by Neil Clarke
“The woman?”
“She’s looking for someone called Pepper. She says he’s her grandfather. She thinks you know . . . ”
“They all do.” June looked down at the remains of his sandwich. “He was okay. I liked him. He paid us in gold to get him out of here, but there were ships waiting for us between the wormholes out and the island.
“He fought them off, and then when he realized we were in danger, jumped into the ocean and sank. Didn’t stop them from sinking the Zephyr III anyway. They killed everyone but me. Dragged me out of the ocean and took me back, forced me to tell them everything he did, or said.”
Tiago wrapped his arms around himself and leaned forward.
The Doacq was hunting them. Nashara may not even be alive, a victim to Kay’s machinations, just like Pepper.
And what was he? If she could throw their lives away so easily, what chance did he have of living if he moved closer into Kay’s world?
He thought of the contact, the compulsion he had to do what she wanted. It came from her voice, her posture, the way she could read him. And it wasn’t real.
With her out of the room, he could struggle away, couldn’t he? All that was left was his fear. Fear of consequences.
Fear that she would track him down for betraying her.
“She has a ship, an armed ship, she said, waiting for her. It’s called . . . the Strainer, or something like that,” Tiago said in a tumble of words. And then he said something he never would have, had he been doing this for Kay. “If you want, we can try to run for it.”
June didn’t even pause to think about it. “Yes. I’d run with you.”
“I could be trying to trick you,” Tiago said.
“I don’t care. I’ll take the chance. I don’t want to be trapped here, I don’t want to get eaten by the Doacq.”
Tiago found himself nodding with June.
“We leave the moment we see morning,” Tiago said.
“So you can spot rain?” It’d be suicidal to try and move through the city without any rain gear. And if he couldn’t see the rain coming, he wouldn’t know to hide from it.
“Yes. Do you have any family?”
June shook his head. “No. They’re dead now.”
Tiago did not follow that up with more questions. He didn’t want to know.
The Ox-men guarding them checked on them randomly. The moment the door closed, the early sun lighting a band of orange up over the rooftops, Tiago broke the locked windows open. There were other skills he’d picked up in addition to picking pockets.
June started to climb down the side, but Tiago shook his head. “Go up, to the roof. They’ll expect us on the street.” The Runners and Ox-men would fan out down there, hunting them.
Rooftop to rooftop would keep them out of sight for longer.
Once up there, Tiago oriented himself. They were closer to the docks than he’d dared hope.
They stuck to the roofs, clambering awkwardly up drain spouts and slipping on tiles. But they made it to the edge of the plaza after an exhausting hour.
The docks ran out from the seawall, long piers of concrete stacked with unloaded goods and Ox-men hauling carts back and forth.
It wasn’t until they’d walked through the crowds of the plaza, and then up onto the seawall, that Tiago relaxed a little. The Ox-men guarding them would have called the alarm by now, phoned Kay, and the entire town might be crawling with people hunting for them, but they’d at least gotten to the docks.
Tiago stopped a dock worker in greasy coveralls overseeing the unloading of a ship docked almost by the seawall. “We’re looking for a ship called Strainer, have you seen it?”
The man frowned. “Streuner? It’s over there.”
Tiago looked. It was a gun-metal gray boat with a large green flag with a black and yellow X on it.
June yanked Tiago around to face the plaza behind them. The hooded figure of the Doacq stood at the far side, people scattering away from it.
“I don’t think it . . . ” Tiago started to say, as the Doacq looked over the top of the crowd right at them, and began to move toward them. “Shit.”
“But it doesn’t come out in the day,” June said, his voice breaking with fear.
Kay had said it seemed to choose the night. That her lights replicating daylight hadn’t harmed it. He shouldn’t have been surprised. But he was. From across the plaza Tiago could see the unnaturally long jaw dislocated and drop, down past the alien’s chest, down almost to its feet. Anything that stood in the way disappeared into it: scared people, tables, chairs. It swallowed them all.
