Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104

by Kressel, Matthew

  One of the soldiers came to his senses and roared at me, waving his spear: “You freakish beast, bare your neck to us tamely! All your followers are dead!”

  Before he even finished his words, I sprang up from the water, and then I bit through a soldier nearby, in the front rank, with my fangs; while the men roiled in confusion, I struck their horses’ legs with my tail. I tore at the throats of the fallen with my claws, and as they groaned I crushed their hearts with my two front paws. When I heard the noise of distant soldiers, too, I fled the lake and leaped into the river. My eyes had always been sharp, and I was able to count the dead by the riverside, one by one. Then I saw the man who had once been my uncle, standing near the river. I tried to slip past him, but then I heard his voice: “Come here, you phantasm!”

  The king sat straight-backed upon a horse, and spoke in such a tiny voice, though for me, having gone through so many bestial transformations, his voice was crystal clear. He said, “If you don’t come out, I’ll kill everyone in the village until I catch you. I’ll accuse them of worshipping a spirit-monster and execute them all!”

  I stopped swimming. It was a bizarre threat. Even my uncle thought that I retained some shred of sacred compassion within me. What relation had I with the lives and deaths of mere human beings? Yet I emerged from the water quietly, going up to the edge of the river, and stood before the king. Of course, it was impossible for my body to stand up like a human does, but I coiled my long tail in a spiral to support my body and hold my neck upright. When I stood myself up thus, I realized how immense I’d become. The soldiers with their spears pointing up at me, and my uncle, they all looked so puny that I could sweep them away in an instant.

  A thousand emotions flooded me as I regarded my uncle closely. Ah, ah . . . he’d gotten old. That transformation must be the end of any creature, even the one that resists any change at all. His once fat belly drooped with wrinkles, his creased face was blotched, and his atrophied arms and legs had dried out in their disuse, and thinned extremely.

  “Now, I recognize you,” he said with very dry voice, like branches rasping in the wind. “You are the seed of the former king. The seed that should’ve dried out long before still remains . . . ”

  I bowed my head, imitating his soldiers who had bent their heads, facing down, and said, “The reason this insignificant one became a beast is not to threaten Your Majesty’s rule, but only to sustain its own existence. These acts were committed by the ignorant, so I beg that you please temper your rage with your vast generosity.”

  “You say it’s an act of ignorance, but you must have known what they were doing, so I have no choice but to accuse you of your crime.”

  “This flesh lost its old life ages ago; why are you trying to take that life twice?”

  “How dare you speak and act that way toward your king?” demanded the king with a piercing voice as thin as a eunuch, so thin I could barely hear it. “Since you are in my kingdom, your body and life are mine. I demand that you to bestow your life to me, as a dutiful subject. Obey my command.”

  “What on earth do you want with the life of a worthless water snake?”

  “How dare a beast converse with a man? How insolent, how disrespectful! You’re such a vile portent! I’m going to conquer you, and get rid of you.”

  “This insignificant one may have become a wicked beast, but the king is no longer human either. How can you demand my life, while pretending at being the king of the humans?”

  The corners of the King’s blind eyes twisted upward with his fury. As he cried out in that thin voice of his, soldiers all around ran toward me, while kicking their horses into action. I dived into the river again. The soldiers chased me along the riverbank, and I swam like the wind, so quickly that the river overflowed and the waters parted behind me.

  I heard the laughter of the king suddenly from behind. I knew the reason of his laughing. A great waterfall, ten jang tall, blocked the way up ahead. However, instead of stopping I pushed myself harder. When I reached the bottom of the waterfall, I threw myself upward, stealing momentum from the whirlpool at its base, and leapt up the falls. My body ascended past the falling water, and the whirlpool that encircled my tail also swirled and rose up with me.

