21st Century Science Fiction

by D B Hartwell

  “You can’t fool us, Naeve. We’re your family. Why else do you think Mahi’s sulking? Maybe you’re lonely.”

  “But I already have all of you.”

  “Not that type of lonely, Mother.” I felt him lean forward until his breath tickled my ear. “Mahi and I could never have passed the third test.” His deep whisper sounded louder than an earthquake. “But he can.” His voice grew fainter and I knew he was vanishing in his own strange way—different parts of him at once.

  His voice was the last to leave. “Are you lonely, Naeve?”

  I sat frozen at the top of my castle, staring at the blackened desert with its shivering, luminescent sand for several minutes. Then, almost involuntarily, I conjured an image of Israphel.

  He was sitting in the parlor where I had left him, a few feet away from the tee-vee. His brows were drawn up in concentration and his fingers occasionally stroked the strange object’s forked tail. I stared at him for minutes, then hours—how many, I’m not sure. He never stirred, but once in that long night he whispered someone’s name. I couldn’t hear him clearly, but I saw his lips move and the pain that briefly flitted across his eyes.

  Was I lonely?

  I waited for the dawn.

  • • • •

  First day light. Mahi awoke me from my trance-like stupor, wiping out the vestiges of Israphel’s image with a flick of his two-dimensional tongue. He was all mouth this morning and his grotesquely abundant teeth were screaming a morning aria that I supposed might be pleasurable to the son of a creature who climaxed while she chewed.

  “You seem happy. Charm told me you were sulking.”

  “Why would I sulk? Our green eyed intruder has failed!”

  I sat up straight and stared at him. “Failed? How do you know?”

  He cackled like a magpie and his teeth groaned with him. Positively unnerving, even for me. “He hasn’t moved. He’s just sat there all night, and the tee-vee hasn’t done a thing. Go down and see for yourself.”

  He compressed himself into a line and started darting around me, giggling even as his teeth wailed like damned souls.

  “I knew you wouldn’t let him pass, Naeve,” he said, flattening himself out again. “Are you coming? I want to see you toss him out.”

  My throat felt like someone had lit a fire to it. “Soon,” I croaked.

  After he left, I turned to stare back out at the desert. The maggots had started popping back out of the sand, making crackling noises like the sound of bones being slowly crushed. Light sprayed and twisted in the rapidly thickening air as they emerged. Just from the timbre of the pops, low and crunchy, I could tell that it must be fairly late in the season. In two days, perhaps, the desert would have its lights. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been here to see it, but my sudden longing was mixed with dread.

  If Mahi was wrong like I thought—hoped?—then in two days we would all see something more than just the lights.

  • • • •

  By the time I arrived, the others were all there, staring silently at Israphel who stared just as silently back at them. Even Top had fashioned a body for herself for the occasion—a seductive brown human connected to the wall with an orange umbilical cord. He still sat on the floor, the tail of the tee-vee balanced on the tips of his fingers. It appeared that what Mahi said was true—he had not gotten it to work. The object looked just the same as it had yesterday. I fought a surge of disappointment. After all, why should I be disappointed? Just one less nuisance in my life. I could still stay and watch the lights if I wanted.

  Israphel looked up as soon as I appeared, and a smile briefly stretched his hard lips. My nipples hardened and I felt Charm flit over them with an almost-silent laugh.

  “There, I’ve been waiting for you,” he said. The night had brought shadows under his eyes, and he held himself with a dignified exhaustion that made him seem very human.

  “I’ve completed the task,” he said, when I didn’t respond.

  Mahi giggled and then stopped when Top glared at him. “You have?” I said, walking closer. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Watch,” he said. The black glass on the TV flickered for a few moments and then seemed to come to life.

  Strange shapes darted and moved inside the box. After a second I realized that they were human, but oddly seemed to resemble Mahi more than any humans I had ever encountered.

  Mahi shrieked and rushed closer to the glass. “What is this? What is this thing?”

