Cat leaned forward, intrigued. Jamal stopped his trudge, just outside the circle, past the rodent-alt, curious. All eyes were on the shaking rodent-alt and the knife she held a few inches from her body. Rover’s tail curled up between his legs. He reeked of fear. Cat didn’t think anyone was really scared of the rodent-alt so much as scared for her.
“We were created to do God’s work. All of us.”
Cat snorted. All eyes turned to her. Her barbels stiffened, but she decided to ignore them. “There ain’t no god, friend. There’s just nature and humans and the mess they make, like us.”
The rodent-alt let out a long, high-pitched whine. “There is too! I’ve seen her and spoken to her, and she wants us to do her work.” She turned to Rover, thrusting her knife in the air toward him, “All of us, Mr Prince. Even you.”
Rover showed the whites of his eyes, tail still thrust between his legs, covering his groin. He whispered, “What does she want us to do?”
Cat leaned forward even more, barbels extended as far as they’d go. The scent of the rodent-alt was fur and candy and something like joy. Cat couldn’t sense any anger in her.
The rodent-alt lifted both arms into the air. “She wants us to store nuts and other edibles for the coming winter!” Her face beamed beatifically.
Cat wasn’t the only person in the circle who laughed, but she was the only one who did more than chuckle, letting out huge heaving belly laughs she hadn’t realized were in her. Her eyes kept closing with the laughter, even as she strained to keep them open, keep them on the poor, deranged rodent-alt and her knife, who didn’t move, didn’t respond to the scornful response of her peers. The rodent-alt still had her arms raised when Little Windsoarer dropped from the ceiling and knocked the rodent-alt onto her back. Jamal leaned over slowly and gently pried the knife from her delicate pink fingers. He took the knife with him as he headed toward the exit.
Little Windsoarer rolled off the rodent-alt, then scrambled to lift her into his/her lap, stroking the rodent-alt’s cheeks around her long whiskers. The rodent-alt kept her eyes closed, the smile still on her face.
“Uhhhhh…” Rover’s tail was no longer between his legs, and he’d gone back to hiding the white of his eyes.
Little Windsoarer looked up at the group. “I think she’s OK. She just needs a rest.” Little Windsoarer sighed. “We all need a rest.”
Rest. Cat realized Gene should have come back already. She closed her eyes, but the suit was doing its job. Without thinking through the consequences or embarrassment, she shed her mask and suit and tested the air with her eyes closed. Yes. They were out there. StateCorp agents manned each door with tranquilizer guns. She could smell Gene struggling two rooms away with three other figures. Likely, he was on his way to prison or rehabilitation. All he’d wanted to do was fix his damn suction cups.
Mr Rover’s primary smell went from general relief to worried excitement. He wasn’t really paying attention to Cat or Little Windsoarer or the rodent-alt. He was staring hard after Mr Jamal. His voice came as a soft growl. “Seriously, Mr Jamal. I implore you. Do not leave this room or you will regret it.”
The man didn’t even pause before he pushed out the door. Cat could smell that once he was fully out of the room he was darted multiple times. They all heard the crash, but no one said anything. Instead, the eyes in the room wandered to Cat in her state of undress, or to Mr Prince and his sagging ears, or to Little Windsoarer who had started swaying dizzily over the rodent-alt, or to the intermediate spaces that had occupied some of the participants’ attention since they’d arrived.
Bombarded by the emotions in the others’ chemical scents, Cat tugged her suit back on. She was surprised by the complexity of Mr Prince’s odors, by the strong tang of defiance she’d overlooked before, when she only had partial senses. She realized that, like her, he got most of his information through smell and wasn’t as easily fooled as he pretended to be. She sat down. Mr Prince gripped his tablet in shaking fingers and gulped. “Okay. Back to business.” He tried to sit up straighter, but failed. “How about you, Mr Torrez?” No one turned to see who he was questioning, and no one responded. Mr Prince didn’t look up. “Ms Yang?”
