Drowned Worlds

by Jonathan Strahan

“They were set into the side of the mountain, and the view truly was breathtaking, from the reinforced glass windows Flora could see the storms forming in the sea so far away. She saw the islands of humanity rise from the deeps. She saw the sea, the sea she loved. And she wondered what she has gotten herself into, and what she could do. And she touched her belly protectively.

  “Mai? Are you asleep?” father says.

  “No,” I murmur. I can see it so clearly, that vanished world, its players re-enacting this ancient drama. Minos, impassive. Flora, pacing, calibrating instruments, filling beakers. She felt as though Cassandra had left her a clue, a scientific puzzle for Flora alone to solve. What had she been working on? Was that the reason that she was killed?

  In his throne room the old lord paced, back and forth, back and forth, brooding. In the rooms the servants came and went on silent feet. What had Cassandra been working on when she died? Her area of speciality was genetic manipulation, she had access to the best science the world had to offer, patents and secrets long lost to us in the flood, things only the climate clans knew. But the equipment told Flora nothing, the notes were cryptic, it was all nonsense, she thought: murder was usually simple, a matter of money or love.

  She interviewed the servants. Cassandra was secretive, she had ways in and out of her apartments no one could access. The whole citadel was riddled with secret tunnels. Flora returned home, and she lay in Deuteronomy’s arms. His hand was on her tummy, open palmed, and he said, in wonder, “I felt him kick.”

  “Him!” Flora said, laughing. “You don’t know that.”

  “I would like a little girl.”

  “Girls,” Flora said, “are more trouble.”

  She did not tell Deuteronomy about the conditions of her bail; she didn’t need to. She lay there long into the night, brooding, as Deuteronomy slept beside her. An earthquake rattled the house, but neither of them much noticed.

  “Hush, little Mai,” father says. All is quiet in the house, and he lifts me in his arms and I snuggle against his chest. He smells of earth and harvest, of fresh water and olive trees.

  “But you don’t understand,” I say, or try to. “I know what really happened, I know what Cassandra was doing.”

  “Hush, now,” he says, and he tucks me in. All is quiet, the house is warm with the slow heat of embers. You see, in my dream, Flora returns to her own, makeshift lab; and she studies the sample of water she’d taken from the rock pools, and what she sees is something strange, something she does not understand. Tiny life forms, unlike any she’d seen: and living, still, in the sample, multiplying.

  This is the story as it is sometimes told, you see. How Flora discovered the truth of Cassandra’s own child bearing, the creatures which lived in her blood. What they were, we still don’t know. A new form of life, a new seed for a dying Earth. Something innocent, and new, like a baby.

  And she went into the rock pools and floated there, serene against the hurricane sky; and she carefully and deliberately cut herself, low shallow cuts, and let her blood flow into the water, and her children to emerge into the waiting ocean just beyond the rocks.

  This is the story we sometimes tell in my family, as fanciful as it is. Cassandra’s body as an incubator, her blood a conduit to future dreams: something twisted and violent, emblematic of those last days of the world as it was.

  “But where was the knife?” I mumble; I turn in my bed. “There was no knife, was there, in the rock pools? None that Flora saw. None that the Sentinels found. So how did she cut herself?”

  And this is the story of how we came to the Land. It is a story of violence and blood and lies, a story of make believe, as all stories are.

  “Well?” demanded the Lord Piyama.

  Flora stood before him, her hand on her belly. If she failed, she and her unborn child would become parts, harvested for organs, the rest made into compost. No one was very sentimental, in that bygone age.

  “It was Minos,” she said. “It was Minos, the Sentinel.”

  There was a shocked silence in the hall of the Lord. Minos stood like a statue. Flora had grown quite fond of his quiet presence, his efficiency, his lack of unnecessary speech. She almost liked him.

  But he was not a good man. Remember that. None of them were, back then: they could not afford to be.

  “Minos?” the Lord Piyama said. “That’s absurd.”

  Flora shrugged. She had learned from Minos, and her face, like his, was without expression. “He helped your daughter, he hid her passing to and from the citadel. He deleted or falsified the records. I see it in the way he doesn’t talk, the way his eyes are still. He loved her. What happened, Lord, I do not truly know. How they came to be at that place at that time. But someone carried the knife away, when it was done. Someone watched as she bled. There wasn’t much pain, I don’t think. She was spared that, at least. But it was him, I am sure of it.”

