Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  Ron turned to New York Ronald—a tall guy with an Italian-looking face under his white paint and clownface tattoos. He was the one who’d taken out the would-be hero, and he kicked the gun from the rancher quickly, before turning to see if Ron was okay.

  “Thanks, Ronald,” he barked. His savior acknowledged it with a nod.

  The ranch-monsters hung row on row, oblivious in their harnesses, deaf as fingers and thumbs cut from a body and thrown to the ground. Looking upon them, rage boiled up within Ron. He could feel Gandhari within him, weeping for the fate of her brothers and sisters, these perverted things that should have been cows.

  While some of the Ronalds chained up the farm-workers and office slugs together in manacles, Ron turned to his second in command—a big black Ronald who was blind in one eye—and muttered, “Little change of plans, Ronald. We’re bringing the boss man with us . . . ”

  “You sure, Ronald?” Worry was visible in the man’s sunken, bloodshot eye.

  “Yeah, no problem. Let’s do this, everyone. Hurry up!”

  The Ronalds howled, hoisting their jerry cans and chanting all the way.

  An hour later, the silent writhing of bovoid horrors aflame still screaming through their minds, the Ronalds shoved their prisoners out of the back of their truck, still chained together, out into the desert heat. They begged to be dropped off in the city, but the Ronalds knew better than that: Homeland Security—or, well, someone hired temporarily by DHS, anyway—would be on top of them within ten minutes of the first phone call. Faraway in the distance, thick black smoke seethed up out of the ground and poisoned the desert air.

  “We’ll drop your phones off a few miles up the road, beside the road. Someone will come and get you,” Ron said, and the door slammed, leaving them on the highway like ghosts in the sandy nothingness, the towering shadows of wind turbines slashing across the road behind them. There they left them.

  All but Dalton, whom they drugged and shoved into a corner of the van.

  “We can save him,” Ron said, his eyes fervid, lit by the remembered flames, now distant. Eyes dark with the smoke that filled the distant air. Eyes gleaming unnaturally with a bloody passion. The others said nothing, but their eyes avoided him as the truck tore down the dirt roads, back to camp, shaking them as they sat silent, waiting.

  Guru Deepak streaked the thick red pooja paste up between Gandhari’s eyes, to the top of her head. The assembled Ronalds tossed flowers into the air, adorning her with necklaces of blossoms.

  She mooed.

  Dalton sat nearby, handcuffed. He oozed disdain. From a distance, Ron had watched Deepak argue with him until, suddenly, the shouting had cooled and Deepak had left the man sitting in the sand.

  Ron’s hope refused to wither. A man like Dalton coming into the fold would be an absolute coup, a portent of worldwide victory. His gaze drifted back to Gandhari, who was being led close to him, so he cast his blossoms up into the air and cried out in joy and boundless, ecstatic praise.

  An hour later, he huddled down to the floor in Guru Deepak’s private trailer.

  “It’s alright,” he said.

  “What?” Guru Deepak wore an incongruous frown upon his face.

  “It’s alright. I didn’t do it for any reward. I just was inspired . . . by Her—Mother Gandhari. I knew in my heart that she wanted him brought to our camp.”

  “Really,” Deepak muttered. It wasn’t a question. Ron carefully searched his guru’s face, surprised, until Deepak snapped, “How do you know what Gandhari wants? How do you know what I want?”

  Ron gasped, panic shivering alive in his guts. Had he really made a mistake?

  “I . . . I just felt . . . when I saw all those . . . things . . . ”

  “I know,” Deepak said, suddenly quiet, but very, very cold. “I know who you are, Kenny,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

  “What? No . . . I’m not Kenny anymore . . . ”

  “You think I’m so naïve?” Deepak asked, a little harshly. Ron’s heart began to thump.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re the fifth plant they’ve sent,” Deepak said, his accent much less pronounced than usual, and his scowl luminous. “I thought you bunch might start finding some other way to spend all those bloody taxes. Don’t play dumb with me. You know very well how Dalton’s involved. What bringing him here is going to jeopardize. You know exactly what you’re doing.” Deepak’s accent had disappeared, and with it his beatific smile. The man looked like any old business captain, suddenly, even in his long golden kurta and brand-name sandals.

