by Neil Clarke
“Why do you think it’ll be better once you’re out?”
She jerks her shoulder and gives me a smoldering look. “Oh, don’t start. Just ’cause you’re depressed, doesn’t mean everyone else has to be too.”
“Sorry,” I whisper. I am.
“We’re ready to order,” she tells the waiter who’s been hovering nearby. After he departs, she gives me a cheerful smile. “You’ll feel better once you get your face fixed up.”
Beauty is fleeting, I want to say, but think better of it. “It’s good to see you, sweetie. Everything will be okay.”
At night, I lie awake listening to the rain’s whisper outside, thinking of love. I believe it is my failure that my daughter would not talk to me, and my granddaughter treats me as a child. I wish I knew how to fix it, how to fit into the snug world of the people I care about. Instead, I leave them behind, on the ground, as my plane sputters and spits jets of dust into too-warm, moist air. I don’t just herd clouds, I make them on occasion. The dust is called ‘condensation nuclei’, but they’re just dust. Tiny grains lodging under my fingernails and making me cough, the grains that already cost me a pair of lungs. I don’t really mind, as long as they make clouds appear out of thin, over-saturated air. I wish I could show my granddaughter that, and perhaps she would love them as much as I do, and by extension love me. I almost weep with joy when the morning comes, grey, weeping along with me.
At the factory, I flash my badge at the security guard, who nods back—a sad little ritual we exchange for the past forty years. I don’t give him a second look—my gaze travels past the undulating membranes toward the airfield.
“Wait,” he calls. “I have something for you.”
I open the manila envelope he gives me, with a panicked strumming of the heart against its cage. This is it, I think. They are finally going to let me go.
“Some girl dropped it off this morning,” the guard says.
I shield the piece of paper with the envelope, and the raindrops splash and slide down the smooth yellow surface. It’s just some photographs. I look closer, and my frantic heart seizes up: it is a picture of the vegetable sheep—just like I remember them, white, snug, content. There’s a close up of one, and on the next frame there’s a bird’s eye view of them, scattering in groups and solitarily across the green mountains. I swallow hard.
“A pretty girl,” the guard says. “Didn’t tell her name or anything, just that you’d know.”
“That’s my granddaughter,” I say, and turn away, stuffing the pictures back into the envelope, to hide them from moisture.
I wonder where she got them as I walk to my plane. There are none on the govnet, just like there is nothing there that would remind us that there is a world outside of our shrinking rainy continent. There are no kangaroos, Coliseum, Aegean Sea, or Sahara. Things she will never know about; yet, she found me the vegetable sheep. I am grateful, and surprised, and a bit sad that I have underestimated her.
The plane rises, and there are almost no clouds. I find a pocket of wet, warm air—I don’t need the sensors to tell me that, I can see the way it shimmers—and turn on my dust cannons on full blast. At first, there are only streams of grey refuse, but then, without warning, a thick fog condenses into white tufts, and soon there are enough of them to nudge gently with the jets of air, until they are compact and round. I pull the pictures out of the envelope and spread them across the seat next to me. I cannot wait to see her, to tell her how much those clouds trapped among the green mountains mean to me.
I never get a chance. I call her as soon as I land, from the soaked airfield. She does not answer her phone, even though I know she never detaches it from her ear. I am starting to worry, but then my ear-piece buzzes.
“Baby,” I say, “are you all right?”
There’s sobbing, and it’s not Ilona. “Anita?” Finally, in a halting, hoarse voice. It is my daughter.
“Petra,” I whisper. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. But Ilona’s missing.”
I count breaths. The joy of hearing my daughter’s voice is dissolved in her tears, and I don’t know what to say.
“Will you help me find her?”
“Of course.”
“Can you come over?”
Of course I can. She lives too far to walk, and I grab the first velorickshaw who idles by the gates of the factory, waiting for the pilots and the engineers to leave for the day. I settle into the rickety, leaking cab, and think, trying to ignore the water splashing in my face with every turn of the rickshaw’s feet on the pedals.
