by Annie Bellet
• • • •
In a rash of terror attacks, the City quickly fell apart: the Tower of Pakistan, Lahore Fort, Iqbal’s Memorial, Shalimar Gardens, Anarkali’s Tomb, and the thirteen gates of the Walled City. They exploded and fell in burning tatters, survived only by a quivering bloodhaze through which peeked the haunted eyes of their immortal ghosts.
This is death, this is love, this is the comeuppance of the two, as the world according to you will finally come to an end. So snarled the beast in Tara’s head each night. The tragedy of the floodwaters was not over yet, and now this.
Tara survived this new world through her books and her children. The two seemed to have become one: pages filled with unfathomable loss. White space itching to be written, reshaped, or incinerated. Sometimes, she would bite her lips and let the trickle of blood stain her callused fingers. Would touch them to water-spoilt paper and watch it catch fire and flutter madly in the air, aflame like a phoenix. An impossible glamor created by tribulation. So when the city burned and her tears burned, Tara reminded herself of the beautiful emptiness of it all and forced herself to smile.
Until one morning she awoke and discovered that, in the cover of the night, a suicide teenager had hit her tent city’s perimeter patrol.
• • • •
After the others had left, she stood over her friends’ graves in the twilight.
Kites and vultures unzipped the darkness above in circles, lost specks in this ghostly desolation. She remembered how cold it was when they lowered Gulminay’s remains in the ground. How the drone attack had torn her limbs clean off so that, along with a head shriveled by heat, a glistening, misshapen, idiot torso remained. She remembered Ma, too, and how she was killed by her son’s love. The first of many murders.
“I know you,” she whispered to the Beast resident in her soul. “I know you”, and all the time she scribbled on her flesh with a glass shard she found buried in a patrolman’s eye. Her wrist glowed with her heat and that of her ancestors. She watched her blood bubble and surge skyward. To join the plasma of the world and drift its soft, vaporous way across the darkened City, and she wondered again if she was still capable of loving them both.
The administrator promised her he would take care of her children. He gave her food and a bundle of longshirts and shalwars. He asked her where she was going and why, and she knew he was afraid for her.
“I will be all right,” she told him. “I know someone who lives up there.”
“I don’t understand why you must go. It’s dangerous,” he said, his flesh red under the hollows of his eyes. He wiped his cheeks, which were wet. “I wish you didn’t have to. But I suppose you will. I see that in your face. I saw that when you first came here.”
She laughed. The sound of her own laughter saddened her. “The world will change,” she said. “It always does. We are all empty, but this changing is what saves us. That is why I must go.”
He nodded. She smiled. They touched hands briefly; she stepped forward and hugged him, her headscarf tickling his nostrils, making him sneeze. She giggled and told him how much she loved him and the others. He looked pleased and she saw how much kindness and gentleness lived inside his skin, how his blood would never boil with undesired heat.
She lifted his finger, kissed it, wondering at how solid his vacant flesh felt against her lips.
Then she turned and left him, leaving the water and fire and the crackling, hissing earth of the City behind.
Such was how Tara Khan left for the mountains.
• • • •
The journey took a week. The roads were barren, the landscape abraded by floodwater and flensed by intermittent fires. Shocked trees, stripped of fruit, stood rigid and receding as Tara’s bus rolled by, their gnarled limbs pointing accusatorially at the heavens.
Wrapped in her chador, headscarf, and khaddar shalwar kameez, Tara folded into the rugged barrenness with its rugged people. They were not unkind; even in the midst of this madness, they held onto their deeply honored tradition of hospitality, allowing Tara to scout for hints of the Beast’s presence. The northerners chattered constantly and were horrified by the atrocities blooming from within them, and because she too spoke Pashto they treated her like one of them.
Tara kept her ears open. Rumors, whispers, beckonings by skeletal fingers. Someone said there was a man in Abbottabad who was the puppeteer. Another shook his head and said that was a deliberate shadow show, a gaudy interplay of light and dark put up by the real perpetrators. That the Supreme Conspirator was swallowed by earth soaked with the blood of thousands and lived only as an extension of this irredeemable evil.
