Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104

by Kressel, Matthew

  She tumbled helplessly. Soon she would diffuse into dust. But after a time the blue sky turned black, the winds abated, and she found she could direct her flight. She flew free from the worst gusts, gaining hope.

  Shapes resolved in the darkness, as if beyond a cloud of dissipating smoke. Buried within tufts of blue cloud, swarms of shimmering lights climbed up and down massive stalks. A forest of Tall Ones spread beneath a night sky, millions of gargantuan trees glowing from their own ethereal light. And below, moving shadows rolled over the rough and ruddy surface of Yi, the great ovum. Sinuous purple arteries weaved through the Tall Ones like tubular rivers, flickering with universes of light inside them.

  But every Tall One, all the countless millions, were stunted, their limbs severed, just as Thept had been. Thept, bless her endless reaching, didn’t reach at all. Like all her severed sisters, she was torn to shreds. She flew above the stunted forest.

  The Farmers had done this, she knew. They had, with their sick philosophy, murdered them all.

  She sloughed off sprays of hadrons as she floated high, while the little realm shivered inside her, eating her insides. It would suckle off her until they both were dust.

  As she flew on, hints of ruddy light shone in the distance, beyond Yi’s curving horizon. She glimpsed it first in silhouette, as the sky lightened behind it. Immensely far off, an ineffable distance away, a single Tall One grew higher than the rest, its arms extended skyward, its branches uncut.

  A survivor.

  Perhaps there someone too had said, “No more.” But this Tall One was an immense distance away. She might die long before she reached it. She could return to Thept or another Tall One and start again.

  But no, that wouldn’t do. There was a garden out there. No matter how far it was, she had to reach it. She gathered the last of her energies in preparation for the journey.

  I will make it, she thought. I will survive. And the next generation will know no pain.

  And deep inside her, as if sensing her thoughts, the little realm with the bipedal girl suddenly stopped shivering.

  About the Author

  Matthew Kressel’s work has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, io9.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Interzone, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, and the anthologies Naked City, After, The People of the Book, and other markets. His story “The Sounds of Old Earth” was recently nominated for a Nebula Award. He has been nominated for a World Fantasy Award for his work editing Sybil’s Garage, a speculative fiction ‘zine he published from 2003-2010. Currently he co-hosts the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan with Ellen Datlow. He is a member of the Altered Fluid writers group, and in his spare time he studies the Yiddish language.

  For the Love of Sylvia City

  Andrea M. Pawley

  Slime criss-crosses AMX-5. I ease a snail from the cable’s sheathing. I doubt something this small is causing the communication anomalies with Sylvia City, but I promised my podsisters I’d examine our outpost’s section of the cable again.

  I put one snail after another into the masticator floating at my side. Each gastropod I find on the cable suffers the same fate. Just removing the snails wouldn’t be good enough. The ones I tagged when I first noticed them a few weeks ago found their way back to eat the algae that’s started growing along the cable sheathing. Ending a snail’s life isn’t like killing a whale. Snails don’t sing about their history, but I’d rather not harm something that’s managed to survive in these conditions.

  The ocean pushes at me more than usual. I’m only twenty meters below the water line and just five kilometers from where AMX-5 enters the ocean. On scalesuited knees, I sink down to stable ground free of the trash littering most of the continental shelf. My mandatory service posting is closer to the dryland world than I ever wanted to be.

  Since my first month at the outpost, I’ve used my free time to bioremediate and disperse the waste in the immediate vicinity of the cable. My podsisters, Daniella and Fatima, have their own tasks and interests. Time in the shallows degrades their health. Removing the trash beside our outpost’s section of the cable was my own special project. With authority and supplies, neither of which I have, I’d set up carbonic acid converters like the ones cleaning the ocean around Sylvia City. Converters would make a real difference. My trashless swath along AMX-5 is nice to look at, but it’s nothing permanent. A few weeks after my service ends, the dryland trash that floats down from above and creeps along the benthos will again cover the cable.

