Sister Mine

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Nearly there, sang Abby. Her voice ran bright in my veins, multifaceted, like diamonds. Whenever Abby took me through this transit, her voice was the only sense the world made. Only Abby was kinda ticked at me right now. If she should abandon me halfway! Panicked, I reached for her, to hold fast to my lifeline through this horror. My hands, trapped inside the sausage of my skin, scrabbled at each other instead. A torn edge of nail on my pinkie scraped the back of my other hand. Broke skin. The scratch welled blood, which whispered the words to “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore,” except that the first, second, third, fifth, eighth, thirteenth words, et cetera were each baby aspirins, in a synaesthetic Fibonacci sequence of pain relief inadequate to my current requirements. “Abby!” I screamed into my skin. Have you ever yelled with your head in a bucket? I nearly deafened myself. Except that I was tasting sounds, not hearing them. Instead of blowing my eardrums out, I came close to choking on a tsunami flavour blast of wasabi and fried eggs.

  Oh, chill already, sang Abby in her crystalline voice, the only sensation that rang true for me in transit. I’m here. Plucked electric chords twanged behind her voice. So’m I, they said. We won’t lose you. Lars, accompanying Abby. That shocked me into calm. I’d never heard any voice but Abby’s in transit before, not even Dad’s. With his circus mind, Lars walked with us through the clouds. For Jimi’s guitar, synaesthesia was probably just business as usual. Touch the sky. ’Scuse me. Kiss this guy. My ass. Wherever my ass was at the moment. Effortlessly, Lars plucked notes from the aether like picking ticks from a favourite dog’s fur.

  I sat—at least, I think I was still sitting—in the car—I hoped it was still a car—and focused on the beacon of sound that Lars and Abby were creating. His music and hers sparred, teased each other, flirted. Even their discords made deliberate, playful harmony. They were at home in this bodiless space between the worlds. Me, I was ever the donkey, needing solid ground beneath my feet to make even poor sense of the world. “Great. That’s just wonderful,” I grumbled.

  “Thank you,” rumbled Lars, misunderstanding. I sighed. My grumpy exhalation was soap bubbles popping in my ears.

  My senses didn’t go back to normal, exactly. It was more like they recalibrated to a new place. But that was transit for you. It began to seem normal to smell the sound of the car’s engine, to hear the dull navy blue of its interior. The flashing indicator light tasted like lemon juice being dripped onto my tongue, and that was fine by me. My stomach settled. It was no longer misty outside. Or perhaps it was. Perhaps what had been mist a few minutes ago I was now experiencing as a tattoo of drums, filling the space. For we were in a space both enclosed and infinite. That plush fun fur tickle behind my eyes was Lars saying, Here’s where I leave you guys. See you when you get back.

  My ears popped and my perceptions shifted once more. The synaesthesia remained, but now, like the image on a transparency smoothed over a paper page, sight was once more sight, sound sound. But different. It’s difficult to explain. Claypicken eyes saw the world as it was. Spirit eyes—well, mine were kinda myopic. Maybe donkeys could only see in a limited spectrum. Everything emerged at me through a gunmetal fog. Perspective was off. An object might be small enough to hold in my hand, or big enough to run me over. I could never tell which unless I got up close to it. And I might be right beside it, or miles away. If miles meant anything in the spirit world. I sort of thought not. For me, the spirit world was always fuzzy, dark. Like a nightmare of nighttime. Abby and I were no longer in her car, but standing beside each other and facing a peristyle, a shout of a pole that extended up and up, drummed as high above us as the breeze of blessing that was the drums could carry it, and higher. I perceived Abby as a shimmering arpeggio, lavender shot through with juniper green and scented with a bouquet of seawater and new shoe leather. I wondered how she saw me.

