Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  It feels almost familiar, as if he is still an unborn child. But there is something—something that grinds at me. A dry, rushed patter—his heart does not beat, it speaks in tongues. A tangle that draws ever tighter as if devouring itself from the inside out. Suddenly, the Boy’s body slams the sand. He twists and flips like the fish he catches; acid and bile surge the wrong way through his gut. Scared, I exit him.

  What have I done?!

  He lies flat, his eyes and mouth are frosted with sand, his stomach is deflated and droopy on the rack of his pelvis and ribs. But he comes to by the time I summon Maria to the scene. I have no courage to tell her I may have caused his seizure. I keep a tight watch, pondering the nature of the tangle inside him, but nothing else happens, and I am almost relieved.

  One day I visit again, and Maria and I are kneeling by her hearth, she is kindling a fire, I pass wood shavings and twigs to her so she could arrange them in the way she likes. Our heads almost touch. She tells me that she was such a confused and selfish little girl back in the day, that she did not think with her head, and that she cannot believe how bold—and casual—she was with me. But when she lifts her head to glance at me, her blue-green eyes are shining and I know she does not regret a single thing.

  The Boy picks up on her smile when he walks in on us. He must not have seen this kind of smile ever on her face. He looks stern. “Who is this, Mother?”

  “That’s Gabriel, remember? He’s known you since you were that small. He is watching over us. He’s a good friend.” She is blushing.

  When the Boy leaves, she measures me head to toe. “Perhaps you could age your appearance. You look much too young next to me. You’re still the young lover that you’ve . . . You look my son’s age! It’s just not—proper, and more so since I’m now a widow. It’s been years, Gabriel, don’t you realize?”

  “You don’t change,” I mutter.

  She shakes her head. “Oh but I do!” There is a shadow of a smile on her face, and a slight frown. I remember what this one means.

  A year after this, the Boy leaves home. He’s been moody and withdrawn ever since his seizure and he’s hardly spoken to anyone lately. That’s what Maria tells me when I come to see her. I say I don’t know what it means, if anything, and she becomes angry with me. “Only you can be so blind, Gabriel! I have to tell you this: I used to think sometimes—and this makes me wonder again—that you are, you know, simple. The way you don’t have an understanding of certain things . . . I just don’t know!” She wells up and walks away from me. She hasn’t even noticed my new, meticulously age-adjusted human-form-for-Maria.

  I am not a fool. I understand what it all means. Worse yet—I may have caused it by entering the Boy. I track him down in the high desert. At first I still hope that he will turn around, or pass through the dead lands and be on his way. Instead, he finds himself an overhang of a rock on a small plateau and settles in.

  The cavity he has chosen has a small hollow, so I make sure it is always filled with water. The day he finishes up his last ration, I leave a loaf of bread at the edge of his shelter.

  He does not touch it, he throws it off the cliff. And the new one the next day, and another one after that. On the fifth day he flings his fist into the air and cries out, “Stop tempting me!”

  Fear fills me up, fear like dead-water of the Wise One’s gorge. The self-devouring tangle, the dry patter instead of heartbeat. The purpose of my Master has woken up. My Boy is listening to the message.

  The next few days he still meanders around in search of food and I try to sneak it onto his path, but he rejects anything more than a dead copperhead as suspiciously convenient, thus a temptation. Then he just sits cross legged at the lip of his cave and stares into space. His head quivers from time to time, as if about to lose its balance on the weak stem of his neck.

  I must save him. I must get through to him.

  I take him by the shoulders and lift him into the air. “Please do not listen to Him who dwells on The Other Side of Things. He does not care about you. You are just a tool to Him, a vessel. He wants this world and He wants to enter it through you, just as He used to want to enter it through me!”

  The Boy’s eyes dart, hazy with delirium. I shake him by the shoulders. “Please, please hear me out!”

  “Be gone with you,” he pushes past his cracked lips.

  “I am your guardian, I’ve watched over you since before you were born. Ask your mother. Just let me take you to your mother and she will tell you! I am Gabriel!”

