’d noticed earlier was not barred. The hall behind it was as narrow as the one we’d come through, but it was dry. After some minutes spent stumbling over stony ground, I stood in a stairwell leading up. At its end, I stood at a second set of bars separating me from a long cavern where a second waterwatcher wrapped in a blanket lay on his rag sack and snored. Over the watcher’s camp was fixed an alarm pull just like the one below in my niche. The light of the Dancing Stones shone in through the entrance and drenched the view in a sickly sheen. The scene was familiar to me; I’d already been here once before, and I asked myself how the watcher could sleep so peacefully. It was no wonder it was so easy for us to steal from them, when you could simply murder them in their sleep. I would’ve liked to have woken the man and reproached him for his carelessness. Instead I climbed down again, to sleep a little myself.
And then I had nothing else to do but make my rounds regularly, scrape algae from the stones, sustain myself on dried fruit, meat, and fresh water, and throw my waste out through the light embrasures. Occasionally someone came to supplement my supplies, and several times during the day I made a pilgrimage to the upper bars. But none of the watchers on duty ever spoke with me. They all stared past me, and many spat on the floor contemptuously when I appeared. As time passed, I realized that they weren’t guarding their water so much as guarding me.
When Pierre finally came, I was already at the point where I was talking to myself.
“Tuela,” he said simply as he appeared at the lower bars. I recognized the deep rumble of his voice more with my gut than with my ears, and a tingling shot through my limbs that couldn’t be explained by just surprise.
He unlocked the bars and stepped in, bringing cheese and fresh soft bread and a pouch of hot tea that did my throat good, sore as it was from constant coughing.
“You’re too thin,” he said as he sat next to me on the rim of the reservoir and watched me eat.
“I was always this thin,” I replied, chewing.
“No, you weren’t. You’ve got to get out of here. Very soon.”
Pierre took my hand and looked at me out of great sad eyes.
“Should you be here with me at all?” I asked.
After all, I was someone put here to atone for the murder of several watchers. I coughed drily.
Pierre grinned. “I cheated a little.” Then he shook his head. “You really don’t look good.”
“Thanks,” I said. I wanted it to sound coquettish and carefree but I didn’t manage. It came out as a true thank you, one that acknowledged how much he worried about me.
“Can you swim?” I asked and wondered at myself for not having had the idea before. At home in the Heights I’d often swum in the drop-seas.
Pierre shook his head. “What’s swimming?”
“Letting yourself be held up by water. Moving through water.”
“Yourself? All of you?”
I nodded. “Come, I’ll show you!”
In a quick motion, I stripped off the fur vest and my unlaundered, greasy shirt, and stepped up to the rim of the reservoir. The water we had at home originated on this world, maybe even from this reservoir. But at home the water was bright and transparent. You could see all the way through and laugh over the strangely wobbling boulders on the other side. Here below, the water was opaque and black and you didn’t know how deep it was. Or what was under there. I hesitated. But then Pierre stood next to me, his penis erect, aroused and full of anticipation. And we let ourselves slip together into the icy water and I showed him how it held us up. At first he was a little fearful, holding onto the edge, but soon he swam with powerful spluttering strokes and savored the gliding motion. After that, we lay wrapped in my blanket and made love while golden snakes danced over the walls and Pierre’s black shoulders gleamed in the light that reflected off of the water.
And again I described for him our Dancing Stones: the sky’s depths, the blue of eggs, and how the childcatchers collect the youths as soon as they leave their nests and threaten to fall over the Stones’ edges.
“Don’t the parents pay proper attention to them?” he murmured, sleepy.
I didn’t have an answer for that, because that question had never occurred to me. What would happen if you left the youths to the birds? What would they become? I shook my head.
“Who would they learn to speak from? How would they leave their Stones without flightsuits? When the Dancing Stones were still all one piece, it might have been possible. But now . . . ”
I described how we grow up with our siblings. How we play. How we learn to fly. But I didn’t describe how we die to him. The thought frightened me. For the first time in my life it was actually important to me that I live. Because I wanted to be together with Pierre, because I wanted something we could call “our life.” Pierre didn’t tell me what would happen if someone caught us. He’d gone to sleep.
And they did catch us. There were eight of them, and they appeared, heads glistening, gasping for air, in the middle of the reservoir. There must have been a hidden inlet below, perhaps a brick channel or a crack in the stone. The water had to come from somewhere, after all. They swam better than Pierre; they were practiced. Their arms cut with quiet liquid noise through the water and pulled their heavy bodies up onto the catwalk where they smacked their shivering bellies and backs to warm themselves. They laughed until someone ordered them tightly to lower their voices. I knew the voice.