  You know those drawings of the superhero the Flash when he’s running? Multiple iterations of him, all spread out in a wavy line? That’s how the whole family looked to me, not just Uncle Flash. Except the comic-book Flash travels in a single line. These guys were all going in all directions at the same time. Made my claypicken eyes queasy, so I didn’t focus on it too much. They were all so zigzaggy that they were, for all intents and purposes, glowing balls of forever. And glowing lines of forever at the same time. See? I said it was difficult to explain. Their radiant selves filled the fogspace that was the best sense I could make of the infinite. I should have found it bright as daylight in there. Abby once told me that to her it was. To me it was twilight. Full moon on a foggy night. Bright and dark simultaneously, refusing to be distinct. I just knew that if I ever saw it clearly, my insides would turn out and I’d never stop throwing up. Got a headache yet? I sure had. So, to simplify it, imagine a boiling night sky with sheet lightning tumbling out of the clouds. That’ll do as an image. Now fill everything you can see in every direction with it. You’re not sure whether you’re standing on firm ground, falling into nothingness, or floating. You might be upside down, right side up, or, yeah; you might be inside out. Whatever. Deal with it. I had to.

  I reached for Abby’s hand. Touching her grounded me a little, and gave my poor inner ear a break.

  To my claypicken eyes, we both were and weren’t in a basement, white-painted brick industrial. Plain. Some nondescript building in the city, then, that rented its space out to these worshippers. Probably owned by someone who was quietly also a devotee. Someone who wouldn’t freak at the sounds of drumming, the occasional chicken feather that escaped the cleanup process. The owner might even be part of the congregation I could see right now through earth eyes.

  “This isn’t a good time,” growled General Gun, crouched beside the human drummers: dark men of flesh, their faces stripped lean of anything but music. Abby nodded in acknowledgement at the human music-makers. At the moment, the General was wearing fatigues, a helmet, heavy laced boots. He carried a Kalashnikov. “We’re working here.” He deliberately addressed his comments only to Abby, not me.

  “Dad’s missing,” Abby said to Uncle Gun. “Have you seen him?”

  Baby Abby came back to us from the other side a living being who could grow and thrive on her own. Of course the Family knew immediately what the brothers had done. Abby shouldn’t have been alive. Those were some big-ass laws they broke. There were to be consequences. Since Dad had been willing to do all that for a human, they made him into one. They stripped his godsoul away from him, leaving him purely claypicken. (You do realize that Dad and his family had been among the first humans of the world? When the Big Boss decided he wanted some managerial staff, they volunteered for the job.) Dad would have to spend a whole human lifetime with only the tricksy pinch of mojo that claypickens can sometimes muster if they chance upon exactly the right charms, potions, and prayers in exactly the right configuration at exactly the right time. His godsoul would return to him when the flesh body died.

  After all, Abby would need someone to look after her until she was grown; someone who wasn’t too busy looking after every other living thing. Because Grandma Ocean had seen to Mom. Grandma’s province is the waters of the world, salt and sweet both. She tossed Mom over her shoulder into one of them, and didn’t even look back to see which one she’d landed in. She didn’t deprive my mother of life, but of the beautiful form with which, Grandma convinced herself, Mom had bewitched her sons. Loch Ness has Nessie, its monster of fame and fable. Okanagan Lake has Naitaka aka Ogopogo, a snake demon. As with them, no one has ever found proof that the monster that people began sighting in Lake Ontario just under thirty years ago really exists. She does have a name, though, and it’s Cora. I call her Mom, or I would, if I ever met her.

  And Uncle Jack? Or John, or whichever of his monikers he chose to use at any given time? Well, his family couldn’t do anything incapacitating to him, as they had to Dad. If they did, it would bung up the claypicken wheel of life and death. No one would be able to get on or off, and pretty soon the Big Boss would come looking for the cause of the cons
tipation, and though he (or she, or they, or it) might or might not be green, they say he’s a big fella, bigger than all Creation, and you sure as hell wouldn’t like him when he was angry.

  So for his transgressions against the tabus of death and life, the Family punished my Uncle in the worst way they could think of; they left him unharmed. His curse was to carry the knowledge of the fate he had helped bring down on his dear brother and on my mother.

  That’s how the story went that Uncle used to tell me and Abby when we were kids and he was babysitting and had run out of other ways to keep us occupied. He made it sound almost jolly. At least romantic. Because Uncle likes to keep things lighthearted. It’s important to him to always have a smile on his face. It keeps his spirits up, and sometimes it prevents people from being too scared when it’s their time and he shows up to ferry them over to the other side. Though sometimes his death’s-head grin just makes them shit their pants with terror. But, as Uncle says, you win some, you lose some.

