She nodded slowly. “That’s all I ask.” With a heavy sigh, she got up, and finally yielded to propriety. “Thank you. Er, have a nice day.” At this, Lise looked pleased.
Death finished his cookie and got up. He walked uptown, which took the rest of the day. By the time he reached the Upper East Side, night had begun to fall. He traveled more slowly along the banks of the river, because the sidewalks and streets were treacherous here. The water flowing through the subway lines had undermined the whole area, and it was obvious that this part of the island would soon be reclaimed by the sea. But at Sixty-Sixth Street he found a downed Victorian turret fetched up against several cars, which formed a precarious bridge. After climbing over this, Death made his way farther north, following the old sense that had always led him to wherever he needed to be.
He found the Nursery Rhymes in the garden of an ancient school. Though it was pitch dark, they were still running about and playing, chasing fireflies, their peals of laughter making Death feel lonely and nostalgic. There were peacocks and peahens in the garden, too, some of them roosting sleepily in the trees as he passed underneath. They cooed challenges at him, less indifferent than his building’s cats. But then he stopped, surprised to find one peacock down on the ground, directly in his path. As he stared at it, he realized it was not blue and green like the others. Its head was a fierce, iridescent red, shading to gold on the neck and below. When it suddenly fanned and shivered its great tail, he saw that all the eyespots were a baleful, white-rimmed black.
Then, as if satisfied that he had noticed its strangeness, the peacock dropped its tail and flew away.
When the children ran over to Death, still giggling and delighted to meet someone new, he could not help noticing how thin they were.
One day Death began to feel restless, which was strange. He was Death, the inevitability of all living things. He should never have felt restless. Yet he did.
He wondered: Was his dissolution beginning, as had happened to so many others? But there was still death in the world, all around him, every day. The cats in his building. The rats and mice and birds that they fed on. The plants that grew from cracks in the concrete. His own kind, when they faltered. Yet he also knew the truth: that death might exist in the absence of humankind, but not Death.
He felt no weaker. There was no perceptible thinning of his substance. But something troubled him, nevertheless.
He began to walk, picking a direction at random. South. The streets in Brooklyn were less damaged and flooded than those in Manhattan, but there were other problems, especially in the poorer neighborhoods. He had to go slowest in Flatbush, which had been in a state of disrepair long before the end of humanity. The sinkholes and downed facades got so bad that eventually he simply willed himself over to Kensington. (He preferred to walk, but physicality was not always convenient.) Strolling along tree-lined streets and gazing at brownstones that still looked as beautiful as the year they’d been built was marvelous, though it felt a bit like cheating.
Because Death did not tire, he walked well into the night, and reached Coney Island by morning. It was nice to watch the sunrise from the beach. The ocean hummed with its own cycles, hardly changed by the presence or absence of humanity. He spent an hour or two just listening to the surge and sough of the waves, and remembering all that had been. He was not like many of his fellows, who were confined to the places where they had been conceived and nurtured. Where there was life, there was death, and where there was death, was his domain. He was one of the few who could, if he wished, travel the whole world. It was good to be Death.
When the sun was well risen, he turned away from the sagging roller coaster and the midway, with its stands full of mildewed lumps that had once been stuffed animals. The aquarium stood open, the glass of its doors long since shattered and washed away in the hurricane that had hit the city not long after its abandonment. Inside the Alien Stingers exhibit—the only building still standing—Death found mostly darkness and silence. He moved quietly between the still, dark tanks, looking for nothing in particular. Just walking. Listening. He sensed now that something had drawn him to this place. He didn’t know what, but he knew this: It was a sensation he had not felt since before people had gone. That in itself was enough to merit his attention.
As Death reached the south end of the building, he found that it had been torn open by long-gone wind and rain, leaving a great, gaping, splintered hole. Debris, itself mostly buried in sand with the passage of time, paved the way across the tumbled wall of the sea lion tank, between the manmade hills (now flat) which had bordered the site, and through the crazily leaning pillars which were all that remained of the boardwalk. The building’s guts trailed away in a clear path all the way down to the water.
Here, Death found something odd. A series of peculiar, curlicued scuff marks moved along this trail of lathing and salt-rotted wood, cutting across the windblown drifts of sand. Following them, he found that the marks petered out a few dozen meters from the water’s edge, washed away by the tide line. Backtracking instead, he found them continuing into the aquarium—but where the sand gave way to the building’s cheap, nearly indestructible carpeting, there were no marks for him to follow.
Death did not have much imagination. He did not require it. He was patient, however, so lacking any other means of fathoming the mystery, he sat down beside the trail. The marks were fresh, after all. Perhaps whatever had made them would eventually return.
And finally, as dusk fell, he saw movement down near the beach. An animal, dragging itself out of the surf. At first he thought that it was another new thing, like the black flower, and the red peacock. Then it drew closer, and belatedly he realized it was just a small, dark blue octopus, walking its way along the lathing and sand. As it came, he saw that it carried an old blue plastic cup that read SLURPEE in faded letters, balanced carefully atop two of its tentacles. Water sloshed over the cup’s lip now and again, though it was clear the creature was making an effort not to spill the liquid. It used the other six tentacles to walk, Death saw, leaving behind that familiar curling pattern.