It belonged to Utjok, who was the last to get out of the water, slender, and shivering just as much as the thickset men ey had come with. Ey was, as always, the leader.
I wanted to jump up, wanted to hurl myself at em. But Pierre held me tight, shaking his head silently. We were only two. Utjok pulled a sack out of the water by a long rope one of the men had bound about his hips, and passed out pickaxes and knives to eir new squadron. I’d no doubt ey would kill Pierre if ey discovered him, just as we’d killed without hesitation on our missions. And suddenly I was uncertain ey wouldn’t kill me, too, when ey realized we no longer stood on the same side.
Pierre and I pulled ourselves further back into the shadows of my niche silently and waited. They took the path down through the inner bars, tearing them right off their hinges with the help of a pickaxe and a rope.
As soon as the last man had disappeared, I reached up and tore at the alarm pull. The leather cord was r
otted through; its end came loose in my hand.
Pierre didn’t even take the time to throw on a shirt.
“I’ll go around outside. Rock’s there! He can give the alarm.”
I held tight to his arm. “They belong to the lost caravan. I know it—we saw them on our approach.”
Pierre nodded. “I know, let me go!”
“Utjok was leader of my squadron. Somehow, under the surface, they must have . . . ”
“I know! There’s no time for this now.”
Pierre pulled away without kissing me.
“And me?” I called after him. “What if more of them come? If they discover me?”
Pierre paused. “Come with me,” he said and we went together, shoving ourselves as fast as possible through the narrow passage, naked.
The upper bars were locked. Rock lay not even an arm’s length from us. The alarm pull was sliced through, just like his throat. His wrinkled face lay in an already congealing pool of blood. He must have been dead for hours. In his fist, Pierre found the key.
“Why didn’t they just come in through here?”
“Eight of them? We would’ve seen them from the wall. The Heights stand in the sky.” Pierre pointed to the full bags and saddles standing ready in the cave. “Early tomorrow morning we three would have been gone. On our way north,” he said sadly.
So that was what he’d meant when he’d said I had to get out. He and Rock had had a plan.
Despite the fear taking hold of me, I rejoiced inside. For the first time in countless days, I breathed the fresh metallic-tasting air of the surface; for the first time in days I felt the wind on my skin. We ran on, naked and barefoot, through the acidic sand. By the time we reached the narrow outer steps, our soles were bleeding, but there was no time left to worry about that. I struggled upwards against the gravity, Pierre hauling me after him and cursing because we were so slow. When I realized he’d signed his own death warrant by taking me up along with him it was already too late.
I knew the wallwatcher awaiting us above. He’d spat in a pouch of dried meat before handing it through the bars to me with a smile. And I’d spat back, hitting him on the chin. He spotted me before he saw Pierre. And while they overpowered us on this side of the stronghold, the strangers invaded from inside and killed more than fifty sleeping people before they were stopped.
Again they blamed me. No matter how Pierre and I stated our case, I’d killed Elder Rock, I’d let the strangers in. As evidence, it sufficed that their leader was a white gangling freak like me. Naturally I’d been in contact with em the entire time and planned everything out long beforehand.
Utjok, eir new squadron, and I were all sentenced to a dishonorable death. We would be pitched from the stronghold wall. The sand would quickly dispose of our remains. The tribe could afford it; there were more than enough other dead to consume. But there was worse in store for Pierre. He would be sent into the desert on foot with enough water to last only a few days. His chances of survival were far slimmer than mine.
When the moment came I begged to be allowed to wear my old helmet. Utjok had lost eirs in the vast labyrinth under the surface, and someone had removed the blinded visor from mine. But it was better than nothing.
I felt no fear as I stood on the battlements naked and chained next to Utjok and eir people. The survivors from Pierre’s tribe stood close behind us in their full number, robes fluttering. I would die, and I didn’t mind. In those last moments of my life I felt only gratitude at being allowed to see the soft shine of the Dancing Stones one more time with my own eyes, and the longing to finally return suffused me.
There was no ceremony, no pronouncement of the sentence. A row of people stepped forward, spiked staves held tight in their hands. With astonishment I recognized Jen among the executioners. In a moment of rage I considered grabbing her stave and dragging her with me into the depths. But it was unlikely that would work. The wall was too high; Jen’s center of gravity was far too low.
I concentrated. More important than revenge was somehow managing to control my fall. Even without a suit and the chance to lie as spread-eagle as possible on the wind. Jen shoved first Utjok and then me down with one hard, focused strike apiece.
And we flew, flew too fast; I saw the strange men and my former squadron leader tumble down before and beside me, rebound off of stones, saw as they dashed against the ground far out, naked like the child whose ribcage I’d squashed more than a lifetime ago. The same thing would happen to us now.
