by Rich Horton
In the strictest sense, these were not the predicted Venusians.
Mother and Father along with an army of researchers spent their remaining lives studying barely visible organisms. Successes were few and huge. The “runes” absorbed almost no energy, yet needing little, they thrived. Exotic techniques produced more of their material, and the creatures consumed the gifts and grew until a thousand graphene bottles were filled with viable cultures. And in the end, after debates and votes and a few noisy defections, the remaining group decided that these organisms were survivors like the acid bugs. They were the left-behind remnants of a second Venusian creation, and everything about Mother’s model of Venusian life was accurate, save for the specifics.
Nobody knew where the Venusians resided today, and the mystery wouldn’t be solved.
In every awful way, the Earth itself was turning to shit.
One last time, sorry parents apologized to their grown child. They said they were idiots to put her in this awful place. Then as Father shook hands with the doomed boyfriend, the white-haired mother took her daughter into a back room. There was gift to bestow. Mother was waiting for the girl’s birthday but that wouldn’t be for months, and maybe the gift had no value at all, yet she should take it anyway and hold onto it.
Really, who knew what tomorrow would bring?
The monsters walk past their refuge, noticing nothing. Armed raiders, lost soldiers, madmen. The possibilities are numerous and grim, and in the end, the truth has no importance. What matters is that luscious sense of peace left in their wake. This is the long vacation at the end of humankind, and the woman finds herself with moments where she feels safe enough to do exactly as she wants.
“Stay below,” she whispers to the others.
They reply with one meaningful tap, concrete against concrete. Other than that, nothing needs to be said.
“Every hill ends with sky.”
Her father—the old rocket builder—used to say those words. He took a hopeful message from the phrase, implying that every climb ends with a good vantage point. And that’s what she thinks as she slips forwards, out of the basement and across the black ash brought to this high ground here by every wind.
And she kneels.
Against her hip is a bottle made of graphene, sealed by every reliable means and charged by her body’s motions. Nobody else knows what she carries. She doubts anyone in her group would understand the concepts or her devotion to what has lost any sense of symbol. This is dead weight, however slight. But she is prepared to surrender quite a lot before this treasure is left behind, and that includes every person hiding inside that miserable basement.
Separated from her body, the confining charge begins to fail.
There is a logic in play, though mostly this is magic, contrived and deeply unreliable, and she would admit as much to anyone, if she ever mentioned it.
“Let a few runes leak free every so often,” her mother told her. “It probably won’t do any good, but it won’t harm anything either.”
“But why bother?” the young woman asked. “What am I hoping for?”
“Humans have so much trouble seeing what is strange,” Mother said. “But we shouldn’t assume that superbeings built from new forms of matter would be any less blind. So let some of the bugs fall free. Every so often, just a few.”
“But why?”
The old woman set the bottle aside, grasping her daughter’s hands with both of hers. “Because maybe a Venusian will be swimming past.”.
“Oh,” the girl said. “I’m giving them something to notice.”
“And after that, maybe it will notice you, and maybe it will save you somehow. Out of kindness, or curiosity, or because saving my daughter would cost that god so very little.”
Magic.
All of this was nothing but hope and wild magic.
Yet she remained on her knees, in the ashes, waving the enchantment with all of her might while thinking how magic has always lived for darkness, and everything was dark, and really, on a day like this, what better thing could she possibly have to do . . . ?
The Endless Sink
Damien Ober
Sheep floating out on their tethers, the milk cows too. Ears flapping and skin and wool fur rippling as our rock sunk endless through the void. It was the day the boys of the rock would choose and so everyone had gathered to see what each would do. All the boys of leaving age lined up on the edge with the teacher there beside them. In front of everyone he had ever known, my brother Kyle was about to decide: rise or sink.
From the back of the crowd, I watched, my mother there with me and on my other side, my father standing stoic as he always liked to be. “Such a shame,” my mother said, “that little Frederick will never have the chance.”
My father grunted his grim consent about my little brother Fredrick, back at the house and too sick to come and see his older brother leave the rock. Frederick didn’t have much time left; he would be dead long before he reached the age when boys decide. And me? I would never reach it. Because only boys are made to sink or rise. Only boys leave the rock.
My father’s eyes thinned. Which meant he was seeing something no one else was seeing. A moment later, a boy on the stage broke down. “Sad,” my father said. And off he ran, this boy, down off the stage and into his mother’s arms. Through the crowd they scuttled, avoiding eyes, back to their house on the other side of the rock.
When we looked back, the other boys were getting ready. None of them wanted to become the next to lose his nerve. And then, off they went, all of the boys deciding simultaneously to rise. Kyle too, my brother. A cheer came up from the crowd, watching the boys get smaller, waving as they went, off for other lives on other rocks somewhere above.
I think I was the first to see it. It happened right then. Amidst the boys getting smaller, a new speck appeared. And this speck was getting larger. I could see it had arms and legs, a head—it was a sinker. The first sinker to come to our rock in as long as I could remember.
