Somewhere, far away, there is a land where we are born. Somewhere, far away, there is a land where people are not buried when they die, but are taken upriver by the Beasts.
I dream of that land almost every day, whether I’m weeding the garden that my adoptive mothers have planted, or baking bread, or washing the clothes in a shallow section of the river. There are so many dead in the baskets of the Beasts each morning that this land they come from must be full of people, more people even than are buried in our cemetery, more than have ever existed in our small town. I wonder what things they have built, towers of marble, cathedrals of glass, bridges of gold that gleam red in the sunset …
My dearest love is a girl named Ria, who was given a boy’s name when she first came here but let her adoptive father know that he was wrong as soon as she could speak. Although nearly adults, we two are the youngest living in the town, as it has been one of the longest stretches between new arrivals that anyone can remember.
In the evenings, Ria sits with me under the apple trees in my mothers’ orchard, nibbling at my ears when she thinks that I have paid too much attention to the Beasts passing us by, holding my hands against her chest when I try to cup them behind my ears to hear the Beasts’ strangely soft footfalls.
I prefer to watch them in the evening. They look happier, their burdens left behind them. Their springy coils of metallic hair bounce with each step. The lightened baskets swing down along their sides, empty and free. Their arms pump the air, all sinew and skin, and their long, long fingers snap quiet rhythms.
“Ria,” I whisper into her ear, resting my forehead against her kinky black hair, “someday I will follow them home, back to where we came from, and I will find out why we were sent away, and how, and by whom, and then we will know who we really are.”
She shakes her head, reaches behind us for a freshly wind-felled apple, and takes a bite before offering it to me. “Why should we care about who we used to be, or who we would have been, or those who never wanted us to begin with?”
The apple’s flesh is crisp and cool and sweet between my teeth. “Aren’t you curious?”
She rolls her eyes and runs her fingers through her hair. “Not about who I used to be, no.”
“But what if … ?”
“No.”
“We could be princes, or kings, or queens, or long-lost siblings to an emperor, or …”
“Or babies too strange to ever be wanted, people with no past worth speaking of or remembering.”
She takes the apple back, and I say, “I don’t understand why you don’t even want to know.”
“You won’t go, anyway,” she says. “You’ve been telling me the same thing, making plans like wisps of clouds, since we were children.”
“Someday,” I insist. “When I’m ready.”
Ria shakes her head, and she pulls me down beside her on the grass, staring up at the leaves and branches and softly reddening apples. Above our farms and the trees, the walls of the valley ascend far into the clouds on most days, so high that nothing can grow in the thinned air. We are ringed around by jagged black teeth, as though we rest in the back of a mouth tipped to the sky.
It is later, after we have made up, and kissed again, and reached gentle fingers under clothes and into all our favorite places, that I realize my mistake. It is not that Ria is not curious. It is that she prefers the morning Beasts, prefers waking before dawn, alone, and watching them walk.
In the mornings, their backs are stooped under the weight of all the dead. In the mornings, they walk like dead things themselves, their eyes tired and pained, their fingers not snapping, but instead dangling near to the cracked road beneath their feet. They do not whistle on their travels upriver, but instead they sometimes hum a dirge, a lullaby, for the dead they carry.
I do not always wake to watch the Beasts pass us in the morning, but I know that Ria does, so I crawl from the warmth of my sheets an hour before dawn, too early, too early, the exhaustion making my skin feel tight and achy. I wash my face in the basin of cold water, trying to bring myself to wakefulness, then grab two rolls left over from dinner the night before and slip out the door quietly enough that my mothers will not wake.
Ria is not by the trees in the orchard, nor is she on the hill beside the river, but when I climb that hill, I do see her sitting on a large stone next to the great road. I sprint to her, nearly dropping our breakfast.
“Ria!” I say, starting to feel the soft, shuffling footfalls of the Beasts upon the earth. They are so near, so near, just around the bend of the river and road. “Ria, what are you doing?”