  She had pieced together a story. It could have been right. Cassandra’s quarters were too clean, her records too sparse, personal information missing in odd places. No one else could have had that kind of access. It was possible, it was even plausible. But was Cassandra murdered, or did she kill herself? Did he help? Did he cry? He doesn’t strike me, in my version of this story, as a man who cried often, or well. But I think he did love her.

  The Lord Piyama turned his azure eyes on his Sentinel. “Is it true, Minos? Can it be true?”

  Flora tensed, expecting any moment a bullet in the head, a knife in the back. But Minos was as impassive as always, and he looked at his lord with calm. “Does it matter?” he said. “You have already decided.”

  And the Lord Piyama nodded.

  And Flora knew, then, that she was right.

  Later, as Minos’ corpse was carried away from the hall, she did not avert her gaze. He was guilty, she was sure of that: he was guilty of something.

  And so was she, but she felt she could live with the guilt. She touched her belly again, she couldn’t help it. She loved the little creature growing inside here so much. She could live with a little guilt.

  ... And so it was that we came to the Land.

  I don’t know who really killed Cassandra, if anyone did. I don’t know if Minos and her were lovers. I do not even know, in truth, if they really did exist. This all happened so long ago and in another world, almost. Puerto Soledad lies under the waves, and Lord Piyama’s skull had long been picked clean by the gulls. The world is quieter now, and an ancient headstone in our cemetery is all that’s left of Flora and Deuteronomy.

  ... Yet sometimes I like to think of those tiny little creatures released into the ocean, and I wonder where they are now, and what they had evolved into.

  “It’s a ridiculous story,” old Grandma Win says, and old Grandma Mosh nods vigorously in reply. And perhaps it’s true.

  But my mother had seen the ocean; and one day I will, too.

  THE FUTURE IS BLUE

  – CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE –

  1. NIHILIST

  MY NAME IS Tetley Abednego and I am the most hated girl in Garbagetown. I am nineteen years old. I live alone in Candle Hole, where I was born, and have no friends except for a deformed gannet bird I’ve named Grape Crush and a motherless elephant seal cub I’ve named Big Bargains, and also the hibiscus flower that has recently decided to grow out of my roof, but I haven’t named it anything yet. I love encyclopedias, a cassette I found when I was eight that says Madeleine Brix’s Superboss Mixtape ’97 on it in very nice handwriting, plays by Mr. Shakespeare or Mr. Webster or Mr. Beckett, lipstick, Garbagetown, and my twin brother Maruchan. Maruchan is the only thing that loves me back, but he’s my twin, so it doesn’t really count. We couldn’t stop loving each other any more than the sea could stop being so greedy and give us back China or drive time radio or polar bears.

  But he doesn’t visit anymore.

  When we were little, Maruchan and I always asked each other the same question before bed. Every night, we crawled into the Us-Fort together—an impregnable
stronghold of a bed which we had nailed up ourselves out of the carcasses of several hacked apart bassinets, prams, and cradles. It took up the whole of our bedroom. No one could see us in there, once we closed the porthole (a manhole cover I swiped from Scrapmetal Abbey stamped with stars, a crescent moon, and the magic words New Orleans Water Meter), and we felt certain no one could hear us either. We lay together under our canopy of moldy green lace and shredded buggy-hoods and mobiles with only one shattered fairy fish remaining. Sometimes I asked first and sometimes he did, but we never gave the same answer twice.

  “Maruchan, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

  He would give it a serious think. Once, I remember, he whispered:

  “When I grow up I want to be the Thames!”

  “Whatever for?” I giggled.

  “Because the Thames got so big and so bossy and so strong that it ate London all up in one go! Nobody tells a Thames what to do or who to eat. A Thames tells you. Imagine having a whole city to eat, and not having to share any! Also there were millions of eels in the Thames and I only get to eat eels at Easter which isn’t fair when I want to eat them all the time.”

  And he pretended to bite me and eat me all up. “Very well, you shall be the Thames and I shall be the Mississippi and together we shall eat up the whole world.”

  Then we’d go to sleep and dream the same dream. We always dreamed the same dreams, which was like living twice.