  I realized that I had generated an ascending wind, and that my body had become so gigantic that I could direct the currents of the air. I rose up into the sky, riding that wind, and the soldiers who were chasing me stopped to watch, befuddled. As I examined my body, I found my greenish scales shimmering spectacularly in the sunlight, and my long tail swung behind me, almost as if to touch the ground. I felt wonderful, so I continued to ascend higher. The air current was practically visible to me, almost palpable, and I sensed how I could change my direction by riding the wind. I realized, then, how to shift the flowing air currents in order to produce rain. Recalling the past, I remembered hating droughts during my human days, though that had been so long ago I couldn’t quite remember quite.

  I directed the air currents upward. Dark clouds formed as soon as the water vapor in the air was carried up into the troposphere. Suddenly, the world was shaken by lightning and thunder. When I shifted the pressure of the air by pressing the clouds gently and then rising up, a heavy rain began to pour toward the ground. The river flooded, the fields deluged, and in a flash the waters swept away the distracted soldiers who stood near the riverbanks, watching me overhead. Powerless to pursue me, the king watched from a distance; immediately his hair whitened and he seemed to turn a decade older in an instant. It was as if I’d evaporated away the last bit of life left in him. However, their lives and deaths interested me not at all, for I was no longer human. It was in skimming the clouds that I exulted, so I built up speed and began to rise steadily higher.

  That was that winter the king died in an uprising. That was the day when I soared through an azure sky.

  Originally published in Korean in HappySF, Volume 2, 2006.

  About the Author

  Kim Bo-young is one of South Korea’s most active and important SF authors. Her first published work of fiction, a novella titled “The Experience of Touch” (2002), received the award for best novella in the first round of the Korean Science & Technology Creative Writing Awards in 2004. Since then, she has published numerous works of short fiction in assorted Korean SF anthologies and magazines. In 2010 she published a two-volume collection of short stories, The Story Goes That Far and An Evolutionary Myth. 2013 saw the publication of her first novel, The Seven Executioners, which won the first annual South Korean SF novel award (a prize launched in 2014). Kim enjoys widespread popularity and support among Korean SF fandom, and on the strength of her fiction writing, she was recruited by Bong Joon-ho to serve as a script advisor during the development of his film Snowpiercer. She lives in Gangwon Province, South Korea with her family, and continues to write while operating a farm that produces peppers and chillies.

  Solace

  James Van Pelt

  The wall display didn’t last two sleep cycles. When Meghan woke the first time, one hundred years into the four thousand years long journey to Zeta Reticula, she waved her hand at the sensor, and the steel wall morphed into a long view of the Crystal River. On the left side, aspen leaves trembled in a breeze she couldn’t feel. The river itself cut across the image, appearing between trees, tumbling over rocks, chuckling and hissing through the speakers before draining onto the floor at the bottom of the image. On the river’s right bank, the generator house, a remnant of 19th Century mining, clung to a gray granite outcrop. A tall water chute dropped from the building’s bottom, down the short cliff to a pool below. She’d taken the picture on her last hike before reporting for flight training. Every crew member’s room had a display. Only hers showed the same scene continuously. She joined the crew for their fourteen-day work period, and then returned to the long-sleep bed.

  But when she awoke the second time, two hundred years after they left Earth orbit, the metal wall remained grimly blank. She sat on her bunk�
��s edge, empty, knowing the lead in her limbs was the result of a hundred years of sleep but believing that sadness caused it. No mountain. No river. No rustic generator house standing against the aspen. She called for Crew Chief Teague.

  While she waited, she opened the box under her bed where she kept a souvenir from Earth, a miner’s iron candlestick holder, a long spike at one end, a brass handle on the other, and a metal loop in the middle to hold the candle. She’d found it in a pit beside the generator house after she’d taken the picture. It had a nice heft to it, balanced in her hand. She had cleaned the rust off so the metal shined, but pits marred what must have at one time been a smooth surface. She liked the roughness under her fingers.