A circle spread in the crowd. The sinker landed perfectly in the center, stood a moment with the people reflected in the visor of his helmet. He had a sword strapped to his back, tucked tightly beside a small backpack. And then the helmet came off and the sinker was a woman. Had been since that moment when I was the first to see her. Through them all she came, right up to my parents and said, “You have beds on this pueblo, I heard.”
And before they could answer, she looked more directly at my mother than I had ever seen a person do. “I have a letter from your brother.”
The sinker had laid herself out straight on top of my bed to sleep. Her body was like an insect’s, condensed and hollow-seeming. On the floor sat her sword and tightly-wrapped pack and on top, her helmet. And though I knew it was wrong to touch people’s things, I picked the helmet up and turned it over and pressed my finger against the sharp point at the front.
“Please put that down.” The sinker’s eyes were the only bright specks in the room, watching until the helmet was back on her pack. “Thank you.” She rolled over and I could see the lines of muscle crackling. There was nothing extra about her. She was exactly what was needed for her purpose and nothing more.
“Have you come to help my brother?”
There was a long silence. I wondered if maybe she had gone back to sleep. “What’s wrong with him?”
“He got cut by the meat knife and it’s got his leg. Mother says it will be his hip and then his heart next.”
The sinker got up. “Where is he?”
I led her into the room my brothers used to share. But now it was just Fredrick, sweating and dying slowly in his bed. The sinker reached out her hand, but I saved her, grabbed her wrist and held it back. “You mustn’t touch him.” Inside her forearm, I could feel each tendon, each wound muscle.
“It’s ok,” she said. And she moved my brother’s hairs so they were all together on one side of his face. When she took the blanket down, it revealed how black his leg had become.
It wasn’t to the hip yet, but it would be soon. “Infection,” the sinker said.
“At least he didn’t decide to sink, that boy. Because staying right where you are, well, that’s better at least than sinking.” My mother was talking abut the boy who ran from the stage that morning. It happened every deciding day to at least one, but every time it happened people acted like it was the first and the last. My mother paused her chopping and looked up, as if seeing through the roof, to the spot where Kyle had vanished into nothing. “My boy,” she said, “a riser.”
My father was sitting opposite me at the kitchen table. He looked asleep except for his eyes. I suppose I had not thought until then, that Kyle rising would have the effect of him no longer being there.
“Your father was a riser.”
“I wanted to be a sinker, though, when I was little.”
“Don’t tell her things like that.”
He shrugged. “What’s it matter? Didn’t do it. Rose instead and here I am.”
“What was your first rock like, Daddy?”
“Not like this one,” my mother said. “That’s why men rise instead of sink.” She went back to cutting things up. “Through generations of male linage, the family eventually reaches Center City.”
“But what if Center City is down?”
My mother laughed. “If you want to get somewhere, you have to rise. Put out some resistance and all these rocks sink right past. You get somewhere. It takes five days of sinking to get where you can in one of rising. By rising, you move further, faster. You show you’re more adventurous.”
“What about her?” I asked. “Her, the sinker?”
My mother shook her head. “I don’t know why we must let her sleep here.”
My father sighed. “That’s the law, hon. A sinker brings a letter, the sinker gets to sleep the night.”
“I know it’s the law, told down from those people up at Center City who don’t know what it’s like down here for us real people.”
I wasn’t sure if my mother understood what she’d just said, how it related to other things she was always saying. I was about to ask when I heard a voice. “Listen to your mother,” it said. And the sinker cut into the room without disturbing even the stillness of the air. “Thank you for the bed. Here is your mail.” She put a single letter on the table.
My mother opened it and began to read. Her younger brother had left the rock the year he came of age. He had chosen to rise.
The sinker was seated now at the table’s other chair. The way she did things was she didn’t really do them, they just changed, like it had happened in the past. My mother continued reading. My father watched her. “Where has he settled?” Mother finally asked. “From how far up did this letter come down with you?”
“A pueblo a day’s rise from here.”
“One day’s rise?” The letter hung there in her hand all finished.
“Have you been to Center City?” I asked.
The sinker looked at me and shook her head. It made me think she wasn’t saying everything when she said, “No.”
“But it’s up there, right?”
My mother turned from the counter to both see and hear the answer. My father too, left his head sunk, but lifted his eyes to gaze at the sinker.
“That’s what people say, isn’t it?”
“But you haven’t been there?”
The Sinker looked at me again.
“Of course it’s there,” my mother said. “We pay our tribute to risers headed there. We obey the laws passed down by magistrates. Who could pay those magistrates, where would the things go? Where do the laws come down from? If there’s no Center City?”
My father put his hand on my head. “Don’t worry, sweetie, Center City is real.”
The boys of the rock were gathered in the meeting house for their weekly lesson about the future of their lives and the need to begin to prepare now no matter how far away the big day seemed. It was there that the boys all learned how to become the kind of risers our rock was surely known for. The man in charge of their lessons was called the teacher.
