Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “Exactly. What is be going to say? Think about the position you put ber in. After weeks of public courtship, you agreed to meet ber in private. Everyone is going to want to know what happened. And be is going to say . . . what? That you manned ber? That be manned you? That you rejected ber? What?”

  Why did things have to be so complicated? Be wanted me, so I took ber. Why wasn’t that the end of it? But even as I was reassuring Idra that everything was fine, I felt another sensation, as unfamiliar as my harnt’s opening had been. They could erase me any time they wanted. I felt weak inside.

  * * *

  “Oh chaste Mabirelle! Oh cruel, virtuous Mabirelle, that withstood temptation’s nearness with yr far-seeing gaze! How can we praise your inviolate harnt, O Mabirelle?”

  I was as shocked as anyone else. Apparently, I wasn’t a crazy slut, I was a chaste virgin. Who had cruelly denied Dot’s advances even though we were in a tiny padded and sound-proofed tube. Though Dot importuned me, I preserved my virtue. Dot proved this by showing someone that ber tharn retained its outer membrane, which meant it had never been inside me.

  I didn’t even know that a pilot’s tharn had an outer membrane. You learn something new every day.

  As the story went, I had arranged the song-booth meeting as an elaborate test to see if Dot could respect my chastity in such close quarters. As if Dot would have been capable of overpowering me anyway! And now that Dot had passed the test, I had agreed to hear ber pair-bonding proposal.

  I was grateful to Dot for coming up with an explanation of the facts that didn’t require anyone to toss me into the Inner Axis. But proposals? The way Idra explained it, I wasn’t committed to pair-bonding with Dot, just hearing ber suit.

  Nobody even knew how pair-bonding would work between a pilot and a daily. It wasn’t very likely that I’d be able to go live with Dot, and the idea of Dot trying to share my bunk in a roomful of twenty dailys made me giggle. With no children and no property, it was mostly a fancy license for Dot and me to do what we’d already done in that song-booth. Except maybe the other way around.

  So this time I had to go up to the pilot quarter, where the air is purer and the gravity lighter. Gleaming star-charts on all the walls and varvet covering every surface. I had to keep ducking to avoid the little nozzles spraying perfumey crap and aromatherapy at me. I usually wore my bandana around my mouth and nose when I cleaned around here, but I figured Dot might take it as an insult.

  “Hey,” I said to Dot. “Thanks, for coming up with a good story. You’re good at that, huh? Telling stories. I have to kick myself to keep from believing the stuff you say about me, and I know myself pretty well.”

  Dot started saying it was all true, and then some. Be wore even more layers than last time, if that was possible, and sat cross-legged on the edge of a massive crescent-shaped couch on the edge of a fake gravity well. You could toss things into it and watch them shrink to a singularity, but it was just an illusion. Dot didn’t need to wear the extra buckles, since I would hardly molest ber with five chaperones watching us from just outside earshot.

  “Anyway, I’m grateful to you. Which is why I’m here,” I said, sitting a decent distance away from ber on the crescent thingy.

  “Mabirelle, because I love you so, I want to be totally honest with you,” Dot said. That sounded like a good idea, so I nodded. Be went on: “I told you the truth before, when I said there was no hidden agenda here. But there is something you don’t know. Can you keep a secret?”

  “You have no idea how many secrets I’ve kept,” I said. “You can trust me, don’t worry.”

  Dot had to pause to offer me chocolates and little cameos, and order up fancy music. Then be went on. “The spirers think they’ve developed a much more accurate long-range scanning technique by combining stellar resonance and high-spectrum ghosting.” Be waited for me to murmur my understanding, then went on. “We think it’s dead.”

  “What’s dead?” At first I thought be meant the little dove-hen I was holding.

  “The planet. Our colony world. Coriolanus, or whatever they’re calling it this week. The breedpods won’t function there, the breeders won’t be able to sustain a new generation.”

  “So we left the Cluster for nothing. We’re sailing towards nothing. This, all of this, is all for nothing.” I gestured around, to indicate the whole City.

  “Yes.”

  “Can we turn back?” I already knew the answer before be shook ber head, but it still felt like a crack in my gut. Be started talking about desperate alternatives: slingshot maneuvers, stellar recharges, increased dark-matter efficiency, but I was still saying “dead world” to myself, over and over. “Dead world.”

  “I can’t stand it among the other pilots any more, or any of the upper dars. The spirers with all those fingers, with their base-27 cleverness. The breeders, tending those breedpods as if they’re going to amount to something. It all makes me feel so hopeless. But when I’m with you, it’s different. I feel alive. Like life is worth something after all.”

  I started to ask why we couldn’t tell everyone the truth, but that was a stupid question, and I don’t ask stupid questions. If I thought people in this City were crazy now, just imagine if they knew they were trapped and it was pointless.

  “Love,” I muttered. “Fucking love. It can’t save you from shit. It’s just anesthetic.”

