Only Ariel feels real to him, and only when he is holding her, and he can feel her lungs expanding and contracting. This is the only proof of life he has. That life exists outside the hard drive of his skull.
***
His cockpit feels like a bed, or maybe a coffin. He’s floating above the mysterious equator of Olympus, but the white hot sun is on the other side of the planet, and it will be for hours. The clouds beneath him are a mess of neon purple laced with delicate lines of silver and little fists of lightning that are as surprising as laughter. Above him, the naked stars lay out in the dark like the inviting form of a young woman.
That’s not for you anymore, he tells himself, and tries to will sleep to invade his body.
He’s on a long deployment. He shits and pisses right in his seat, into a chute that opens up under him like a trap door. He eats A-ration packs and lets the scraps of foil packaging collect at his feet like drifts of snow or tinsel, even though he could drop those in the chute as well. He likes these deployments. They’re only for aces. Rooks can’t handle the soft emptiness of the hours and days and weeks stacked on top of each other like weird towers.
He feels like a wild spirit, free from any decaying, human form. He feels like somebody could conjure him up with a spell and a sacrifice. His BrightGlass window screen displays an unbroken 360° angle of his whole world. His Seraphim hovers, like he is an actual cloud or angel, in standby mode. In a tiny corner of his window screen, he has scratched ariel. ariel. ariel, with a diamond edged flick knife he won in a card game. He hopes this doesn’t fuck up whatever smart circuits are embedded in the glass, but he finds that he doesn’t really care. He cheated at that card game. This is a bad habit of his. This tiny blind spot may be what gets him killed one day.
***
Twenty-eight days later, he has scratched ariel into his window 292 more times. He pictures her, leaving him behind in time. Not so far behind, but further every day, it seems. He imagines her on her eighth birthday, gap-toothed and strong and so smart. Her twelfth birthday, a little woman already. Uncomfortable hugging, but hugging him anyway. The little beat of her little heart through her back. Her tiny shoulder blades like tiny wings. She looks more like him than she does her mother. He imagines her first kiss. What must it have been like? Was she disappointed? When she got her first period, had she been afraid? When she started high school, had she been confident? Had she ever been in a fight? Did she have bad dreams? Were they about him? How had her mother managed all this in his absence?
It’s making it hard for him to see clearly. The faint white scratches of her name like the fingernail markings made by someone buried alive in a glass coffin. Beyond them, the clouds shift and turn in irregular shapes. They are both formed and unformed. They’re a soft, velvet color today. When he returns to the SoSoft satellite base in thirteen more days, he decides he will request some of that leave he has racked up. Maybe he’ll break contract even, and quit outright. Probably not. These pangs are just an itch, he tells himself. Scratch it, and it’ll go away.
His console pings. A bogie. The Seraphim is great. EM shields for miles, radars and sight for miles, even in these alien clouds.
***
“How many?” Bastian, Diego’s mechanic in this company, asks. They’re in the harbor of the SoSoft outer orbit satellite. Gray steel. A crisscross of pipe and catwalk. The smell of gas and hot particles. Hard, white light.
“Twenty-three,” Diego says.
Bastian whistles. “Gonna need to make room on your wing. What companies?”
“Loyals, Advent, Air Corp, Unity Group, MZS, KX6, U.S Air Force, Royal Air Force, People’s Liberation Army Air Force, JSD, Indian Cloudfront, Mad Dogs, Upside-Down. Maybe others. A few were unmarked. Maybe deserters. I don’t know.”
So many ships. So many notches on his wing like the faint markings of a horde of ghosts passing him by. So many lives, just like his own, obscured by clouds now forever. So what, in the end? He’s seen people eject, helplessly from their disintegrating fighters, screaming and laughing like all of life was just some cheap ride in an even cheaper amusement park. He’s seen fighters blow themselves up just to take the satisfaction of another notch away from him. More than once he’s seen two or more friendlies crash into each other in the middle of an EM blind cloudbank because of bad communication. Had almost done that himself. He’s seen a boy, a friend of his, accidently eject from a perfectly functioning Nimbus. He’d been way high on some chem and Diego had talked to him and tried to find him until he fell out of range or else the EM storms fried him.