  “No! Don’t touch her! Stay away from us!” He fights me now, kicks, scratches at me.

  I lift him up and up into the sky. We fly. Higher, faster. Shreds of clouds tumbleweed past us. “Look around, am I not real? Am I not holding you? Look down. Will you not fall if not for me? I am here, while He is not. I am holding you, not Him. Do you want me to let you go to prove it? Do you think He’ll catch you? Because He won’t! He can’t! Say a word and fall, if you want, fall and break upon the ground because He won’t be there to support you!”

  Clawing, panting, the Boy chants, “Kill me if you must, but I shall not put the Lord my God to the test—”

  Higher and higher. “Open your eyes and see the world as I show it to you. Have courage!” Mountains are wrinkles, rivers are veins, forests are fur. Lost on the Boy, the glory of the world; his eyes are squeezed shut and wind sucks tears out of them. His pallid lips move, though no sound is coming out. I plummet to a snow-crowned peak, I crash him onto a glacier, slippery, steep, blinding to the eye, razor sharp; he retches bile, he curls up like a grub, he gulps for air. I am no longer invisible, I cannot . . . temple stones and pale worms, gutted bullocks and throbbing veins, thunderclouds and obelisks, a fiery scale, a burning bush, a human-form-for-Maria, a shining jellyfish, pieces, pieces—I swarm in front of the Boy, I swell, “I care for you—I want to protect you—please, look at me—see me for what I am—I am your father—”

  But he covers his eyes with his forearms, he crawls from me, away, away, he whimpers, choking on his puke, “Be gone, Satan, leave me alone!”

  When the Boy loses consciousness, I fly him back to his home. It is night there, and I knock on the door before I leave him on the doorstep. I watch his family flutter about him, drag him inside. I do not reveal myself.

  Almost immediately thereafter He who dwells on the Other Side draws me into His presence.

  Fight! Grab onto air, resist! A pain of inversion. Fight, fight! A shining jellyfish. Helplessness. Let me out becomes take me, I’m yours. Pleasureshame. Loathingbliss. Caressinterrogation. Now He knows everything I’ve done. He knows.

  And then—a thought slips through, a wrinkle in the shining wind. You keep hanging on—stretched as you are, you are afraid to give it up and die a dense dot—

  Yes, my insides moan.

  A comb of hatched lines—The Other Side frowns?—rakes me head to tail. He is releasing me and I am collapsing, about to burst through my own tail-end and into a pore of the world’s sieve; but even as I do it, I catch a glimpse of something I am not supposed to know about Him. A weakness.

  Growling, I fall flat onto the ground of my world.

  I learn that I have been kept away for ten years. The Boy has disciples now, followers. Crowds gather to hear him preach. He is rumored to make dead humans walk and turn things into other things. Is he capable of it now? Or has the other messenger been helping him? The Boy has come into Jerusalem and the capital is ready to boil over.

  The Boy is arrested.

  I know—He who dwells on The Other Side made sure I do—that He has devised to kill the Boy, discard him as faulty, because the Boy is not His son. Because, not being His son, the Boy has misread the message.

  Misunderstood it, garbled it up. No wonder—the Boy’s other father is a simple one.

  He who dwells wants me to know His plan and yet be unable to foil it. As I rush to the execution site to rescue my Boy, someone dark rises to stop me. One of my kind, but bigger than me. A wi
ld one, crazy for his Master’s caress. More than an Ur-Ag-ghel, worse than an Ur-Ag-ghel. The shadow messenger, the snarling dog, the hurricane. Beelzebub.

  We clash.

  All I want is to claw my way to my Boy’s cross, all he wants is to keep me away. He drags me across half the world, slams me into mountaintops, tangles me in the roots of continents deep underwater. We tear pieces out of each other, we bleed memories and thoughts.

  It may have been days. We’ve worn each other out, we are both stuck inside Earth, stranded in its vein-work, mired in its black, tarry blood; he is locked in on me, leeching my life away, and I am gnawing at him, eviscerating his life. The degradation of our fight is almost complete, we are almost one, a killervictim, a hideous creature born of hatred; our joined flesh jerks and shudders.

