Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91

by Sean Williams

  “I found a tower.”

  “How does it look?”

  “Old,” I said. “Weak. It’s falling over.”

  “Ah.” My mother closed her eyes and I imagined, for a moment, that she had spent the past four days sitting exactly where she was now, never moving, never stirring, doing nothing but waiting. “That’s something, at least. At least they’ve managed that.”

  We sat in silence for a time. I listened to the bell-like music of the blighted bushes.

  “How do you know it will make any difference?” I asked.

  There were men in the northern swamplands who would treat a snakebite by first killing the snake, then amputating the hand, then the forearm, the elbow, all the flesh up to the shoulder as the dying boy screamed around a leather strap. I had seen them do it. I had been hiding behind my hands, too horrified to watch, and mother had scowled at their blades and blood-splattered faces before telling them it was too late.

  “Mother? How do you know?”

  She stood slowly, unsteadily, joints snapping and legs unfolding beneath her as though she had forgotten how they worked. She said, “You must be hungry. I’ll check the traps.”

  She disappeared into the forest. I laid down on the rock again, feet tucked safely away from the water. Wisps of clouds drifted overhead. I felt I was floating above the land, but at any moment I might fall and splash to the ground like a dropped bucket of water, scatter into rivulets before seeping into the earth.

  My mother had taken my knife while I was in the city. She kept it as we descended into the rolling foothills. I settled into my body again, that frail prison of skin and bone, so clumsy and slow and hungry. The nights had lost their chill while I was away. Each day was hotter than the last, the hours of sunlight harder to endure.

  After noon on the second day we came to a meadow. The river spilled from the trees and into broad open bowl. Without thinking I brushed my hand over the swaying grass and withdrew with a gasp of pain. The meadow grass was sharp enough to open a fan of tiny cuts across my fingers and palm.

  “Alis, wait.”

  I looked over my shoulder. My mother stood at the edge of the forest, safely in the shadows.

  “I’m only going for water,” I said.

  “Not here,” said my mother. She stepped forward, hesitated. “Come back to the shade. Please.”

  I had never heard my mother plead before.

  I turned away from the meadow and followed her into the forest again. A few paces from the trail she brushed orange leaves from a log and sat down. The sunlight dappled her shoulders and the crown of her head. I sat beside her.

  “We’ll wait for evening,” my mother said.

  I took the water skin from my pack and tilted the last drops into my mouth. Sunset seemed an age in the future. I imagined my lips and tongue drying like summer mud, pink flesh splitting along cracks, all the spit and blood evaporating away. I shifted into a firmer patch of shade, but it did nothing to alleviate the heat. My mother passed her water to me.

  “What were their names?” I asked.

  I expected her to tell me not to ask questions, not to be stupid. I did not expect an answer.

  “I never gave them names,” said my mother. “I never named you either. You chose your name for yourself. Do you remember? We were in one of the desert forts. There was an old woman leading a caravan. You tried to run away with her. She said she wouldn’t take you unless you had a name. You made one up, and she brought you back to me.” My mother looked at me. “You don’t remember?”

  I remembered hiding in a pile of blankets that stank of camel and falling asleep to the grind of cartwheels on sand.

  “All old women are the same to me,” I said, and my mother laughed.

  The sunlight deepened the lines around her eyes and sharpened the angles of her face. She would not pass for a mountain clanswoman now, nor a desert wanderer, nor an island adventuress. Should we cross the mountains again, my mother wearing that thin face and those golden eyes, she would be a stranger everywhere. Children would dare each other to slip frosthand blossoms into her tea and hide behind tent flaps to watch her choke.

  “We still have a chance,” she said. My mother plucked a handful of grass from the ground near her feet, crushed the brittle blades in her palm. Blood rose in beads across her skin. The swarm flowed from her fingertips, ate through the grass and stitched the wounds closed. “If most of them are still hiding away in the ark, we still have a chance.”

