by T. J. Berry
“Everyone ready?” asked Ricky. Gary lifted his cap just enough to give him a clear view of the parrot. A weak assent went through the group. Ricky cocked her head.
“That’s not nearly good enough for the Sixian parrot. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” screamed the crowd, shading their eyes despite the glasses.
“Lads, lasses, and every combination in between, I present to you… the Sixian parrot.”
Ricky yanked the cover away from the birdcage with a flourish and Gary crouched into a fighting stance, holding his face inches from the bars.
“Go!” shouted Ricky.
The bird was not there. Or rather, it was there, but it existed as a void in space and time. Looking into it was like looking into a hole in reality. Gary opened his eyes wide and stared into the bird. Purple light focused directly into his pupils in two pulsating lines. It suffused his brain with energy. He could no longer think of anything but the bird. Far in the distance, Ricky counted off the seconds.
“One, two, three, four, five…”
The room slid away from him, and he careened toward a handful of tiny lights within the vantablack outline of the bird. The parrot trilled and one of the dots zoomed closer, faster than the speed of sound. Gary fought the urge to tear his eyes away. He leaned into the fall, expecting to hit the floor, but he continued to drop into blackness.
The girl in the front row whimpered.
“Six, seven, eight, nine, ten…”
Gary’s jaw clenched and his hands balled into fists. A humming sound emanated from the bird in a multipart harmonic. It wove its way into everyone’s brain and vibrated the teeth in Gary’s jaw.
The dot grew in size until it eclipsed everything else in his vision. It was a star, a red dwarf, old and dim. Orbiting it was a planet ringed with spiral wisps of pink gas. It was not a world that he recognized. He flew toward the planet like a ship coming out of orbit.
“Eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen…” Gary could still hear Ricky counting in the bar.
The bird leaned forward and opened its beak. The harmonic filled the room and every creature resonated with the sound.
The vision brought Gary to the clouded surface of the planet. It was lush and damp, similar to the Bala worlds that had been colonized by the humans. Pink-leaved vegetation towered as high as a Reason skyscraper. He came to rest near two figures kneeling together in the loam. One was his future self, fully bearded and hair grown long and shaggy. The other was a woman, swathed in blue fabric from the top of her headscarf to the hem of her sari. Mud soaked their knees as they knelt in the grass.
“Sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty…”
Spittle dripped down Gary’s chin and his entire body shook with the effort of keeping eye contact with the bird. A puddle collected beneath him. The odor of hot urine filled the room. In the back of his mind, he felt like he was back in the Quag.
“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five…”
The bird added one additional note to the harmonic and someone in the front row vomited onto the floor. A few people staggered out of the bar, clutching their heads.
In the vision, future Gary’s voice was high and strained.
“I can’t,” he said.
“You must,” said the woman, sounding calm. She placed her hand over his. “It was foreseen.”
Gary realized that his future self was holding an object about two feet long and pointed at one end. His horn. He instinctively reached for it before remembering this was only a vision. He was at the mercy of the parrot to move his body where it wanted him.
“Do it,” the woman commanded, an edge creeping into her voice. Future Gary began to cry in ugly sobbing gasps. He had never seen himself so distraught.
“I can’t,” he said between gasping breaths. “I’ve failed you.”
“You are the bravest person I have ever met,” the woman said. “The Pymmie are humbled before your sacrifice. Succeed in this or all is lost.” She let her hands fall back into the dirt at her sides and waited.
“Twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty… This is where it usually happens!” cried Ricky.
Gary’s mouth opened wide in a throaty scream that added a baseline to the harmonic. Future Gary clutched the horn and raised it as if to strike the woman. She reached up and grasped his shoulder, fingers digging in to hold herself steady. She looked over future Gary’s shoulder and stared directly at him.
“Are you here?” she asked. Her eyes didn’t quite meet his, but she seemed to know that he was watching. “I know the parrot brought you here. You must tell the Pymmie to eliminate all of the humans. Leave not a single one alive. And Gary, this is most important. You must kill Penny. Remember. Kill Penny.”
In the bar, Gary ran out of air and the scream became soundless. His fists flailed at his sides, pummeling the air like an invisible enemy as he fought the bird for air. Ricky’s voice cut into the vision.
“Are you dying? Don’t die,” she whispered to him. “A stoneship without fuel is just a floating rock in space.”
Someone was about to die, but it certainly wasn’t him. Future Gary raised the horn above the woman, closed his eyes, and plunged the point into the woman’s chest. It slid in easily. Gary heard a crunch as the wide end cracked her ribs apart. Future Gary pulled the dripping horn back out. Blood pulsed out of the woman’s body like a fountain.
“Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty…”
Future Gary dropped the horn and let out a yell that startled the trees. They retracted their pink leaves until only pale bare branches remained, pointing at the sky. The woman dug her fingers into the dirt, clawing for something to hold on to. She gurgled and a mouthful of blood ran down her chin. In the gaping chasm of her chest, Gary saw a heart muscle flutter.
Gary’s future self doubled over. His screams echoed throughout both the pink planet and the Bitter Blossom.