  An odd, distorted voice came from inside the television: “What time is it?” I realized that one of the flat humans was speaking.

  “It’s howdy doody time!” smaller humans with gratingly high-pitched voices shouted in chorus.

  I turned to Israphel, whose skin was faintly glowing with a sheen of sweat. “How did you do this?” I asked. But before he could answer, Mahi shrieked again—probably in delight, though it was difficult to tell through the distorted sound on the tee-vee. He had managed to enter the picture.

  Israphel watched with every appearance of rapt fascination as the humans scattered from Mahi’s giant jaws, screaming and blubbering. He gathered up three small stragglers with one swipe of his blood-red tongue and began mashing them up with his teeth. In fact, his teeth themselves seemed to gobble up the two-dimensional humans, and when they finished they spit the masticated globs deep into Mahi’s apparently bottomless throat.

  He tore through the humans, screaming as he ate them, like his mother had all those cycles ago, and laughed at their obvious terror. “You’re all like me, now,” I thought I heard him say, but his mouth was too full of screaming humans for me to be sure.

  “Unbelievable,” Charm said beside me. “I never knew the kid had it in him.”

  Minutes later, there were no more humans left on the screen. Mahi had relaxed himself into a vaguely anthropomorphic shape—more like a giant mouth with legs and arms—and was reclining in a steaming vat of blood and still-twitching body parts. He giggled and splashed some of the blood at the screen.

  “More . . . want more.” His words were slurred, as though he was drunk on the killing. “Give more,” he said, and giggled again.

  “How odd,” Israphel said softly. “It must be a property of this universe.”

  “Naeve,” Top said, sounding torn between disgust and envy, “get him out of there. That many humans at once can’t be healthy.”

  “Can you?” I asked Israphel.

  He shrugged and let go of the forked tail. Immediately, the screen went black again and Mahi came hurtling back out. I expected him to wail and throw a tantrum, but he was surprisingly quiet as he turned his mouth towards me.

  “Keep him,” he said. Then he fell down and drifted straight through the floor.

  Israphel stood up gingerly, as though his bones ached. “I take it that I’ve passed the first test,” he said.

  I nodded, afraid to even speak. The very novelty of what he had just done terrified me.

  “And the second?” he said, very gently, as though he understood my fear and wished to reassure me.

  “Tell me who you are. Why are you here?”

  He seemed surprised, which I took a perverse pleasure in, considering that I was just as surprised myself. Why had I laid such a simple task? But as any sign of emotion fled his face, I realized that perhaps I had stumbled upon an adequate task after all. He didn’t want to tell me, but if he wanted to stay, he would.

  “Top, Charm,” I said, suddenly. “Leave us.” They left with hardly a murmur, since of course I could hardly stop them from eavesdropping.

  Israphel stared at me silently while I smiled and settled myself against the rippled lake-floor.

  “I take it you don’t want to tell me,” I said.

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “I’m waiting,” I said. “You have until second day light.”

  • • • •

  Hours passed in silence. I amused myself by changing my body into various imaginative—and
perfectly hideous—forms. A gigantic pair of jaws as close to Mahi’s mouth as I could manage emerged from my stomach, growling and sweeping its fleshy tongue over the floor. Israphel, staring with a bizarre intentness at the wall behind me, didn’t even flinch. I looked over my shoulder once to see what could possibly be so interesting, but of course the wall was blank. Whatever horrors Israphel witnessed that night, they were of his own creation. A thousand tiny arms sprouted from my face and filled the room with the cascading sound of snapping fingers. That, at least, he acknowledged with a slight upward quirk of his lips.

  The night dragged on. I wondered if he would remain silent, if he would choose death over revealing his identity. The implications disturbed me on many levels, none of which I particularly wished to examine.

  The floor still looked like a lake, and quite possibly was one, since various fauna periodically swam beneath us. A fish—the color of days-old dung and large as my torso—passed underneath me and paused just before Israphel. Its jagged teeth peeked over its lips and a strange appendage on its forehead gave off an ethereal glow that cast our faces in shadow.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” I said, without really meaning to.