  She stood and strode into the forest. I listened until her footsteps faded, then slid to the ground and closed my eyes. There was nothing to hunt and we had not eaten in days. I drifted into a restless slumber.

  When evening came and the heat released its choke-hold on the day, I returned to the meadow of knife-sharp grass. The mountains still shone with light, but the river was in shadow. I found my mother kneeling in a fresh clearing. The swarm hummed around her in, cutting the grass blade by blade. It slowed when I approached, quivered uncertainly, sped along.

  There was a pile of dirt on the ground before her, oblong, the length of her forearm. She dribbled water from the skin and stirred it with her hands. Beside her lay the bundle she had carried from the nomad’s camp: clean white bones in a tattered shawl.

  My mother drew my knife from its sheath and drove it into the ground, jerked it free and stabbed again, and again, churning up dirt, grass, sand. She mixed in more water and worked it with both hands until it she had a sticky, gritty mud. She unwrapped the bundle, and one by one she picked the bones from the pile. The skull first, the knobs of the spine, the shoulders and ribs, arms and legs, the twin curves of the pelvis, the impossibly tiny fingers and toes. The swarm gathered to watch. The last daylight vanished from the highest peaks and the first stars emerged.

  With my knife, my mother opened a long cut down her forearm. She smeared blood onto every bone and scooped handfuls of mud to shape two legs, two stubby arms, a small head and a round body. She smoothed the shawl over the child-to-be.

  “You have more water in you than your sisters did,” my mother said. She was looking at the lump on the ground. The swarm spiraled and danced, twining through her fingers, and disappeared beneath the bloody cloth. “I used to think it was a mistake. They never tried join a caravan or sneak aboard a trading ship.”

  The shroud shifted as though caught in a breeze.

  My mother held up my knife. I stepped forward to claim it.

  “I won’t tell you what to do,” she said. “You can go back over the mountains if you want. You’ll have to decide. I’ll let you go now.”

  Something like a laugh teased the back of my throat, but the sound I made was closer to a sob. She wanted me to decide. She had woken me from a warm sleep in the nomads’ camp, led me through the ancient battlefield and the winter forest, spilled my blood into a wild river. She had brought me over the mountains to this dying land, and she wanted me to decide. Here, where the grass cut like knives and trees rattled in the wind and we hadn’t spotted a bird or a squirrel for days. Here, beside this lonely river that tasted of iron and fed into the heart of a grotesque city, and there was nothing to see out to every horizon but what would become of the forests and farms and cities and swamps, to the entire world, if the blight spread unchecked.

  Here, where she had made me from sand and bones and blood, she was letting me go.

  “Will you give her a name?” I asked.

  My mother tugged at a corner of the shawl, touched her hand to the round belly of mud. I turned away and pushed through the biting grass until I found the trail again.

  “Alis,” said my mother.

  I stopped, and my heart thudded with faint hope, but I did not turn.

  “I’ll choose a good name for her,” she said.

  Her voice was so low it breathed with the murmur of the river. When she fell silent the night swallowed her whole.

  I walked to the edge of the river. Perhaps it was the same beach where my sisters had once stood, trus
ting and docile, before my mother asked for their knives and led them into the water. The river ran swift and smooth. I unlaced my boots. I waded into the water and squeezed the shifting sand between my toes. Beneath the stars, the meadow and the forest might almost be mistaken for alive.

  I pressed my knife to the inside of my arm.

  There was a chance, my mother had said.

  The first drop fell. I ran with the current out of the foothills and onto the plain. The shifting riverbank beneath my feet, the water lapping my legs, the night air teasing the hair around my face, the burn of thirst and dull ache of hunger, the rattle of wind through dying grass, all of it slipped away, and there was nothing left but rust and silt and the cool dark river.

  About the Author

  Kali Wallace studied geology and geophysics before she decided she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds as much as she liked researching the real one. Her short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, and on Tor.com. Her first novel will be published by Katherine Tegen Books in 2016. She lives in Colorado.

