The Memory of Sky

by Robert Reed

  Into that mayhem came a young woman and the inchoate nut.

  In the standards of papio, she was prettier than some but not most. There was a little too much beard and too much breast and scars that had been carved by accident, not by any artful hand. Yet she moved easily, carrying her nut in both hands, speaking to it and laughing while she spoke. The nut had a name. Her voice was quiet, too quiet, and thirteen hundred days later, each of the Eight remembered a different name. But they were certain that the nut was a stand-in for some young man, real or imaginary, and she danced with him as she moved up the slope, past the same warning markers, oblivious to two boys who were throwing their urine into a world grateful for every goodness.

  Inchoate nuts took forever to ripen, and even in the best times and in the best ground, they were rare and exceedingly precious.

  What the woman carried wasn’t yet ripe, which meant that it wasn’t edible. But as the caretaker explained with a quiet, know-everything-about-everything voice, it was her food to do with as she wished.

  She was pretending that it was a lover’s face.

  Like any smitten young woman, she kissed the face to prove her devotion. ”I will not bite you; you may trust your lips to mine,” was what kisses mean. The rude boys saw her approach, and they tried to make her wet and angry. But discovering that they were out of ammunition, they threw out a few good insults, just enough to make their fierceness known, and then they scampered off, leaving the woman and her lover alone at the mouth of that shadowy, mysterious and forbidden ravine.

  The Eight shared eyes but not every impression. What they had heard and what they imagined were rarely the same, which made the story worth repeating now.

  The small voice inside them said, “This is what I thought would happen.”

  Then she confessed her guess, and the others told theirs in turn. Most of them had imagined something crude, and none proved right. In the end, the young woman kissed her dear nut once again, happy to the end, and then she set it on the ravine wall, exactly as high as her boyfriend’s head would rise, and smiling, she made happy tears before pulling a pistol from a pocket, aiming at the imaginary boy before turning the gun on her rubbery heart.

  Hundreds of days had passed since the half-pretty woman killed herself. The reasons for suicide were learned long ago: a boy had wronged her, and she left the world where he lived. What seemed important then had become just another small experience in a life full of more drama and suffering that any one failed love could ever cause. But only now, only as they tumbled into oblivion, did the Eight finally understand why the Procession was done this way and no other.

  The papio deeply, truly believed in traditions and strictures and the value of old voices telling the species what to do.

  Creatures with those qualities didn’t need to practice what their instincts knew, what their blood and hearts understood from the moment of birth. The Procession of the Harvest was a wondrous chance to be less of a papio, not more. It was an unpracticed dance of bodies and inspirations, with beauty in this half-wild chain that was dragged past an entity that had thought itself brilliant.

  The Eight had been foolish about the Procession and quite a lot more too.

  That was never more obvious.

  The Eight were falling, and the next little while was spent searching for some little moment, some past incident or lack of incident, where a different turn or words or maybe one unspoken phrase might have saved the world.

  Because the world was dead.

  Gazing upward, they saw the purple light of the coronas fading away, and the human fires were spreading through the dying forest, and a few columns of electric light were pointing down at them, searching for answers that did not exist.

  No light lasts forever.

  That was this day’s meaning.

  And maybe, hopefully, each of them hoped that no misery can outlast the end of All.

  There was one light burning inside the corona. Master Nissim held the torch high until that arm grew tired, and then he changed hands and swung the beam in a circle, counting faces once again.

  He wanted everyone to stay together.

  Elata didn’t want to be here.

  She stood at the edge of the group, grieving the fact that she had made the walk with everyone else. She shouldn’t have done it. Why did she? She could have walked in any other direction, and who would have stopped her? Nobody. Maybe Seldom would have tried to coax her back, but that’s all. She knew the boy, knew that he’d call to her and ache when she ignored him, and grieve after she left him. But Seldom wouldn’t have chased after her. Everybody but Elata would have stepped inside the dead animal, and the boy would have been too cowardly and too sensible to do anything else. And now she should be outside, enduring whatever awful thing that King was doing and the coronas were doing, and the soldiers, and the miserable sunless world.

  A quiet voice said, “Tell me.”

  She didn’t recognize List immediately. In this space, surrounded by alien meat, nothing sounded like it should.

  “Tell me what it means,” the Archon said, his voice smoother and more pleasant than usual, and by a long measure.

  “The inscription,” the Master said.

  Yet his voice was more like it ever was, if that was possible.

  “You made a translation,” List said. “I know you did, and I don’t see why you won’t share it.”

  Nissim said nothing.

  Noise passed through the stomach walls. The rumble might have been an explosion diluted by the creature’s body, or maybe it was the body changing shape. Quest had vanished long ago. At least it seemed like long ago. Diamond had set his sister down, and she quickly ate her way into the floor and out of sight, taking her glowing light with her. And since then, very little had happened.