Tara listened and tried to read between their words. Slowly, the hints in the midnight alleys, the leprous grins, the desperate, clutching fingers, incinerated trees and smoldering human and animal skulls — they began to come together and form a map.
Tara followed it into the heart of the mountains.
5
When the elementary particle boson is cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, a dilute ‘gas’ is created. Under such conditions, a large number of bosons occupy the lowest quantum state and an unusual thing happens: quantum effects become visible on a macroscopic scale. This effect is called the macroscopic quantum phenomena and the ‘Bose-Einstein condensate’ is inferred to be a new state of matter. The presence of one such particle, the Higgs-Boson, was tentatively confirmed on March 14th, 2013 in the most complex experimental facility built in human history.
This particle is sometimes called the God Particle.
• • • •
When she found him, he had changed his name.
There is a story told around campfires since the beginning of time: Millennia ago a stone fell from the infinite bosom of space and plunked onto a statistically impossible planet. The stone was round, and smaller than a pebble of hard goat shit, and carried a word inscribed on it.
It has been passed down generations of Pahari clans that that word is the Ism-e-Azam, the Most High Name of God.
Every sect in the history of our world has written about it. Egyptians, Mayans. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim mystics. Some have described it as the primal point from which existence began, and that the Universal Essence lives in this nuktah.
The closest approximation to the First Word, some say, is one that originated in Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers. The Sumerians called it Annunaki.
He Of Godly Blood.
Tara thought of this oral tradition and sat down at the mouth of the demolished cave. She knew he lived inside the cave, for every living and nonliving thing near it reeked of his heat. Twisted boulders stretched granite hands toward its mouth like pilgrims at the Kaaba. The heat of the stars they both carried in their genes, in the sputtering, whisking emptiness of their cells, had leeched out and warped the mountains and the path leading up to it.
Tara sat cross-legged in the lotus position her mother taught them both when they were young. She took a sharp rock and ran it across her palm. Crimson droplets appeared and evaporated, leaving a metallic tang in the air. She sat and inhaled that smell and thought of the home that once was. She thought of her mother, and her husband; of Gulminay and Sohail; of the floods (did he have something to do with that too? Did his rage liquefy snow-topped mountains and drown an entire country?); of suicide bombers, and the University patrol; and of countless human eyes that flicked each moment toward an unforgiving sky where something merciful may or may not live; and her eyes began to burn and Tara Khan began to cry.
“Come out,” she said between her sobs. “Come out, Beast. Come out, Rage. Come out, Death of the Two Worlds and all that lives in between. Come out, Monster. Come out, Fear,” and all the while she rubbed her eyes and let the salt of her tears crumble between her fingertips. Sadly she looked at the white crystals, flattened them, and screamed, “Come out, ANNUNAKI.”
And in a belch of shrieking air and a blast of heat, her brother came to her.
• • • •
They faced each other.
His skin was gone. His eyes melted, his nose bridge collapsed; the bones underneath were simmering white seas that rolled and twinkled across the constantly melting and rearranging meat of him. His limbs were pseudopodic, his movement that of a softly turning planet drifting across the possibility that is being.
Now he floated toward her on a gliding plane of his skin. His potent heat, a shifting locus of time-space with infinite energy roiling inside it, touched her, making her recoil. When he breathed, she saw everything that once was; and knew what she knew.
“Salam,” she said. “Peace be upon you, brother.”
The nuktah that was him twitched. His fried vocal cords were not capable of producing words anymore.
“I used to think,” she continued, licking her dry lips, watching the infinitesimal shifting of matter and emptiness inside him, “that love was all that mattered. That the bonds that pull us all together are of timeless love. But it is not true. It has never been true, has it?”
He shimmered, and said nothing.