  “Maybe,” Dot said. “But it’s life-saving. Mabirelle, I meant everything I said before. Your beauty, your wisdom, the longing inside me. It wasn’t a pantomime, or a distraction from my existential crisis. It was itself. I love you, and I can’t bear to be away from you.”

  I didn’t love Dot, but I liked ber more and more. Even though be had left me in an ugly spot. I could turn ber down, but then what? I could spend the next few decades among the dailys, knowing we were going nowhere. The dailys would never treat me the same after this, once I went from being the romantic heroine to being the fool who spurned a pilot. They might never let me touch them again. And I wasn’t sure I could go back to being who I’d been, even if they’d let me.

  I took a deep breath and looked around this foolish room. I couldn’t help laughing, and then I had to reassure Dot that I wasn’t laughing at ber. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just all this. How can you live like this? It’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m used to it, I guess,” Dot said. “You know what they say about pilots, we’re not like other people. I know everyone makes fun of us behind our backs.”

  “Yeah, but not as much as they make fun of the spirers.” I got my giggles under control and then looked into Dot’s eyes, which looked like they could swallow me whole. “Listen, I can’t live here. But I can’t go back either. Can you make me a little love-nest, like in those dumb dreamliminals? A little place where I can live and you can visit? Not in the daily quarter, but not here either.”

  Dot thought about it for a moment, then started rattling off the various lavish apartments in the interstices between the City quarters, where I could live in luxury. Eventually, be came up with something a bit more realistic, but still comfortable. Even if I was going to be a kept daily, I didn’t want to be over the top.

  “I guess we can give it a try,” I said. “Just two more things. I want my friend Idra to come live with me. So I don’t go nuts with loneliness when you’re not around. Y needs yr own space, so y can entertain whoever y’s madly in love with this week. And the other thing is, I won’t woman to you. I can think of a few other ways to get rid of that pesky membrane on your tharn, don’t worry. But I just don’t like the idea of back-to-back sex, it’s too weird. Oh, and my name is Mab, not Mabirelle or anything else. Okay?”

  It wasn’t the kind of courtship Dot had had in mind. And when the minstrels sang of our pair-bonding and the dreamliminals recreated it, they portrayed it very differently. The quivering Dot, the beautiful unyielding Mabirelle, the hours of ardent supplication before I finally consented to turn my back on ber and become ber mate, all that crap. I had to bit
e my tongue whenever people started carrying on. But I was starting to learn that you had to leave people their romantic illusions.

  Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived by Her Mercy

  1. This was sacred, this was stolen

  We stood naked on the shore of Bernal and watched the candles float across the bay, swept by a lazy current off to the north, in the direction of Potrero Island. A dozen or so candles stayed afloat and alight after half a league, their tiny flames bobbing up and down, casting long yellow reflections on the dark water alongside the streaks of moonlight. At times I fancied the candlelight could filter down onto streets and buildings, the old automobiles and houses full of children’s toys, all the waterlogged treasures of long-gone people. We held hands, twenty or thirty of us, and watched the little candle-boats we’d made as they floated away. Joconda was humming an old reconstructed song about the wild road, hir beard full of flowers. We all just about held our breath. I felt my bare skin go electric with the intensity of the moment, like this could be the good time we’d all remember in the bad times to come. This was sacred, this was stolen. And then someone—probably Miranda—farted, and then we were all laughing, and the grown-up seriousness was gone. We were all busting up and falling over each other on the rocky ground, in a nude heap, scraping our knees and giggling into each other’s limbs. When we got our breath back and looked up, the candles were all gone.

  2. I felt like i had always been wrong headed

  I couldn’t deal with life in Fairbanks any more. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to mega-city as I hit my early twenties. I lived in an old decommissioned solar power station with five other kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could, with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We wanted to shake our cinderblock walls and make people dance until their feet bled. But we sucked. We were bad at music, and not quite dumb enough not to know it. We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and tried to make our own drums out of drycloth and cracked wood, and we read our poetry on Friday nights. There were bookhouses, along with stinktanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. People came from all over, because everybody heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on Earth, and that’s when I decided to leave town. I had this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant job and our cool little scene, and feeling like there had to be more to life than this.

  I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia, at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs, and doing a way better job with the drugs than the food. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify what it could mean. When you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens.

  We were all complaining about our dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and I found myself talking about how my parents only liked to listen to that boring boo-pop music with the same three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA/BBB/CDE/CDE rhyme scheme, and how my mother insisted on saving every scrap of organic material we used, and collecting every drop of rainwater. “It’s fucking pathetic, is what it is. They act like we’re still living in the Great Decimation.”

  “They’re just super traumatized,” said this skinny genderfreak named Juya, who stood nearby holding the bong. “It’s hard to even imagine. I mean, we’re the first generation that just takes it for granted we’re going to survive, as like a species. Our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents, they were all living like every day could be the day the planet finally got done with us. They didn’t grow up having moisture condensers and myco-protein rinses and skinsus.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said. But what Juya said stuck with me, because I had never thought of my parents as traumatized. I’d always thought they were just tightly wound and judgey. Juya had two cones of dark twisty hair on zir head and a red pajamzoot, and zi was only a year or two older than me but seemed a lot wiser.