  Steel shows on a section of AMX-5 where snail slime has eaten through. Snails still swarm the breach, which is strange. They usually detach before they get too far into the cable’s magnetic field. Turning my greenlamp up to full, I lean in for a closer look. Real Benthans wouldn’t do that, but my dryland eyes never seem to gather enough light.

  A scan indicates that water’s only pushed a few millimeters into the sheathing. My instruments detect no electric current. The cable sometimes loses power but never for very long. I check the time. My journey back to the outpost will take half an hour in the Nidaria, my snug submarine vessel. If I’m late, Dannie will worry, but a superficial repair like this one won’t take long. I expand a drycage over the damaged section of AMX-5 and evacuate the water inside. I begin to peel back cable sheathing layers, some living, some inanimate.

  This is my 227th repair. At 228, I’ll have mended the cable once for each month since Sylvia City took me in nineteen years ago. I haven’t told anyone about the tally, not even Dannie. She’d say I’m keeping track for the wrong reasons, and she’d insist I don’t owe Sylvia City more than anyone else does. But she doesn’t know what it means to be born on dry land.

  I was an infant when my parents fled with me to the ocean floor. Sylvia City had already turned away thousands of Carbon War refugees after the first few hundred tried to spread the dryland conflict to the benthos. But my mild-mannered parents were engineers with the skills to fix Sylvia City’s overburdened environmental systems. My parents were welcomed. I was let in, too. I have no memory of life beyond the ocean floor, but growing up, I was known as the last dryland refugee. Ten thousand cable repairs can’t erase that fact.

  I try to focus on my work in the drycage. I’m careful to place tools so they don’t nick my scalesuit. In the shallows where I’m working, the weight of water won’t crush someone in a compromised scalesuit, but carelessness is a bad idea. The ocean holds too many dangers.

  Sharks were once the greatest threat on the Blake Plateau. Now, threadfin drones are. They look like fish, but they travel alone, and they’re made of metal. Built by drylanders to spy on one another, threadies explode when they come near people in the water. Only a drylander would blow something up to guard a secret. Shrapnel from an explosion can slice through a scalesuit and the person inside it.

  I’m never close enough to a threadie to worry about the blast zone. Marksmanship is the only thing I’ve ever excelled at, so Sylvia City decided my mandatory service would be at the outpost with the most threadie contact. Since the end of the Carbon War, when AMX-5 was still a vital communication link between the wet and the dry land, Sylvia City has kept her promise to maintain the cable. I wouldn’t have tried so hard to impress anyone with my ability to shoot a compressor gun if I’d known the reward would be six months living this close to the shore.

  My thoughts drift ahead to the 228th repair. I wonder what it will be. I don’t know if anything will be different after I complete it.

  Red light flashes across my scalesuit eye coverings and resolves to a dot that indicates something unknown fifty meters away. I’m about to be delayed. The approaching object would have to be at least as large as a threadie for my proximity alert to detect it. I have no way of knowing how big it is or if it’s anything more than a large piece of trash, but I know it’s coming closer. With the water so churned up today, I can only see twenty meters. I wait for the object to change direction. It doesn’t.

  I’d rather be safe than shred
ded or bitten. I hurry through this repair’s last steps and turn off my greenlamp. Sharks notice bright lights. So do threadies. I reach for my compressor gun, which is already charged to fire. I only need one shot to destroy a threadie. Twenty meters of visibility will give me plenty of time. But if a shark’s approaching, I’ll need multiple re-charges to deter one of those mutated creatures. The compressor takes time to ready after each shot. The crushed snails in the masticator will speed up the process, but I don’t know how much. For a moment, I hope this part of the ecosystem is too compromised to foster apex predators. It’s a shameful thought, one a real Benthan would never have.

  Sensing heightened tension, a layer of my scalesuit breather tries to push past my lips and into my throat where it can protect me from drowning. I’ve never needed the device as a throat-breather, though I’ve had to cough it out of my windpipe many times. It’s only a distraction now. I bite down to stop the breather’s intrusion. The device pulls back to sit atop my nose and mouth where it belongs. The thing in the water is forty meters away now.