  The Cuckoo

  Sean Williams

  April 1st, 2075, 9:15-9:23am

  More than one thousand commuters traveling via d-mat arrive at their destinations wearing red clown noses; they weren’t wearing them when they left. The global matter-transmission network is rebooted, source of the glitch unknown. All the clown noses are destroyed except for three retained by private collectors.

  April 1st, 2076, 10pm precisely

  One year later, every d-mat booth in the world opens at exactly the same moment, releasing a powerful scent of roses. Peacekeepers analyzing the fumes find no evidence of toxicity. People begin to talk about the existence of a new, anonymous art-prankster in the vein of Bekhisisa Uteku or Banksy, who turns 100 this year.

  April 1st, 2077

  At random times throughout the day, eight hundred and sixty nine booths each deliver a single page on which are typed twenty three different words from William S. Burroughs’ cut up novel The Soft Machine.

  May 23, 2077

  Professor Eme Marburg, 53, of New Leiden University begins investigating the activities of “The Fool,” as she dubs the prankster on her blog. She is a teacher of complexity theory and author of several abstruse textbooks on the subject, but it is her interest in mid-Twentieth Century literature that initially piques her interest. What happened to the remaining pages of The Soft Machine? Private collectors again, she is forced to assume.

  April 1st, 2078

  Two hundred and seventy-one children are redirected in-transit to a location in Macau, where they arrive wearing the costumes of popular fantasy adventure series Super Awesome Ninja Ponies. They play without adult supervision for sixteen minutes before being rescued. No serious injuries are reported.

  April 2nd, 2079, 12:03am

  Following the attack on children the previous year, PKs worldwide are on high alert for any sign of The Fool. There are no incidents for twenty-four hours. After declaring the operation a complete success, outspoken octogenarian lawmaker Kieran Defrain is redirected in-transit and dumped in Times Square, wearing nothing but a cloth diaper and a tag tied around his left big toe, inscribed “Gotcha!”

  November 9, 2079

  Anggoon Montri, 32, from the Thai Protectorate, confesses to being The Fool. After eight hours of intense interrogation he recants, claiming he simply wanted to publicize his own original artwork and leaving The Fool’s true name and motives a matter of keen speculation. Some say that he or she is a disgruntled employee intent on exposing the flaws in the d-mat network, others that “The Fool” is actually a collaboration of many people dedicated to Eris, the ancient Greek Goddess of chaos. Still others believe that each incident is perpetrated by copycats, and that the original Fool went to ground long ago. No evidence exists to confirm any of these theories.

  April 1st, 2080

  Despite a vigorous, yearlong search, The Fool remains at large. Embarrassed by their failure, PKs instruct the general public to avoid using d-mat except in the case of dire emergencies. No incidents are recorded involving d-mat booths. Instead, every networked fabricator in the world makes a unique piece of a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, each approximately one cubic centimeter in size, which, if assembled, would form a sculpture of an upraised middle finger twenty-five meters high.

  June 17, 2080

  Professor Marburg of New Leiden University publishes a paper in the journal Complexity and Organization entitled “Manifest Meaninglessness: The Fool and his Meme are Easily Imparted.” She notes that six weeks before The Fool’s first known incident (clown noses), a major Peacekeeper initiative was launched to curb youthful misuse of d-mat booths, called “Quit Clowning Around.” Similarly, the following year’s incident (the smell of roses) was preceded by the “It Stinks” meme, instigated by a celebrity complaining that she didn’t receive a red nose. The cut up novel allegory is obvious. That The Fool is a playing a game at everyone’s expense was a notion widely discussed prior to the mass-kidnap of children in 2078; “Gotcha” in turn connects with the PKs’ determination to apprehend and punish the prankster, while the disassembled, statuesque obscenity clearly relates to a growing worldwide amusement at official impotence.

  Professor Marburg concludes that this series of correlations is evidence of an emerging, powerful memeplex, or complex of memes, focused on The Fool. Whoever he or she originally was, he or she is here to stay.