Cat smelled him moments before everyone else heard the sucking and popping of suction cups attaching and detaching. She jumped up and cried “Gene!” Gene sidled back into the room. All eyes turned to him, everyone holding their breath. Cat kept herself from locking him in a bear hug. Mr Prince’s tail wagged uncontrollably, slapping his chair loudly. “Welcome back, Mr Papadopoulos. Welcome back! I trust you’re all straightened out?”
Gene blushed and shrugged, confused. “Well, yes, just fine. Thank you for asking. Some StateCorp personnel were very helpful in the matter. One of them was also named Gene, if you can believe that. I had a delightful chat with one of their scientists about my research into the possibility of interspecies breeding. She was quite interested. I do believe I might receive a most helpful grant for my research.” He smiled brightly as he took his seat, but the others, including Cat, frowned and looked away. Mr Rover’s tail stopped mid-wag. He looked back down at his tablet and halfheartedly muttered, “Good for you, Eugene. Good for you.”
Cat surveyed the gathered misfits, starting to understand. She wondered what plans they had for Little Windsoarer, for Yolanda Perez, for her, what they might use as bait or net. They’d darted Ahmed Jamal and rewarded Gene, illustrating for the rest of the group their two options: you could go along willingly or unwillingly, but you were going along, one way or the other.
Cat’s back began to itch. The sensation spread out to her limbs. You didn’t take the suit off and put it back on without a new layer of ointment. The itch grew unbearable. If she scratched, she’d hurt herself. She put the mask on and closed her eyes, using visualization techniques taught to her when she was younger, a ward of StateCorp. She imagined herself in another world, a calm, mundane place without industry, without alts, without politics or military, a giant pond, mud thick and delicious, sinking down into the depths. She imagined fins for herself, parts she’d always felt were lacking. She imagined away her ridiculous jointed limbs, streamlined her body, locked her razor sharp spines for protection, let her barbels unfurl, and sunk down to where it was quiet and warm and no one ever spoke a word.
***
Harmony Neal appeared recently in Black Static (issue #53, still available from our website) with the extremely well received ‘Dare’. You can find other weird fiction and nonfiction of hers all over the internet. She’s trying to compile it all into a website: harmonyisawitch.com.
DOGFIGHTS IN OLYMPUS AND OTHER ABSENCES
RYAN ROW
illustrated by Jim Burns
Diego’s chasing some punk through wisps of cloud so white they almost don’t exist. His console shows that flat heart of an EM storm. Sensor fry. This planet is all cloud and electricity. There’s something special at the center of it all, some flower of superdense element or highly radioactive, sub-alive titan bioform. It doesn’t concern him. Why should it? The white nothing billows by him. His eyes feel sharp and animal. He twists the Nimbus fighter through the slipstream left by the punk. It rapidly closes in front of him until there is no evidence of this crime left except for the empty places of the spent shells in his forward Les guns.
He bursts the surface of the cloudform and into a valley, an open space surrounded by curls and rings of super white cloud like God smoking up the universe. There’s the kid’s Nimbus, halfway through the valley, sputtering. One fusion engine spits a trail of black smoke where Diego tagged him earlier. The kid’s retro rifles open and thin beams of crystal blue light shatter harmlessly on Diego’s forward shield. He doesn’t even bother evading. Diego opens up. The Nimbus shakes with it like a jittery dance. One two three. One two three. He’s spinning with it. There’s a release to it, like sex. It’s all totally silent and brilliant. There’s no shame up here.
The kid tries to zip, or maybe make a 90° or some other evasive m
ove, but he can’t handle his ship, and one engine is popping with flames and holes of light and smoke. Diego’s velocity suit hugs him all over, like a lover. He can hear his own breath, and it feels complicated and almost musical. The kid goes into a spiral. He’s as good as gone, gone baby gone, but Diego doesn’t let up. The kid’s ship is coming apart, and it feels like it’s coming apart right in Diego’s hands. Like a handful of pebbles slipping through his fingers. The ship’s in pieces now. It rains into the cloud below him, a violent, celestial hail. Diego is ringing like a glass bell. Diego feels so alive that he might just shatter all over this planet. The muscle of his heart aches, like he’s been using it to lift weights and it’s running super hot in his chest. This planet feels like it’s made up entirely of clouds and light, which seems to have no source at all but comes at him from everywhere. Do the other pilots feel like this? he wonders. He’s just a rookie himself.