“I still believe, though. In existing. In ex nihilo nihil fit. If nothing comes from nothing, we cannot return to it. Ergo life has a reason and needs to be.” She paused, remembering a day when her brother plucked a sunflower from a lush meadow and slipped it into Gulminay’s hair. “Gulminay-jaan once was and still is. Perhaps inside you and me.” Tara wiped her tears and smiled. “Even if most of us is nothing.”
The heat-thing her brother was slipped forward a notch. Tara rose to her feet and began walking toward it. The blood in her vasculature seethed and raged.
“Even if death breaks some bonds and forms others. Even if the world flinches, implodes, and becomes a grain of sand.”
Annunaki watched her through eyes like black holes and gently swirled.
“Even if we have killed and shall kill. Even if the source is nothing if not grief. Even if sorrow is the distillate of our life.”
She reached out and gripped his melting amebic limb. He shrank, but didn’t let go as the maddened heat of her essence surged forth to meet his.
“Even if we never come to much. Even if the sea of our consciousness breaks against quantum impossibilities.”
She pressed his now-arm, her fingers elongating, stretching, turning, fusing; her flame-scar rippling and coiling to probe for his like a proboscis.
Sohail tried to smile. In his smile were heat-deaths of countless worlds, supernova bursts, and the chrysalis sheen of a freshly hatched larva. She thought he might have whispered sorry. That in another time and universe there were not countless intemperate blood-children of his spreading across the earth’s face like vitriolic tides rising to obliterate the planet. That all this wasn’t really happening for one misdirected missile, for one careless press of a button somewhere by a soldier eating junk food and licking his fingers. But it was. Tara had glimpsed it in his nuktah when she touched him.
“Even if,” she whispered as his being engulfed hers and the thermonuclear reaction of matter and antimatter fusion sparked and began to eradicate them both, “our puny existence, the conclusion of an agitated, conscious universe, is insignificant, remember . . . remember, brother, that mercy will go on. Kindness will go on.”
Let there be gentleness, she thought. Let there be equilibrium, if all we are and will be can survive in some form. Let there be grace and goodness and a hint of something to come, no matter how uncertain.
Let there be possibility, she thought, as they flickered annihilatively and were immolated in some fool’s idea of love.
• • • •
For the 145 innocents of the 12/16 Peshawar terrorist attack and
countless known & unknown before.
* * *
Usman T. Malik is a Pakistani writer resident in Florida. His work has won a Bram Stoker Award and been a Nebula finalist. His stories have been published or are forthcoming in several Year’s Best anthologies, Tor.com, Nightmare, Strange Horizons, and Black Static.
This Chance Planet
By Elizabeth Bear
We are alone, absolutely alone on this chance planet: and, amid all the forms of life that surround us, not one, excepting the dog, has made an alliance with us.
— Maurice Maeterlinck
“It’s not like I’d be selling my own liver.” Ilya held casually to a cracked strap, swaying with the motion of the Metro. “Petra Ivanovna. Are you listening to me?”
“Sorry,” I said.
I’d been trading stares with a Metro dog. My feet were killing me in heels I should have stuffed into my sometimes bag, and the dog was curled up tight as a croissant on the brown vinyl of the only available seat. I narrowed my eyes at it; it huffed pleasantly and covered its nose with its tail.
Ilya kept on jawing. It was in one ear and out the other, whatever he was yammering about, while I gave the dog wormhole eyes and plotted how to get the seat away. The dog was a medium-large ovcharka mutt, prick-eared, filthy under a wolf’s pelt with big stinking mats dangling from its furry bloomers. It was as skinny as any other street dog under its fur—as skinny as me—but the belly seemed stretched—malnutrition? Worms? When it lifted its head up and let its tongue loll, the teeth were sharp and white.
Behind its head, a flickering advertisement suggested that volunteers were needed for clinical trials, each of which paid close to a month’s grocery money. It alternated with one urging healthy young (read: skint) men and women to sell their genetic material to help childless older (read: wealthy) couples conceive. Pity those skinny jeans were probably destroying Ilya’s fertility as we spoke.