I didn’t lose consciousness, although the breakneck fall tore the breath from my lips, although my instincts balked against experiencing my death while conscious. Despite everything, I stayed with myself as my backbone broke, as my organs burst, as my lungs collapsed. Around me eight bodies struck the ground with dull finality. Utjok didn’t manage it. Eir skull was smashed to pieces.
Do we remember the first moments after our birth? They fade so quickly and there are no words for them, because we experience entirely new feelings that we have to learn first. None of us still remember the day of our birth.
But a piece of Tuela remembers, a piece that we retain until it is time to reach a decision whose necessity we begin to divine. We remember.
At first there was a distant many-voiced whisper. Then eyes opened and looked into a familiar face. The name that belonged to it wanted to be spoken. But there was no throat any longer, no vocal cords, and the tongue had retracted, had begun to turn into a tract deep in the throat which felt an unprecedented sensual itch at the sight of this face. Greedily the bird-mouth gaped open to receive its lover, and a demanding gurgle rose from it.
But he did not understand us and shrank back, letting Tuela’s helmet fall into the sand, and we slid from his lap into the biting sand and screamed in pain.
Quickly, Pierre picked us back up, shoved a scarf under us that would protect us for a while, and dripped water in our mouth. A hot wind stroked over the feathers already shoving through the skin of our cheeks. The separation took place quickly. Our new feet kicked out of the old neck, wings unfolded themselves, and last of all, the spine binding us to the old body dissolved with a quiet, definitive pain.
In that moment Tuela began to fade and she had to hold herself together with effort. She holds on now, still, and we help her by encapsulating her life in this story. We begin to feel the urgency she felt. We want her plan to work.
Pierre picked up our new body carefully, wrapping it loosely in his scarf, and we slept as he carried us away from the stronghold deeper into the desert. He went to his own death, but that did not bother us. We just needed a little peace. We slept lulled by the soft swing of his steps, slept until agonizing thirst woke us and he gave us water. We beat our wings, fluttered up, and turned our first reeling rounds on the steady wind of the Yellow World.
Seated on a stone, Pierre watched us, full of astonishment. And as we landed in his lap, a little clumsy and awkward yet, he let us quiet the other longing, too, let us drink our fill from him as birds do. He shook as he gave us semen and, after, we watched him cry many salty tears that mixed, bubbling, with the sand.
When he had cried himself out, the Dancing Stones stood slanting over the horizon, and his mouth moved. He spoke, but we no longer had ears that could hear him. We heard now only our own distant whisper deep in our skull, but we heard no wind, no hiss of sand. Not his booming voice that had moved Tuela to laughter. The world was silent and Pierre’s lip movements struck us as ridiculous and lewd and we tried to laugh. Pierre stopped talking, staring at us.
What must he have seen? Tuela’s head without the body he had loved sat before him on bird feet and blinked at him. The hair had fallen out of that head. Instead it grew light-colored feathers. She wanted to say that he shouldn’t speak, that there were more important things now, but his expression told her she uttered only sounds, meaningless guttural bird sounds, wet and ugly, that made them both sad.
Tuela felt it would be a relief to give up the past; the temptatio
n was great, the promise of the eternal moment enticing. She could have turned around and flown away, back home. Forever. She was tired, as dying is hard work against which one cannot shield oneself. But although we suffered growth pains, the pain of rejection, and the pain of loss, we were not really dismayed and we felt that home would accept us.
But there is something still better than forgetting—more life! Togetherness! Trees to sleep in!
The realization of how simple it would be to have all of this forced Tuela anew to hoarse laughter. Our lung volume had shrunk and pulled back into the inside of our cranial cavity. That chamber of bone was still there and in its interior there was a new pitch-black dot with seven layers, one for each dimension, harder than stone and as all-encompassing as an entire universe. We felt its pulse, felt how our thoughts reached for it. This awareness was what made us heavier or lighter; suddenly the gravity of the Yellow World no longer pressed us down. We weighed less than nothing; our flight was elegant and we savored it. We understood the Dance of Stones and how we brought it about; we saw the warping of space in and around us, and it pleased us.
Once, in school, Tuela had dissected a dead bird. She had removed the cherry-sized seven-hulled kernel from its brainstem, had cut it open. She had found a smaller cherry inside, and inside one smaller yet, and so on to infinity. Life is exactly as large inside as outside, and the flight to the center of a molecule takes just as long as that to the edge of the galaxy. They do not realize everything is just as light as it is heavy, just as large as small. Just as sweet as sour. It is easier than thinking. It is easier than wanting. It simply happens.
Pierre no longer sat on his weathered stone. Instead he hung helpless in the air under us with his arms paddling; we had picked him up with us, and we admit, his fear amused us. And then we started on our way. We hoped we would be welcome.