  He turned to look at me, and I flinched. “Beautiful? In its own way, I suppose. But it’s not of this world.”

  “Maybe from Top’s world, then?” But after a moment I realized what he had implied. “No . . . from yours. From the human world.” He remained silent, and despite myself I was drawn out. “Time acts strangely in our universe, but something tells me that when you traveled here, your human world had long since been destroyed. So how would you know what creatures once lived on it? Unless . . . are you one of those humans? The ones reborn on the other side of the desert?” The very idea seemed ludicrous. Those humans were barely capable of seeing the desert, let alone crossing it.

  The fish dimmed its light and swam away, leaving us again in semidarkness.

  “Can you die, Naeve?” he asked.

  I snorted. “Am I alive?”

  “But old age can’t kill you. Or disease . . . probably not even an atomic bomb.”

  “I’m not human, so why would I die in a human way?”

  He looked at me so intently that I felt my skin begin to shiver and glow in response. If his expression hadn’t been so serious and inexplicably sad I would have thought he was courting me—I had only ever seen that kind of stare from a demon of the third sex who wanted to mate.

  “What do you think happens when you die?”

  “My body will take its final journey, back to the Trunk. The Trunk will crush my bones and my siblings will masticate my flesh and I will be remembered by my etching in the bark.”

  His eyes narrowed and I struggled to stop my skin from mottling iridescent ochre and gold. Sex ought to be lovely and ephemeral, but with him I knew it would mean far more. I couldn’t afford to reveal my desire.

  “The prospect doesn’t scare you?” he said, as though it would certainly terrify him. “What about an afterlife?”

  I gave a disbelieving smile. “Afterlife? You mean, some sort of soulessence surviving somewhere after death? Who believes that but humans? Though,” I said thoughtfully, “I suppose you humans might have a point. Wherever you come from, a few of you are reborn here. Maybe this is your afterlife?”

  Israphel clenched his hands so tightly I could hear the constricted blood pounding through his veins. “And what of those humans reborn here? And what of their children? None of them die of old age either, but they can be killed. What do you think happens, Naeve, when you die in your own afterlife?”

  I gave up and let my skin explode into whorls and starbursts of color. In the extra light, I could see how the grief I had only glimpsed before now twisted his face.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never thought about it before. But I assume the humans feed the maggots, just like the rest of us. Does this have a point, Israphel? You don’t have much time until daylight.”

  He briefly closed his eyes and when he opened them again, the pain had nearly left his face.

  “Let me tell you a story, Naeve, about a human boy who became a post-human and then became a god.”

  I looked at him curiously. “Is that what you are?”

  He shrugged. “It’s what I might as well be. Or an angel. A Nephilim, perhaps?” He smiled bitterly, as though at some private joke. “So I was born on the first human world—earth, as it was unimaginatively called at the time. After humans had traveled to space but long before we really colonized it. I grew roses—like the ones in this world, only you couldn’t use the thorns for impaling stakes. I had a wife who liked to write stories about monsters and death.”

  “You’re married? Then you can’t—”

  His sudden glare was so inimical that I cut myself short. “She died,” he said, his words clipped staccato, “when she was thirty-five. An eon later, I discovered that she had been reborn here and that she died here too—nearly a triad ago, by your count.” He was silent for a few moments and then answered my unspoken question. “She tried to cross the desert.”

  “Which is why you’re here?”

  “Yes. No. Not entirely.”

  “What else, then?”

  “To retrieve the last of the humans, the ones we spent centuries hunting for before we found this strange pocket universe. Do you know how statistically improbable it is that a universe so unlike anything ever burped into the cosmos could exist? We didn’t even realize it until the computers showed a discrepancy of precisely one billionth of a percent between the predicted numbers of retrieved humans and actual ones. But I already knew something was wrong, because no one could retrieve my wife. So I came here, and I realized—a person can’t exist in two places at once, and they can’t be retrieved if they don’t exist at all.”