Now and again the creature stopped, set the cup on some flat surface or against a rock, and thrust its head into the water. Death watched it breathe in and out, its color flickering momentarily lighter blue, like the cup. When it had finished this procedure, it withdrew from the cup and resumed walking.
It paused when Death rose to follow it into the aquarium. He stopped when it did, and felt himself actively considered by the creature’s strange bar-pupiled eyes. When he did not approach more closely, however, the creature finally resumed its laborious march.
Inside, they both proceeded to one of the building’s vast, double-walled tanks. Here, unlike the rest of the tanks—most of which no longer had any need of his services—this one still flickered in glowing, vibrant blue. There was a hole in the tank’s uppermost corner, where the glass met the plaster of its display case, and something had cleared away the killing algae from the water’s surface. Above the tank was a skylight in the aquarium’s ceiling, which let in plenty of the setting sun’s rays. Thanks to this, Death could see that the tank was still halfway full with water, the water mark just at his eye level. The water had gone murky, the glass speckling with age and wear—but beyond the speckling, he could see many small things darting and moving.
Before he could identify this, the octopus stopped beside this tank, then laboriously climbed the glass wall, still carting the cup. It poured the water into the tank, dropped the cup—Death had already noticed many other cups, cans, and coconut shells littering the floor here—then wriggled through the gap in the glass. Here it paused, clinging to the glass above the water line, gazing through a clear patch at Death. Again, Death felt himself considered.
Then one of the darting things in the water flicked up and attached itself to the plastic, too, and he understood. It was a tiny copy of the larger octopus—a baby. There were likely hundreds of them, if not thousands, in the tank.
>
Death leaned close to the glass, looking the elder octopus in its—her—odd little eye. He considered her in return.
“Shall I kill you?” he asked. “Is that what you want?”
He felt her deep weariness. This was the way of things, he knew then: The mother died, her flesh granting the young a last bit of strength so that they might survive. It had happened for countless generations already, since the destruction of the aquarium had provided her ancestors with such a convenient, safe nursery for their young. How many more octopi had survived their youth, thanks to this happenstance, than there would have been in the wild? How many more adults had learned to leave the ocean, carrying their water with them as they found safer shelter somewhere along the empty seaside?
The octopus did not answer. She could not speak. Yet he knew, because he was what he was, that she understood what he was. She was not a red peacock or a black flower, yet she was, in a similar way, a new thing. Or an old thing, taking advantage of a new opportunity. It did not matter. Of such opportunities, embraced and exploited, were new things born.
One of the mother octopus’s wet, attenuated tentacles curled over the edge of the broken glass, twitching slightly. Nodding, Death touched this. A moment later the octopus turned gray and dropped into the water. The tank roiled with movement as her children swarmed in for a last loving taste of her.
The small octopus that had leapt out of the water, and which had continued to cling to the glass, observing, while Death killed its mother, remained where it was. Death nodded to it, solemn, then turned to go.
Movement caught his eye. The small octopus had begun to scurry up toward the hole in the glass. Death stopped.
“No,” he said, recalling that its mother had not come ashore ’til dusk, with the tide. “Wait until morning, near dawn. Bring water with you.”
The baby octopus stopped, its sides heaving with the effort to breathe out of the water. He had no idea whether it understood him. If it did, it would wait, and have that much better a chance of surviving the trek to the ocean. Perhaps a few of its siblings would attempt and survive the journey, too, and in turn they would pass on the necessary skill, and the intelligence to use it, to the young who came after them. And in time, with luck and other opportunities …
It was how people had begun. It was how all new things began. He understood this, the life and death of species, as he had always understood the life and death of individuals. But perhaps he had been too preoccupied with the latter, as a result failing to notice the former.
The little octopus detached itself from the side of the tank and dropped back into the water, darting in for its own share of the mother’s corpse. Death felt himself ignored and forgotten—but that was all right. The young did not often think about Death, but Death was no less eternal for their disinterest.
He smiled with the realization that some concepts would always be the same, no matter who conceptualized them. Still … lifting his hand, he contemplated the shape and structure of tentacles. They would be very versatile, he decided, though they would take some getting used to.
Then he turned and headed for home.
A few days later, Death went to Union Square. He walked over to the worshippers on the south-end steps, and asked them what to do.
“Just … think about the one you’re trying to help,” said the Dragon King, who had been looking at him oddly since his arrival. “That’s all any of us really needs, y’know. But if you don’t mind me saying so, buddy, I never expected to see you here. I figured—” He paused abruptly, looking embarrassed. “Well, I figured you didn’t mind seeing the rest of us crash and burn.”
Death understood. Others usually assumed worse. “Death comes on its own,” he said. “I don’t have to do anything to facilitate it. But everyone deserves a chance to try and survive.” Even us, he had decided.
“Well, sure. But …” The Dragon King scratched his long, curling mustache, finally letting out a weak laugh. “Man, you’re weird.”