  “Involved? What? What are you . . . I don’t understand, Guru,” Ron said, and he dropped to his knees. “Please . . . whatever I’ve done . . . ” Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he touched his master’s feet.

  Guru Deepak stared at him for a moment, cautiously, and then his expression brightened. “Could you really not be . . . ?” he asked. “I want you to go meditate in Mother Gandhari’s womb.”

  “Thank you,” Ron whispered, touching Deepak’s feet again, and he hurried out of the trailer to the trunk containing the VR gear.

  As he slid headfirst into the great cow’s womb, Ron’s heart was full of fear and confusion. He trembled in the darkness, and she said nothing to him for what felt like many days. The silent darkness was bisected by the pinprick sensation of an intravenous feed being inserted into the faraway arm of Ron’s faraway body, and still, he waited, as desert heat grew and subsided, like tides on the shore.

  When she finally spoke to Ron, his faraway body—all but abandoned, that stinking flesh—was stretched out across the dusty ground, the helmet too heavy to support any longer. What she whispered to him was terrifying. Promises of plagues. Deadly cows wandering, dazed, through the smoldering ruins of shopping malls, speaking a language no human ears had ever heard, exhaling deadly contagion scented as sweet as wildflowers. Millions of their two-legged oppressors dead and left to rot, the meat in their bellies burning its way through them, unleashing wracking, fatal sicknesses. It was the end of the human world, the end of that long, hard, ceaseless fouling of the earth. It had come already, she told him, this end. It could never, ever be undone, she told him. She was elated, and his exhausted body bubbled with glee, knowing the plague would claim him, soon, too.

  Shanti, shanti, he reminded himself. Peace, peace. Rebirth, he knew, would eventually come. He meditated, and he prayed, and it felt as if yet more months passed. Distant voices muttered somewhere over the virtual horizon, all of them too faint for the words to reach him. Rumors of a war. The gossip of an enemy, of government agents shouting, searching his body, rifling through the dreams in Gandhari’s womb.

  Ron desired nothing more than to be born, in his next life, as a calf. Not as a man, at least: as something other—finer—than a human being. He yearned for his true, eternal form. To be a silent bull grazing the weeds of the remade earth. The image sang to him of the voices of choirs, the dung of the world, worms in the soil. An endless chorus of low, undulating moos.

  And at the far end of that eternally warm and wet silence, a ripple surged through the womb shrouding his body—still the body of a man, though he was certain it would be transformed at any moment into his true four-legged form—and with a gentle quiver, he was pushed from dark, warm, sludgy comfort toward the dry dust and cold, once again out into the frightening nighttime of the world.

  About the Author

  Gord Sellar is a Canadian who was born in Malawi and lived in South Korea from 2002 until early 2013. A 2006 graduate of Clarion West and a 2009 finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, his work has appeared in many major SF magazines and numerous anthologies and collections, and his first screenplay (“The Music of Jo Hyeja”, a Korean adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft story) was made into an award-winning short film in 2012. For recent news, visit his website at gordsellar.com.

  The History Within Us

  Matthew Kressel

  On a wrist-mounted computer
, Betsy Haadama watched a six thousand-year-old silent film. It was grayscale, overexposed, two-dimensional, and chronologically jumbled. On the film: a mustachioed man doting over his young son at a crowded zoo. A woman vigorously combing the boy’s white hair beside a large piano. A family eating a large meal, candles burning on a table, men wearing yarmulkes, bodies shivering in prayer. A river, people swimming, women in white bathing caps and full-body suits. Men on rocks by the shore, pipes in mouths, smoke drifting lazily upward. A park, the boy looking down at a dead pigeon. Staring. Staring. Father picking him up, kissing him. In the sky, a bright sun.

  A young sun.

  “Pardon my intrusion in this time of ends,” a Twirlover said, startling her. The Twirlover’s six separate, hovering pink objects—like human knuckles—danced a looping, synchronized pattern in the air. “If it pleases you, will you share with me why you watch that flickering device so incessantly?”