  People and Diamond stood together.

  Without fans blowing, the air was growing hotter, and each breath tasted staler than the one before.

  With that strange voice, List said, “Master. Please. I want to know.”

  Nissim moved the torch again, changing arms and counting those scared sorry faces. Except for Karlan’s face, which was hidden. Their bully-protector was holding one rifle, staring back at the collapsed hole, probably wishing that an army would give him another excuse to fight.

  Haddi put her hand in the torch’s beam, finger shadows dancing across the stomach walls. With a sharp impatient voice, she said, “Tell my son at least. He deserves to know, doesn’t he?”

  The gray ball was resting in the middle of them. It would be nice if the object glowed for them. That was a small trick to dream about from the object that had destroyed the world.

  The torch tilted, its beam finding the inscription.

  “Art has a tone,” the Master began. “Even in translations, art and poetry have a distinct feel—one layer over another five layers. You often see that in the old works, the classics that people save and protect long after governments vanish and every tree and its grandchildren have died.

  “But this is not one of those times. This is not art.”

  He paused, and the stomach around them shivered. For an instant it seemed as if they were moving with the corona, but then the meat wasn’t shivering meat, nothing around them but a deathly calm.

  What if Quest couldn’t digest the corona?

  The idea came into Elata’s head, and she couldn’t fling it out again. That’s how true it felt.

  “Okay,” said Seldom. “But what does this mean?”

  “These are instructions,” said the Master.

  The beam wasn’t bright enough to reveal the etched words. When Elata looked, all she saw was the smooth timeless gray face of the ball.

  “They are brief and very simple instructions about how to begin a purging or cleansing,” he continued.

  “Cleansing what?” Elata asked.

  Except why did she talk? She didn’t care one way or another.

  “The cell,” the teacher said. “Cleansing the cell.�
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  “Like cells under a microscope?” Seldom asked.

  People weren’t real, Elata was thinking. Habits were what counted, and people were just convenient closets to fill up with important, everlasting habits.

  And just like that, in this unimagined place, they were suddenly in class again.

  “Not that kind of cell,” Nissim said. “I can’t be sure, but the text seems to refer to the kind of cell where prisoners are kept.”

  List made a soft, doubting sound.

  Then Prima began to laugh—a long strange cackle leaving everyone else uncomfortable.

  Nothing around them moved, and the heat was growing worse by the moment.

  Nissim moved the torch to the other hand, and he looked at Elata’s face longer than anyone else’s. Then he pointed the beam at the ball, saying, “If I understand what I can read, then the sun’s disappearance was just the initial step. Then the cell’s floor opens, and every wisp of moisture and every breath of air is sucked out of the bottom, leaving the cell chamber ready for new prisoners.”

  “Prisoners,” List said.

  “Yes,” Nissim said.

  Karlan snorted, amused or angry. Who knew?

  Haddi leaned away from the globe, brushing against Elata.

  Elata couldn’t remember where Diamond was. She turned her head one way and then the other, discovering him standing back as far he could be without being alone.

  She looked at his face in the gray reflected light, and nothing about his manner seemed at all surprised.

  Cold ideas got busy inside Elata’s head.

  “No wonder you didn’t want to tell us,” said Prima, not laughing anymore. Now she was miserable, saying, “All of our noise about the Creation being special, except this is just a cage with bars, and everybody is a prisoner.”

  “Children of prisoners,” Haddi said.

  Now the old lady was laughing, nothing happy in the sound.

  Elata watched Diamond, and he looked at her until he grew uncomfortable, then turned to glance into the back of the corona’s cavernous gut.

  The corona was dead around them. No sound leaked in from the world outside, and maybe there wasn’t a world outside anymore.

  “But there’s more,” the Master said.

  Everyone turned to him. Even Karlan.

  “That’s why I was desperate to look below with a good telescope. Somewhere past the sun is a mechanism, some kind of lock. The purge can be stopped. Like I said, this cell can be readied for new prisoners.”

  List sounded like his old self, shrill and tense when he asked, “And how do we manage that magic?”

  “Use this key to engage the sun again,” said Nissim.

  “But how?”

  The Master wasn’t sure. He said so with his bouncing eyes, his silence, with the hard chewing that his bottom lip had to endure. And then finally with his voice, he admitted, “I don’t have any idea how.”

  Elata looked back at Diamond.

  This time the boy didn’t look away from her.

  “I don’t understand,” Seldom complained. “Do these instructions tell us how to use the key or not?”

  “I can’t decipher that last line,” the old man admitted. “Not well enough, not even to guess.”

  Then the torch changed hands again, early this time. But both arms were very tired, and the beam dropped low and stayed down.

