Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104

by Kressel, Matthew

  “Do they suffer,” she said, “when we destroy them?”

  “The disease must be removed before it spreads.”

  The graviton wind was unusually calm, and she thought she heard a scream out in the Expanse. “But do they suffer?”

  The Supervisor’s energy body roiled, sparking with angry bursts of anti-matter. “All this time and still a damned child,” he spat as he raised up a storm of gamma rays, pelting her energy-body. She withered in pain. But she took the blows as Rearing Mother had taught her, and her mother before that, going all the way back to the First Ones. One’s worst tendencies had to be beaten out, she knew.

  He let up his blows an instant before she would have diffused into random sparks of radiation.

  “I love you,” he said, his energies still fierce. “That’s why this hurts me more than it hurts you. But this is for your own good. We must excise your worst habits, so that what remains is pure. I know you understand.”

  She muttered, “Yes, Supervisor.”

  Soon he was caressing her with a gentle stream of infrared photons. She let him soothe her pain, because she needed the relief, though she hated herself for it. “Now,” he said, “finish your work, so I may finish mine.”

  Aya collected her energies and crept toward the realm. A tight beam of Z-particles was all it took. It leaped from her, melting the realm like a comet in a supernova. Matter decayed by the yotta-particle, flashing brightly before fading. And just like that, the realm was gone.

  Bits of scintillating energy snowed to the ground. It would take eons for all the sparks to reach the surface. Which one, she wondered, had been the quadruped? Would that spark ever rise to wonder again?

  “It’s amazing,” the Supervisor said, “how precise you are. A skill like yours comes once in a generation. Why is it so hard for you to use your gift?” He puffed himself into a hundred billion 50-spaces, so that he expanded enormously above her. “Now be a good Farmer, Aya,” he said, then corkscrewed up the branchlet, past a trillion realms, off to mind other Farmers in other fields until he vanished in the haze.

  The sparks from the snuffed world fell. Where the first sparks touched the ground, new realms were born. They flashed, inflated, and slowed, their quark-gluon plasma too hot for solid matter. It would take an eon before galaxies formed. Two or three more before animal life arose. The Farmer folk sang ballads about the sparks of dead realms. The dust, forever alive, the lyrics went. Death, an illusion, just forms changing.

  But that quadruped, that particular arrangement of mind and will, would never know wonder again. If that wasn’t death, what was?

  The Eighty Eight Lights were ascending quickly. She had to get back to work, but there was someone she needed to see.

  Aya flew downstalk, over row after row of middle-aged realms that leaned steeply into the graviton breeze, each realm the same as the next.

  “Aya!” Ri called. Her sister farmed the fields downstalk, singing an ancient song. “It’s been ages!” Ri said, brightly expressing herself as a tiny white ball.

  Aya allowed herself to expand into a large sphere, not as wild as she preferred, so her sister would not get offended.

  “What brings you downstalk, Aya? Have you a problem?”

  “I wanted to ask you about something.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Ri, chuckling a blue-green shower of leptons that spiraled off into the Expanse. “Your curiosity always gets you into trouble.”

  “I went to see Old Gia recently.”

  “I don’t understand why you visit that old bag of particles.”

  “I saw one of her of her memories, Ri.”

  Ri flickered for a moment. “What do you mean, saw?”

  Aya told Ri about Gia’s journal, and the memory of the severed branch.

  “That’s disturbing, Aya.”

  “I know,” Aya said. “Now I hear screams coming from the Expanse, and I haven’t been sleeping.”

  “No,” Ri said. “It’s disturbing that you stole. Rearing Mother would give you quite a beating if she hears of this.”

  “One beating from Supervisor Bu is enough for today.”

  “He disciplined you, again? I thought you were his favorite.” Ri dimmed an order of magnitude. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Do you ever look into realms, before you destroy them?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And what do you see?”

  “Disease, mostly.”

  “Never beauty?”

  Ri paused. “There’s never beauty in sickness.”

  “But what if a sick realm held something, however miniscule, worth saving? Would you spare it?”

