She remembers the man who sold her that carpet. His name was Lann and they were lovers for almost a week before Klary felt herself becoming attached. Lann had the oddest collection of combs: silver and bone and glass and gold. She had never met anyone before who collected combs. She wonders what became of him. Of her life.
Then she sees realizes that she is sitting in a puddle. She picks herself up. Janary stares at her.
“I did this for you,” Klary says. “Our sisters chose me to rescue you.”
“No.” Janary strangles on the word. “You don’t understand.”
“I was going to buy you afterward, bring you home. You weren’t supposed to know about this. Nobody was.”
The wound she has inflicted on the soulcatcher is already healing. Asher’s head grimaces and turns away from them.
“I had a plan, Janary. All this would have been a secret.” What is that in her sister’s eyes? Hatred? Horror? Fear?
She wonders then if anyone is coming to rescue her.
About the Author
James Patrick Kelly has written novels, short stories, essays, reviews, poetry, plays and planetarium shows. He has won the Nebula and Hugo Awards and his fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. With John Kessel he is co-editor of seven anthologies, most recently Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology and SFWAs Nebula Awards Showcase, both published in 2012. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He was an early and eager adopter of podcasting; his podcasts include James Patrick Kelly’s StoryPod on Audible.com and the Free Reads Podcast (http://feeds.feedburner.com/freereads). Jim is thrilled to have his first publication in Clarkesworld and is particularly excited that Kate Baker, Audio Goddess, will be intoning his words.
Tachy Psyche
Andy Dudak
The woman who means to kill Wang Zhe is, like the rest of the universe, apparently frozen, though actually in glacial motion.
He has studied the scene for subjective years: the sculpture of her flowing cloak, the mask of her smart grease paint, the beginning of channel through that paint at the corner of her right eye. He’s gone mad theorizing on that tear. He’s gone mad counting the rain drops that hang suspended in the autumn air of this narrow Kashgar street; and mad again gauging the progress of her pistol as she levels it.
He’s gone mad wondering which will kill him first: a bullet, or the heat of his fatally overclocked brain.
There was a time, long ago, when he made a great effort of will to move his right hand on a collision course with her weapon. But of course, his body isn’t overclocked like his modified brain. He devoted volition to his hand in weird, Zen-like shifts for an apparent year before giving up. He wonders what she’ll see. Maybe a twitch before she fires, or before infected processors cook smoking holes through his skull.
He’s aware of his rising fever, but doesn’t feel it like he would in baseline time. It’s a barely perceptible global warming. The air on his skin and the weight of his utility kilt are an unchanging tactile cocoon, sound a basal drone. Sometimes the hellish monotony of his final moment is too much to bear. He retreats into memory.
He remembers his modification, deep in the bowels of a qingbaochu somewhere between Lhasa and Chongqing. All the agents endured it. After two months of psychedelic torment, they emerged with strange new powers. The one that would be their downfall was considered the greatest: acceleration or deceleration of thought, at will. The former would give them initiative in split-second decision making; the latter would speed them through isolation or torture.
The PRC’s sorcerers were optimistic. If they imagined a virus that could set thought-rate fluctuating randomly and beyond design specs, they didn’t picture it in the hands of Uyghurstan.
It hit him first in the Urumqi Han ghetto. One moment he was shuffling along with a river of his emaciated countrymen, and the next they flowed past him in a blur. He barely had time to realize he was underclocked before suspicious Uyghur troops buzzed in and whisked him away. Still he decelerated. Months of internment flashed by in minutes.
He doesn’t know if she visited during that time. She would have been another flash in the racing patterns of daily activity. Humans came in streams. They were blood, pulsing through routines with each day’s heartbeat. With each beat came the high-pitched whine of daytime clamor, the momentary break of night—with each beat, a staccato of force feedings and med-probes.
She probably had access to his little white cell. She must’ve known he wouldn’t recognize her. Was she tempted to come? Was their Tashkurgan tryst just business for her? He entered Uyghurstan via Pakistan, following the rubble of the Karakoram Highway through the Khunjerab Pass. Love was the last thing he expected to find on the Roof of the World. It managed to over- and underclock him at once. Three incredible days shot by, but there were moments that seem in retrospect to weigh centuries. A kind of gravity pulls him back to the ancient battlements of Tashkurgan Fortress, her hand in his, looking down upon the vast green plain sprinkled with white yurts.
“Uyghurstan will never again be Xinjiang province,” she murmured.
He was determined to do his part in returning Xinjiang to the fold—and he loved her anyway. Her passion was all the more endearing for its futility. Did she say it to test his reaction? Could she read micro-expressions like he could when overclocked? Had she been waiting for him at the border? If so, who betrayed him?
In his endless final moment, he guesses that she must have tracked him after Tashkurgan. He was probably watched in Urumqi. Perhaps he was chosen as a test subject for the virus. When it first yanked him from slow-thought into overclocked fever, he knew what was at work in his brain. For a baseline moment he was there with the doctors in the cell. He heard enough before they sank into slow motion. Then came three subjective weeks in a universe not much faster than the one he’s trapped in now. When Han insurgents overran the place—like a rumbling, inexorable storm front—he had ample time to wonder if they would kill him along with his captors.