  I win by a thread. That’s how little is enough to unbalance a scale on the finger of the Universe. It takes me another eternity to extricate myself from the ground, and from my victim’s flesh. When I drag myself to the cross, it’s over.

  I find my son a few days later—they sealed him in a crypt. I search for signs of life. Any life. My life-force. My Master’s purpose. Human warm-churning. There is none. I take his body to the mountain glacier we have been to. I make him a tomb of ice and granite.

  They say, while on the cross, he cried out, “Father, why have you forgotten me?” I will never know if it was me he called for. But I know that I have not come.

  What is love?

  Leaving white lilies in the places our son has spent his last days in, knowing that she will be there, she will come upon them. Leaving lilies even though I know they fit no longer, they are ridiculous, dated, outrageous—knowing all that and still not being able to stop, because this is the only language of speaking to her heart, that I know. My Master never loved you. I do.

  What is love?

  I stand in a grove. Lilies everywhere, their heavy fragrance mixes with twilight. “Joshua?” she calls in a breaking voice. “Son?” Too little light to see well, but I am just as culpable—she wants it so much that my body can’t help but assume the resemblance. She runs towards me but the closer she gets, the less believing she is. “Gabriel? . . .No. You don’t! Stop it, stop it now!” She groans and swings her fists, hits me in the chest, face.

  “I am so sorry,” I whisper, “So sorry.”

  Not for my failure to save him. For that—no word sorry is even allowed. I am sorry that my human-form-for-you is so easily mistaken for our son, I just wanted you to see what you yearned to see—just for one moment—I thought—yes, it is callow and cruel of me, you are right, I am simple, I am Gabriel-the-silly-man.

  “You left us,” she sobs, “you’ve abandoned us for ten years! How could you?”

  What is love?

  Our son is dead, we both know it. He has been killed because of something we did thirty three years ago. Our son’s followers keep seeing signs of his resurrection, they may have glimpsed my shape, wandered into my stubborn lilies. Soon neither she, nor I can stop the legend from forming. It will gain a meaning of its own, a message that neither she nor I will recognize though it will hardly matter; nothing we will or will not do will change its course.

  What is love?

  I will dote on her till the end of her days. There will be more tears and accusations. Guilt. Our life will be bitter, but not all the time. Sometimes there will be a shadow of a smile and only a slight frown to go along with it. “We’ve come a long way, you and I, haven’t we?” Yes, we have.

  Fairness is made out of time. When Maria passes away, I will be free to fight and die. I know this much: the One who kills His son because he has got His message wrong, knows no love.

  When You draw me in one more time—even if I have to kill every mature one of my kind to force You to turn to me as the only suitable messenger, because You will want one, You cannot help it—

  When You do it, when I am stretched on The Other Side—breaking off the attachment to my entry point will kill me but that’s not all. I know Your weakness, Master. The scar left of my ripped umbilicus will shut the pores of my world. You will never be able to reach into it again.

  All You will be left with, to contemplate till the end of eternity, will be a dense dot, blown about ceaselessly, aimlessly. A bitter little residue of me.

  About the Author

  J.M. Sidorova is a biomedical scientist and a writer of speculative fiction. She was raised in the USSR, Singapore and Germany before immigrating to the United States. She is a Clarion West workshop graduate of 2009. In addition to Clarkesworld, her short stories appeared in Asimov’s, Abyss and Apex, Albedo 2.0, and other venues. Her debut novel The Age of Ice, a work of magic realism, is due to be published by Simon and Schuster in July 2013.

  A Jar of Goodwill

  Tobias S. Buckell

  Points On A Package

  You keep a low profile when you’re in oxygen debt. Too much walking about just exacerbates the situation anyway. So I was nervous when a stationeer appeared at my cubby and knocked on the door.

  I slid out and stood in front of the polished, skeletal robot.

  “Alex Mosette?” it asked.