I think of what I can do—the friends to talk to, the old favors to call on. I’m not like Petra, who—I can feel it, I know—is sitting in her kitchen, crying, tearing her heart out imagining every pain, every violation that Ilona could’ve suffered. She’s always been too quick to grieve.
She left the door unlocked, and I find her in the kitchen, her shoulders heaving.
“Petra.”
She flings herself into my arms, with a fierceness of one who missed comfort.
I stroke her hair, dyed deep auburn. “Calm down. It’s not that bad. When did she disappear?”
“She didn’t come home from school.”
“Maybe she’s with some friends.” Even I know it’s a lie; another teenager might run off, but not dutiful Ilona, who took it on her thin shoulders to be the link between me and her mother, the only one who was young enough to not be burdened by old hurts.
Petra doesn’t even bother to argue. “I called the police, and they said they’ll look into it. They don’t return my calls.”
This is bad. “I’ll call Jeremy,” I tell her. “Blow your nose and make me some tea.”
She nods, and fusses with the kettle. If she were younger, she would’ve blamed me for everything.
I call Jeremy. He’s a cop and a good friend, and Petra hates him. But not today.
“I need a favor,” I tell him. “My granddaughter’s missing.”
He doesn’t seem surprised. “Can’t help you,” he says, and lowers his voice. “This is Federal jurisdiction.”
“BLIPs?” I see Petra flinch, and lower my voice. “What did the kid do?”
“Downloading and distribution of copyrighted materials.”
I think of the pictures in my plane. Vegetable sheep, so harmless. Who would’ve thought that the Bureau of Licensing and Intellectual Property would be interested in a sixteen-year-old kid? Unless she already has a record.
“We made the arrest, but the BLIPs took her off our hands quickly.”
I hang up, and look at Petra. She looks back, guilt shining through her tears like stars. I warned you, didn’t I?
I get a hold of Maria. She is a high school friend, and thus our relationship combines a gradual distancing with an exaggerated sense of obligation. But even she cannot help me.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers into the phone. “I can’t do anything. The computer on which download has occurred has been tapped for a while. We were just waiting for something serious enough to occur.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know,” she hisses. “Sorry, got to go.”
Petra is fiddling with her hair. “It’s my fault.”
No point in arguing—we both know she is right, but I’m not going to gloat. It was hard enough for me to lose her to the misguided rebellion that offered no action and no escape. She was only fourteen when the entertainment conglomerates first ran for presidency, and eighteen when they won. She still remembers when the information was not screened or regulated by the government, when there was no such thing as a govnet. Ilona doesn’t.
Petra was not the one to ignore it, but she was not a fighter. Her anger manifested in small acts of disobedience, which gave little consolation and even less meaning. One can talk shit about the government all one wants, but in the end is trapped worse than those who are oblivious.
“But what was I supposed to do?” Her voice gains a cracked quality. “My own mother
was working for them.”
So your daughter pays for the sins of your mother. Only you are untouched. “What exactly did you do?”
Petra tells me that she had her computer hacked, connected to the other net, not the govnet. She used it to read the news; she never knew that Ilona had any interest in using it, but didn’t make much of an effort to hide it, or to explain to her daughter the intricacies of the Declaration of Copyright. Of course the kid is going to see a picture and print it, never realizing that that constitutes intent to distribute, jail time mandatory. She had no way of knowing that everything is copyrighted in perpetuity, regardless of where it appears. Free net or not, it’s BLIP jurisdiction.
I drink the lukewarm tea as Petra cries and talks, cries and talks. Her sobs and babbling create a soothing rhythm, and it is easier to think to it. I think of the Federal penitentiaries in the area, and I think of how many of them I have flown above. No reason not to do it again.
“Tomorrow,” I tell Petra, “I’m going to do some reconnaissance flying.”