  After checking the circuits, crew chief Teague said, “Everything about this expedition is an experiment.” He punched at the manual overrides for the display behind a cover plate in Meghan’s room. “There’s no way to test the effects of time on technology except to watch it over time, and that’s what we’re doing.” He clicked the plate shut. “All that matters is keeping life support, guidance, and propulsion running for the whole trip. You make sure hydroponics continue to function. I work in mechanical repair. Teams service the power plant. One of the four crews is awake every twenty-five years, but we don’t have time to repair a luxury like your display wall. We’re janitors.” He ran his hand down the blank surface. “It’s already an old ship, and we have a long, long way to go.”

  “We have to keep running too. The people.”

  “Yes, there is that.” He rubbed his chin while looking at the candlestick holder in her lap. “Interesting piece. Does the handle unscrew?”

  She twisted it. “Seems stuck.”

  “We could open in the machine shop.”

  She shook her head.

  After Teague left, Meghan tried to remember how the river looked and sounded. With the wall display working, she could imagine an aspen breeze on her face, the rushing water’s pebbly smell. She could remember uneven ground, slickness of spray-splashed rocks, stirred leaves’ sweetness. With eyes closed, she tried to evoke the memory. Hadn’t the ground been a little slippery with gravel? Hadn’t there been a crow circling overhead? When she was a little girl, her mother died. A month later Meghan could not remember her Mom’s face. Only after digging into a scrapbook did the sense of her mother come back to her. Now, it was just as bad, but what she couldn’t remember was Earth. The metal walls, the synthetic cushioning on the floor, the ventilation’s constant hiss seemed like they had been a part of her forever, and the Earth slipped away, piece by piece.

  She placed the flat of her hand on the blank wall. It’s only two years, she thought. In two years I’ll be out of the ship, if the planet around Zeta Reticula is habitable. But she shivered. Only two subjective years. She’d spend most of the trip in the long-sleep cocoon. If the technology worked, she would leave the ship in four thousand real years.

  Teague was right, though, about untested technology. Nearly every element of the expedition was a prototype. Could a human-manufactured device continue to function after four thousand years, even with constant maintenance? The Egyptian pyramids were forty-five hundred years old, and they still stood, but they were merely rocks in a pile, not a sophisticated space vehicle. After four thousand years, the pyramids weren’t expected to enter an orbit around a distant planet while maintaining a sustainable environment against the deadliness of space.

  And what of the people on board? The only test of the technology that kept a person alive for four thousand years and preserved the seeds and fertilized ova would take four thousand years. Dr. Arnold, who knew all their medical charts by heart, told her that what she felt was homesickness. Like Meghan and the rest of the crew, he was in his twenties, but he spoke with maturity. Meghan trusted him. “Look for these symptoms,” he said, “episodic or constant crying, nausea, difficulty sleeping, disrupted menstrual cycle.” He consulted his notes. “Of course, those symptoms may also be induced by long sleep.” His assistant, Dr. Singh, nodded in agreement.

  “Dr. Arnold, I’m two hundred years late on my last period.”

  Already she felt old. Already, with the sun no more than a bright star in their wake, she felt creaky and removed, a part of the dead. I shouldn’t be able to sense Earth’s pull from here, she thought. I shouldn’t have come. They should have known that a hydroponics officer wouldn’t do well away from Earth, away from forests and long stretches of mountain grass. Even when we arrive, if everything works, if the planet is hospitable, it will take years and years to grow Earth trees to sit beneath. I’ll never see an aspen again.

  I won’t make it.

  Isaac scooted his stool closer to the tiny woodstove. If he sat close enough, long enough, the warmth crept through his mittens and the arms of his coat. His knees, only a few inches from the stove, nearly blistered, but the cold pressed against his back. It slipped around the sides of his hood. He eyed the tiny pile of wood by the stove, the remains of the table he’d broken into pieces the day before. All the cabin’s goods sat on the floor since he’d burned the shelves earlier. Beside the remains of the table, the only other wood was a small box of kindling in case the fire went out, and the chair he sat on. Outside, snow covered the ground so deeply that there was no hope of finding deadfall. Besides, every tree within a mile had either been cut down for mine timbers or had its low branches cut off for firewood. He’d hauled the wood he’d been burning for the last ten days from a site four miles upstream, but that was long before the storm moved in, cutting visibility to a few feet.