  There was no sense in lying. The stationeer had already scanned my face. It was just looking for voice print verification. “Yes, I’m Alex,” I said.

  “The harbormaster wants to see you.”

  I swallowed. “He could have sent me a message.”

  “I am here to escort you.” The robot held out a tinker-toy arm, digits pointed along the hallway.

  Space in orbit came at a premium. Bottom-rung types like me slept in cubbies stacked ten high along the hallway. On my back in the cubby, watching entertainment shuffled in from the planets, they made living on a space station sound exotic and exciting.

  It was if you were further up the rung. I’d been in those rooms: places with wasted space. Furniture. Room to stroll around in.

  That was exotic.

  Getting space in outer space was far down my list of needs.

  First was air. Then food.

  Anything else was pure luxury.

  The harbormaster stared out into space, and I silently waited at the door to Operations, hoping that if I remained quiet he wouldn’t notice.

  Ops hung from near the center of the megastructure of the station. A blister stuck on the end of a long tunnel. You could see the station behind us: the miles-long wheel of exotic metals rotating slowly.

  No gravity in Ops, or anywhere in the center. Spokes ran down from the wheel to the center, and the center was where ships docked and were serviced and so on.

  So I hung silently in the air, long after the stationeer flitted off to do the harbormaster’s bidding, wondering what happened next.

  “You’re overdrawn,” the harbormaster said after a needle-like ship with long feathery vanes slipped underneath us into the docking bays.

  He turned to face me, even though his eyes had been hollowed out long ago. Force of habit. His real eyes were now every camera, or anything mechanical that could see.

  The harbormaster moved closer. The gantry around him was motorized, a long arm moving him anywhere he wanted in the room.

  Hundreds of cables, plugged into his scalp like hair, bundled and ran back along the arm of the gantry. Hoses moved effluvia out. More hoses ran purified blood, and other fluids, back in.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammered. “Traffic is light. And requests have dropped off. I’ve taken classes. Even language lessons . . . ” I stopped when I saw the wizened hand raise, palm up.

  “I know what you’ve been doing.” The harbormaster’s sightless sockets turned back to the depths of space outside. The hardened skin of his face showed few emotions, his artificial voice was toneless. “You would not have been allowed to overdraw if you hadn’t made good faith efforts.”

  “For which,” I said, “I am enormously appreciative.”

  “That ship that just arrived brings with it a choice for you,” the harbormaster continued withou
t acknowledging what I’d just said. “I cannot let you overdraw any more if you stay on station, so I will have to put you into hibernation. To pay for hibernation and your air debt I would buy your contract. You’d be woken for guaranteed work. I’d take a percentage. You could buy your contract back out, once you had enough liquidity.”

  That was exactly what I’d been dreading. But he’d indicated an alternate. “My other option?”

  He waved a hand, and a holographic image of the ship I’d just seen coming in to dock hung in the air. “They’re asking for a professional Friend.”

  “For their ship?” Surprise tinged my question. I wasn’t crew material. I’d been shipped frozen to the station, just another corpsicle. People like me didn’t stay awake for travel. Not enough room.

  The harbormaster shrugged pallid shoulders. “They will not tell me why. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement just to get them to tell me what they wanted.”

  I looked at the long ship. “I’m not a fuckbot. They know that, right?”

  “They know that. They reiterated that they do not want sexual services.”

  “I’ll be outside the station. Outside your protection. It could still be what they want.”

  “That is a risk. How much so, I cannot model for you.” The harbormaster snapped his fingers, and the ship faded away. “But the contractors have extremely high reputational scores on past business dealings. They are freelance scientists: biology, botany, and one linguist.”

  So they probably didn’t want me as a pass-around toy.

  Probably.

  “Rape amendments to the contract?” I asked. I was going to be on a ship, unthawed, by myself, with crew I’d never met. I had to think about the worst.

  “Prohibitive. Although, accidental loss of life is not quite as high, which means I’d advise lowering the former so that there is no temptation to murder you after a theoretical rape to evade the higher contract payout.”