  After that, whenever we were hungry, which was always all the time and forever, we’d say we’re bound for London-town! until we drove our parents so mad that they forbade the word London in the house, but you can’t forbid a word, so there.

  EVERY MORNING I wake up to find words painted on my door like toadstools popping up in the night.

  Today it says NIHILIST in big black letters. That’s not so bad! It’s almost sweet! Big Bargains flumps toward me on her fat seal-belly while I light the wicks on my beeswax door and we watch them burn together until the word melts away.

  “I don’t think I’m a nihilist, Big Bargains. Do you?”

  She rolled over onto my matchbox stash so that I would rub her stomach. Rubbing a seal’s stomach is the opposite of nihilism.

  Yesterday, an old man hobbled up over a ridge of rusted bicycles and punched me so hard he broke my nose. By law, I had to let him. I had to say: Thank you, Grandfather, for my instruction. I had to stand there and wait in case he wanted to do something else to me. Anything but kill me, those were his rights. But he didn’t want more, he just wanted to cry and ask me why I did it and the law doesn’t say I have to answer that, so I just stared at him until he went away. Once a gang of schoolgirls shaved off all my hair and wrote CUNT in blue marker on the back of my skull. Thank you, sisters, for my instruction. The schoolboys do worse. After graduation they come round and eat my food and hold me down and try to make me cry, which I never do. It’s their rite of passage. Thank you, brothers, for my instruction.

  But other than that, I’m really a very happy person! I’m awfully lucky when you think about it. Garbagetown is the most wonderful place anybody has ever lived in the history of the world, even if you count the Pyramids and New York City and Camelot. I have Grape Crush and Big Bargains and my hibiscus flower and I can fish like I’ve got bait for a heart so I hardly ever go hungry and once I found a ruby ring and a New Mexico license plate inside a bluefin tuna. Everyone says they only hate me because I annihilated hope and butchered our future, but I know better, and anyway, it’s a lie. Some people are just born to be despised. The Loathing of Tetley began small and grew bigger and bigger, like the Thames, until it swallowed me whole.

  Maruchan and I were born fifty years after the Great Sorting, which is another lucky thing that’s happened to me. After all, I could have been born a Fuckwit and gotten drowned with all the rest of them, or I could have grown up on a Misery Boat, sailing around hopelessly looking for land, or one of the first to realize people could live on a patch of garbage in the Pacific Ocean the size of the place that used to be called Texas, or I could have been a Sorter and spent my whole life moving rubbish from one end of the patch to the other so that a pile of crap could turn into a country and babies could be born in places like Candle Hole or Scrapmetal Abbey or Pill Hill or Toyside or Teagate.

  Candle Hole is the most beautiful place in Garbagetown, which is the most beautiful place in the world. All the stubs of candles the Fuckwits threw out piled up into hills and mountains and caverns and dells, votive candles and taper candles and tea lights and birthday candles and big fat colorful pillar candles, stacked and somewhat melted into a great crumbling gorgeous warren of wicks and wax. All the houses are little cozy honeycombs melted into the hillside, with smooth round windows and low golden ceilings. At night, from far away, Candle Hole looks like a firefly palace. When the wind blows, it smells like cinnamon, and freesia, and cranberries, and lavender, and Fresh Linen Scent and New Car Smell.

  2. THE TERRIBLE POWER OF FUCKWIT CAKE

  OUR PARENTS’ NAMES are Life and Time. Time lay down on her Fresh Linen Scent wax bed and I came out of her first, then Maruchan. But even though I got here first, I came out blue as the ocean, not breathing, with the umbilical cord wrapped round my neck and Maruchan wailing, still squeezing onto my noose with his tiny fist, like he was trying to get me free. Doctor Pimms unstrangled and unblued me and put me in a Hawaiian Fantasies-scented wax hollow in our living room. I lay there alone, too startled by living to cry, until the sun came up and Life and Time remembered I had survived. Maruchan was so healthy and sweet natured and strong and, even though Garbagetown is the most beautiful place in the world, many children don’t live past a year or two. We don’t even get names until we turn ten. (Before that, we answer happily to Girl or Boy or Child or Darling.) Better to focus on the one that will grow up rather than get attached to the sickly poor beast who hasn’t got a chance.