  The Nidaria is closer, but in the other direction. I resist the urge to turn and swim to my vessel. Predators often attack from behind. I swipe my scalesuit to release an olfactory neutralizer to help disguise my location from a shark. The neutralizer won’t affect a threadie if I’m in its path. My compressor gun is primed to fire.

  I stare into the wide, watery darkness. My proximity alert shows the object’s approach is slowing. It might be preparing to attack. My knees press into the ocean floor. I’m breathing too hard. I curse my lack of benthic enhancements.

  The neutralizer isn’t having an effect. Whatever’s approaching can’t be a threadie because it’s moving from side to side. Threadies travel on a set path that rises and falls through the ocean’s photic layer. The pattern of movement on my proximity alert doesn’t make sense. The distance to the object shrinks to thirty meters. I still can’t see it.

  Dread sucks the moisture from my mouth. I realize my mistake. I was looking in the middle of the water column. My gaze rises to the water’s surface. Waves show as gray-black shadows. Just at the limit of my vision, something resolves. I think I recognize it. I should lower my compressor gun, but I hold it steady. Noise disappears. My thoughts race faster than time should allow. What I see is more startling than a threadie or a shark.

  A boy falls toward the ocean floor. His mouth is open. He can’t be more than six years old. He still has all his limbs. He might have only just drowned. Tattered clothing made of sea plants marks him as a scavenger child from one of the defunct oil platforms. The nearest is kilometers away.

  If the boy only went under a moment ago, I could save him. I could swim up to him before he falls too far. I could break the water’s surface for the first time in my memory. I could revive him with filtered air from my own lungs and the press of my scalesuit-covered hands against his chest. I could breathe the fetid air above. I could push that air into the boy’s body. I could wait for the boy to breathe again. I could fight to keep my own head above the watery embrace that’s held me safe all these years. I could give the boy back his life and let the poisons in the air above steal a little of my own. I could throw away nineteen years of trying to feel like a real Benthan. Or I could let the boy die.

  Sound disappears. The water’s roiling slows. My thoughts cavitate.

  I know what to do.

  Noise like color blazes around me. I swipe my scalesuit for a rapid ascent. I soar. I catch the boy’s sinking form. I increase my scalesuit’s buoyancy. The boy and I shoot toward the ocean’s surface. We burst above the water line. A swell pitches us toward the sky. The light blinds. My scalesuit eye coverings can’t compensate for the glare. I squint against the pain. If I were a real Benthan, my retinas would be ruined. My eyelids squeeze shut. The pain recedes. I blink and can see again.

  The ocean’s surface crashes onto itself. Swells break into whitecaps. My scalesuit’s buoyancy helps me keep the boy’s head above water. His body is limp. If his heart beats, I don’t feel it. I want to believe he only just went under. I put his back against my front and begin to compress and release his chest. His clothing pulls apart beneath my motions. A rash—red, raw, and bleeding—covers his head and shoulders. The wounds are almost familiar. The rest of his body shows the blue-gray pallor of hypothermia.

  I peel off a layer of my breather and set it across the back of my scalesuit-covered hand. The bud needs a moment to grow. I suck as much filtered air into my lungs as they will hold. I stroke the breather parent protecting my own airways. I roll it to the side. Cold water sprays the skin of my exposed nose and mouth. I pinch the boy’s nostrils closed. My mouth seals over his. I blow clean air into his clogged lungs. I pump his chest again. I gulp at the dryland air. It tastes of acid. I force this polluted air into the boy. The inside of my nose burns.

  I will the boy to live. In his slack features, I imagine a benthic future for him, one that knows the rhythms of the deep ocean.

  I feel movement in his chest. The water pitches us around. The boy convulses. I hold onto him. Together, we rise on a wave. He gurgles and begins to cough. He vomits. I turn from his bilious spray.

