Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106

by Sam J. Miller

  “You on the Lady Cecilia?” she asked him, hoping he would give himself away but knowing he wouldn’t.

  “I am,” he said, and then dipped his head to take a long draw of the cider. He glanced around. “Or at least,” he added, “I was . . . ”

  “Tish?”

  Milton. He gestured. They had customers lined up at the bar. The Droplet had grown crowded and Tish had barely noticed. She moved away from the stranger, and served old Ruth with her usual Brewer’s Gold and nuts.

  Later, she noticed the three men as they came in from the darkening evening. They were strangers too, as were many of this evening’s clientele, but they didn’t look like they were on any kind of grand tour. Their eyes scanned the crowd, and as one of the men fixed on her for the briefest of instants she felt skewered, scanned by some kind of machine.

  But no, these three were men, if clearly enhanced. They wore identical dark-gray outfits, and now she saw what appeared to be weapons at their belts.

  Tish had never seen a weapon before, unless you counted harpoons and ginny traps and the like. She had never seen men who looked like machines, although up in Daguerre she had seen machines like men and women.

  One of the men pointed, and the other two swiveled their heads in unison until all three looked in the same direction, motionless like a sandfisher poised to drop. The pointing man opened his hand and a beam of light shone from it across the crowded bar.

  Tish turned and saw a single man picked out by the beam, a long glass poised partway to his mouth, a mouth which revealed one imperfection in its otherwise flawless ranks of teeth.

  The stranger dropped his glass, ducked down, darted into the pack of bodies near to the bar.

  The three . . . they were no longer there by the door, they were across the room, standing where the stranger had been, motionless again, robot eyes surveying the crowd.

  Tish revised her earlier assessment. These men could not be mere humans—enhanced or not—and move as they did. They must be more than that. Other than that.

  The stranger . . . a tussle by the far door, and there he was, reaching for the handle.

  But the handle vanished, the door blurred, its boundaries softening, merging . . . and it was wall, not door. There was no exit there. There never had been.

  The stranger’s hand slid across the smooth surface, and he staggered. Why was he scratching at the wall like that?

  The three stood, watching, eyes locked on the stranger . . .

  . . . on nothing.

  The stranger had ducked into the crowd again.

  Tish leaned against the bar, her heart pounding, her mind swirling, her brain playing catch-up with the succession of images crammed into the merest of seconds that had passed since the door had opened and the three more-than-men had appeared.

  Another disturbance.

  The stranger.

  He had a wooden chair raised above his head. Beyond him, the sun was setting, heavy and swollen over the rainbowed water. The sky was cast in bands of the deepest of crimsons, a staggering gold, shading up to a high, dreamy purple. Laverne’s rings slashed darkly across this vivid sunset.

  The sky shattered. Crazed lines divided it up into an enormous, jagged jigsaw.

  Someone screamed, someone else shouted, someone else . . .

  Tish could no longer see the three men, and she could no longer see the stranger. She could see the chair embedded in one of the big windows though, the glass crazed but still holding in its frame.

  Then she saw him, a silhouette against the fiery sky, diving.

  He hit the glass and for an instant it held and she thought he would end up embedded like the chair. And then the moment had passed and the glass shifted, bulged, and it, the chair, and the man tumbled out into the air.

  Someone screamed again, and the shouting continued, as the crowd shuffled back from the abyss.

  Tish looked away. They were half a kilometer up here, nothing but an awful lot of air between them and the rocks and waves below. No one could survive such a fall.

  She looked up again. The three were standing by the opening, peering out into the gloom. They were not talking, but she could tell from the poise of their bodies that they were somehow communicating. Was this a satisfactory outcome for them, or was it not?

  And then she thought, why would they do such a thing? What was it that had brought them here, on this evening, to do this?

  Why would they come here, to her normally peaceful cliff-hanging bar, and pursue this stranger in so startling and violent a manner?

  Why would anyone want to chase God, or even a very small fragment of God?

  Tish dropped in an air-shaft to Fandango Way, Penhellion’s main thoroughfare. The Way was cut into the base of the cliff, and ran from the docks to where it wound its way up the cliff face three kilometers east.

  She stepped out among the stalls of itinerant traders. She nodded and smiled and exchanged words here and there. She was not here to buy, and most of the traders knew that anyway—these same traders delivered supplies direct to the Falling Droplet. Tish had little need of market shopping.

  She carried a basket though, and in the basket, beneath a checkered cloth, there was a crust of bread and a fistful of feathers from a quetzal.

  She crossed the road, dodging rickshaws and scooters. Lifting her feet daintily over the low wall, she stepped out onto the rocks.

  Down by the water’s edge, first of all she looked at the gentle chop of the waves, and then she craned her neck to peer upward, but she could not pick out the Falling Droplet’s frontage from all the others. So many dwellings and other establishments, set into the cliff here. It was a very desirable place to live. She was lucky.