  In some parts of the galaxy one could be killed for being human. Betsy wasn’t sure if this Eluder Ship was such a place. But death was coming for all soon enough. So why fear it now?

  “This is an ancient film of my paternal ancestor,” she said defiantly.

  Puffs of air beat against her face as the Twirlover spun. “An ancient film? Indeed, such a rare treasure, an artifact of the past! If it pleases you, may we watch a portion together?”

  She was about to tell it no, that she’d rather die alone, contemplating what might have been, when the alarm trilled down the cavernous halls of the Eluder Ship. A cold shiver ran down her spine as a cacophony of voices warned in ninety languages simultaneously, “Gravitational collapse imminent, my beloveds! Please take your positions inside your transitional shells!”

  Angry rainbows flared across the floor and ozone and ammonia soured the air, warning those who communicated by color or smell. Betsy’s mind skipped and stuttered like the ancient film playing on her wrist as a warning to the telepaths skirted the fringes of her consciousness. Still more warnings she could not perceive with her natural senses no doubt flooded the chamber now.

  Hundreds of creatures ran or flew or poured inside their transitional shells, strange cocoons fitted to their variform bodies. The Twirlover tumbled away as Betsy closed the cover of her shell. She hugged her knees and shivered as the glass cover sealed her inside with a hiss and a confirmation beep. A lifeboat or a coffin? She’d find out soon enough.

  Transitional shells filled the gargantuan chamber of the Eluder Ship like arrays of soldiers preparing for battle, their noses pointed toward the red-giant star looming outside. Maera—“The Daughter Star”—one of the few still-burning stars in the galaxy. It seethed before all, a conflagration as large as a solar system, turning everything the color of blood.

  Forty seconds.

  This was a pitiful end, but it was this or slow starvation, privation, death. The galaxy had been laid sere. No planets to grow food. No stars to keep warm. It wasn’t fair. None of them deserved this. But then she remembered Julio, and what she had done to him at Afsasat.

  I left you to die, Julio. And for that I deserve this.

  Thirty seconds.

  Soon now, Maera’s heart would cool by a fraction of a degree, and billions of tons of matter, no longer kept aloft by nuclear winds, would plunge towards its gravitational center at the speed of light. The star would collapse, go nova, and in its tortured heart the universe would tear. A singularity would form, a black hole, and Betsy Haadama and the thousands of others on this Eluder Ship would ride that collapsing wave into another universe. Their matter and energy, transmuted into pure information, would seed a new creation, the World to Come. Their consciousness, over long eons, would push matter into form, coerce dust to life. In some strange new way they would live on, gods reborn further down the corridor of infinity. And they had been doing this forever, would be doing this again and again until the end of time.

  Or so the litany went.

  The story soothed troubled minds. But the science behind the technology was just a theory. It could be proven only by first-person observation. Any object which crossed a black hole’s event horizon could never communicate with the universe again. Just as easily, she might be annihilated forever. To those witnessing from the outside, there would be no difference.

  Twenty seconds.

  She tried not to peer up at The Daughter, though its ember light corrupted everything with its hellish glow. Instead she watched the film on her wrist: men in fedoras, women in ostentatious hats at an airport, people descending a stairwell from plane to tarmac. A baby hoisted in the air. Smiles. Laughing. Cut to a park. The boy looking down at the dead pigeon, staring. Staring. Father picking him up, patting him on the shoulder. The boy, crying.

  Why do you stare at the bird? Betsy thought. What are you thinking?

  She looked up at the seething star. So beautiful, terrible, immense. A wonder that such a thing existed. A horn bellowed and Betsy screamed.

  “False Alarm! Beloveds, the imminent collapse was a false alarm! Spurious readings caused us to make an erroneous conclusion. We estimate at least six hours before stellar collapse, based on present readings.”

  The voice announced the message in multiple languages, simulcast with aggressive rainbows, smells, alien sensations.

  I’m alive! she thought. I’m still here! It felt exhilarating, for a moment. Then she remembered she’d have to do this again.