“Shh,” she says. “They don’t mind if you sit so close to watch them, as long as you are quiet.”
“But …”
“Come and sit with me,” she says, “or go back to bed.”
I climb up to sit next to her on the stone, and hand her one of the rolls. She sniffs it, smiles, and then puts it inside a small canvas bag she has slung over one shoulder.
“You spend so much time thinking about the land we’ve come from,” she says. “Do you ever think about what might be further on down the road?”
I frown, my fingers tearing into the roll I have kept for myself. Crumbs fall to the road, and a quick and fearless crow grabs them before the Beasts round the corner.
They are as heavily laden this morning as they ever are. I have never sat so close to watch the dead. I recoil slightly, but Ria grabs my arm and steadies me. The dead are old and young and in between. Some look peaceful as they gaze out at the valley. Others are weeping tears of blood, or holding together grievous injuries with pale, bloodless fingers.
The Beasts ignore us, ignore the valley, pay no attention to anything around them, until suddenly Ria jumps down from the stone and dashes onto the road, dancing around the feet of the Beasts in the front until she is standing before the last of them.
I cannot breathe, and I cannot move, and I cannot save her.
The Beast stops, its feet slowing to a shuffle and I see that Ria is barely as tall as half its shin. It stares down at her, long fingers straying up to scratch the curly hairs on its chest.
“I wish to go with you,” Ria says.
The Beast looks over her to the others in its procession, passing the orchard and the hill, and soon to be out of our town altogether.
Its voice rumbles in its chest, and I think that it is about to talk, but it does not. It hums to itself quietly, thoughtfully, and then reaches behind to the baskets on its shoulders. It palms something, and then holds out a hand the size of a small house to Ria. A child sits there, eyes wide and frightened, not looking nearly as dead as the others.
“Stay here,” the Beast says, its voice like rolling thunder. “Safe, here.”
Ria looks for a moment like she will argue. But the Beast is as tall and implacable as a mountain. Her shoulders slump as she accepts the refusal. She reaches out, and the child slides down off the Beast’s great hand to stand with her on the road.
The Beast considers them for a moment, rubs Ria’s hair gently with a single fingertip, and then steps over them, walking a touch faster than usual so that it can catch up to its fellows.
Innumerable Glimmering Lights
Rich Larson
At the roof of the world, the Drill churned and churned. Four Warm Currents watched with eyes and mouth, overlaying the engine’s silhouette with quicksilver sketches of sonar. Long, twisting shards of ice bloomed from the metal bit to float back along the carved tunnel. Workers with skin glowing acid yellow, hazard visibility, jetted out to meet the debris and clear it safely to the sides. Others monitored the mesh of machinery that turned the bit, smoothing contact points, spinning cogs. The whole thing was beautiful, efficient, and made Four Warm Currents secrete anticipation in a flavored cloud.
A sudden needle of sonar, pitched high enough to sting, but not so high that it couldn’t be passed off as accidental. Four Warm Currents knew it was Nine Brittle Spines before even tasting the name in the wate
r.
“Does it move faster with you staring at it?” Nine Brittle Spines signed, tentacles languid with humor-not-humor.
“No faster, no slower,” Four Warm Currents replied, forcing two tentacles into a curled smile. “The Drill is as inexorable as our dedication to its task.”
“Dedication is admirable, as said the ocean’s vast cold to one volcano’s spewing heat.” Nine Brittle Spines’s pebbly skin illustrated, flashing red for a brief instant before regaining a dark cobalt hue.
“You are still skeptical.” Four Warm Currents clenched tight to keep distaste from inking the space between them. Nine Brittle Spines was a council member, and not one to risk offending. “But the ice’s composition is changing, as I reported. The bit shears easier with every turn. We’re approaching the other side.”
“So it thins, and so it will thicken again.” Nine Brittle Spines wriggled dismissal. “The other side is a deep dream, Four Warm Currents. Your machine is approaching more ice.”