“Where are you?” Diego had hissed. “Where the hell are you?”
“Baby,” the boy said, still tripping the universe, “I’m everywhere.”
So nothing.
Bastian nods appreciatively at Diego’s list.
“The Americans and the Chinese are well outfitted, so’s Advent and KX6. Well done. It’s in your brain?” Bastian says, rapping his knuckles against the flat chrome hull of the Seraphim, roughly where the black box combat record is stored. The tin rapping sounds oddly hollow, and hurts Diego in his chest.
“It’s in there,” Diego says, tapping his temple. His smile feels a little crazy and jagged in his mouth. Bastian doesn’t seem to notice. He takes a magnetic screwdriver to the hull, takes off a panel, then plugs in a diagnostic tool, which glows softly with a metal light. All the while he’s humming some popcorn radio song popular back in the colonies and shuffling in his sandals.
Diego’s body feels atrophied and unfamiliar. His legs are shaking under him. He feels like blackout all over. Scraped out inside.
“Where’s the captain?” Diego says.
Bastian throws his head back toward the officers’ lounge, and the motion makes his long neck look boneless and weird, like a ragdoll or a newborn.
***
“Captain,” Diego says.
“Ace,” the Captain says. “Twenty-three’s a great number. Good work.”
“Not really,” Diego says, but he remembers the thrill of each one. Each one like a lightning storm in his mind. Thunder clapping with each rook he sent down to the open grave of Olympus. I am, the thunder booms and crashes. I am. I am. I am.
Is he lying to himself? Can he really leave all this behind? Maybe. Maybe he can. The thought of Ariel, so unprotected without him, living her life exposed, fatherless, naked skin out in the ice storm of life, makes him sick. This desire to protect her is very obviously selfish. He knows it. But who’s he kidding? It’s only him inside his head.
“I think we need to talk,” Diego says.
***
It’s always boring, but the return trip feels even longer than usual. The stars slide by. Time speeds up. He feels like he’s chasing it, or maybe running from it.
***
He is meeting his wife, his ex wife, for lunch. He’s sitting at a table outside. The air is tropical and smells, just slightly, of sand. The climate of the Terra Six artificial moon is trophic all the time.
He can’t seem to find Ariel. She isn’t answering his messages, but he’s trying not to panic. She’s a teenager now, after all, fifteen or thereabout. Perhaps she is building some structure of independence around her life. That’s alright. The SunLights above warm his skin on all sides. It’s nice, to be able to track the light. To see its source. He feels unbelievably clear. He’s got time now for miles.
Her mother appears. He’s shocked again by how old she looks, but good, very good. She’s stopped dying her hair, and little streaks of silver run through it like veins of ore. She’s in good shape, probably better than him. Her blue eyes have faded a little, and there’s a blackness behind that almost makes them look multicolored. She’s dressed simply, long skirt, blouse with gold buttons done up to the neck. She’s elegant now in a way he can’t remember her ever being before. He feels dumpy beside her, a little ridiculous even. He’s in a T-shirt, and his head is shaved, and there are big pockets on his pants. He needs some adult clothes.
&n
bsp; “What did you want?” she says, even before she has sat down. She orders vodka and water, and when it comes it throws rainbows everywhere like confetti.
“Ariel is not answering her phone,” Diego says.
He shows her the messages he sent, though he’s deleted several after saving them to a private file. Most of his messages say he’s in town now, and they ask if they can meet.
“That’s not her number anymore. Hasn’t been in…probably three years.” She drinks from her glass and makes it look beautiful. Her lips are pink, and they look supple and moist pressed against the glass. “Anyway, she’s not here anymore.”