  3

  GENERAL GUN TURNED HIS cold iron eyes Abby’s way. “Boysie’s gone AWOL, has he?”

  “Yes, and he’s too sick to be wandering on his own. We thought he might have come looking for family. Part of him probably remembers you guys.”

  If I were Dad and I remembered that lot, I’d have run as far as possible in the opposite direction.

  Gun shrugged. “Do you see him here?”

  Apparently he now considered us dismissed, because he turned his back on us and returned to forging red-hot steel on an anvil. In the space between one instant and the next, his chest had gone bare. The sweat beading his dark skin flickered red, reflecting the incandescent metal he was working. Each upper arm was thicker around than my both my thighs together. He pounded his hammer on the anvil in time with the beating of the palais drums. The motion made the muscles of his pecs and biceps jump. I was pretty sure he wasn’t making a ploughshare.

  Over the knell of the hammer, Abby called, “Do you know where he is, Uncle?”

  General Gun just shook his head no. He was wearing a beret and army drab now, sitting at a heavy metal desk. He was too busy writing a cover-up of a massacre to pay attention to us. I managed to squeak out, “Maybe you could help us to look for him?”

  It was the hunter of the lot who answered. “Why should we do anything of the sort?” Uncle Hunter was carrying a briefcase in this instant. He wore a snappy suit, had a cell phone clipped to his waist in a tasteful leather hard-shell case. “I’ve been doing his job just fine, haven’t I, Ma?”

  And there was Grandma Ocean, her godsoul piggybacking on that of a big, beautiful woman who was sitting in the front pew. Grandma nodded indulgently at her son. “You know so, darling.” Her horse flipped open a fancy yellow lace fan to cool her face with. Hunter smirked. He knew he was one of his mother’s favourites. He flipped the cuff of the suit off his wrist to check his watch, just as his form changed: leather outback hat, khakis.

  In the courtyard a live white chicken, held aloft by its bound feet, was being swung in a huge circle by the officiating claypicken woman. Blood from the chicken’s severed neck spattered the chanting celebrants. One of them, a woman who’d been singing the invocation in a high, strong soprano, gasped when the blessing splashed the left side of her face. She stiffened, then began to tremble. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She slumped. The celebrants near her leapt to support her. In overlay, I saw the chicken’s flung lifeblood cohere into a shape that enveloped her. It dropped when she dropped. When her friends picked her back up again, she seemed much taller than she had been. Her limbs had gone skeletally thin. She laughed, and her voice was deep and hollow. She had offered entrance to the guardian, our uncle Leggy John, sometimes called Jack. “Girls!” came his rattly voice. “I didn’t expect to see you here!”

  “Uncle!” Abby ran to hug his tall, bony self. In palais space, Abby could move quicker than thought. I hung back, seething. Never lied, did he? Only all my life, as it turned out.

  Uncle John was dressed to party, as he always was. He swirled his cape out of the way, dropped his gold-topped cane, and opened the long reach of his arms to welcome us. In her haste, Abby knocked his top hat off. He just chuckled and reached to pull me to himself, too. Resenting him, resenting myself for giving in to the beloved and familiar, I sank into the dark cave of his embrace. He smelled the way he always had, like the step through a doorway to something unknown on the other side, like the last breath before forever. And like cigars and peppermints. There had to be an explanation for the secret they’d hidden from me all these years. Abby could be spiteful and Dad moody, but Uncle, never.

  Uncle said, “I’m afraid I have something awful to tell you. Boysie—”

  Abby nodded. “We know. He’s gone missing from the nursing home.”

  Uncle drew back in surprise. “But that’s—”

  “Jack, we’re busy here. Why’re you letting the children interrupt us?” It was Aunt Zeely, a vision as usual in flowing blue watered silk that perfectly complemented her earth tones.

  Right. As though we could interrupt them. As though they weren’t all simultaneously doing an infinity of things in an infinity of locations in the present, the past, and the future.

  Abby replied, “Like I said, I thought you would tell us where he is. That you might want to help. He’s your kin.”

  “We don’t know where he is. We’re only multipotent, not omnipotent. Seeing all is for the Big Boss. You know that.”