  Slowly, shells opened and creatures emerged. Betsy scanned the motley lot of them as her cover retracted. A zoo of sentient species escaping from their cages, creatures made of every color, texture, and temperament.

  So much life, she thought. Snuffed out by the Horde. Crimes beyond forgiveness. And made all the more vile because the Horde had been the progeny of the human race.

  Betsy activated inositol in her bloodstream via thought command in order to suppress her panic/flight response. It soothed her, but only just enough to notice the hairs on the back of her neck rising from an electrostatic charge as the Twirlover returned.

  “That was exciting!” it said.

  “I wouldn’t call it that,” Betsy said.

  “To be so close to annihilation and then to come back again. It renews the sense of life!”

  “Or the dread of living.”

  “But the dread, if you explore it,” the Twirlover said, “reveals the miracle of existence out of nothingness. From out of horror comes life.”

  The litany again. “Or out of life, horror,” she said.

  It tumbled quietly for a moment. “Sometimes.” It moved closer to inspect her film. “That’s a child of your species, is it not?”

  She glanced down at her screen. “No, that’s a rhinoceros.”

  “Ree-Nos-Ur-Us. What a marvel of composition, all those rolling mountains of flesh. Does it still exist?”

  “Extinct.”

  The Twirlover whistled a mournful, descending arpeggio. “Like so much life in the galaxy. Like the once-glorious stars.”

  The Horde had obliterated stars by the billions. They had wrapped the Milky Way inside a bleak cocoon of transmatter so that nothing, no ship, no signal—not even light—could pass. And then they vanished, leaving the galaxy to rot. Such was the legacy of humanity.

  She wondered if the Twirlover would kill her outright if it knew what she was. Death by physical means might be preferable, she thought, to being flash-baked into quantum-entangled gamma rays. Six in one, really.

  The film cut to a boy in a crib, bouncing. His mother lifting him, smiling for the camera. The boy laughing.

  “That’s one of us,” she said. “My paternal ancestor.” Surprising herself, she felt pride.

  “Ah, such wonderful protuberances!”

  A wisp of dust coalesced above Betsy’s head. Winking diamonds swirled in yellow clouds. An aeroform creature. For a moment she glimpsed her own face of colored sparkles reflected back at her. But the aeroform being soon spiraled away, only to pause a few seconds later before a group of fronded Whidus wh
o turned their mushroom-like eyes in her direction. Maybe they recognized her, knew what she was. Maybe they were plotting her demise.

  A second, identical Twirlover approached Betsy and said to the first, “You know, my bonded-one, that we are about to die, do you not?”

  “I was about to come back to you, my flesh-bond,” the first said. “And tell you about my sharing with this creature.”

  “Indeed you were. I saw you tumbling towards me with great haste.”

  “My flesh-bond, just take a good look at her smooth, auburn skin, the fine black threads that emerge from her head, the little valve at her peak where she modulates her words with a bacteria-laden pink muscle! And on her upper-left protuberance, that metal device which flicker-flashes with strange images. She watches it incessantly. She is curious, is she not?”

  “There is something curious here, certainly.”

  “My love, let us join so I can share my thoughts with you.”

  “Indeed, I look forward to it!”

  The two tumbled together into a single dancing, twelve-piece ring. Knuckles hopped, bounced, tumbled over each other. Music piped and whistled in byzantine harmonies. There arose a great shriek about them, and soon after they separated again into six-pieced individuals. Betsy thought they might have interchanged pieces in the process.

  “Not fair!” said the second. Or was it the first? Betsy couldn’t tell them apart anymore. “You playful trickster! You gave me your segment, so now I know your thoughts. But then, you sense my emotions too.”

  “What joy it is to share mind with you, beloved! Yes, I feel your misplaced jealousy. And so much of it! What a waste of energy. Don’t you see? This creature is alone and needs to share with someone!”

  “Perhaps, but does it have to be you?”

  “Not me alone, but us together!”

  “In this last hour, you would defile us?”

  “Please!” Betsy interjected. “I’d prefer to be alone anyway—”

  “One must never be alone!” the first said. “Share with us! Let us merge gloriously with your words.”