“The calculations,” Four Warm Currents protested. “The sounding. If you would read the theorems—”
Nine Brittle Spines hooked an interrupting tentacle through the thicket of movement. “No need for your indignation. I have no quarrel with the Drill. It’s a useful sideshow, after all. It keeps the eyes and mouths of the colony fixated while the council slides its decisions past unhindered.”
“If you have no quarrel, then why do you come here?” Four Warm Currents couldn’t suck back the words, or the single droplet of ichor that suddenly wobbled into the water between them. It blossomed there into a ghostly black wreath. Four Warm Currents raked a hasty tentacle through to disperse it, but the councillor was already tasting the chemical, slowly, pensively.
“I have no quarrel, Four Warm Currents, but others do.” Nine Brittle Spines swirled the bitter emission around one tentacle tip, as if it were a pheromone poem or something else to be savored. Four Warm Currents, mortified, could do nothing but turn an apologetic mottled blue, almost too distracted to process what the councillor signed next.
“While the general opinion is that you have gone mad, and your project is a hilariously inept allocation of time and resources based only on your former contributions, theories do run the full gamut. Some believe the Drill is seeking mineral deposits in the ice. Others believe the Drill will be repurposed as a weapon, to crack through the fortified cities of the vent-dwelling colonies.” Nine Brittle Spines shaped a derisive laugh. “And there is even a small but growing tangent who believe in your theorems. Who believe that you are fast approaching the mythic other side, and that our ocean will seep out of the puncture like the viscera from a torn egg, dooming us all.”
“The weight of the ocean will hold it where it is,” Four Warm Currents signed, a sequence by now rote to the tentacles. “The law of sink and rise is one you’ve surely studied.”
“Once again, my opinion is irrelevant to the matter,” Nine Brittle Spines replied. “I am here because this radical tangent is believed to be targeting your project for sabotage. The council wishes to protect its investment.” Tentacles pinwheeled in a slight hesitation then: “You yourself may be in danger as well. The council advises you to keep a low profile. Perhaps change your name taste.”
“I am not afraid for my life.” Four Warm Currents signed it firmly and honestly. The project was more important than survival. More important than anything.
“Then fear, perhaps, for your mate’s children.”
Four Warm Currents flashed hot orange shock, bright enough for the foreman to glance over, concerned. “What?”
Nine Brittle Spines held up the tentacle tip that had tasted Four Warm Currents’s anger. “Traces of ingested birth mucus. Elevated hormones. You should demonstrate more self-control, Four Warm Currents. You give away all sorts of secrets.”
The councillor gave a lazy salute, then jetted off into the gloom, joined at a distance by two bodyguards with barbed tentacles. Four Warm Currents watched them vanish down the tunnel, then slowly turned back toward the Drill. The bit churned and churned. Four Warm Currents’s mind churned with it.
* * *
When the work cycle closed, the Drill was tugged back down the tunnel and tethered in a hard shell still fresh enough to glisten. A corkscrewing skiff arrived to unload the guard detail, three young bloods with enough hormone-stoked muscle to overlook the still-transparent patches on their skin. They inked their names so loudly Four Warm Currents could taste them before even jetting over.
“There’s been a threat of sorts,” Four Warm Currents signed, secreting a small dark privacy cloud to shade the conversation from workers filing onto the now-empty skiff. “Against the project. Radicals who may attempt sabotage.”
“We know,” signed the guard, whose name was a pungent Two Sinking Corpses. “The councillor told us. That’s why we have these.” Two Sinking Corpses hefted a conical weapon Four Warm Currents dimly recognized as a screamer, built to amplify a sonar burst to lethal strength. Nine Brittle Spines had not exaggerated the seriousness of the situation.
“Pray to the Leviathans you don’t have to use them,” Four Warm Currents signed, then joined the workers embarking on the skiff, tasting familiar names, slinging tentacles over knotted muscles, adding to a multilayered scent joke involving an aging councillor and a frost shark. Spirits were high. The Drill was cutting smoothly. They were approaching the other side, and though for some that only meant the end of contract and full payment, others had also been infected by Four Warm Currents’s fervor.
