Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 102

by Naim Kabir

  “I love you,” the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen kept saying over and over. It felt strange when the mask on my face spoke but I didn’t speak. “I love you. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. I love you. I can’t stay.”

  My mask and I said both together: “We are afraid of the wall.”

  “Don’t be doltish,” an Incarnadine Fisherwoman said. She must have been a good fisherwoman as she had eight vermillion catfish hanging off her belt and some of them were still opening and closing their mouths, trying to breathe water that had vanished like a mask. “You’re one of us.”

  So my sorrow swam through the wall. She got into the scarlet water which rose all the way up to her eyeballs but she didn’t mind. I rode her like sailing a boat and the red water soaked the train of my red death dress and magenta dolphins followed along with us, jumping out of the water and echolocating like a bunch of maniacs and the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen said:

  “I am beginning to remember who I am now that everything is red again. Why is anything unred in the world? It’s madness.”

  Jellyfish hid her lavender face in her watermelon-colored hooves and whispered:

  “Please don’t forget about me, I am water soluble!”

  I wondered, when the river crashed into the longest wall in the world, a red brick wall that went on forever side to side and also up and down, if the wall had a name. Everything has a name, even if that name is in Latin and nobody knows it but one person who doesn’t live nearby. Somebody had tried to blow up the wall several times. Jagged chunks were missing; bullets had gouged out rock and mortar long ago, but no one had ever made a hole. The Incarnadine River slushed in through a cherry-colored sluice gate. Rosy sunlight lit up its prongs. I glided on in with all the other fisherwomen like there never was a wall in the first place. I looked behind us—the river swarmed with squirrels, gasping, half drowning, paddling their little feet for dear life. They squirmed through the sluice gate like plague rats.

  “If you didn’t have that mask on, you would have had to pay the toll,” whispered Jellyfish.

  “What’s the toll?”

  “A hundred years as a fisherwoman.”

  Cranberry-on-Claret is a city of carnelian and lacquerwork and carbuncle streetlamps glowing with red gas flames because the cities of the Red Country are not electrified like Plum Pudding and Lizard Tongue and Absinthe. People with hair the color of raspberries and eyes the color of wood embers play ruby bassoons and chalcedony hurdy-gurdies and cinnamon-stick violins on the long, wide streets and they never stop even when they sleep; they just switch to nocturnes and keep playing through their dreaming. When they saw me coming, they started up My Baby Done Gone to Red, which, it turns out, is only middling as far as radio hits go.

  Some folks wore deaths like mine. Some didn’t. The Ordinary Emperor said that sometimes the dead go to the Red Country but nobody looked dead. They looked busy like city people always look. It was warm in Cranberry-on-Claret, an autumnal kind of warm, the kind that’s having a serious think about turning to cold. The clouds glowed primrose and carmine.

  “Where are we going?” asked my watercolor unicorn.

  “The opera house,” I answered.

  I guess maybe all opera houses are skulls because the one in the Red Country looked just like the one back home except, of course, as scarlet as the spiral mouth of a mask. It just wasn’t a human skull. Out of a cinnabar piazza hunched up a squirrel skull bigger than a cathedral and twice as fancy. Its great long teeth opened anc closed like proper doors and prickled with scrimshaw carving like my Papo used to do on pony-bones. All over the wine-colored skull grew bright hibiscus flowers and devil’s hat mushrooms and red velvet lichen and fire opals.

  Below the opera house and behind they kept the corrals. Blue stories milled miserably in pens, their sapphire plates drooping, their eyes all gooey with cataracts. I took off the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen and climbed down my sorrow.

  “Heyo, beastie-blues,” I said, holding my hands out for them to sniff through the copper wire and redwood of their paddock. “No lachrymose quadrupeds on my watch. Be not down in the mouth. Woe-be-gone, not woe-be-come.”

  “That’s blue talk,” a boy-story whispered. “You gotta talk red or you get no cud.”

  “Say what you mean,” grumbled a girl-story with three missing scales over her left eye. “It’s the law.”

  “I always said what I meant. I just meant something very fancy,” sniffed a grandfather-story lying in the mud to stay cool.

  “Okay. I came from the Purple Country to find a boy named Orchid Harm.”

  “Nope, that’s not what you mean,” the blue grandpa dinosaur growled, but he didn’t seem upset about it. Stories mostly growl unless they’re sick.

  “Sure it is!”

  “I’m just a simple story, what do I know?” He turned his cerulean rump to me.

  “You’re just old and rude. I’m pretty sure Orchid is up there in the eye of that skull, it’s only that I was going to let you out of your pen before I went climbing but maybe I won’t now.”

  “How’s about we tell you what you mean and then you let us out and nobody owes nobody nothing?” said the girl-story with the missing scales. It made me sad to hear a story talking like that, with no grammar at all.

  “I came from the Purple Country to find Orchid,” I repeated because I was afraid.

  “Are you sure you’re not an allegory for depression or the agrarian revolution or the afterlife?”