Tiago and June turned and sprinted for the dock leading to Streuner. An act of faith that they could protect them, really, but what else could they do?
They shoved people aside as they ran the slow curve, ignoring the curses aimed in their direction.
When they turned onto the dock and sprinted, Tiago looked over at the seawall. The Doacq barreled along it.
He realized he was screaming as he ran. Dockworkers were turning to look, and then jumping into the water as they realized it was the Doacq.
It gained on them. They had half the dock before they could reach the Streuner, and the Doacq was coming up the dock, may three hundred feet behind them.
Tiago knew he shouldn’t look over his shoulder, it slowed him down, but he couldn’t help it.
The dark pit of its maw was so wide and inescapable, ready to swallow them, the pier, and anything else.
As to where people ended up when it got them, only those swallowed knew, and they’d never come back to talk.
Tiago realized he was about to find out. He wasn’t going to make it to the end of the dock, where the Streuner waited. Maybe even if they made it, they’d still be swallowed up.
Maybe it could eat the whole boat.
He glanced back over his shoulder, and as he did so, a loud boom came from the end of the dock. Something large whipped past his had, and the Doacq staggered and fell.
Its mouth dipped, hitting the concrete of the dock and swallowing a scoop of it, concrete chipping around the edges of its mouth.
Another boom stopped it as it struggled up to its feet again.
Tiago redoubled his run, as did June. He ran so hard it felt like his joints would pop, his brain would be jarred free of his skull, and his lungs would burst into flames.
As they moved clear, the booms turned into an all-out barrage. Continuous thunder rolled from the ship, bursting out from large guns that had rolled out of emplacements all over the ship.
His eardrums stopped trying to understand the deafening sound as the entire section of the dock under the Doacq disappeared.
The Doacq had picked the wrong ship to run at.
Two dark-skinned crewmen, just like Nashara, held out their hands at the top of the plank leading on to the deck. Tiago sprinted into them, knocking them over and collapsing, panting, amazed to still be alive.
“Cast off!” Someone yelled, and the plank was tossed free. From his viewpoint on the deck, Tiago saw a tiny rocket shoot up several hundred feet into the sky, dragging a length of parafoil with it.
The foil expanded, filled with air, and the ship began to move.
A pair of feet in familiar boots stopped in front of Tiago’s face. He looked up. It was Nashara. She moved slowly, with a slight limp, and wore a patch over one eye. Her hair had been burned off, and one arm was in a sling.
She kneeled and grabbed his hand and said something, but he couldn’t hear it through the ringing in his ears because the guns still hadn’t stopped: Streuner shivered constantly as it continued firing on the Doacq as they moved away from the dock. Slowly, at first, but then the ship built a bow wave as it sped up.
A few minutes later the entire ship slowly struggled up onto the hydrofoils underneath its hull, and it popped free of the resistance of pushing against water.
They sped away from the docks, the deck tilting alarmingly as the Streuner turned hard toward the open sea.
June was still in a room being checked over for injuries, but Tiago was allowed to wander around inside the ship. There were crew cabins, a kitchen, storage rooms, a common sitting area.
Nashara sat there, playing with a small piece of paper. She kept folding it until she had turned it into a tiny flower.
“She sent me to pick your pocket,” Tiago confessed, standing at the table. He’d expected the boat to sway more than it did, but the foils kept it almost rock steady. “It was a trap from the beginning. And I’m sorry.”
She looked up at him with one eye, and Tiago flinched. What would he do to someone who’d cost him an eye? What would someone as powerful as Kay do?
“I knew it was a trap,” Nashara said. “What I wasn’t expecting was the Doacq.”
“You?” He found that hard to believe, knowing the things Nashara had seen and participated in.