“What will we see?” a worker signed. “Souls of the dead? The Leviathans themselves?”
“Nothing outside the physical laws,” Four Warm Currents replied, but then, sensing the disappointment: “But nothing like we have ever seen before. It will be unimaginable. Wondrous. And they’ll soak our names all through the memory sponges, to remember the brave explorers who first broke the ice.”
A mass of tentacles waved in approval of the idea. Four Warm Currents settled back as the skiff began to move and a wave of new debates sprang up.
* * *
The City of Bone was roughly spherical, a beautiful lattice of ancient skeleton swathed in sponge and cultivated coral, glowing ethereal blue with bioluminescence. It was older than any councillor, a relic of the dim past before the archives: a Leviathan skeleton dredged from the seafloor with buoyant coral, built up and around until it could float unsupported, tethered in place above the jagged rock bed.
Devotees believed the Leviathans had sacrificed their corporeal forms to leave city husks behind; Four Warm Currents shared the more heretical view that the Leviathans were extinct, and for all their size might have been no more intelligent than the living algae feeders that still hauled their bulk along the seafloor. It was not a theory to divulge in polite discourse. Drilling through the roof of the world was agitator enough on its own.
As the skiff passed the City of Bone’s carved sentinels, workers began to jet off to their respective housing blocks. Four Warm Currents was one of the last to disembark, having been afforded, as one of the council’s foremost engineers, an artful gray-and-purple spire in the city center. Of course, that was before the Drill. Nine Brittle Spines’s desire for a “sideshow” aside, Four Warm Currents felt the daily loss of council approval like the descending cold of a crevice. Relocation was not out of the realm of possibility.
For now, though, the house’s main door shuttered open at a touch, and, more importantly, Four Warm Currents’s mates were inside. Six Bubbling Thermals, sleek and swollen with eggs, drizzling ribbons of birth mucus like a halo, but with eyes still bright and darting. Three Jagged Reefs, lean and long, skin stained from a heavy work cycle in the smelting vents, submitting to a massage. Their taste made Four Warm Currents ache, deep and deeper.
“So our heroic third returns,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, interrupting the massage and prompting a ruffle of protest.
“Have you ended the world yet?” Three Jagged Reefs added. “Don�
��t stop, Six. I’m nearly loose enough to slough.”
“Nearly,” Four Warm Currents signed. “I blacked a councillor. Badly.”
Both mates guffawed, though Six Bubbling Thermals’s had a nervous shiver to it.
“From how far?” Three Jagged Reefs demanded. “Could they tell it was yours?”
“From not even a tentacle away,” Four Warm Currents admitted. “We were in conversation.”
Three Jagged Reefs laughed again, the reckless, waving laugh that had made Four Warm Currents fall in love, but their other mate did not.
“Conversation about what?” Six Bubbling Thermals signed.
Four Warm Currents hesitated, tasting around to make sure a strong emotion hadn’t slipped the gland again, but the water was clear and cold and anxiety-free. “Nine Brittle Spines is a skeptic of the worst kind. Intelligent, but refusing to self-educate.”
“Did you not explain the density calculation?” Three Jagged Reefs signed plaintively.
Four Warm Currents moved to reply, then recognized a familiar mocking tilt in Three Jagged Reefs’s tentacles and turned the answer into a crude “floating feces” gesticulation.
“Tell us the mathematics again,” Three Jagged Reefs teased. “Nothing slicks me better for sex, Four. All those beautiful variables.”
Six Bubbling Thermals smiled at the back-and-forth, but was still lightly spackled with mauve worry. The birth mucus spiralling out in all directions made for an easy distraction.
“We need to collect again,” Four Warm Currents signed, gesturing to the trembling ribbons. “Or you’ll bury us in our sleep.”
Clockwork Phoenix 5 Page 27