  Ri floated higher. “I see what’s happened here. Gia’s memory has poisoned you. That baby branchlet cried when they cut it free, yes, but didn’t we cry when Rearing Mother beat us? It hurt then, but look at what Farmers we’ve become! Those beatings were for our own good, rooting out our worst habits. In the same way, eradicating disease is healthy for Thept. Pain is necessary for growth. If I’m ever chosen to be a Rearing Mother, I’ll root out the unruliness from my children the same way. And it will hurt me more than it will hurt them. Don’t you see? It’s all for the collective good.”

  “I suppose,” Aya said, feeling sick.

  “Sister, you look exhausted. Your energies are wild. Why don’t you go and take a nap over there? I’ll watch for the Supervisor and wake you if he comes. I’ll even tell him how I saw you eradicate a young cancer.”

  Never mind that there would be no cinders to mark the grave, Aya was exhausted. “Thank you, Ri. You’re a good sister.”

  “And you a troublesome one! But I love you, Aya. Now sleep, so you may forget this foolishness.”

  Aya floated back to her fields and nuzzled between a dozen middle-aged realms. They caressed her sides as she drifted off to sleep. In her dreams a million blue tendrils squeezed her until she exploded in a flash that didn’t wink out, but slowly faded, like a cinder. When she awoke, the Eighty Eight Lights had already passed Half Stalk.

  Ri was nowhere to be found.

  Repentance Day came and went, and Aya sang the songs and played the games, but her heart was not in it. The Eighty Eight Lights climbed the Prime Stalk of Thept two thousand times. Most days she lay in her fields and dreamed of the Tangle. But sometimes she exposed herself to the harsh particle rains when she should have waited them out in a safe hollow.

  She was drifting low over her fields, and the Eighty Eight Lights had just begun their morning climb when she saw it. It grew from the side of a tall, ancient realm. An irregular carbuncle not one-hundredth the size of the parent it clung to, a cancer that needed to be excised.

  The cancer had given birth to billions of galaxies. They spread across its 10-space like the vanes of a feather. In one spiral galaxy, a yellow sun drifted near the galactic edge. Orbiting this sun was a blue-white world. And on this world a copper-skinned biped sat on the ground and drew a figure in the dirt with a stick: a quadruped, with branching horns.

  The biped examined her drawing. It wasn’t alive, she knew, but an echo. Yet as she stared at the figure, she saw the blood on Father’s face and felt the men’s hard, beastly gazes. She smelled the hot animal flesh as Mother and the other women opened the animal with their bone knives. Even the twirling smoke stung her eyes as it rose from the flames to appease Sky God and her Thousand Bright Children. Her heart thrummed and her stomach grumbled, as if this were happening now. But the hunt was yesterday, and somehow every vivid sense folded itself into her figure in the dirt. The drawing, the biped realized, was magic.

  A larger female walked over, Mother. She saw the drawing, shrieked, and immediately stamped it out. Mother too had sensed the drawing’s power to evoke memory. She struck the child in the face. And the child held in her cries, because Mother hated tears even more than magic drawings.

  A third biped walked over, Father. Mother swung again at the child, but Father grabbed her before she could strike. His look was fierce, ani
mal-like. His words were elaborated grunts, their special language not yet mature.

  He said, “No more. No more!”

  Father threw her hand down and walked away, back to sharpen his spear with the other males. But with his back turned, Mother hit the child again. And the magic vision of the hunt and all its vivid senses receded further from the child’s mind with each blow. In pain, the child vowed that if she were ever blessed by Sky God to birth a child, she would never hit him.

  Aya removed her gaze from the cancerous realm and gazed over her fields as if seeing them for the first time. Like the bipedal child, her pain didn’t have to continue. She didn’t have to destroy worlds. She didn’t have to take the blows. How curious that it took an infinitesimal creature to show this to her.

  Ever so carefully, with a fine Z-beam, she severed the cancer from its parent. It floated free, still alive. Without an energy-source, it would eventually die. But she knew a place to hide it, where it could grow and even thrive.

  When she reached Gia’s hollow, the opening was brightly lit. A harsh yellow glow pooled on the ground outside it. Aya hid the cancer in the adjacent field before she entered.