Nashara shook her head. “It’s a massive universe, Tiago, with many participants. The Doacq’s an important force, and I’m not sure what it’s up to. We need to find Pepper, if we can, if he’s still alive. If June can help. Maybe together we can find some answers, find out if the Doacq is a threat to us. But Tiago, I’m just tiny player on the edge of some large events. I don’t know half of everything. The universe is not tidy. You don’t always get quick answers.”
It was a sentiment that Tiago felt a kinship to. She felt just like him. Navigating her way through all this just as best she could.
But then that raised his suspicions.
“Are you saying that just to make me feel better?” He asked. “Do you rule me know, like Kay?”
If she had the same talents, why not?
“I mean, if I’m your pawn, you seem calmer than Kay,” he continued. “She isn’t just someone organizing street kids, protection setups, scams. Not anymore. Now she’s just using us up like our lives don’t even mean anything.”
Outside the ship slowed, hydrofoils sinking deeper into the water until the hull hit water.
Nashara crushed the little paper bird into a wad. “Sometimes we become the thing we’re fighting hardest against,” she said thoughtfully. “And Kay is fighting hard against an unimaginable past on Okur. I was there, once. I’ve seen what she came from. I don’t think she will stop fighting it for quite a while.”
Tiago thought about Placa del Fuego, caught between the forces of Kay and the Doacq, and wondered if the island would survive the both of them. “She said she’d rule the island.”
“And maybe more, no doubt,” Nashara said. Then something strange happened, a fluttering sensation in the deepest pit of Tiago’s stomach that left him suddenly dizzy. Nashara stood up and grabbed his shoulder. “Come, Tiago, I want to show you something.”
She led him out onto the rear deck of the ship, which was dominated by the black nothingness of a wormhole.
Tiago gasped. He’d never seen one this close, towering over his head. Large enough for a whole ship to pass through and that had once floated above a world. Spaceships had once passed through it before being deorbited.
And now him.
The sky overhead was covered by a dark, orange cloud in outer space, whisps of it streaming off toward the horizon. And cutting the sky in half: a silver twinkling band. The Belt of Arkand. He’d heard it mentioned by sailors, and here he stood looking at it with his own eyes.
“You asked if I made you do this,” Nashara said. “But this was your own choice. I didn’t make you do it. This is your new life now.”
But was it the right choice?
He looked around at the strange sea they plowed through, and saw another wormhole far ahead in the distance, propped on floats and bobbing on the surface of the green ocean. That wormhole led to yet another ocean, and more worlds.
More possibilities.
Maybe not the right choice. Only time would tell that. But it was certainly his choice, he knew, leaving all those years of sitting on the sea wall and dreaming behind for a chance just like this.
About the Author
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born New York Times Bestselling novelist and short story author. His work has been translated into 16 different languages. He has published some 50 short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and Campbell awards. You can find him online at TobiasBuckell.com.
Herding Vegetable Sheep
Ekaterina Sedia
I herd the clouds as I do every day. Their ghostly protuberances wrap around the wings of the plane, obscuring the blue AOL logo with their wispy fingers, and then retreat under the stream of air from the props, swirling and compacting into tight white formations that remind me of those queer plants—what were they called? Vegetable sheep. I’ve seen them on my vacation in New Zealand, years ago, when there was a New Zealand. These plants are related to daisies, the tour guide said. It was hard to believe that.
I watch the columns of numbers that scroll across my retinal implant, with an occasional commercial interruption from my employer, only nowadays they call them ‘congressional communiqués’. I suppose they are. I wish I could save them to reread them later, but preserving such trivia is not worth getting arrested for.
The clouds swirl, tighter and snugger, their color deepening into grey, and my plane circles them this way and that, herding them together, making them coalesce like vegetable sheep in the New Zealand mountains. The plane growls like a sheep dog, and the clouds gain mass and finally weep. I circle them again, strangely uneasy about their watery release. Rain is good, I remind myself. Rain is power, rain is electricity, rain is new juice in the batteries.
The radio implant buzzes and I wince.