“Where is she?” Diego says. There’s the beginnings of a falling sensation inside him, but he holds it steady.
“She joined a cloud outfit, as a pilot. You didn’t know? She said she sent you a message. I gave her the money for it.”
“But,” Diego says. It’s his heart that’s falling. Right out of his chest and onto the floor with a soft plop like a sigh. He doesn’t understand. It’s so hot, suddenly, and the air tastes recycled. “She’s only fifteen, or…or sixteen?”
Her mother frowns. “She’s eighteen, Diego. She was able to join a private company right out of high school because her simulator scores were so high. Highest in the quadrant, actually. She won a trophy for it. The companies had a little bidding war for her and everything. She used to practice for hours. She was so focused. It was almost like she was away, like you.”
She seems distant. She dips a finger into her glass, then presses it against her lower lip.
“What company?” Diego says. He’s shaking. His lungs have fallen out of him, following the slipstream his heart left behind. Then goes his liver. His kidneys. Miles of intestine. He’s getting tunnel vision again. He might pass out. He knows the signs.
“I’m not sure. Angel’s…something something something? Mad something? Protect something? I don’t know. Maybe one of the new ones. 3rd Realm or Virtuoso, or Upside-Down something?”
“For the love of god, Gloria,” Diego says, very softly. “You’re killing me. You’re tearing me apart. Have a little mercy on me.”
“Diego,” she says, softly, not unsympathetically. Her brows are knit together. There’s pity in there, in her face. She puts a hand lightly on his. Her index finger is wet. When she had told him, years ago, that she could not stay married to his ghost, she had said she would always care for him, and that he would always be Ariel’s father. But she doesn’t know what he’s thinking now. Hasn’t put it together. Had Ariel? Had Ariel considered this possibility, perhaps even sought it out? How much she must have hated him. Her hate for him, her resentment. He can picture it. In his picture, it’s shaped like a whole planet. Thick with light and unformed shapes like memory. Her mother takes her phone out of her bag. “You can just read the acceptance mail for yourself.”
Finally, his brain falls out of him. He’s a neuron mess. He’s a splash of stars. His bones turn to liquid and flush down the drain of him. Surely, no one in this vast universe is any lower than him.
***
Unity Group. She’d joined Unity Group. They still flew 2nd gen Nimbus with 80% output nuclear fusion reactors that melted holes right through their own hulls if you hit it just right, and Diego often hit it just right. Oh, how he could hit it just right. With his eyes closed. Inside his vast sleep. The dove of a Les shell, flying into the infinity of a dark cloudbank. The glowing orb of the reactor coming loose. The cyclone of hydrogen and helium and beryllium spilling wild like a super hot flower and falling right out the bottom of the ship like a rejected organ. Tearing the ship to pieces as it fell and broke magnetic containment.
He’d taken down dozens of those jokers in just that way. Not so long ago. Not so long ago at all.
It had made him feel like God. Destroying stars.
***
“When did she deploy?” Diego says. Everything else in the world has vanished. He has vanished. They are surrounded by the whiteness of a blank page. All the universe, a blank page.
“I don’t know. You read the mail. You know what I know now.”
“More than a year ago? More than six months? It’s not dated. I was flying six months ago. It takes six months to get here.”
“Sometimes longer,” she says, taking her hand off his. Age has carved her into a great beauty. Diego feels primal, stripped down, very young. There’s a bead of rainbow vodka on the back of his hand. Where is his daughter now? Where is she?
Gone to Olympus.
***
He dreams about Olympus almost always. What else? He’s in the clouds, but there’s no ship. He has a full spherical view of all the whiteness and yellow lightning of cloud infinity. Not even his body is in his way. He’s got the living lightness of a child. He feels like lightning. He is so alive. It is always after he has awoken, deep in a cool, tropical sweat, that he realizes it is a dream about ejection, expulsion. Failed escape.