  I was born already a ghost. But I was a very noisy ghost. I screamed and wept at all hours while Life and Time waited for me to die. I only nursed when my brother was full, I only played with toys he forgot, I only spoke after he had spoken. Maruchan said his first word at the supper table: please. What a lovely, polite word for a lovely, polite child! After they finished cooing over him, I very calmly turned to my mother and said: Mama, may I have a scoop of mackerel roe? It is my favorite. I thought they would be so proud! After all, I made twelve more words than my brother. This was my moment, the wonderful moment when they would realize that they did love me and I wasn’t going to die and I was special and good. But everyone got very quiet. They were not happy that the ghost could talk. I had been able to for ages, but everything in my world said to wait for my brother before I could do anything at all. No, you may not have mackerel roe, because you are a deceitful wicked little show-off child.

  When we turned ten, we went to fetch our names. This is just the most terribly exciting thing for a Garbagetown kid. At ten, you are a real person. At ten, people want to know you. At ten, you will probably live for a good while yet. This is how you catch a name: wake up to the fabulous new world of being ten and greet your birthday Frankencake (a hodgepodge of well-preserved Fuckwit snack cakes filled with various cremes and jellies). Choose a slice, with much fanfare. Inside, your adoring and/or neglectful mother will have hidden various small objects—an aluminum pull tab, a medicine bottle cap, a broken earring, a coffee bean, a wee striped capacitor, a tiny plastic rocking horse, maybe a postage stamp. Remove item from your mouth without cutting yourself or eating it. Now, walk in the direction of your prize. Toward Aluminumopolis or Pill Hill or Spanglestoke or Teagate or Electric City or Toyside or Lost Post Gulch. Walk and walk and walk. Never once brush yourself off or wash in the ocean, even after camping on a pile of magazines or wishbones or pregnancy tests or wrapping paper with glitter reindeer on it. Walk until nobody knows you. When, finally, a stranger hollers at you to get out of the way or go back where you came from or stop stealing the good rubbish, they will, without even
realizing, call you by your true name, and you can begin to pick and stumble your way home.

  My brother grabbed a chocolate snack cake with a curlicue of white icing on it. I chose a pink and red tigery striped hunk of cake filled with gooshy creme de something. The sugar hit our brains like twin tsunamis. He spat out a little gold earring with the post broken off. I felt a smooth, hard gelcap lozenge in my mouth. Pill Hill it was then, and the great mountain of Fuckwit anxiety medication. But when I carefully pulled the thing out, it was a little beige capacitor with red stripes instead. Electric City! I’d never been half so far. Richies lived in Electric City. Richies and brightboys and dazzlegirls and kerosene kings. My brother was off in the opposite direction, toward Spanglestoke and the desert of engagement rings.

  Maybe none of it would have happened if I’d gone to Spanglestoke for my name instead. If I’d never seen the gasoline gardens of Engine Row. If I’d gone home straightaway after finding my name. If I’d never met Goodnight Moon in the brambles of Hazmat Heath with all the garbage stars rotting gorgeously overhead. Such is the terrible power of Fuckwit Cake.

  I walked cheerfully out of Candle Hole with my St. Oscar backpack strapped on tight and didn’t look back once. Why should I? St. Oscar had my back. I’m not really that religious nowadays. But everyone’s religious when they’re ten. St. Oscar was a fuzzy green Fuckwit man who lived in a garbage can just like me, and frowned a lot just like me. He understood me and loved me and knew how to bring civilization out of trash and I loved him back even though he was a Fuckwit. Nobody chooses how they get born. Not even Oscar.

  So I scrambled up over the wax ridges of my home and into the world with Oscar on my back. The Matchbox Forest rose up around me: towers of EZ Strike matchbooks and boxes from impossible, magical places like the Coronado Hotel, Becky’s Diner, the Fox and Hound Pub. Garbagetowners picked through heaps and cairns of blackened, used matchsticks looking for the precious ones that still had their red and blue heads intact. But I knew all those pickers. They couldn’t give me a name. I waved at the hotheads. I climbed up Flintwheel Hill, my feet slipping and sliding on the mountain of spent butane lighters, until I could see out over all of Garbagetown just as the broiling cough-drop red sun was setting over Far Boozeaway, hitting the crystal bluffs of stockpiled whiskey and gin bottles and exploding into a billion billion rubies tumbling down into the hungry sea.