I snorted, but that ad faded into one reminding me that it wasn’t too late to enroll for fall classes.
Well, if I had the damned money, I would have enrolled for summer classes, too. I had my bachelor’s, but that was useless in Moscow, and to get the specialist degree took money. Money I didn’t have. Wouldn’t have, unless Ilya started contributing more.
I looked away, and accidentally caught the thread of Ilya’s conversation again. His latest get rich quick scheme. It was always a get rich quick scheme with Ilya. This one involved getting paid to incubate somebody else’s liver. In his gut. Next to his own liver, I guessed?
I imagined him bloating up, puffing out like an old man whose insides had given up from too much bathtub liquor. Like a pregnant woman. I wondered if his ankles would swell.
I punched his arm. “Like an alien!”
Visions of chestbursters danced in my head. I played the whole VR through last year with my friend GreyGamine, who lives in Kitchener, which is in Canada somewhere.
We got killed back a lot.
Ilya scoffed. It was a very practiced scoff, nuanced and complex. He used it a lot. The Palm d’Or for scoffing goes to Ilya Ramonovich.
“How’s it different from growing a baby?” he asked me, sliding an arm around my hips. His leather jacket—scarred, stiff, cracked—creaked. I tried not to think about how it was probably too old to have been decanted, and that it had probably started life wrapped around an actual cow. “You want to have a baby someday, don’t you?”
We couldn’t afford a baby. I couldn’t afford a baby. Either the money or the time, until I finished my degree.
The strap of his electric guitar case slid down his shoulder. The case swung around and banged my ribs. He gave my hip a squeeze. He smelled fantastic: warm leather and warm man. It didn’t make my shoes hurt less.
Well, I was the idiot who wore them.
“Having a baby is hardly the same thing as organ farming.” I don’t know why I argued.
Actually, I do know why I argued. When you stop arguing, you’ve given up. I looked at the way Ilya’s black hair fell across his forehead and tried to enjoy it. Like Elvis Presley. Or any given Ramone. That tall guy from Objekt 775.
Skinny jeans were back again.
“Well, for one thing,” he said, “growing a liver takes less than nine months. And they pay you for it. With a baby, you
have to pay. And pay, and pay.”
Despite myself, I was getting intrigued. Half-remembered biology classes tickled me with questions. “Wouldn’t you reject it? Or wouldn’t you have to take all kinds of immunosuppressing drugs?”
“They use fat cells. And—I don’t know, shock them or something. To turn them back into stem cells. Then they train them to grow into whatever they want. Whatever the rich bastard they’re growing it for has killed off with his rich living. Liver. Lungs. Pancreas.” He shrugged. “All you’ve got to do is provide the oxygen and the blood supply.”
“And not drink,” I reminded. “No drugs. I bet they won’t even want you taking aspirin. Coffee. Vodka. Nothing.”
“Just like a baby,” he agreed.
I should have been suspicious then. He was being much, much too agreeable. But I had gotten distracted by the way that fringe of hair moved across his pale forehead. And the little crinkles of his frown, the way the motion pulled the tip of his nose downward.
We were coming up on my stop. Soon, I would get off and walk to my job. Ilya would continue on to his “band” practice: with “Blak Boxx,” his “band.” Which was more or less an excuse to hang out with three of his closest frenemies drinking and playing the same five chords in ragged 4/4 time.
You know which five chords I mean, too: nothing more complicated than a D major.
Fortunately for “Blak Boxx,” most of rock and roll is built on the foundation of those five chords. Unfortunately for “Blak Boxx,” to play live music you still need to be able to change between them without looking at your hands.
I didn’t feel like having an argument with Ilya about who was paying the rent this month, again. And at least he was talking about something that might make money, no matter how harebrained. I should try to encourage this line of thinking. So as the train squealed into the station, rather than picking a fight about money, I just edged him away with an elbow and stepped back.