  “I want to find all the music we used to have,” I said. “You know, the weird, noisy shit that made people’s clothes fall off and their hair light on fire. The rock ’n roll that just listening to it turned girls into boys, the songs that took away the fear of god. I’ve read about it, but I’ve never heard any of it, and I don’t even know how to play it.”

  “Yeah, all the recordings and notations got lost in the Dataclysm,” Juya said. “They were in formats that nobody can read, or they got corrupted, or they were printed on disks made from petroleum. Those songs are gone forever.”

  “I think they’re under the ocean,” I said. “I think they’re down there somewhere.”

  Something about the way I said that helped Juya reach a decision. “Hey, I’m heading back down to the San Francisco archipelago in the morning. I got room in my car if you wanna come with.”

  Juya’s car was an older solar model that had to stop every couple hours to recharge, and the self-driving module didn’t work so great. My legs were resting in a pile of old headmods and biofills, plus those costooms that everybody used a few summers earlier that made your skin turn into snakeskin that you could shed in one piece. So the upshot was, we had a lot of time to talk and hold hands and look at the endless golden landscape stretching off to the east. Juya had these big bright eyes that laughed when the rest of zir face was stone serious, and strong tentative hands to hold me in place as zi tied me to the car seat with fronds of algae. I had never felt as safe and dangerous as when I crossed the wasteland with Juya. We talked for hours about how the world needed new communities, new ways to breathe life back into the ocean, new ways to be people.

  By the time we got to Bernal Island and the Wrong Headed community, I was in love with Juya, deeper than I’d ever felt with anyone before.

  Juya up and left Bernal a week and a half later, because zi got bored again, and I barely noticed that zi was gone. By then, I was in love with a hundred other people, and they were all in love with me.

  Bernal Island was only accessible from one direction, from the big island in the middle, and only at a couple times of day when they let the bridge down and turned off the moat. After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments with people in the Wrong Headed crew.

  “The ocean is our lover, you can hear it laughing at us.” Joconda was sort of the leader here. Sie sometimes had a beard and sometimes a smooth round face covered with perfect bright makeup. Hir eyes were as gray as the sea and just as unpredictable. For decades, San Francisco and other places like it had been abandoned, because the combination of seismic instability and a voracious dead ocean made them too scary and risky. But that city down there, under the waves, had been the place everybody came to, from all over the world, to find freedom. That legacy was ours now.

  And those people had brought music from their native countries and their own cultures, and all those sounds had crashed together in those streets, night after night. Joconda’s own ancestors had come from China and Peru, and hir great-grandparents had played nine-stringed guitars, melodies and rhythms that Joconda barely recalled now. Listening to hir, I almost fancied I could put my ear to the surface of the ocean and hear all the sounds from generations past, still reverberating. We sat all night, Joconda, some of the others and myself, and I got to play on an old-school drum made of cowhide or something. I felt like I had always been Wrong Headed, and I’d just never had the word for it before.

  Juya sent me an email a month or two after zi left Bernal: The moment I met you, I knew you needed to be with the rest of those maniacs. I’ve never been able to resist delivering lost children to their rightful homes. It’s almost the only thing I’m good at, other than the things you already knew about. I never saw zir again.

  3. “I’m so glad i found a group of peopl
e i would risk drowning in dead water for.”

  Back in the 21st century, everybody had theories about how to make the ocean breathe again. Fill her with quicklime, to neutralize the acid. Split the water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, and bond the hydrogen with the surplus carbon in the water to create a clean-burning hydrocarbon fuel. Release genetically engineered fish, with special gills. Grow special algae that was designed to commit suicide after a while. Spray billions of nanotech balls into her. And a few other things. Now, we had to clean up the after-effects of all those failed solutions, while also helping the sea to let go of all that CO2 from before.

  The only way was the slow way. We pumped ocean water through our special enzyme store and then through a series of filters, until what came out the other end was clear and oxygen-rich. The waste, we separated out and disposed of. Some of it became raw materials for shoe soles and roof tiles. Some of it, the pure organic residue, we used as fertilizer or food for our mycoprotein.

  I got used to staying up all night playing music with some of the other Wrong Headed kids, sometimes on the drum and sometimes on an old stringed instrument that was made of stained wood and had a leering cat face under its fret. Sometimes I thought I could hear something in the way our halting beats and scratchy notes bounced off the walls and the water beyond, like we were really conjuring a lost soundtrack. Sometimes it all just seemed like a waste.

  What did it mean to be a real authentic person, in an era when everything great from the past was twenty feet underwater? Would you embrace prefab newness, or try to copy the images you can see from the handful of docs we’d scrounged from the Dataclysm? When we got tired of playing music, an hour before dawn, we would sit around arguing, and inevitably you got to that moment where you were looking straight into someone else’s eyes and arguing about the past, and whether the past could ever be on land, or the past was doomed to be deep underwater forever.