  April 1st, 2081

  Ignoring stern Peacekeeper warnings, the “Fool’s Tools,” a loosely organized movement of everyday citizens travel en masse continuously for twenty-four hours, awaiting, perhaps inviting, the latest prank from their hero. None is forthcoming, although over the course of the day six copycat stunts are easily detected and reversed, their perpetrators taken into custody. The only work ascribed to The Fool is a maze of d-mat addresses that, once entered, cannot be exited. The technician who stumbled across the artifact is never seen again, prompting another global manhunt. The Fool is now a wanted murderer . . . but remains no easier to catch.

  April 2081-March 2082

  The longer The Fool remains at large, the higher his or her public profile rises. Numerous organizations form to honor the prankster’s artistry, including the Fool’s Brigade, the Tomfoolerists, and the First Church of the Foolhardy. No matter how vigorously Peacekeepers crack down on publicly disruptive initiation rites, the number of disciples, prophets and self-proclaimed messiahs mounts. A monument to the Unknown Fool is erected in Berlin. A popular genre of erotic fan fiction, known as Foolfic, explores the motives and secret emotional life of the men and women supposedly behind the meme. In a series of increasingly obscure articles and blog posts, Professor Marburg, now 57, continues her examination of the phenomenon, placing the latest stunt in the context of a memeplex that seems on the one hand healthy to the point of profligacy and on the other verging on implosion.

  She suggests that The Fool never existed at all, in any sense that matters–not as a person, or as a series of people copying each other, or as a group of people acting in concert. “The Fool” might very well be an emergent property of the world’s memeverse, in the same way that magnificent dunes form out of the simple interaction of sand grains and the wind, without conscious control or intent. Hence, she says, we have organizations that mimic The Fool, inferior to the original in some eyes but nevertheless an authentic part of the phenomenon. If that is so, she speculates, it is entirely possible that the sealed maze–cause of The Fool’s one and only direct fatality–might be a sign that the original Fool, whoever or whatever that might be, is now turning on itself, strangling itself in a knot of memetic transmutation that can only conclude one way.

  She recants her previous prediction, and issues a new one: The Fool is dead. The knot has been tied off. All that remains is aftershock.

  April 1st, 2082

  Few people read the theories of obscure professors. Huge
celebrations greet the latest Fool’s Day and no one is immune to the party atmosphere–not even those who, led by a masked figure called “Straight-Face,” mount theatrical mock-protests against the rising tide of foolishness. Pranks of all kinds are performed, ranging from the harmless to the extremely dangerous. One hundred and seventeen people are killed in accidents; many more are injured. None of these tragedies are connected to The Fool. The world waits in anticipation to see what this year’s “official” prank will be, without release.

  April 2082-March 2083

  The Fool’s absence does nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the Foolish. After all, “Gotcha!” happened the day after April 1st. The Fool’s fans assume that the prank, when eventually revealed, will be unmatched in subtlety and explosiveness. Plans for next year’s celebrations begin early. “Best ever,” the world is promised.

  In New Leiden University, Professor Marburg is troubled by the deaths. Not a day doesn’t go by that she doesn’t wish the world would put aside “The Fool” and the troubling visions he, she, or it inspires in her. As the memeplex grows larger than ever, The Fool as an active participant in its own perpetuation is made conspicuous by its absence. The Fool is dead; long live The Fool. How can that be possible?

  The growing memeplex, as mapped out by other colleagues in the field, is already a fiendishly convoluted web of popular culture. Only she is fixated on its connection to d-mat, the means of mass-transit for ninety-nine percent of the world’s population. It’s no accident, she has always understood, that The Fool manifests this way, for that network contains–and symbolizes–vast complexity. She herself is part of this complex whether she wants to be or not, both by traveling via d-mat and by publicly posting her speculations. She cannot help but wonder what role she has played in the evolution of The Fool. Did she inadvertently name it, for starters? Did she shape its evolution by noting its past connections and predicting its disappearance? What if her musings are the butterfly wings that created a storm that is still unfolding, albeit invisible to her, now?