  Gia’s particle soup had been swept clean, and four Supervisors circled the rear, as if searching for something. Supervisor Bu was among them. Gia and her journal were nowhere to be found.

  “What’s happened?” Aya said. The Supervisors stopped whatever they had been doing.

  “Why, hello!” Supervisor Bu said as he came over. “Just the farmer I wanted to see.”

  “Where’s Gia?”

  “Gone, I’m afraid.”

  “To where?”

  “To dust,” he said. “She decayed just this morning.” He caressed her. “I’m sorry, Aya. Were you close?”

  Aya wanted to scream or fly as high as she dared go, higher even. She felt like exploding or turning to dust. But she just said, “We were friends, I think.”

  “So, I’ve heard. When did you last visit?”

  “I haven’t seen her for thousands of days.”

  “And what did you two speak about, typically?”

  “Many things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Where’s her journal, Supervisor?”

  “Her journal?”

  “Her memories?”

  “Ah, yes. Aya, when one starts to decay, like Old Gia, the mind decays too. This journal of hers was plagued with disease. It had to be destroyed.” Inside his body, a tiny pink sphere, just like the one from Gia’s journal, flashed and winked out.

  The hollow seemed to spin, faster and faster, and Aya retreated toward the exit. “I have to get back to work.”

  “That’s my good Farmer,” he said, petting her. “Always working hard. I’ll need to ask you more questions, later, once we sort this mess. I’ll see you in your fields.”

  Outside and alone, the infinite Expanse pressed down upon her. All Gia’s memories, gone forever. Was it possible?

  She returned to the hidden cancer. Like Gia’s memory, she absorbed the realm into her body, where it remained whole and alive. It could feed off her for a while, suckling radiation from her, until its growth killed both of them. But this would suffice for now. The realm shivered, tickling her as she spiraled upstalk.

  The biped’s voice echoed in her mind “No more. No more.”

  She soared high, until the branchlet was barely visible in the haze, then she dove to skate the realm tops, spraying their energies across the field. Supervisor Bu would discipline her for that, but not if he couldn’t find her.

  She flew beyond the edge of her fields, and entered Nessa’s. Her other sister dawdled above a row of ancient realms and called out as Aya hurtled past, but Aya didn’t slow. She flew past Jia, and Thi, and Den, and Hio, and Sil, and a dozen more of her siblings’ fields. The Eighty Eight Lights were nearing Half Stalk when she reached the fork. The branchlet split, each half vanishing into the haze. This was the farthest she’d ever gone. She was forbidden from going any further.

  She chose left and went up.

  She flew past more farms. Some Folk called out to her. Most ignored her. In some fields, there were no Farmers at all. And yet the endless budding realms looked no different from hers.

  Up she flew.

  The Expanse grew dark. How had the Eighty Eight Lights descended so quickly? The sky faded to black. Somewhere out in the dark, seven yellow lights blinked, then vanished, while the realms beneath her twinkled with countless galaxies and stars. Their light was pale and ghostly, and the darkness overwhelmed her. She stopped.

  She crawled between two bulbous realms and tried to sleep, while the cancer tickled her insides. Sometime later, she awoke. A Farmer hovered above her, shouting. Behind her glimmered the blue-gray of the morning sky. She sped away.

  Exhausted, she flew on. On the second night, the graviton wind blew so fiercely she had to cling to the realms so she wouldn’t fly into the Expanse. The torrential particle rain dissolved her energies as she hid the cancer deep inside herself. It shivered with her. But the storm passed, and the next morning she flew on.

  She reached a fork on the sixth day and went right. On the ninth day, she turned left. Directions didn’t matter, so long as she went up. With a chill she realized that if she turned back now, she wouldn’t know which way was home.

  The branchlets thinned ever more, so that she could loop around them quickly, while the Expanse grew massive around her. At Full Stalk the Eighty Eight Lights weren’t so high anymore. And at night, if the winds were calm, she saw indistinct shapes shimmering out in the Expanse. Tall Ones, winking?