Death smiled. It pleased him to be called “man,” though eventually there would be other names and other manifestations for him. He would not be the same, filtered through such different imaginations. None of them would be—but it was now important to him that his fellows hold on, take the opportunity to adapt if they could. The world had not ended, after all. The stuff of which he and his kind had been made had not vanished. The thinker did not matter, so long as thought remained.
“Thank you,” Death said, and then he clapped the Dragon King on the shoulder. (The Dragon King started and threw him a puzzled look.) “Now tell me: Are bagpipes easy to learn?”
While he still had fingers, he would need a way to pass the time.
The Narcomancer
In the land of Gujaareh it was said that trouble came by twos. Four bands of color marked the face of the Dreaming Moon; the great river split into four tributaries; there were four harvests in a year; four humors coursed the inner rivers of living flesh. By contrast, two of anything in nature meant inevitable conflict: stallions in a herd, lions in a pride. Siblings. The sexes.
Gatherer Cet’s twin troubles came in the form of two women. The first was a farmcaste woman who had been injured by an angry bull-ox; half her brains had been dashed out beneath its hooves. The Sharers, who could work miracles with the Goddess’s healing magic, had given up on her. “We can grow her a new head,” said one of the Sharer-elders to Cet, “but we cannot put the memories of her lifetime back in it. Best to claim her dreamblood for others, and send her soul where her mind has already gone.”
But when Cet arrived in the Hall of Blessings to see to the woman, he confronted a scene of utter chaos. Three squalling children struggled in the arms of a Sentinel, hampering him as he tried to assist his brethren. Nearer by, a young man fought to get past two of the Sharers, trying to reach a third Templeman—whom, clearly, he blamed for the woman’s condition. “You didn’t even try!” he shouted, the words barely intelligible through his sobs. “How can my wife live if you won’t even try?”
He elbowed one of the Sharers in the chest and nearly got free, but the other flung himself on the distraught husband’s back then, half dragging him to the floor. Still the man fought with manic fury, murder in his eyes. None of them noticed Cet until Cet stepped in front of the young man and raised his jungissa stone.
Startled, the young man stopped struggling, his attention caught by the stone. It had been carved into the likeness of a dragonfly; its gleaming black wings blurred as Cet tapped the stone hard with his thumbnail. The resulting sharp whine cut across the cacophony filling the Hall until even the children stopped weeping to look for the source of the noise. As peace returned, Cet willed the stone’s vibration to soften to a low, gentle hum. The man sagged as tension drained out of his body, until he hung limp in the two Sharers’ arms.
“You know she is already dead,” Cet said to the young man. “You know this must be done.”
The young man’s face tightened in anguish. “No. She breathes. Her heart beats.” He slurred the words as if drunk. “No.”
“Denying it makes no difference. The pattern of her soul has been lost. If she were healed, you would have to raise her all over again, like one of your children. To make her your wife then would be an abomination.”
The man began to weep again, quietly this time. But he no longer fought, and when Cet moved around him to approach his wife, he uttered a little moan and looked away.
Cet knelt beside the cot where the woman lay, and put his fore- and middle fingers on her closed eyelids. She was already adrift in the realms between waking and dream; there was no need to use his jungissa to put her to sleep. He followed her into the silent dark and examined her soul, searching for any signs of hope. But the woman’s soul was indeed like that of an infant, soft and devoid of all but the most simplistic desires and emotions. The merest press of Cet’s will was enough to send her toward the land of dreams, where she would doubtless dissolve into the substance of that r
ealm—or perhaps she would eventually be reborn, to walk the realm of waking anew and regain the experiences she had lost.
Either way, her fate was not for Cet to decide. Having delivered her soul safely, he severed the tether that had bound her to the waking realm, and collected the delicate dreamblood that spilled forth.
The weeping that greeted Cet upon his return to waking was of a different order from before. Turning, Cet saw with satisfaction that the farmcaste man stood with his children now, holding them as they watched the woman’s flesh breathe its last. They were still distraught, but the violent madness was gone; in its place was the sort of grief that expressed itself through love and would, eventually, bring healing.
“That was nicely done,” said a low voice beside him, and Cet looked up to see the Temple Superior. Belatedly he realized the Superior had been the target of the distraught husband’s wrath. Cet had been so focused on the family that he had not noticed.
“You gave them peace without dreamblood,” the Superior continued. “Truly, Gatherer Cet, our Goddess favors you.”
Cet got to his feet, sighing as the languor of the Gathering faded slowly within him. “The Hall has still been profaned,” he said. He looked up at the great shining statue of the Goddess of Dreams, who towered over them with hands outstretched in welcome and eyes shut in the Eternal Dream. “Voices have been raised and violence done, right here at Her feet.”
“S-Superior?” A boy appeared at the Superior’s shoulder, too young to be an acolyte. One of the Temple’s adoptees from the House of Children, probably working a duty shift as an errand runner. “Are you hurt at all? I saw that man …”
The Superior smiled down at him. “No, child; I’m fine, thank you. Go back to the House before your Teacher misses you.”
Looking relieved, the boy departed. The Superior sighed, watching him leave. “Some chaos is to be expected at times like this. The heart is rarely peaceful.” He gave Cet a faint smile. “Though, of course, you would not know that, Gatherer.”
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? Page 27