  “I’m not an allegory for anything! You’re an allegory! And you stink!”

  “If you say so.”

  “What do you mean then?”

  “I mean a blue dinosaur. I mean a story about a girl who lost somebody and couldn’t get over it. I can mean both at the same time. That’s allowed.”

  “This isn’t any better than when you were saying autarchy and peregrinate.”

  “So peregrinate with autarchy, girlie. That’s how you’re supposed to act around stories, anyway. Who raised you?”

  I kicked out the lock on their paddock and let the reptilian stories loose. They bolted like blue lightning into the cinnabar piazza. Jellyfish ran joyfully among them, jumping and wriggling and whinnying, giddy to be in a herd again, making a mess of a color scheme.

  “I love you,” said my sorrow. She had shrunk up small again, no taller than a good dog, and she was wearing the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen. By the time I’d gotten half way up the opera-skull, she was gone.

  “Let us begin by practicing the chromatic scale, beginning with E major.”

  That is what the voice coming out of the eye socket of a giant operatic squirrel said and it was Orchid’s voice and it had a laugh hidden inside it like it always did. I pulled myself up and over the lip of the socket and curled up next to Orchid Harm and his seven books, of which he’d already read four. I curled up next to him like nothing bad had ever happened. I fit into the line of his body and he fit into mine. I didn’t say anything for a long, long time. He stroked my hair and read to me about basic strumming technique but after awhile he stopped talking, too and we just sat there quietly and he smelled like sunlight and booze and everything purple in the world.

  “I killed the Ordinary Emperor with a story’s tail,” I confessed at last.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “Are you dead?”

  “The squirrels won’t tell me. Something about collapsing a waveform. But I’m not the one wearing a red dress.”

  I looked down. Deep red silky satin death flowed out over the bone floor. A lot of my skin showed in the slits of that dress. It felt nice.

  “The squirrels ate you, though.”

  “You never know with squirrels. I think I ate some of them, too. It’s kind of the same thing, with time travel, whether you eat the squirrel or the squirrel eats you. I remember it hurt. I remember you kissed me till it was over. I remember Early-to-Tea and Stopwatch screaming
. Sometimes you can’t help vanishing. Anyway, the squirrels felt bad about it. Because we’d taken care of them so well and they had to do it anyway. They apologized for ages. I fell asleep once in the middle of them going on and on about how timelines taste.”

  “Am I dead?”

  “I don’t know, did you die?”

  “Maybe the bubbles got me. The Emperor said I’d get sick if I traveled without a clarinet. And parts of me aren’t my own parts anymore.” I stretched out my legs. They were the color of rooster feathers. “But I don’t think so. What do you mean the squirrels had to do it?”

  “Self-defense, is what they said about a million times.”

  “What? We never so much as kicked one!”

  “You have to think like a six-legged mauve squirrel of infinite time. The Ordinary Emperor was going to hunt them all down one by one and set the chronology of everything possible and impossible on fire. They set a contraption in motion so that he couldn’t touch them, a contraption involving you and me and a blue story and a Red Country where nobody dies, they just change clothes. They’re very tidy creatures. Don’t worry, we’re safe in the Red Country. There’ll probably be another war. The squirrels can’t fix that. They’re only little. But everyone always wants to conquer the Red Country and nobody ever has. We have a wall and it’s a really good one.”

  I twisted my head up to look at him, his plum-colored hair, his amethyst eyes, his stubborn chin. “You have to say what you mean here.”

  “I mean I love you. And I mean the infinite squirrels of space and time devoured me to save themselves from annihilation at the hands of a pepper grinder. I can mean both. It’s allowed.”

  I kissed Orchid Harm inside the skull of a giant rodent and we knew that we were both thinking about ice cream. The ruby bassoons hooted up from the piazza and scarlet tanagers scattered from the rooftops and a watercolor unicorn told a joke about the way tubas are way down the road but the echoes carried her voice up and up and everywhere. Orchid stopped the kiss first. He pointed to the smooth crimson roof of the eye socket.

  A long stripe of gold paint gleamed there.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and several alarmingly large beasts. Her newest adult novel, Radiance, will be published by Tor Books in August.

  All Original Brightness

  Mike Buckley

  Gonzo arrived in an assault of brass music and spilling banners rippling the pelt of cannon smoke where her feet would’ve been, taking up the hotel entrance in all its marble and chrome—its expensive anachronisms and the people paid to stand next to them in red vests—filling it up as I probably had, Mitchum thought. Funny; from the inside, none of us feel so big.

  But then PFC Evelyn “Gonzo” Gonzalez’s immerso read the space it had available and shrunk. The smoke recoiled as if some great lungs within had inhaled, banners withdrew, the brass march quieted. A hovering face clarified in the nano swarm of the immerso, shifting features, for a moment not quite this person or that, then Gonzo’s still-beautiful voice came out of it.

  “Mitchum, you goat rapist.”

  “Gonzo, you short bus rock star.”