  In the room below, machinery thumped steadily. Water poured through a sluice to turn a wheel connected to a squat generator. Cables ran up the mountain to the mines’ compressors, clearing dead air from the tunnels and powering the drills, but Isaac couldn’t tell if the miners were still working. They probably were hunkered down like he was, in their bunk houses near the digging, or they were stuck in the town of Crystal. If they were working, the compressors needed to run.

  He looked out the window. Thick frost coated the inside of the glass and snow piled half way up outside dimmed what light the dark afternoon offered. The window in his tiny, second story maintenance room was at least fifteen feet above the ground. Two weeks of non-stop snow had nearly buried the building. Ten days ago, when the supplies clerk dropped off a bag full of dried meat and two loaves of bread, he’d said, “First winter in the mountains, boy? It’ll get so cold your piss will freeze before it splashes your boots.”

  Isaac hadn’t been able to open the outside door for the last three days. Heavy snow blocked it. He rubbed his mittens together, trying to distribute the heat. A steady wind moaned outside. Trees creaked. Something snapped sharply overhead. He glanced at the thick timbers supporting the roof. How much weight could they hold? How much crushing snow lay above him?

  He sighed, unwilling to leave the stove’s meager heat, but he had a job to do. Checking for candles in his coat pocket, he walked down to the darkness of the generator room, a “Tommie Sticker” in hand to hold the light. It was a fancy one, with a brass match holder and a screw-on cap to keep the matches dry serving as the handle. Ice covered the stairs, and the air smelled wet and cold. He jammed the spike end of the Tommie Sticker into the plank wall, then carefully lit the candle, using both hands to hold the match steady against his shivering. Oil for the lamp had run out two days ago. The wavering candle revealed water pounding through the sluice against the horizontal wheel, turning it ponderously counter-clockwise.

  Isaac used a two-pond hammer and chisel to clear ice from the water’s entrance and exit points. If the machinery stopped, miners would be without ventilation or power. Ice blocks as big as his head broke free from the structure and clattered to the unlevel floor, where they slid to the far wall. Despite the cold, he soon built up a sweat. He pulled his hood back and unfastened the coat’s top. When he finished, he would strip his coat and layers of shirts, replacing the damp undershirt with a dry one. If he didn’t, he’d be
too cold to sleep later.

  The work wasn’t unlike living in the monastery, he thought, complete with a vow of silence and constant labor to keep his hands busy. He thought about God and God’s plan. He never felt as close to heaven as he did when he worked alone, cut off from human conversation and the daily distractions. In a way, he hoped the storm would hold. As long as the weather cut him off, he could replicate life in the monastery. He had loved his room there. The rough-hewn bed and the blanket thrown over a thin mattress. He’d read by candlelight there, too. Yes, the generator house reminded him of the monastery. The wooden building felt like a cradle of the miraculous, a miracle that never occurred when he had been an initiate.

  It hadn’t been this cold, though. No, not nearly so cold at all.

  Meghan came awake slowly and in pain. Dr. Arnold had decided four cycles ago that the powerful painkillers they used to soften the shift from the long sleep’s near death to full wakefulness were damaging, so they didn’t flood her system with them before they woke her. Lying as still as she could in the cocoon, her elbows and knees ached, as did her ankles and wrists. Even her knuckles hurt. A tear squeezed out of each eye and raced into her ears as she thought about clenching her fists for the first time on her own in a hundred years. Every move would hurt, at first, even though the mechanical manipulators flexed her joints daily.

  When she’d gone to sleep last, Crew Chief Teague had refused. She’d shaken his hand before heading to her cocoon. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll have a rich and long life, working in the ship. In twenty-five years I’ll greet the next work crew.”