The crowd at the front of the bar stepped back and covered their ears, but there was no escaping the pervading sense of impending doom. Creatures held onto each other and wailed. The girl at the front had sunk to the floor. Ricky still counted, but her voice quavered ever so slightly.
“Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, forty-five…”
The bird sat back on its haunches and the harmonic dropped an octave, rattling everyone’s intestines hard enough that a scuffle broke out between patrons racing for the bathroom. The moment seemed to never end. Gary wondered if he was going to be one of the people who became trapped in their vision.
The image finally began to pull away from the planet. Gary floated numbly on the bird’s tickling current, back toward the bar. He was supposed to have seen his own death, and yet he’d seen himself murder someone else… again.
Unicorns weren’t technically immortal – they could certainly be killed in the right circumstances – but they wouldn’t succumb to disease or moderate wounds. Did this vision mean that he would never die? With no vision to show him, perhaps the bird had substituted the closest approximation, a future time when he would kill another person. If there was any consolation at all, it was that at least he knew his horn still existed and someday he would find it.
“Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty… almost there!”
Coming back into his body, Gary shook so hard that his hooves clattered against the floor. With great effort he managed to stop yelling and take a single gasping breath.
“Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three, fifty-four, fifty-five…”
The parrot tilted its head in that curious way that birds do and its ultraviolet beams shifted to deep blue. Gary panted as if he’d just run for his life, but did not break eye contact with the bird. Ricky Tang was a stickler for rules and he would not look away until she said so.
“Fifty-six, fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine… sixty!”
The parrot that was not there chirped and ho
pped back onto its perch, pecking daintily at a cup of seed hanging off the bars. A server locked the door and threw the cover back over the cage. Gary took two steps backward and dropped into a chair that had been vacated by a terrified patron. He rested his face in his hands and wiped away a mix of saliva and tears.
The creatures in the room found themselves clutching each other and laughed sheepishly as the terror dissipated and they let go. COs helped fallen friends to their feet and razzed them for being weak. Servers circulated among the guests, offering refreshed drinks and discounted uniform trousers.
Gary checked on Jenny. Her disguise was completely gone, washed away by the tears she tried to swipe away discreetly. Smug satisfaction blackened Gary’s heart. He wanted to see her suffer, after what she’d done to him and what she’d forced him to do.
His father’s voice cut through his self-pity.
Each of your actions must stand alone by the reckoning of Unamip.
His anger dissipated like an angel after a miracle. Harboring silent resentments was like stabbing yourself and hoping the other person died. He could only serve his own penance for Cheryl Ann’s death, not exact punishment from Jenny as well.
Jenny lifted her eyes to meet his while Ricky was distracted chirping orders to servers about cleanup and refills. There was something in the look she gave him. Not quite contrite, but definitely not hostile. She lifted one finger and pointed it first at him, then at herself, and finally let it rest on the Jaggery outside the window. It seemed she was making an offer. Gary did not respond.
This was a woman who had wrestled him into a cage and kept him locked there until he was nearly mad with hunger and thirst. She’d dug into his skull for remnants of horn until he’d begged the gods to strike her down and end the pain. She’d placed him into the devastating position of having to eat the bones of someone he loved. He had been working on letting go of his anger toward her, but it was going to take him a minute to follow her into battle.
Ricky, oblivious to the negotiating going on between Gary and Jenny across the room, stepped in front of the crowd, tiptoeing over new puddles. They merged with the old puddles, reinvigorating the smells.
“That was very impressive, was it not?” Ricky asked. “The first challenge has been won!”
The crowd cheered, sounding less like enthusiasm for the game and more like the relief of having survived a traumatic ordeal together.
“Don’t worry,” said Ricky, “The last two will have decidedly less audience participation.”
She winked and a weak laugh went up from the room.
“The human race will become extinct in a prison of its own making,” said a high-pitched voice. Ricky frowned and looked down at the sundress girl, sitting on the floor.
“What?” she asked, forgetting to mute her microphone. The little girl stood up and faced the room.
“Human strongholds will turn to sand. We will feel the wrath of the old gods when we are stranded in a desolate corner of the universe. The only survivors will renounce Reason and beg to join the outcasts in their new home. I will starve in the street while the Reason decays.”
Ricky reached over and pulled the protective glasses off the girl’s face. She held them up to the light. Down the center of one lens was a hairline crack. She grabbed a server by the shoulder and whispered to him. The crowd murmured its concern as the sundress girl was led away into a back room. Ricky held up her hands to soothe the tittering audience.
“Everything is going to be fine. You must excuse our young friend. Regrettably, she looked upon the Sixian parrot and it has scrambled her thoughts. If this strapping bulk of a man barely made it through his journey to the future, then a child…” She trailed off and raised her glass, pivoting to a more solidly rousing topic. “To the survival of man!” she called.
“Manifest destiny!” echoed the officers in the room by rote, gulping down whatever was in front of them.
“Don’t think we forgot about you, Gary,” said Ricky, pulling him out of the chair. His soaked trousers stuck to his crooked equine legs, making it even more obvious that he was not fully human. Ricky lunged under the game table and came back with a purse embroidered with a bouquet of roses; temperamental plants that only grew on two planets in Reasonspace these days, neither of which was Earth.