  Medals blinked into existence on Gonzo’s immerso, and Mitchum watched the floating pictures next to them—images that expressed her state of mind: Gonzo pretending to ride a broken surfboard, or standing in the sun at high school graduation. And here, with a boy. Mitchum felt his weight shift among the suspension gel in his tank—or maybe it was his imagination. Seeing Gonzo now, he wondered if she could feel her weight in the gel, if she sometimes felt the tug of the jack that ran from the inside of the tank and bolted to her forehead just like Mitchum’s did, between his two vanished eyes, the jack that carried images from the cameras on the outside of the tank and landed them in his brain, in what the AIs called the V2 portion of the gray matter. The AIs had a separate language altogether. Multisensory Projective Identity Display is what they called the nanites that clouded around the tank and formed images to express the tanked Marine’s emotional state. The Marines just knew them as immersos.

  They stood apart from each other, as soldiers do, looking at and thinking about the other.

  Gonzo broke the silence.

  “What are we waiting for?” she said. “Let’s drink, man.”

  A year ago, Mexico City, following the purchase of the Mexican capital by the Morninglory Corporation

  For the first two months it had been DF, Distrito Federal, but then the Marines changed it. DF, USA. Then just DFUS, Distrito Federal United States, they told the officers, but it really meant something nastier. The 5th was billeted in a church close to the city center. Pews had been yanked out to accommodate the rows of Marines. During the day the middle of the church was a sort of communal space. Mitchum left it alone as much as he could and spent time in one of the draped-off naves, reading the books his mother sent him. Gonzo got them after he was done.

  “I think your mom’s a lonely woman,” Gonzo said one day.

  “Huh?”

  “All she sends you are romances.”

  “It’s what she reads.”

  “Which is why I said she was lonely, Brainstein.”

  Every night they suited up and met the patrol convoy out front. Fat bellied med robos, carrying gallons of compressed stabilization gel, passed the thinner, lethal firing platforms. The boss robo, the thing that had taken the place of the officer corps in the field, wasn’t even within sight. It floated a mile above DF, staring down at the squad and reading the nano-spread in their blood. These patrols were meant to hit the Narkys, gangsters from all over the world hired by Morninglory, brought in to cause mayhem, just before they bought DF—to drive the price down, of course. The Narkys were too dumb to know that once the deal was done Morninglory would turn its attention to killing them off. They’d hired the USMC to do it.

  “Good evening, Squad six,” the boss robo said into their earpieces as they stepped out into the night. No one answered. Humvees moved up the block, patched in scrap metal. Small black globes floated over them, anti-ballistic nano swarms. Once on the road they’d disperse around the vehicle.

  Their ritual: Before every patrol Gonzo smacked Mitchum’s back hard.

  “Tip of the spear,” she said.

  Gonzo and Mitchum walked farther into the hotel, their immersos expanding from the joy they felt at seeing each other.

  “Where you been,” Gonzo said.

  “Been home.”

  “So I was right about the goats?”

  They floated into the Marine Corps Ball.

  Mitchum and Gonzo ordered drinks, and red-suited waiters reached in to the multicolored boil of the immersos. The bottles of beer were gripped by the nano swarms in the immersos, which could act like hands. Around them other Marines started arriving, grouping up, formal but just barely containing their joy and rage. Mitchum had felt this before. Get a bunch of Marines in a room and you can almost hear the whir of life. What other people were like this? Mitchum’s mom had been a teacher. Get twenty-five teachers in a room and the bitterness and disappointment they put off was like scalded coffee.

  “God,” Gonzo sighed, sipping through the oral port in her tank. “Beer tastes like God.”

  “You’re a heathen, Gonzo.”

  “You can’t tell me you still believe in that shit you used to talk about.”

  “What?”

  “Jesus. God. The holy toast.”

  Mitchum twitched. To calm himself, he watched Gonzo’s medals turn. He had the same medals: campaign ribbons, Mexico and Panama
; meritorious service award; Purple Heart.

  Mitchum didn’t believe in God anymore. Not even close.

  But because it was Gonzo, he lied. “Of course I do. Now more than ever.”

  “Ain’t that special,” she said.

  Mitchum drank.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said to Gonzo. “It’s important.”

  “What?”

  Mitchum thought about what he needed to say to Gonzo. He formed the words but didn’t release them. And then he lost his nerve.

  “I’m going to the head,” he said.

  “You’re right, that is important. Thanks for keeping me in the loop,” Gonzo answered as he moved away.

  This was Mitchum’s first MC Ball. They always happened in hotels like this one, expensive enough to have marble and soft carpets, but cheap enough to have rooms available to Marines that would trash half of them. Every Marine brought a date, which they ditched when they arrived so drinking could begin. The Dump tonight was a bar adjacent to the main ballroom. The abandoned dates were standing in groups, mostly women but a few men. They weren’t excited to be here, but seeing women dressed in their gowns calmed Mitchum, reminding him of pictures of his mother, and rose petals fell around him in a drifting snow—a reflection in the immerso of the change in his heart rate.