The Drowned Life

by Jeffrey Ford

  He put the two longest fingers of each of his three-fingered hands, pointing atop his wrinkled forehead. She understood and nodded. He then made as blank an expression as he could with his face, closing his eyes, turning his mouth into a perfect “O.” She nodded. When he saw she was following him, he held his right hand up as high as he could and then leaped up to show the stranger’s height. Last, he said, “Thula,” which meant “deadly.” In response, she made a fist, and he responded by lifting his weapon and exiting out upon the treetops to summon the forces of the Aieu.

  As old and tired as she was, there still burned within her a spark of envy for those who now swarmed away from the hive to meet the threat of this new enemy. She lit her pipe, ran her hand across the old crone stubble on her chin, and, with a vague smile, found in her memory an image of herself when she could still run and climb and fight. It hadn’t taken her long, once the Aieu had brought her around, before she was back on her feet and practicing competing with the best hunters and wrestlers her rescuers had among them. She’d taken to the treetops as though she’d been born in the lace forest, and a few days after they’d demonstrated for her the jump-bone-throwing technique, she was more accurate and deadly with it than those who were still young before the jump-bone animal had been hunted to extinction.

  But it was in the war against the Fire Hand that she’d proven herself a general of keen strategic insight and unfailing courage. Utilizing the advantage of the treetops, and employing stealth and speed to defeat an enemy of greater number, she’d helped the Aieu turn back the bloodthirsty hordes that had spilled down over the high lip of the crater and flooded the forest. It was this victory that had elevated her to the status of royalty among them. She drew on her pipe, savoring the rush of imagery from the past. As the smoke twined up toward the center of the hive, a distant battle cry sounded from the forest, and in the confusion of her advanced age, she believed it to be her own.

  The victory shouts of the Aieu warriors woke her as they led their prisoner into the hive. The giant indigo creature, wings bound with woven white vine around its chest, hands tied together at the wrists in front, a choker around its muscular neck, strode compliantly forward, surrounded by its captors, who brandished jump-bones above their heads.

  “Bring him into the light,” commanded Zadiiz, and they prodded the thing forward to stand in the glow of the two torches that flanked her throne. When she beheld the huge indigo form, she marveled at the effectiveness of her battle training on the Aieu, for it didn’t seem possible that even all who lived in the treetop complex surrounding the hive could together subdue such a monster. “Good work,” she said to her people. Then her gaze came to rest on the emotionless, shell mask of a face with its simple holes for eyes and mouth, and the sight of it startled her. It shared, in its blank expression, the look of another face she could not help but remember.

  It was in the dream that had preceded her waking into the lace forest and the people of the jump-bone animal, the first of her sleeping lives that John Gaghn had promised after he’d closed her in the cradle. In this one, she’d lived alone in a cave on a barren piece of rock, floating through deep space. She spent her time watching the stars, noting, here and there, at great distances, the slow explosions of galaxies, like the blossoming of flowers, and listening to endlessly varied music made by light piercing the darkness. A very long time passed, and she remembered the weight of her loneliness. Then one day, a figure appeared in the distance, heading for her, and slowly it revealed itself to be a large silver globe. Smoke issued from its back and it buzzed horribly, interfering with the natural song of the universe.

  The vessel rolled down onto the deep sand beside the entrance to her cave. Moments later, a door opened in the side of it and out stepped a man made of metal. The starlight reflected on his shiny surface and he gave off a faint glow. At first she was frightened to behold something so peculiar, but the metal man, whose immobile face was cast in an expression of infinite patience, spoke to her in a friendly voice. He told her his name was 49 and asked if he could stay with her until he managed to fix his craft. Zadiiz was delighted to have the company, and assured him he could.

  She offered him some of the spotted mushrooms that grew on the inner walls of the cave, her only sustenance. They tasted to her like the flesh of the hurrurati. 49 refused, explaining that he was a machine and did not eat. Zadiiz didn’t understand the idea of a robot, and so he explained that he had been made by a great scientist named Onsing, and that all of his parts were metal. He told her, “I have intelligence, I even have emotion, but I was made to fulfill the need of my inventor, whereas beings like you were made to fulfill your own desires.”