  Abs and I shared a look. This was old-time story, but neither one of us had really understood what it meant before this. Abby said, “And the Big Boss won’t intervene? Not for his very own kin?”

  General Gun hissed. “You want the Big Boss to interfere in the gears that keep the worlds going? You want existence to end?”

  “Besides,” Grandma Ocean added, “Biggie B. isn’t our kin, except in the way that everything in Creation is related. He’s our employer.”

  Abby persisted. “Couldn’t you guys, I dunno, ask around? I’m sure you could contact more beings quicker than Maka and I could.”

  Aunt Zeely replied, “We won’t, though.”

  Abby faced her down. I had to admire her courage. I could scarcely look those folks in the eye without shitting my pants in fear. “You hate Dad that much? Just because he caused us to be?”

  Zeely, now a large seal with soft, liquid eyes, honked with laughter. “We don’t hate him.”

  “But he could be in danger!”

  “Of what, dear? We’re immortal.”

  “Dad isn’t! Not any more!”

  Zeely’s smile was patronizing. “Of course he is. And the sooner he throws off that hard shell that Ma stuck him into”—she cut her beautiful brown eyes at Ma Ocean—“the sooner he comes back to us whole once more. I, for one, miss him. Not like some here.”

  Matter-of-factly, Hunter said, “Yeah, I do hate him.” Hunter, dressed in denim and wearing a fluorescent orange vest, sighted Abby and me down the length of a modern-day crossbow. I shouted and ducked, pulling Abby down with me. We sprawled on whatever passed for the ground in this space. Hunter smirked and lowered his weapon. “I hate him like poison. If he comes back, he’ll be protecting half my prey from me, like he used to do. With him tied to a body, I have his domain, and I have free range.”

  Uncle Jack grimaced. “Killing spree much, Bro?”

  Hunter grinned. “Part of the job description.”

  “By your interpretation, anyway. I’m glad it’s only human souls I have to ferry, otherwise you’d keep me jumping.”

  Hunter’s grin went feral. “I can dream, can’t I?”

  “Never mind that right now. The thing is, the girls are right. Boysie might be in danger. Because it’s not just his shell that’s missing. His soul’s escaped the place where I’d stored it.”

  The general psychic racket in the palais went silent. In clayspace, it was as though someone had muted the sound. Some of the ridden humans were coming out of their trances. They bli
nked and looked around, bewildered. The dancers were wheeling to a halt and the drummers were looking distracted. In the palais, the old guys and Abby were staring, open-mouthed, at Uncle Jack. So was I. I said, “Hang on; what? You had Dad’s soul somewhere that wasn’t inside him?”

  Uncle nodded. Abby looked horrified.

  I couldn’t make any sense of this. “For how long?”

  “Since you girls were born.”

  “You pilfered Dad’s soul?”

  “I didn’t steal it, Niece. Boysie knew about it. I had it in safekeeping.”

  “Why in all the worlds would you do something like that?”

  Abby touched my shoulder. “Maka, wait. Let me explai—”

  Uncle said, “Ma ordered me to do it. But this morning, lightning blasted my silk-cotton tree, and Boysie’s soul slipped out from beneath its roots.”

  Hunter chuckled evilly. “Is that where it was? I’ve been looking high and low for it.”

  General Gun said, “So, Boysie’s soul’s been reunited with his body? Then why’s the girl OK?”

  Abby gave a little cry of dismay. Aunt Zeely said, “And why hasn’t Boysie come back to us?”

  I tried to ask Uncle Gun what he meant, but Uncle Jack was saying something, and Hunter and Zeely were yelling at each other.

  Ma Ocean surged up off the low carved wooden stool on which she’d been sitting. In a fathoms-deep voice she roared, “Flash! Cathy! You get here right this minute!” The palais fairly rocked with the power of that summons.

  A bolt of lightning crisscrossed the palais space, blinding me for a second. Aunt Cath showed up concealed in the squirming, crackling column of silver snakes that was her hair. She whipped her head, revealing that her hair was all she was wearing. A rope of lightning-snake dreadlocks snapped way too close to me. The magnetic pull of it set my altered senses jangling painfully. Then a sudden thunderclap made me jump again.