The clocking malfunctions got more extreme as he returned south. He was trekking over moaning sands when days strobed by in seconds, bringing hunger and thirst like a knife in the gut. He emerged baseline on a straw pallet in a Silk Road Buddhist cave. The ancient walls danced with demons and saints as an old Han anthropologist nursed him back to health. The hermit and his heritage site had survived the Uyghur Dawn. Wang Zhe was grateful for the peeling, oxidized murals when the next overclocking hit: he lost himself in Sakyamuni’s Temptation for a subjective month.
When he emerged again, he confessed everything to the old man in a desperate rant.
An underclocking followed. Suddenly he was in the old man’s rickety ACV, hurtling south over the Taklamakan. Somehow sensing that Wang Zhe was baseline conscious, the old man explained, “We’re both Han, after all.”
Another underclocking zapped him into a flea-bitten room in an old Kashgar hostel. The place had once catered to laowai backpackers, and the walls were papered with old maps. Turn-of-the-millennium China was prominent, with its quaint autonomous regions and special economic zones.
The old man lay beside him on a dusty mattress. Breathing weakly, lips blood-flecked, he whispered, “Little brother, are you a Buddhist?”
“No,” Wang Zhe said.
“Some of us like to tailor our final moment. Optimize our eternity. I looked through the library here. A lot of old Lonely Planets, but no Bardo Thodol. Guess I’d need a lama anyway.” A coughing fit wracked him. Wang Zhe suspected the old man had spent the last of himself coming here. “Maybe you’ve read it?”
Wang Zhe knew of the text—Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Liberation through Hearing—but he hadn’t read it. The old man wanted guidance as he crossed over. “Sorry, uncle,” Wang Zhe answered. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“Tell me, do you really think this p
lace can be China again?”
“It has strayed before,” Wang Zhe said, “and been brought back home.”
The old man smiled. He began to mutter snatches of the Bardo Thodol, playing lama for himself: “I have arrived at my time of death. By means of this death, I will adopt the characteristics of an enlightened mind. I will become compassionate. I will attain perfect enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings.”
He barely whispered his last words: “The present moment is a Bardo, lying between my past and future selves. This Bardo is a chance to know true reality, which is also true self.”
In the Bardo of his final moment, Wang Zhe has repeated these words thousands of times. They have become a mantra. The unmoving raindrops have become prayer beads. Past and future have melted away. He has worn his memories out. They’ve been rewritten too many times.
He can only accept the street, the girl, the gun. In the end he can only become them.
When a syringe dart finally emerges from the pistol, crawling at a snail’s pace through the rain-studded air, Wang Zhe is incapable of surprise. He cannot hope it contains a vaccine.
About the Author
Andy Dudak’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online, Abyss & Apex, Ray Gun Revival, and other fine venues. He is a published illustrator and aspiring translator. He lives in Beijing, and knows the Forbidden City better than most natives.
(R + D) /I = M
E. Catherine Tobler
Grapes grew differently on Mars and no one minded. This trespass was for science, ask anyone.
Perhaps they shouldn’t have grown at all, but they did, into oblong coils that turned the color of copper under the days of long, if distant, sunshine. We found they were best at night, when they froze into slush.
We would sneak into the vineyard, just the two of us, silent as we always had been. We had heard the humans wish for this ability, to be naked under the Martian sky, stretching in our low gravity, bodies coiling however they might. They pictured Martians like grapes, though never noticed any of us in those early days. They didn’t then know how close they were to the truth. Our bodies grew as slender as the grapes did, tethered to the ground by delicate webbed feet the way the grapes held to their vines, spout-like heads spread open to collect whatever moisture the air produced. The leaves and coiled vines hovered in the air, held back by only the weight of the fruit upon them. Once plucked, the vine sprang back, looking much like we did when we jumped.
It didn’t take us long to perfect our system of thievery, though we would both argue we weren’t stealing anything. A certain percentage of the crop would be lost; we reasoned we were taking grapes before they could be lost to conditions not even they could bear. The planet’s orbit would carry it farther and farther away from the sun, and the humans had not yet perfected their methods of harvest. They were still monitoring, calculating, devising. They wanted a year-round harvest; they were to be sorely disappointed.
We gorged ourselves amid the vines, unable to wait for the first taste of sweet grapey slush that befell our stigma when we crushed the grapes in our hurried hands. We ate until our bodies ached from the cold, then ate some more because we could. We sprawled on the ground, not drunk, but still intoxicated by the fruit, by the very idea that humans had come here and planted such wonders. We had never known such things. The humans found them commonplace, only an experiment.
Eventually, the outpost believed it had ghosts. One night, we overstayed our welcome and found ourselves lingering amid the vines as the humans patrolled. You—it was always you and never me—had chewed a vine and it stood out starkly against the sepia sky of mid-morning.
“Ghosts don’t chew grapevines.”
“Mars has no indigenous life—what else might have done that?”