  “What is your master’s need?” asked Zadiiz.

  “Onsing has passed on into death,” said 49, “but some time ago, while he still lived, he discovered through intensive calculation, using a mathematical system of his own devising and entering those results into a computer that not only rendered answers as to what was possible but also what could, given an infinite amount of time, be probable, that his sworn enemies, the Ketubans, would some day create a mischievous creature that could very likely manipulate the fate of the universe.”

  Zadiiz simply stared at 49 for a very long time. “Explain ‘infinite’ and ‘probable,’” she finally said.

  The robot explained.

  “Explain ‘fate,’” she said.

  “Fate,” said 49, and a whirring sound could be heard issuing from his head as he stared at the ground. Sparks shot from his ears. “Well, it is the series of events beginning at the beginning of everything that will eventually dictate what must be. And all you would need to do to change the universe would be to undo one thing that must be and everything would change.”

  “Why must it be?” she asked.

  “Because it must,” said the robot. “So, to prevent this, Onsing created a machine of one thousand parts that could, once its start button was pressed, send out, in all directions, a wave across the universe that would eventually find this creature and melt it. When he had finished the machine, he hoped to always keep it running so that it could forever prevent the Ketubans from undermining fate.”

  “And did he?” asked Zadiiz.

  “Poor Onsing never had a chance to start his machine, because it was destroyed by the evil Ketubans, loathsome creatures, like steaming piles of organic waste with tentacles and too many legs. They used their psychic power to automatically disassemble the machine, and all of its individual parts flew away in as many different directions as there were pieces. Onsing, too determined to give up, but knowing he would not live long enough to rebuild the machine or find all of the parts scattered across the universe, created one thousand robots like me to go out into space and fetch them back. Nine hundred and ninety-nine of the robots have found their parts, and they have assembled all of the machine but for one tiny gear that is still missing. That is my part to find, and they wait for my success. Once I find it, I will return with it. It will be fitted into the machine. The robot that has been designed to press the start button on the machine will fulfill its task and the fate of the universe will be protected.”

  “How long have you searched?” asked Zadiiz.

  “Too long,” said 49.

  Eventually, Zadiiz grew weary, as she always did when eating the mushrooms, and fell asleep. When she awoke, she found that 49 was gone from the cave. She ran outside only to discover that his sphere of a vessel was also gone. Some time later, she realized that the metal gear that had hung around her neck was missing, and the thought of having to live the rest of that lonely dream life without even the amulet’s small connection to John Gaghn sent her into shock. Her mind closed in on itself, shut down, went blank. When she awoke, she was surrounded by the pale faces of the people of the jump-bone animal.

  She surfaced from her memory, again surrounded by the Aieus’ pale faces; this time in the hot and crowded hive. They’d been waiting in expectant silence for her to pronounce the
fate of the assassin they’d brought before her. Zadiiz realized she’d had a lapse of awareness, and now tried to focus on the situation before her. She looked the horned figure up and down, avoiding another glimpse at the face. She wondered who could have sent this thing. Because of its unknown nature, its obvious power and size, she could not allow it to live. She was about to order that the creature be drowned in the white pool when she noticed the fingers on its left hand open slightly. Something fell from between them but did not continue on to the floor. It was caught and suspended by a lanyard looped through one of its small openings.

  Upon seeing the gear, she gasped and struggled to her feet. The fact that she’d just been thinking of it made her dizzy with its implications. “Where did you get that?” she asked. The implacable face remained silent, but her obvious reaction to the sight of the curio sent a murmur through those assembled. “Who sent you?” she asked. Its eye holes seemed to be staring directly at her. She started down the two steps from her throne, and her people came up on either side to help her approach the creature. As she drew near, she felt a flutter of nervousness in her chest. “Did John send you from his own dream?” she said.