The kid’s nowhere to be seen, and the holes his wreckage left in the cloud are already closing up like old wounds, which have healed over, and scarred.
***
Diego brushes his young wife’s black hair away from her damp brow. Her skin is a soft brown, which he has always thought of as the smoothest color. She’s naked beside him, and the lights are on in their small home. He’s on leave. She’s not as fit as she was when he left. He notices the carpet needs vacuuming. The room smells of garlic and warm tortilla and sex. He wants to get up and turn out the lights. He doesn’t want to see this room where she lives alone, but where there is also space for him. Empty drawers and hangers in the closet shaped like his life. Space waiting to be filled by the shape of him. Her eyes are black and huge like empty galaxies. Her lips are thin and warm. He loves her so much. He can’t stand the sight of her.
“I want to get pregnant,” she says. “I’m lonely.”
His fingers are tangled in her hair, which has always been a little coarse and prone to knots.
“You want to get pregnant,” he says. “With who?”
She giggles and playfully hits him in the chest. Her little fists, he thinks, are like a child’s.
Her breasts shake, and he’s very aroused suddenly. Really, he is just a man. Just a man, after all, and not so complicated.
***
Humans have been fighting over Olympus for years, the name of this cloudy planet. Countries’ air and space forces as well as dozens of private military outfits for hire. Angel Element. Air Corp. Freedom Control Limited. Aero Tec. SoSoft. And on and on. Free for all.
These outfits trade pilots like stocks, like baseball cards. When Diego’s tour with the U.S. Air Force ended, he entered the shuffle of the private companies. First Aero Tec, then Black Spades, Mad Dogs, which he’d hated, Tru Sky. A few months or a year with each. He had some value. He was an ace now for the sheer fact of his stubborn refusal to die.
***
Three Nimbus on his slipstream. God damn. The air around him fractures wonderland. Curealian and silver beams slide off his hull and turn to chips of solid light that fly off and disappear into the metal purple of the clouds. The terrestrial lights are going wild again, and they light up his whole world neon quantum pink and purple. His shield’s getting thin. He can hear it crackling like burning paper. The heavier artillery, the Les shells, fly by him like thin, oblong eggs. He feels like an egg himself. Just about ready to crack open. Just about ready to be born.
He jerks left, right, right, slams the retros and halts in mid-air. He loses one in a cloudbank thick with weird, Olympian light, crooked bolts of pink heavy with lens flare and purple fog. Two still on him. He crisscrosses and zips. Pulls a 90° and a short dive, then spins back. They’re on him like gravity. He’s being pulled down. A Les shell glances off him and rips a hole in his shield the size of his whole life. The shell of his head is cracking. He’s breaking out of it like a baby bird.
He dives. Dives hard. He feels like he’s being compressed, like he’s getting smaller. Dark clouds rush by. They remind him of leaves, of a river that was near his house as a child and which he almost drowned in. The water had been high and dark like this, and fascinating. He’d let it drag against his dipped fingers. He’d been alone, and he leaned in closer and closer until he just fell in and almost died. It had carried him hard, held him all over, like a darker parent.
His console is screaming. Consciousness is a soft, strobing light. In and out. In and out. He thinks he can hear the clouds whispering in a bizarre and angelic language. All ice crystals and intricate patterns of light. It is so beautiful, it makes him never want to speak again.
He falls into a narrow valley of cloud. A corridor in which he feels tiny and swallowed. The walls are gentle and filled with lightning. He hits the retros and spins, facing the little hole he came out of. The move throws him hard, even through the velocity suit. He passes out very briefly. He’s still falling slowly, and he lets himself fall. Be carried.
When his two tails finally break the cloud like divers with their breath held, gasping, he’s already pulling the trigger. And the Les shells, pretty and white like astonishing doves, have been flying up toward them, where he knew they would appear, for what feels, to Diego, like forever.