  She reached the next fork, but it wasn’t a fork at all. A gnarled lump, weathered by wind and rain, was all that remained of its right side. Eons ago this branch had been severed from Thept. Aya wondered if this was the same one Gia and her sisters had cut.

  She went left and passed more severed limbs, and the Expanse yawned ever larger around her. Her fear grew as she ascended, and the little cancer inside her grew weaker by the day so that she knew it was alive only by its tiny shivering.

  The farms abruptly ended. Beyond lay pale, barren, withered ground. No realms bubbled from the surface. And just a short journey onward she finally reached the tip, the last finger of Thept. In Gia’s memory, glittering dew dusted the surface, and the tendrils were timid but exuberantly alive.

  This branchlet was dead.

  Its surface was ashen and black, and where the tendrils should have been holding the vanguard against the Abyss, were seven gnarled stumps. The gulf unfolded its massive blue nothingness around her, and the branchlet shuddered in the graviton wind. A strong gust and she might blow away forever.

  She retreated to the last fork, a half-day’s journey, and took the opposite branch. But this led to another dead branch, ashen and black. She was exhausted, and the light was fading, but the winds were too strong to sleep here. Out in the Expanse, vague forms shimmered.

  “Aya, my beloved! There you are!” His voice came as if arising from a dream.

  She shivered off a muon cloud as Supervisor Bu, five Supervisors, and her sister Ri, floated up to her.

  “Aya!” Supervisor Bu said, exasperated. “We’ve been following your energy trail for days.”

  “Aya,” Ri said, “I was so worried for you!”

  “The tips,” Aya said. “They’re all dead.”

  “Pruned,” Bu said, “Eons ago. Aya, come here.” He gently caressed her, but she withdrew from him.

  “How can you caress me one moment and pummel me the next? That’s not right.”

  “What is this? Come here, before you decay.”

  Dr.Aya paused as the truth of it all became clear. It had been the same with Old Gia, she thought. The Supervisor pretended compassion even as he beat and razed. “Gia didn’t decay naturally,” Aya said. “Did she?”

  The graviton wind gusted once, hard, and everyone struggled to hang on.

  “Old Gia was spreading disease,” he said. “And disease must
be eradicated.”

  Aya was sick. She had once loved Supervisor Bu. But now she saw he was a monster. “She had so many untold stories.”

  “She was full of madness,” Ri said. “I found a globe of hers in my field. She must have been spreading poison all over the place. I saw what her memory had done to you, Aya, so I told Supervisor Bu before she might hurt someone else.”

  “She wasn’t spreading those memories,” Aya said, “I threw her memory globe away. It must have landed in your field.”

  “Either way,” he said, “she had become a cancer.”

  Aya felt sick. It was her fault. If she hadn’t taken that memory, Old Gia would still be alive.

  “Aya,” he said, approaching her. “We love you. You’re sick. You need help.”

  “Like you helped Gia?”

  “Aya, you’re the best Farmer in a generation. Come home, and let’s forget all this nonsense.”

  The cancerous realm inside her had been softly shivering, when it shuddered once, violently.

  “What’s that inside you?” he said. He peered deep within her. “Is that a realm? A cancer?” His tone shifted abruptly. “Why is that disease inside you, Aya?”

  “I saved it,” she said, “because it’s precious.”

  “I didn’t want to do this,” he said. “But you leave me no choice.” His body roiled as he prepared a storm of rays.

  Part of her longed to return home, to soar over her fields and feel free again. She longed to watch the Eighty Eight Lights descend with her sister by her side. She missed Rearing Mother and her other siblings. But going back meant forgetting everything that had happened.

  She stepped back from him and said, “No more. No more.” Then she leaped into the Expanse.

  “Aya!”

  She plunged into the blue void, and the graviton wind quickly grabbed her. The branchlet vanished in the haze, and their screams were soon lost in the wind.

  Terror consumed her as she hurtled into the endless blue. She tried to direct her flight, but the currents were too strong. Harsh winds attacked her, tearing at her energy-body, while the realm inside her quivered like a nervous atom. Neither of them would last long.