  When she was less than a step away from the prisoner, she reached out for the amulet, and that is when the indigo creature inhaled so mightily the ropes binding its wings snapped. In one fluid motion, it ripped its wrists free of their bonds, the vines snapping away as if they were strands of hair, and took Zadiiz by the shoulders. She was too slow to scream, for he had already leaned forward and the pointed nozzle had shot forth from its mouth. There was the sound of an egg cracking. The Aieu did not recover from their shock until the nozzle had retracted, and by then the creature had torn the lead from its neck and leaped into the air. At the same moment, Zadiiz fell backward into her subjects’ waiting arms. Jump-bones were thrown, but the assassin flew swiftly up and out of the opening at the top of the hive.

  The indigo creature flew on and on for light-years through space, past planets and suns, quasars and nebulae, black holes and wormholes, resting momentarily now and then upon an asteroid or swimming down through the atmosphere of a planet to live upon its surface for a year or two, and no matter the incredible sights it witnessed in the centuries it traveled its expression never once changed. Finally, in a cave whose walls were covered with spotted mushrooms, on an asteroid orbiting a blue-white star, it found what it had been searching for—a large metallic globe and, sitting next to it upon a rock, a robot, long seized with inaction due to the frustration of its inability to accomplish the task its master had set for it.

  Dangling the gear upon its lanyard in front of the eye sensors of the robot, the indigo creature brought the man of metal to awareness. Robot 49 reached up for the gear, and the creature placed it easily into his ball-jointed fingers. The two expressionless faces stared at each other for a moment and then each turned away, knowing what needed to be done. The robot moved to his globe of a space vessel, and the indigo creature sprinted from the cave and spread its wings. Even before the sputtering metal ball had exited the cave and set a course for the hollow world, the indigo creature had disappeared into the vast darkness of space.

  On an undiscovered world where a vast ocean of three-hundred-foot-tall red grass lapped the base of a small mountain, the creature landed and set to work. Time, which had passed in long lazy skeins to this point, now was of the essence, and there could be no rest. At the peak of the mountain, the winged being cleared away a tangled forest of vines, telmis, and wild lemon tress, uprooting trunks with its bare hands and knocking down larger ones with its horns. Once the land was cleared, it set about mining blocks of white marble from a site lower down the slope, precisely cutting the hard stone with the nail of its left index finger. These blocks were flown to the peak and arranged to build a sprawling, one-story dwelling, with long empty corridors and sudden courtyards open to the sky.

  When all was completed upon the mountain peak, the creature entered the white dwelling, passed down the long empty corridors to the bedroom, and sat down upon the edge of a soft mattress of prowling valru hide stuffed with lemon blossoms. It could see through the window opening the ringed planet begin its ascent as the day waned. Twilight breezes scudding off the sea of red grass rushed up the slopes and swamped the house. The indigo creature folded its wings back and stretched its arms once before lying back upon the wide, comfortable bed it had made.

  As the horned head rested upon a pillow, many light-years away, at the center of the hollow planet, robot 49 fitted the small gear into place within Onsing’s remarkable machine. Cheers went up from the 999 metallic brethren gathered behind him. And the 1,001st robot, designed solely to press the start button on the machine, finally fulfilled its task. A lurching, creaking, clanging of parts moving emanated from the strange device. Then invisible waves that gave off the sound of a bird’s call issued forth, instantly disabling all of the robots, traveling right through the hollow planet and outward, in all directions across the universe.

  The indigo creature heard what it at first believed to be the call of the pale night bird, but soon realized it was mistaken. It then made the only sound it would ever make in its long life, a brief sigh of recognition, before it began to melt. Thick droplets of indigo ran from its face and arms and chest, evaporating into night before staining the mattress. Its horns dripped away like melting candle wax, and its wings shrank until they had both run off into puddles of nothing. As the huge dark figure disintegrated, from within its bulk emerged a pair of forms, arms clasped around each other. With the evaporation of the last drip of indigo, John and Zadiiz, again young as the moment they first met, rolled away from each other, dreaming.