Standing atop an empty barrel, peering through the room’s back window, I could see the teacher at the front of the rowed desks. “Though you will not reach Center City yourself, by your rising, perhaps some day your sons or the sons of your sons . . . ” Behind him was the drawing which every boy was made to learn and draw from memory—a pyramid pattern of rocks like ours with Center City up at the top and biggest of all.
One of the other girls was tapping the back of my calf so I climbed down because it was the next girl’s turn to stand on the barrel and look in. “Hey,” one of them said to me, “It’s the sinker that stays in your parents’ house.” And there she was, the sinker, standing way over at the very edge of the rock.
“My parents said not to go near the sinker and that it would be better if she wasn’t here at all or never came.”
“My parents said the laws say your parents only have to let the sinker stay for—” But I was leaving those girls behind. I crossed the rock to stand beside the sinker. The milk cow was out there on its tether. It looked over at us from way past the edge. The wind made strange temporary shapes of its udder. The sinker was leaning over the edge, letting the rushing wind hold her place. Her gaze aimed deep into the darkness, her hair pointing back up at distant rocks above, back at all the other lives she must have crossed. And soon, off she’d sink, off to where ever it was she was headed, somewhere far below.
“How many rocks have you been to?” I asked.
A single tear got sucked up and vanished from her face. “Lots,” she said.
I moved right to the edge, got down on my stomach with my head poking over. “My brother left yesterday. He chose to rise. And I’ll stay here, until a riser comes up to marry me.”
The sinker sat down beside me, let her feet dangle.
I had to speak loudly with the wind howling past us. “One girl was made to leave this rock. It was before I was born, but everybody knows about it. She had betrayed her family. Did you betray your family?”
The sinker was looking out straight and I had never considered until that moment that in addition to other rocks below and above ours, there could be ones out to the side, out to all the sides. Other rocks with other families on them, in every possible direction.
“On other pueblos,” the sinker said, “ . . . other rocks, things are different.”
“How do you mean different?”
“There are lots of other pueblos out there. Rocks. Some people call them islands, towns. Every place calls them different. On other rocks, people don’t die of infection.”
“They don’t?”
“On some they do, but not on all.”
I wondered then, why none of the boys who left had ever sunk back down, back down to their home rock. “My brother will die of infection,” I said. “My uncle did and my father’s best friend.”
“I will take you as far as Roseblood,” the sinker said. “But not back.”
“What do you mean?”
“Roseblood. The next pueblo down.”
I woke to complete darkness. The wind that roared around me had been in my dreams too. It was the sound of the edge of my rock, but endless now. There was no quiet to step back into. We had left solid land behind and were off on the sink. Little lights clipped to our belts were turned off. In all directions, I could see nothing. Everything was gone. Everything but the wind and the black void.
I felt the sinker’s hand on me and could then make out the rough shape of her. She was peering through some sort of device, off at something far below us. Her shout reached me through the roaring howl, “Risers!” And then I could see them, two glinting specks coming towards us.
The sinker unhooked the tether which kept us from drifting apart. “Give me some space.” I didn’t know what she meant and so she shouted, “Spread your arms and legs! Rise a little!” The specks had grown into people, coming up fast. Two men it looked like, each wi
th a small light on the front of his helmet. The sinker straightened her body and went diving toward them.
As the three forms converged, there was a flash in the dim light of the risers’ headlamps. Then the risers were still, rising limply toward me. As they passed, I saw one’s face, frozen in a contorted grimace. Little droplets of blood hung around them in strange shifting patterns. Up they went, just dead bodies now.
The sinker floated back to me as I sank down to her. She was wiping and sheathing her sword. “They find you sleeping and you never wake up. Take everything you have to trade at whatever pueblo they land on next.” She reclipped our tether.
“Sorry,” I shouted back.
The sinker smiled. “We all fall asleep, kid. You have to.”
“Where is it?”
The sinker went into her pack, pulled out a roll of paper. She spread a stretch of it between her hands.
“What’s that?” I shouted.
“A map.”
“A map?”
“We’d be lost out here without it.”
We passed a skeleton, or the skeleton passed us. The sinker told me it was a riser, or another sinker maybe. When I asked her what happened to all his stuff, to his skin and all the rest, she told me people took it. I asked her if it was before or after he died and she said it looked like after. She said he left some pueblo and never found the next one. Ages ago. Floated around out there until he starved to death. “Happens,” she shouted, “Happens all the time.”
At first, it was just a dim, glowing ball in the distance. I was struck with dread, remembering fires I’d seen burn down whole houses on the rock back home. But as we got closer, the lights began to separate and I could understand what it was I was seeing. It was not a fire, but a hundred—a thousand maybe—separate fires. They burned along the edges of a high wall. On one side, there was a thin patch of ground, but on the other, there was a city like I’d only heard about until then. Houses were all clumped together and stacked on top of one another. There were larger buildings too, bigger than all the houses on my rock put together. Wide paths cut between them, people riding animals like the milk cows but thinner. And there were lights too, dotted throughout, as far as I could see.