She stops sobbing. “Isn’t it dangerous?” Her eyes glitter, anxious. “I don’t want to lose you too.”
You threw me away years ago. What other loss are you afraid of? “It’s a government plane, baby, remember?”
“They let you fly anywhere you want?”
“As long as there are clouds.”
She stares at me, and I tell her of warm dry winters when clouds are hard to find, and there’s not enough moisture in the air to make them. I tell her of the quilt of the fallow fields and the green silk of the ocean, its foamy crests like tiny clouds. Of the tedious azure of the sky and the thrill of the hunt as I spot a white wisp of a nascent cloud, still unsure whether to come into being, its transparency both a promise and a threat. I chase them across the sky, over land and over sea, and whatever lies beneath is not my concern.
I let the clouds lead me. It is neither faith nor superstition, but a voice of experience—as long as I follow the white fluffy shapes, they will lead me where I need to be. It may be a roundabout way, blown by winds and air currents, convection and condensation, but we will get there in the end.
I follow them, but for the first time I let them be. My plane swoops down, closer and closer to the bejeweled patchwork of the ground, until I can discern tall grey cement and low greenery, and almost lose my way in the vapor rising from the over-saturated ground. I rise again to safety, but descend again, circling, looking. I disconnect the communication system and turn the scopes to the ground, and search it.
I watch the yards of the penitentiaries, and I look for women. At the Austin Federal Penitentiary, I find a group of young girls, in identical orange jumpsuits, as they circle aimlessly through a grey cement yard, and I look for the familiar face. It is hard to see in the grey rain, even with the scope, until one of them tilts her head upwards and smiles.
A day passes like that, and another one. It’s raining fine without me, leaving me free to look like a hawk. On the third day, I am denied entrance to the airfield.
I think of making a dash—the guard would never catch up with me. Instead, I ask why, even though I know the answer. The security guard looks at me with pity in his eyes, and it belies the banality of his words—subversive element in the family, security risk, retirement age. They don’t even bother to pick one excuse; they lump them all together, without an appearance of respect.
“I’m sorry,” he says in the end. “She was a real pretty girl.”
I lean closer to the plastic of his booth, and he doesn’t flinch away. “Listen, Thomas,” I say. “I left some personal belongings in the cockpit. Think I can run in real quick and get them?” And add, to ease possible suspicion, “Or you can get them for me.”
He sighs and shifts in his narrow stool, his bulk sloshing from one side to the other. He peers at the grey rain, coming down in glassy sheets. “You go right ahead,” he says. “Just don’t dawdle.”
I have no intention to. I cross the airfield in a quick walk, my boots sliding on the wet grass. Other pilots pay me no mind—they never do; I am too old to be looked at with any comfort. They don’t seem alarmed when I grab the prop and pull it, desperation tripling the weight of my frail body. The engine starts, its metal heart beating in a faster rhythm than mine, and the plane glides down the field. I catch up to it in a run and vault into the cabin, just as I hear someone call out, “Hey!”
The air is wet in my face, until I slam the door shut, and we’re off, spiraling, ascending on the warm currents, the clouds moving down to greet us, like sheep greeting their shepherd. I look at the clock—8 am. I have an hour to get there. I need forty-five minutes.
The girls are in the yard again. It is raining hard, and they wear yellow slickers, the hoods obscuring their faces. There are two female guards, watching from the cover of the tall wire fence; there are probably others.
One of the yellow hoods tilts back, and I see a pale face and dark hair, a small mouth opened in hope and wonder. She is the only one left standing as my plane drops into the yard, like a bird of prey. I land by the fence, and hope that the yard is long enough to stop.
There are gunshots, and the white panicked faces of the guards through the windshield. I turn the dust cannons on full blast, and they are lost in the grey cloud of searing particles. A small fist pounds on the door, and I swing it open. Ilona clambers into the seat next to me and the plane turns around. There’s not enough space for a proper takeoff and I gun it, taking off the top of the fence.