The idea was absurd, but we learned early on that absurdity never kept humans from trying or thinking a thing. They moved past us and never noticed us amid the tangle of fruit and vines. Also absurd, considering how tall you stand and how your stomach growled (it was well past midday and stolen grapes eaten in the middle of the night cannot wholly sustain a body or the child within).
After that, we left them more clues. It was too fun not to. We also ached for contact, though our elders had forbidden us. Leave them be, we had been told. We wondered about the humans every day, because if they had something as wonderful as grapes, what else might they have? Clearly they were absurd—ghosts on Mars! they cried—but we didn’t care. One night, we left them grapes on their doorstep, spelling out a greeting in our language. They stared at the mess, unable to make anything of it. Knowing their language might help, you suggested with the curl of a lip. I scoffed.
We watched as the woman cleaned up the grapes, carefully placing them in a bin so that she might take them inside for salvage, study. But before she carted them away, she paused and looked at the vines where we hid. We held our breath, clutched our hands. I think you were holding me back rather than holding on. We did not move.
The woman smoothed the ground flat before her. She made a shape, grape by grape, then went inside. Was it a word? We watched until it froze with nightfall, then ate it piece, by piece, by piece. In our bellies, it sounded like a welcome.
They have the most amazing things, humans.
We watch from a distance, but get closer all the time, and when we find a way in, we don’t immediately leave. It’s not their walls we sink through—those are as solid as anything, and we are only flesh and sometimes bone. It’s the minds we find a way into, because humans think so loudly.
They have come a long way—from the bluish planet in the sky, or so they believe. We remain doubtful, though we have not traveled beyond our own skies, so who is to say? They have brought with them wonderful things, things we cannot explain. Perhaps the blue world is filled with such things—the better we get to know their thoughts, we realize it is so.
Within their habitat, they have rooms where they appear able to return to their home world if only for a time. These rooms mimic landscapes they know, but also those they have never visited. Virtually, they can go anywhere. The woman loves these landscapes, the man is at first hesitant. Didn’t they come to Mars to see Mars? he asks.
He holds to her hand—and as we step into their thoughts (their skins), I feel your hand in mine, an echo of theirs. They walk across a watery landscape that has both breadth and width and a strange depth that glimmers with colors we have no name for. Their bare feet press against wet lily pads which they think look painted and we watch the water ripple outward, ever expanding rings that deepen the sense of unease we feel as we go.
We don’t understand water, not this way. In our world, water is brief, transitory, often frozen. Our water does not unspool through the world the way this water does. Our water does not hold things—these lilies and fibrous green pads unfurl in the liquid, flowers spreading up and roots sprawling down. Each is reflected up and down until there is no up and down and I feel lost, lost though I know exactly where I am. I’m not in this room at all, but my mind says otherwise, hooked into the woman’s mind as I am. She takes a deep breath and leaps—
Her toes spring from one lily pad, to the next, and it’s slick, and she slides—the thrill down her-my spine is like nothing I’ve known—then she’s righted herself. They only delight in this—they cannot do this in the real world, only in this illusory place. They leap from pad to pad, hand in hand, and it’s too much for me, me who wanted to go. I pull myself out and you follow, so there we are, where we have always been, crouched outside their habitat again, familiar sepia wind washing over us. Our feet dry. Our hands unclasped, because that is also a human thing—
Until you take my hand in yours.
They keep us in a room that we can cross in three strides. The gravity within this holding space is heavier than our own, so we don’t stride. We haven’t moved at all, wrapped around each other. When I slide inside your mind, I can see the blackness, your eyes closed as
you murr like a low ground tremor, the slope of your head matching the concave curve of my neck. We notch together as we ever have. I know you miss the sky.
Our long legs fold together, mine around you and yours around me, your softly swelling body fitting within the hollowed well of my own. My arms enfold you as if they could keep you from all harm, though in this false gravity I am not sure how well they would move. Were that true at all, we would not be in this room, would we? We should have run—we tell each other this over and over, but it’s no use. We were too curious. You liked those grapes too well and I cannot blame you. I liked their taste on your skin.
The humans watch us from a window that seems little more than a slit; her eyes are blue and his are hazel. They want to know what we are—not who we are. “Martians” is the word he uses over and over, muttering it as he paces in disbelief. Others are coming to see for themselves, just to be sure. As if we might be a hallucination.
“Martians!”
We suppose that’s accurate, as they call this world Mars.
Later, they slide a tray into the room and hastily close the slot. The tray is filled with their food, but no grapes. We cannot tell them that we don’t consume these things. We eat differently than they do, drinking sunlight and not water. The grapes were the first food we dared. Eventually, we will wither without the sunlight; maybe then they will understand.
I feel you slip into sleep, your round body a little more lax against my own. I bid my warmth into you, as if we can make sunlight here between us as we did the bud of a child, but keep my attention on those eyes beyond the window. Are they angry? Upset we took their grapes? They douse the lights soon after the thought—I still don’t know if they’re telepathic; it’s too easy to presume they’ve taken the light away because we took the grapes, so I won’t. It can’t be that easy. My skin puckers in the darkness, I curl around you, because I think it’s night, time to rest, even though it’s not.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 80 Page 2