  I had spent my life traveling between universes, and yet what Israphel was implying boggled me. Humans were that dominant in his time? “This retrieval . . . you mean, you’re trying to revive every human who ever existed?”

  “And every one who might have existed. Those are easier. It’s a moral duty.”

  “But . . . that must be . . . do numbers that large exist? Where could you possibly get the resources?”

  His eyes looked very hard, and the last of my sexual arousal shivered as it left my skin. “You don’t want to know,” he said. “It will be easier for you if you don’t.”

  “Or you don’t want to tell me.”

  He met my eyes, but twitched as though he longed to look away. Some strange emotion was tearing at him, I could tell that by his posture, but what? “Other universes,” he said, his voice rough. “We strip other universes, and then convert them to power sources, and when they burn out, we find other ones.”

  Of course. Now I understood the elusive emotion: guilt.

  “That’s why you’re here?” I said. My eyes turned glassy and golden as magma with anger. “To save all the humans and then destroy this universe and every other creature in it? What about saving us? Does your moral imperative only apply to yourselves?”

  He looked away and stared at the lake floor. “It would be a never-ending task. Humans take care of humans.” It sounded like a mantra, something recited frequently to stave off doubts or reason.

  I snorted in self-fury—I had thought better of him. “I’m sure they told you to believe that. And you call us demons. Of all the monumentally selfish . . . I suppose you came here and petitioned me so you could use my powers to hunt down the stragglers from your project?” I laughed, high and brittle. And I had thought I was too old to feel such bitter disappointment.

  I elongated my lower left arm and forced him to meet my eyes. He looked positively tormented, which pleased me. “You would kill me too, wouldn’t you? If you get your way, you would use me and then strip this universe and kill me too.”

  He grimaced and roughly knocked my hand away. “I’ll find a way to save you—”

  “And my family?”

  He remained sile
nt, but met my eyes.

  I sighed. “No, of course not. Well,” I said softly, leaning in closer and letting my eyes burn so hot he flinched, “lucky for us that you won’t succeed.”

  “Naeve . . . I told you what you demanded. I’ve passed the second task, and you know it. You can’t break your own law.”

  I smiled. “You want your third task, human? First tell me, you wish to become a member of my family, but which one? I already have three children. Would you be my fourth child? Or someone else?”

  “Someone else,” he said.

  My turn to dance. “Who?”

  The unexpected compassion in his smile made me feel like tearing at my skin. “Your husband,” he said.

  I leaned in so close our noses touched. “Then your task is to pleasure me.” Before I could pull away, his eyes caught mine and his fingers gently traced my lips.

  Abruptly, I stood up. “You’ll have to do better than that,” I said, shaking. I turned my back on him and headed towards the nearest hallway.

  “Don’t let him leave,” I said to Top. Even after the wall had solidified behind me, I had the eerie sensation that I could feel those unfathomable eyes on my back.

  • • • •

  I lay on the roof, shivering and devouring bits of Trunk bark laced with black sand. Usually this treat comforted me, reminded me of my childhood, but today it merely deepened my loneliness. Oh, I had a family but I was still lonely. Israphel’s presence made me realize it—if only because of how much I had foolishly hoped he would comfort me. He was lonely, too—anyone could sense that—but he had chosen to deal with it by brainwashing himself to a cause whose end result was the complete eradication of the non-human universe.

  My hysterical laughter became confused with sobs and I fell asleep.

  • • • •

  When I woke, it was dark. The maggots had buried themselves for the night, but in the final stage of their metamorphosis they glowed so brightly that their light was visible even through the sand. The desert now looked like the skin of a giant black leopard.

  The maggots would die too, if Israphel succeeded.

  Charm lightly brushed my shoulder and offered me a jug filled with saltwater. I took a swig just to be polite—saltwater didn’t affect me the same way. He took it back, and when he drank I could momentarily see the outline of his long neck and squat torso. When he first petitioned I wondered what his face looked like, or if he even knew. Now I figured that he didn’t—why else would he drink so much?