Ilona gasps next to me, and then regains her usual composure. “Did you like my pictures?”
“Yes. Thank you very much.”
“I thought you would.”
I point at the approaching tight cluster of white clouds, and my granddaughter laughs. “Just like in the pictures.”
I aim the plane into the center of it, and cut the engine. We fall, weightless, surrounded by the celestial vegetable sheep. One of them takes us into its soft arms and smiles, cradling the plane.
The engines rev back to life, and Ilona lets out a long sigh. “I could fall like this forever.”
I nod. She is strong and she will learn to fly.
About the Author
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. Her critically acclaimed novels, The Secret History of Moscow and The Alchemy of Stone and The House of Discarded Dreams were published by Prime Books. Her short stories have sold to Analog, Baen’s Universe, Dark Wisdom and Clarkesworld, as well as Japanese Dreams and Magic in the Mirrorstone anthologies.
The Devonshire Arms
Alex Dally MacFarlane
1. The door, welcoming.
The door closed behind Ambri with a click.
A candle burned.
There was a sword by the heavy wooden door, and a coat made of raven feathers. The leather on the sword’s hilt was faded from long use. The coat had holes at the elbows and armpits.
Overhead hung a chandelier of amber and glass. The walls were dark, and fabric-covered lights hung over the counter. Windows admitted the murky rainlight of day’s fade. In high-sided booths made of leather like the finest dark shoe, murmurs and laughter passed from mouth to ear, mouth to glass.
With a swish of her dark red skirts, Ambri swung onto a stool and asked for a whiskey with lemonade. The painted man behind the counter nodded and mixed the drink, moving his hands with the surety of one fluent in the language of bottles and taps. Ambri watched him. A map of the London Underground had grown on his skin, and when he shifted she saw the blues of Victoria and Piccadilly merge into one, the yellow of Circle split into two circles, four circles: an irreal mitosis of helical tracks.
A strange never-told story, Ambri thought.
With a word of thanks and an exchange of coin, she received her drink.
She looked at it sitting on the counter, one amid many low, broad glasses stomach-full of liquids light and dark, and she sucked from the thin black straw. When the alcohol-laced sweet coldness slid down her
throat, she smiled.
It is so good to be back here.
She smiled over and over.
2. The walls, dark like cushions
Ambri had put her sword by the door many times in the century and a half since finding the pub, since that day when she had stepped inside with shoulders aching like the un-oiled joints of a suit of armor and she had seen a woman made of smoke and fire napping in a chair.
Many times since, she had seen new solid faces between the wispy, unfocused shapes of the short-lived people. She had been the woman the solid people saw at the counter, in a chair, talking at a naval-high table—the woman they approached, saying, “This place! Are you here often? Do others like us come here?”
“This place is very new,” the woman made of smoke and fire had said when Ambri woke her with those words. “It is my first visit. But I think I will return.”
Her voice had sounded like spices and sun-baked bricks.
“Welcome.”
“Welcome,” Ambri later said to Esnan, who wore a gold ring in his eyebrow that winked like a courtesan. “Welcome,” Ambri later said to the earth-skinned and sun-haired epicene, calling hirself Aus in these times, who had created cassowaries and platypi in hir youth. “Welcome,” Ambri later said to others.
And afterward she often saw them in the pub, resting between their work, between the hard steps of their lives.
“Welcome,” Ambri said to the girl who could not tolerate rhythms, the first time they met.
3. The plates, hot like embraces
In a booth of blue leather Ambri found her friends: Esnan, mixing trickeries with the fortunes he sold and talking to Aus, who practiced hir next creations with napkins and straws. Idjinna smouldered in the back.
“Ambri! Good to see you!” Esnan stood up so that she could slide to the back of the booth. “How are you?”
“Busy.”
Her sword, with well-worn leather on its hilt, rested by the door.
Aus flicked dark fingers, and a marsupial bird made of folded napkins crumpled into sleep.