  She knelt on a big rounded boulder and wondered why she should be so sad also. She knew this feeling from the months after Druce was born. Back then she had been offered medication but had refused. Such feelings were part of the full spectrum of being and she had felt it her duty to endure them, so that one day she could carry them into the Accord—her contribution, a droplet of despair in the ocean of human experience.

  But this . . . this weight. She could not remember when it had started, and she suspected that there could be no such neat line—in some ways it had started in the mixing of genetic material used at her conception, while in others it might be quite recent.

  This melancholy was different to the post-natal darkness. Not so deep, yet somehow more pervasive. A flatness that smothered everything, a tinge of desperation in her thoughts, a clutching at the straws of strangers’ imagined lives.

  She told herself to stop being so maudlin.

  She pulled the cover from her basket and took out the crust of bread. She broke it into three pieces and hurled each as far as she could manage out onto the waves. Then she took the quetzal feathers and cast them into the breeze, watching them as they fluttered, some onto the water and some onto the rocks.

  Food for the journey and feathers for the passage. An old family tradition, perhaps even one that came from Earth.

  Softly, she wished the stranger a peaceful transition into the Accord.

  Milton had square shoulders and a square face. Most often, if you caught him unawares, you would see him smiling because that was the way his features settled themselves.

  He was a good man.

  Tish came into the bar of the Falling Droplet just as Hilary and Dongsheng were leaving, having replaced the picture window through which the stranger and one of their bar chairs had plummeted the night before.

  Milton was looking out through the new glass, relaxed, smiling gently.

  Tish came up behind him, put her hands on his shoulders and turned him, kissed him, first close-mouthed and then, briefly, allowing her tongue to press between his lips.

  He stepped back, smiling more broadly now—a sure sign that he was unsettled by her ways. “Steady, steady!” he said. “What’s got into you, then, eh? Won that grand tour ticket or something?”

  “No,” she said.
“Not that.” She took hold of a handful of his shirt and smiled. “No,” she went on, “I just want to fuck you, Milton.”

  He looked scared, like a small animal. Once, she had found that endearing.

  “But . . . ” he said. “What if someone comes in?”

  “We’re closed.” She toyed with the handful of shirt she still had, knowing she was pulling at the hairs on his chest, knowing how that turned him on.

  “But Druce—”

  “Isn’t here,” she said.

  “But he might—”

  “So you’d better be quick.”

  But the moment was going, had gone. Had maybe never really been there at all.

  She released his shirt, moved away.

  “You’re a good man, Milton,” she said, looking out over the bay.

  When she glanced back over her shoulder, Milton was smiling, because that’s how his features tended to settle themselves.

  It would have ended there, if she had not gone up top to the Shelf—the window repaired, the stranger and his three pursuers gone, the spark just beginning to return to Tish Goldenhawk’s life—and to Milton’s, whether he wanted it or not.

  But no, four days after paying tribute to the stranger’s passing over into the Accord, Tish took a shaft up to the top of the cliffs again, to the Shelf, and there she saw what her first response told her must be a ghost.

  Here, a row of homes and bars and shops lined the cliff top, so that one had to enter a building in order to enjoy the view over the bay to the Grand Falls.

  Tish had been in a bar called the Vanguard, sharing gossip with Billi Narwhal, a multicentenarian who was currently wearing his hair white on the principle that it advertised his many years of experience to any of the youngsters wanting lessons in love. The Vanguard was busy, with another two cruise ships in harbor having replaced the Lady Cecilia, now two days south.

  A little tipsy from Billi’s ruby port, Tish left the bar. A little way ahead of her was a man and there was something about the way he held himself, something about the slight taste of cinnamon on her lips—on the air, a scent.

  He turned. The stranger. Undamaged, unblemished by his fall.

  Tish clutched at the doorframe and blamed the ruby port, both for her unsteadiness and for the apparition.

  The stranger was no longer there. For a few seconds Tish was able to convince herself that he never had been.

  She gathered herself and tried to remember what she had come up to the Shelf to do. She hadn’t just come up here to gossip with Billi Narwhal and flatter herself with his attention.

  She pushed through the crowd. She was following him. Following so quickly that it was more pursuit than passive following.

  She paused, thinking of the three men in the Falling Droplet. Had it been like this for them? Were they mere innocents suddenly overcome with the urge to pursue? She knew such things were possible—the Accord could reach out to any individual and guide their actions.

  But why? Why pursue this man? She was convinced now that he was a part of the Accord, a fragment of God made flesh. Why, then, were the men pursuing him? Or rather, what was it that was guiding them?

  She sensed no dark presence lurking in her mind, no external force appropriating her body, her senses.

  She started to walk again, eyes scanning the faces.

  She found him at a cafe, sipping jasmine tea while a newscast spoke to him from the middle of the table. She sat across from him. “May I?” she asked.

  He smiled and blanked the ‘cast with a pass of his hand. He looked quizzical.

  “The Falling Droplet,” she explained. “You . . . left rather abruptly.”

  Understanding crossed his face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I did not anticipate that. I should have known.”

  She smiled. He should.

  “There are expenses?”