“Are we ready for the second challenge?”
The crowd, emboldened by their death-adjacent experience and feeling the tingling rush of new drinks, cheered loudly enough that Ricky smiled over them like a benevolent dictator.
“This bag contains a set of slightly more difficult tasks. I’d say about half the creatures that pick from this bag get a survivable challenge. I hope the odds are in your favor, Gary!”
As Gary reached into the flowered bag, again going deep into the corner for an unrigged game piece, he stole another glance at Jenny. She flicked her head toward the window and he again made no indication that he agreed. Her entire upper body slouched in exasperation. She had a fair bit of hubris to assume that he would simply submit to her demands after all this time.
His fingers grazed a dusty item in the corner of the bag. He made a valiant effort, but it jumped away from him. In this second challenge, every piece was rigged to Ricky’s advantage. She was giving him exactly the challenges she wanted. And he understood why. No one with any sense would leave the fate of a stoneship to chance.
Ricky held out her palm to take the game piece. Customers leaned forward to see the tiny bit of orange plastic in her hand. She held it aloft and her ocular display projected an enlarged image into the air for everyone to see. She turned the hollow triangle in different directions, but the confused audience did not react.
“Are you all too young to remember this?” she asked. “It’s an old game token. Trivial Pursuit, it was called. Well, today’s pursuit is not so trivial.”
Gary mused how one of the galaxy’s leading pre-exodus Earth historians was a game hostess in a dive bar. If universities had still existed, Ricky Tang would have been the star of an anthropology department. Now she served drunken government officials who would have arrested her long ago if not for the fact that this was the only decent place to get a drink and have some fun on the continent besides New Sydney.
“But what does the pie slice mean? Any guesses?”
“Singularity pie!” shouted Lieutenant Cy, his uniform shirt soaked with something brown and oily.
“That’s right,” said Ricky. “A gut-busting slice of singularity pie.”
Jenny cursed into the momentary silence and a few people laughed. Gary saw her pull out a tablet and begin typing. He said a lengthy silent prayer to Unamip to give him strength. The odds were not in his favor.
CHAPTER THREE
Singularity Pie
Six servers – heavyset dwarves thick with muscle and of indeterminate gender – pulled a wagon into the room. The wheels groaned under the weight of a single dessert plate resting in the center of the bed. Ricky patted the top of Gary’s cap in mock affection. He pulled away. She was checking for sharp bits of horn, not being friendly. She turned to the crowd.
“Felines and waterfowl, this is a single slice of incredibly rare singularity pie forged in the depths of uninhabited openspace. There’s a little bit of black hole goodness baked into each bit. It takes six strong dwarves to move it anywhere. Gary will need to eat an entire slice and keep it inside himself for at least a minute.”
Singularity pie was intended to nourish universe-builders and demigods. Gary had never tasted it himself, but he’d seen it as a child, on a banquet table set for the unicorn gods of Bala before most of them had been hunted out of existence by the humans. A single bite could turn a human’s insides into a pile of innards on the floor. It was a prolonged and messy way to die. Gary prayed to Unamip, hoping that he would intervene if he still existed in some form.
Ricky patted his chest as if he was a pet.
“Poor Gary. The pie itself is so dense with gravity that the steel plate would crum
ble if we lifted it. He’ll need to lean down and eat the pie face first.”
Gary gave Ricky a long look. That last comment about the plate was a lie, meant to up the showmanship of the game. Bala bodies had been degraded for spectacle throughout the last century, and today would be no different. Ricky returned Gary’s stare, daring him to object. Gary knelt next to the wagon silently, his wet pants slapping the floor.
“Hands behind your back, just like an old-fashioned pie eating contest,” goaded Ricky.
The crowd did not react. They could barely remember pies, let alone county fairs and corn dogs. Ricky had probably only seen images of them on old tapes and in stories the surviving humans told at the bar. Gary had talked to actual humans who had been there.
“On your mark. Get set. Go!” she yelled.
Gary opened his mouth and bit down on the pie. The filling looked soft and pliable, but it was impossibly heavy, like leaden gel. He tried to chew, but it dragged at his teeth, threatening to wrench them out of their sockets. He tilted his head back and let the pie slide down his throat. It burned with cold, prickling and bubbling down his esophagus. He grabbed the side of the wagon and held on as it slammed into the pit of his stomach. His face twisted into a grimace as he tried to keep the pie from tearing through his internal organs.
A full unicorn would have completed this challenge as easily as eating an ordinary dessert, but a half-unicorn was made of just enough human meat that the outcome was questionable. His healing blood would try to repair the damage as fast as it could, but he might bleed out if it couldn’t keep up.
He took a deep breath as the pie popped through something vital in his gut. He saw motion from the back of the room; Jenny held up a single finger to someone outside the window. Gary dipped his head, pretending to strain under the effects of the pie, and looked to the side to see who she was signaling.
An old man stood outside the Blossom’s back window. Gary’s insides twisted, and not just from the pie. It was Cowboy Jim, and he did not look pleased.