Later, after he has tracked down his third tail and taken him too, his base leader squawks over the intercom, “Diego, are you alive?”
“Never more,” Diego says. He feels brand new.
***
There is some relativity involved here, just a little. The cloudy Olympus is 0.2 lightyears away from the Terra Six artificial moon where his family makes their home. His two year tours take about three years. His three year tours take about four, more if he takes any leave in the middle and goes home and adds time through the ferryman of relativity.
Sometimes, this makes him feel uncomfortably immortal. The way people age, just a little, around him, like water running around a rock. He walks with his wife through a public garden. The stars are cased in glass above, as if they have been gathered together like ancient artifacts just to be put on display. Amazon Lilies hang heavy and white over blue grass. Smooth trees with fat red leaves that smell like pepper cast great, warm shadows. Her hand is in his. She’s very pregnant now, and happy.
“I love you so much,” he says. At that moment, it’s true. Life is so slow here.
“I know you do,” she says. She is smiling, and about to cry again. Those black eyes, wet like puddles of rain.
He isn’t himself anymore.
Other times, it is like he was never gone at all.
***
He misses the birth, of course. His wife splurges and buys a message. It costs so much to communicate over this distance. She attaches a little file with a few compressed images. His little daughter. Her name is Ariel. Ariel is shaped like a seed, he thinks. There’s something precious about that, he thinks.
He’s in the clouds again. This time they’re a cobalt blue so deep he almost can’t breathe.
He and his squad are waiting to ambush a pack of Mad Dogs. Crossfire. They don’t stand a chance. Not so long ago he’d been one of them. He might know a few of the guys. So what? His little daughter is shaped like a seed, a sunflower seed, and for some reason, that’s all he can think about.
***
There are moments where he feels frozen in time. Where he almost doesn’t feel alive at all. He comes home and his wife has dyed her hair a metallic red and wears a multicolored lipstick which has come into style in his absence. He doesn’t like it. What kind of mother is she?
His daughter is two now and babbling like music. Like a strange language he’s sure he’s heard before, but he can’t remember exactly where or when. He is sure there are secrets in it. Keys in it with which she could unlock any of the tiny compartments inside his bloody heart.
He lifts her up. Her little ribs shake as she laughs and squirms. He’s never felt anything so alive or innocent.
***
Not a Nimbus anymore. That model’s on its way out. Good riddance. It’s all about t
he Seraphim now, the high angel. It takes him to a whole other realm. The Nimbus had been all angles, all edges. The Seraphim is all curves, like the idealized thought of a woman. Diego runs his hand along the hull. The slope of his wife’s hip. Her thigh. Her navel. He wants to kiss the thing. To caress it with his tongue. To fuck it. To live inside it forever.
It handles like a fantasy. Like it’s not even real, it makes him feel unreal too.
***
He doesn’t see Ariel again until she’s six years old. She’s obsessed with cloud fighters, like him, and Olympus and hyper potential energy dense matter, which makes up, scientists theorize, the dirty core of Olympus over which he has been fighting for years.
“How long are you staying this time?” she says. She is excited. There’s a whistle in her teeth. A few are missing. He loves the sound of it. And her little head under his hand.
“A long, long time,” he says.
“A few months,” his wife says.
His wife has become more gray at her temples, so she has bleached her hair ultra silver, and her teeth are so white it hurts his eyes. She has had her eyes colored a stranger blue. She’s fit again. Fitter than she’s ever been, actually. Maybe artificially so.
“You look beautiful,” Diego says.
“You look young,” she says. “I think we need to talk.”
They have a little house now on a quiet, safe street under a thick glass portion of Terra Six’s outer shell. He can see a close, orange star through it and mess of other, tiny lights. He has paid for this house, which he has never slept in. It has two bedrooms, a small living and dining room. A kitchen. A bathroom. But comparing it, in his head, to the one room apartment where they used to live together, this place feels incredibly small and almost fake.
Interzone #267 - November-December 2016 Page 4