  The shore five kilometers away comes into view. I’ve seen images of what that landscape should look like. AMX-5’s power station should be visible on a peninsula. Just beyond that, buildings should rise from streets clogged with traffic. A latticework of rail lines should weave between the middle stories of skyscrapers and across the tops of shorter buildings. Transportation vehicles should zip around. Aerial crafts should dot the sky.

  The shore looks nothing like that. Reality wobbles. The child shuddering in my arms begins to slip away.

  AMX-5’s power station seems intact, but the shore beyond is a calamity. Black smoke streams from a dozen buildings and gathers above the city. Flames spark orange and yellow in too many places to count. Rail cars wait motionless in the middle of elevated lines or lay crashed atop automobiles glinting below. No evacuation sirens sound. No instructions to shelter blare. Not a single rescue craft circles a flaming building. The greater distance holds more smoke.

  The world has seen this before. I have, too, in documentaries about the Carbon War. The boy’s rash suddenly makes sense. He’s been exposed to carbon weapons fire, though he was outside the weapon’s immediate range. His head and shoulders must have been above the water line when a pulse deployed, but he was far enough away not to be turned to ash. The ocean protected the submerged portion of the boy’s body the same way it protected Sylvia City when I was an infant. Air conducts carbon weapon pulses. Water doesn’t. People die, but infrastructure remains in place.

  New worry seizes me. A haven that persists from one apocalypse to another might look even more to refugees like a promised land. Just as before, anyone who can follow AMX-5 from the shore into the water will soon set upon Sylvia City. This time, the drylanders might be more forceful about bringing weapons and conflicts. The whale song halls might not survive.

  I hold tighter to the boy. His terrified gaze darts around. My lips begin to burn. I press them together. I’ve read about what a secondary carbon rash feels like, but this is the first time I remember experiencing one. I’m lucky only my lips touched the boy’s flesh. Salves can mitigate the pain of my secondary rash, but in a few days, my scalesuit will die from having touched the boy in so many places. With his primary rash, the boy’s medical need will be so great that only doctors in Sylvia City will be able to save him.

  An airplane appears just above the swells. The craft flies in halting, predatory bursts parallel to the shore.

  Flecks of ash like graphite tears smear the boy’s face. My exposed skin must look the same. Ash from dead drylanders and burning buildings is in the air. Millions might have died already. Their remains will rest momentarily on the ocean’s surface before precipitating through the pelagic to fall—inedible and useless—to the benthos.

  The ocean will suffer greater injustice than ashes though. Carbon w
eapons release vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the air. So do survivors willing to burn anything they can find for warmth and cooking fuel. Like the last time, the ocean will attempt to absorb it all. The water’s acidity will shoot up. Great colonies of plants and animals will die. New, sickly species will add to the ranks of mutated sharks, thin-shelled snails and algae that grows where algae shouldn’t be able to grow.

  Sylvia City has ways to prepare herself and her environment. She can mitigate some initial carbonic acid effects, but she needs to deploy her defenses while the danger is still in the ocean’s upper layers. Panic squeezes the breath from my chest. I hope Sylvia City knows what’s happened.

  The airplane turns toward the ocean and drops low to hover a few kilometers away near an oil platform. People must have been detected. I can’t look away from what’s about to happen, but the boy has seen enough. Despite his coughing, he buries his face in my neck.

  A blast shoots out from under the airplane’s wings. The area in front of the craft undulates with the pulse, which makes contact with the platform. Anyone who was alive is ash now.

  I’ve been above the water line too long. I check that the breather bud on my hand is ready. I lean back so I can see the boy’s face. In my scalesuit, I must seem strange to him, but my differences are nothing compared to what people from Sylvia City look like.

  “I’m going underwater,” I tell the boy. His eyes are bloodshot. “To Sylvia City. I can give you something to let you breathe in the water. You’ll be able to get to the shore, but you’ll need treatment for what the carbon weapon did to you. Sylvia City can help. If you come with me, you’ll have a home for the rest of your life, but you’ll be different from everyone else. Always. Or you can go back to the dry land.”