  In the morning they were awakened by the light of the sun streaming in the window without glass and the sounds of the migrating birds. They discovered each other and themselves, but had no memory, save their own names, of their pasts or how they came to be on the mountain peak. All they remembered was their bond, and although this was an invisible thing, they both felt it strongly.

  They lived together for many years in tranquillity on the undiscovered planet, and in their fifth year had a child. The little girl had her mother’s orange eyes and her father’s desire to know what lay out beyond the sky. She was a swift runner and climbed about in the lemon trees like a monkey. The child had a powerful imagination and concocted stories for her parents about men made of metal and dark-winged creatures, of incredible machines and vessels that flew to the stars. At her birth, not knowing exactly why, John Gaghn and Zadiiz settled upon the name of Onsing for her and wondered how that name might direct her fate.

  WHAT’S SURE TO COME

  • ONE •

  Outside on the cracked concrete sidewalk stood a wooden Indian with headdress and hatchet, which my grandfather had christened Tecumseh. Inside, the place smelled like a chocolate egg cream laced with cigar smoke and filtered through the hole of a stale doughnut. From beneath a pervasive layer of dust, one could dig out Green Lantern comics and Daredevil: The Man Without Fear. In the back, next to the phone booth with flypaper glass, were wooden shelves holding plastic models of planes, monsters, and the awe-inspiring car designs of Big Daddy Roth. There were spinning racks of paperback books, rows of greeting cards, crinkly bags of plastic soldiers, paper and pens and crayons. At the soda fountain, they made cherry Cokes, black-and-whites, and malteds that were hooked up to a green machine and cycloned into existence. My father bought his Lucky Strikes there. My grandfather bought his horse paper there. My mother would go in once a year, stir the dust, and come out with a notebook to keep her thoughts in.

  The owners, Leo and Phil, carried on a subdued argument day in, day out, which occasionally erupted into shouts of “Shmuck” and “Stick your ass in a meat grinder.” Leo was tall with glasses and a bald head. He always wore a green T-shirt and a graying apron with which he would swipe your glass before setting it under the soda jet. The brown, smoldering length of stiff rope he smoked throughout the day ma
de him talk out of the side of his mouth in a voice like a ventriloquist’s dummy. “Put ’em back in your head,” he would bark from behind the counter when he’d see my gaze drift up over the comics to where the Playboys were kept. He worked the register, but the register never worked. So when you brought your purchase to him, he’d blow smoke in your face and add the prices out loud: “Eh, let’s see here, fifty-four, twenty-eight, seventy-five, ahhhh…a buck ninety.”

  Leo’s brother-in-law, Phil, was short, with a broken nose and one walleye always looking to the left. Mrs. Millman said the bad eye was a result of all of those years of spying on Leo at the cash register. Phil was crankier than his partner and would scurry around with a dirty rag, dusting. Many of his days were spent in the center aisle, trying to remove a giant wad of gum that had been flattened into the linoleum and blackened by a million footfalls. “It’s a sin, watching him go at it,” my mother said. Once he brought in a buffing machine with the idea of whisking that sin away, but when he turned it on the thing went out of control, knocking fat Mrs. Ryan on her rear end and denting a shelf. The presence of children made Phil nervous and he gave us names—Cocker, Fuck Knuckle, Putzy Boy, and something that sounded like Schvazoozle.

  In the back of the store, through a small doorway you could only get to from behind the fountain counter, was a cramped stockroom. Old centerfolds were the wallpaper, and chaos reigned among the shelves. At the center of that room, beneath a single bare bulb, sat a card table and four chairs. On Thursday nights after closing, those chairs were occupied by Leo, Phil, Dr. Geller, and my grandfather. They played a two-card game of their own invention called Fizzle—quarter ante, deuces high, fold on any pair, ace of spades takes all. They moved like reptiles in the cold, eyeing their cards, drinking whiskey, cigar smoke swirling with nowhere to go.