  “Oh no,” she said. “Well, yes, actually, but they’re covered by the city.” Acts of God.

  They sat quietly for a while, and Tish started to think he might prefer to be left alone. “How did you survive?” she blurted out eventually.

  “There are ways,” he said. “It’s not important.”

  She smiled. So far he had said nothing to deny her belief about his true nature, her fantasy.

  “How do you find all this?” she asked him now, making conversation, prolonging their exchange. “The world of Laverne?”

  “It’s a mystery to me. The place, the people. You. It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful. Being chased by men who wish me harm—it’s all beautiful.”

  That last bit rather detracted from what he was saying, Tish felt. Here, sitting at a table with a strange and handsome man, telling her she was beautiful . . . yet, he was like a child, eyes newly opened to the world.

  “Shall we walk?” he asked.

  They walked. Out past the last of the clifftop dwellings, to where the road became a track, became an ill-defined path.

  They walked—Tish Goldenhawk, hand in hand with God.

  “Why did you come after me if there is no debt?” the man asked, after a time.

  “I’ve never met anyone like you before,” Tish told him. Then, brave, she added, “Anyone of your kind.”

  He was shaking his head, smiling as if at the wonder of the world, of this simple exchange. “You people,” he said. “Always drawn to me . . . ”

  She knew what he meant. Their touch—her small hand in his larger, smoother, stronger hand—was like a wick in an oil-lamp, energy flowing through it, always from her to him. It made her buzz, made her feel alive.

  Later, stopping on a promontory, breathing salt, cinnamon, grass, with butterflies flitting about the flowers in the turf and gulls raucously occupying the cliff below, they stopped. Picking up the thread of their conversation as if there had been no gap, he said, “My kind. What did you mean by that?”

  Suddenly shy, Tish looked away, then lowered herself to the springy grass, spreading her skirts out across her legs, smoothing the fabric down.

  “You,” she said, wondering how to shape her words, “you’re no grand tourista. Even without the goons chasing you through my bar, it was obvious that you’re different.”

  He nodded, smiled, waited for her to continue. A bee hummed nearby.

  “You’re of the Accord, aren’t you?”

  That single question embodied so much more. The Accord—the Diaspora-spanning networked supermind where we all go when our time in the real world is up, the amalgam of all past human experience, a super-city of the mind, of minds, of souls, even. The Accord.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Your body,” she said, “grown somewhere, budded off a clone of a clone, just waiting for an emissary of the Accord to occupy it. Don’t worry—we all know it happens—the Accord reaching out to the real world.” All that stored experience and individuality was nothing without a connection to real life. Not nothing, but something other—the Accord sent out men and women like this stranger all the time. The process kept it human.

  “If the Accord is our God, then you are a part of God,” she told him. As he kneeled before her, she added, “You are God, too—God in . . . in a man’s body.”

  And she hoped desperately that he would not correct her, not now. She reached for him and in her mind she pleaded that he should let her believe, for now, at least.

  Afterwards, she lay back, enjoying the play of the clifftop breeze on her body.

  She had never done this before. Never taken one of her fantasies and played it out. Never betrayed poor, dull Milton, whom she had once, long ago, loved and now merely liked.

  She turned onto her side as this man—this God—rose to a squatting position.

  “Let me show you something,” he said.

  She laughed. “I’m not sure I’m quite ready yet,” she joked.

  He stood, wearing only a creamy cotton smock top that buttoned to halfway down. He reached down, arms crossing, took its hem and pulled the top over his head, discarding it so
that now he stood over her, fully naked.

  She looked at him, enjoying what she saw, his nakedness somehow adding to the frisson of sheer badness that touched every aspect of this engagement.

  He turned, and she saw a strange lump between his shoulder blades. She was sure that had not been there moments before, when she had held him. As she watched, it bulged, grew, bifurcated.

  As she watched, feathered wings sprouted from his back.

  With a shake, he settled his flight feathers and held his wings out stiffly behind him. He turned and stepped off the cliff and, moments later, was soaring, swooping, cutting back heavenward in an up-draft like a giant gull, like an angel.

  Her angel.

  Tish returned to the Falling Droplet late, unwashed.

  Milton smiled at her, because that was how he was, and she wondered if he could tell, if she was that changed by what had happened.

  She certainly felt different. She felt like something had been added, something taken away. She was not the woman she had been this morning.

  She kissed Milton, willing him to taste the salt on her lips, to smell the cinnamon scent on her hair, her clothes.

  She had arranged to meet her angel again the following day, and she knew she would keep the appointment.

  “Customers,” murmured her husband, drifting away.

  She turned, looked out across the bay to where birds and pterosaurs flew, wondering if he might be out there too.

  It couldn’t last, of course. It could never last.

  Ever more brazen, Tish had brought her lover to the Vanguard to eat the renowned dipped crabs. They had met in the street, like passing friends, with a smile and a few words, with not a single touch exchanged. Even now, sitting across a table from each other, their hands did not touch, their feet did not brush against each other. Only their eyes met, filled with promise, anticipation.