“Anita,” it says, and for a moment I believe it is speaking to me—the radio, I mean, not just the person on the other end. The illusion fades. “You better come down—you’re running low.”
“Okay,” I say. “I was just about to.” I touch the pads and spiral downwards, like a falling leaf, with grace and dignity.
It is raining hard when I land, the black wings of the generator’s membranes thrumming, vibrating up and down, giving birth to electricity that feeds the city around it. It is like a giant diaphragm, its undulations under the insistent drumming of the raindrops betraying its thoughts to the world. The Greeks used to think that the diaphragm’s movement generated thoughts, and I am almost ready to believe that. The membrane thrums, its dark thoughts enveloping the city with fog. I glance at the time indicator of my heads-up display and rush away from the airfield, through the iron gates of the energy factory. I am running late.
The rain is pouring now, and my yellow slicker caves under the coalescing and dividing rivulets of rainwater, presses against my shirt, cooling my skin, crushing my chest with its weight. It is hard to breathe underwater. I cross the streets, knocking over the mushroom caps that have colonized every sidewalk and almost skid on the patch of green algae, camouflaged treacherously between the white stripes of the pedestrian crossing, but right myself. I have an appointment to keep. I enter the cafe, and wedge my body into a narrow booth, and look out of the window until a tall mermaid-like shape swims from out of the rain. My granddaughter.
“Hi, Anita,” says the girl as she slides sideways into the booth, keeping her head down, as if afraid that someone would recognize her. She is afraid that someone would recognize her, I think. This is why she never calls me grandma.
“Hi, baby. Does your mother know you’re here?”
She scoffs. “I’m not a baby, Anita.”
I know that. I just want to find out if my daughter ever asks about me.
She softens, and smiles at the waiter who brings us a pitcher of cold water. “We’ll need another minute,” she tells him, her eyes green and vacant, like those of a cat. New contacts, I guess. Then she turns those hollow eyes at me. “I wanted to talk to you, Anita,” she says in a caring voice. As if she’s the g
rown up.
I nod. “Go ahead, Ilona.” I know what she’s going to say.
She leans in, her narrow palm pressed against the plastic of the table between us. “How old are you, Anita?”
“Sixty-eight.”
“It shows.”
We stare at each other, not blinking, and under her gaze I feel every blemish and wrinkle pucker up, turn purple, leer.
“I don’t mean to be cruel,” she says, “but you don’t have to look this way.”
“I know.” If I change, will you be less embarrassed of being seen with me? “I’ll think about it.”
“There’s nothing to think about,” she says with a beam of confidence only pretty teenage girls can muster, and starts flipping through her menu.
I do the same, all the while wondering why am I not ashamed of my face? Instead, I cringe at the thought of my optimized heart and metal joints, of my eyes that can see so well because of lasers, of my new healthy lungs. I can only bear these artifices within me because my old skin is covering them up. I could not imagine separating from it. But the love, the love . . . my eyes skim over the lines in front of me, as I imagine what it would be like to have my daughter back, my granddaughter not ashamed.
My granddaughter looks up and frowns. She pulls out a handkerchief tucked in her wristband, spits in it, and rubs my cheek, as intrusive and unselfconscious as a parent with her child. I submit. She looks at the handkerchief, incredulous. “What’s that?”
It’s a green smudge. “Algae,” I say. “They grow everywhere.”
“On your face?” She doesn’t bother to hide her disgust.
“It’s even wetter up in the clouds,” I say. “They look like vegetable sheep from up there. You should— ”
She interrupts. “Vegetable sheep?”
“Big white and grey cushions—millions of tiny plants wedged together, all the same height. They grow high up in the mountains, where it’s cold. If one grows taller than the others, it dies of frostbite.” I’m not making sense, and I change the subject. “Anyway. How’re things at school?”
“Boring.” She gives a little laugh. “I can’t wait until I’m out of there.”