***
He lives in a small, one bedroom apartment on the Terra Six satellite now, because where else would Ariel return to? He, like her mother, waits for her messages, which never come. They wait because they do not know where to send their messages. By the time they arrive, she will surely be gone. The companies were notoriously bad with private mail, and there are few opportunities for pilots to access radio equipment powerful enough to respond. Secretly, he sends her messages anyway. The cost is huge, but he’s got the money. He expects her mother does the same, but they don’t talk about it.
Is she alive? He believes that she is with his whole mind. The waiting is hard, maybe the hardest thing he’s ever done. He feels like he’s killed her. He will keep waiting until the end of time, he tells himself. And this time, he means it.
***
It comes to him that in all those years, he’d never seen the secret heart of Olympus. That bizarre core they were all fighting over. But that was alright. He’d never shown it his, either.
***
He takes walks in a small, nearby park. It’s lush and tropical like everything is in Terra Six. Trees with huge, heavy leaves. Vines covered in little yellow flowers. Purple African Moon flowers, orange sunburst Blanket flowers, pincushion Blood Lilies. It’s very pleasant and reminds him of his youth. The colors remind him of Olympus, but not enough to hurt so bad.
He has started to date his ex-wife, and it’s very exciting. She’s an independent woman now. She runs the administration department of a sleep clinic at which she used to receive treatment, and she is no longer lonely for him. He has so much to learn from her. From the way she lives. She helps him sleep. They make love constantly in the blue grass, soft as moss, in that park that smells of pepper and flowers, in that park that was theirs for a moment. So long ago. He craves the safety of her body all the time. Almost like they are kids again. Almost like they have traveled backwards in time. Almost like it might nearly be possible to regain all those things they’d thought they’d lost for good.
***
Ryan Row’s fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Quarterly West, Shimmer, and elsewhere. He is a winner of the Writers of the Future Award, and holds a B.A in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. He lives in Oakland, California with a beautiful and mysterious woman. You can find him online at ryanrow.com.
THE HUNGER OF AUNTIE TIGER
SARAH BROOKS
illustrated by Jim Burns
And underneath her skin, a tiger was waiting
— Chinese folktale
Auntie Tiger has gobbled up my brother again. Auntie Tiger is always hungry. She waits in the forest for lost children and she hides her bright fur under human skin. She is careful not to show her yellow eyes and sharp teeth. She is careful not to show how her hunger has claws.
***
“Why do I always have to get eaten?” says Xiao Wei, folding his arms across his chest the way Baba used to.
“Because you’re the youngest,” I say, in my calmest voice, which always makes him mad.
>
“But there’s more meat on you, you’re taller.”
“Well, she goes for the easy victim first.”
His forehead wrinkles in the little frown that means he’s thinking, which is never good, so I jump in quickly: “And anyway, you get to be Auntie Tiger, too, so it balances out.”
Of course, one of us is always Auntie Tiger, now that we have her forest all to ourselves, except for Nainai, and she doesn’t count. See, we tell each other, the bones of the waystation look like trees, the metal skeletons reach towards the sky like they could sprout green leaves at any moment, if you screw up your eyes really tight… In Auntie Tiger’s forest we can pretend we are anywhere. We can practise the words the Company left us: aquifer, mo-screen, fuselage. We can fill our bellies with food, all the tastiest, tenderest food we imagine.
“I’m hungry,” says Xiao Wei.
“You can’t be hungry yet, you’ve just eaten a whole boy.”
“No, I’m hungry, real me. Can we eat the dumplings now? Please?”
We’ve waited all day, knowing that they are there, safe in the burnt-out ship which is Auntie Tiger’s house, and knowing this is almost as good as knowing they are in our bellies. Almost. The sun is falling and the forest is full of shadows. My stomach has been rumbling for hours. Xiao Wei runs his tongue over his dry lips. He wraps his skinny arms over his belly and shuffles from foot to foot.
Interzone #267 - November-December 2016 Page 5