  Elata approached Diamond. She could barely see the face. Grabbing his shoulders, she dragged him away from the others. Five long steps, and it felt as if they were far from prying ears. And then when she was certain that nobody else could hear, she said, “You know what the words mean. Or at least you think you know.”

  He nodded. But then he said, “No.”

  “You and your siblings knew to put fingers inside those holes,” she said. “So I think you know a lot, even if you’re too stupid to realize it.”

  The nearly invisible face lifted, staring at her.

  And then an old thought came back to Elata—an idea the girl dreamed up maybe two days after she met Diamond. She had never mentioned it. It was such an obvious idea, simple and direct and obvious. In a world full of people who were smarter than she’d ever be, she couldn’t believe that no one else had thought it. So the inspiration had to be stupid and wrong, and that’s why she never brought it up.

  Until now.

  “Diamond,” she said. “You have the power to do whatever you want. You could shape the world as it needs to be, or at least better than this shitty damned mess of ours. You had the power when I met you, and you didn’t even know it, did you?”

  “Know what?” he asked.

  “You could have told us,” she whispered. “You could have told us that you remember your life before, and you remember the Creators, maybe, and we would have believed a thousand smart instructions from the Creators. After that first day with me, you could have claimed anything. The Creators sent you here to share their blessings, and maybe you could have gotten some good things done.”

  He said, “No.”

  “No?”

  “Because I don’t remember any of that,” he said.

  Diamond’s face was acquiring sharp lines. Leaking from the stomach walls and from the floor was a faint glow, and maybe it was Elata’s imagination, but she felt cooler than just a moment ago. The air was fresher, wasn’t it?

  “I don’t have anything to tell,” he insisted.

  She said, “You’re not listening to me.”

  “I’m supposed to invent a story?” he asked.

  Then she lifted her face into his face, and for the first time in her life, Elata kissed Diamond’s odd mouth.

  And having won his undiluted attention, she told him, “Every story is a lie. But if you could have done that one thing, given us a lie worth believing, then the world wouldn’t be any worse than this, at least. If you just would have.”

  NINE

  No flesh was stranger than corona flesh. Quest had lived inside one forever, but she plainly hadn’t been able to consume what was in easy reach. Later, young and free in the wilderness, she would steal scales that refused to be chewed and bones that fought every stomach she could conjure. Even a thin shred of black meat proved too novel for metabolisms that thrived on every other kind of food. But where a monkey might dream about conquering undiscovered trees, Quest fantasized about acids and heat and wondrous enzymes that had never been born, and later, living in the District of Districts, she sneaked inside one of the factories that turned meat into guns, stealing a wide sampling of parts that slowly taught her how to consume the life that was like none other.

  She imagined needing these skills, but never like this.

  Not this scale

  Wounded and tiny, scared beyond every fear experienced before, she was barely able to form any thought as Diamond carried her inside the carcass. She certainly didn’t dream that he would let her go with the promise that she would grow as large as possible. She should have explained how unlikely that was, but then she astonished herself, blindly carving a path into the dead meat, wasting energy and time before the stomach’s lining became a tumor wrapped around a stale mass of congealed blood.

  Corona blood was the easiest meal.

  One feast led to another five, each larger than the last, and faster, and more efficient. Energy collected was energy to be focused. Quest wove a wormy shape and stretched long before building branches. Every end hunted for delicious cancers and willing organs. The first neck found was infiltrated. Dead flesh was pushed aside by rubber and simple new tissues and neurons fat enough to carry images from big, unborn eyes. In less than a recitation, Quest fabricated new eyes inside the sockets of the old, and ears sprouted along the rubber skin, and with its fifth try, that reborn neck rose off the bone butcher floor, absorbing vibrations that sounded like explosions, and then a blurring image that turned clear and still made no sense.

  King was falling, which was quite unexpected and a little funny too.

  Why was h
er brother up in the air?

  Then the fletch above him turned to flame and shattered.

  King struck the floor and started to run. A length of pipe was clenched in his hand. Three strides were made, and then the fourth began before guns and soldiers began battering him from all sides.

  King spun, and the pipe flew free, and he dropped and hands struck the floor, and he rose and again sprinted as the wreckage fell behind him and the fire stood tall and more guns drove metal into his armor, his muscle.

  King was fighting to reach the dead corona.

  To shelter against her.

  She reached out with the neck, wanting to surround him, and then a cannon began firing quick concussive blasts. Her brother leapt sideways before a shell hit the floor and skipped and detonated, and he shrank down low and ran faster than seemed possible, fabulous long strides keeping him ahead of the next three blasts. But the reborn neck had too far to reach, and the last round dug low into King’s back and emerged again in front—a timed round meant to punch through the armor on papio wings—and the explosion left two of her eyes blind and King thrown back onto the floor, exposed and limp, both hands thrown across a hole that filled with bright purple blood.

  Three more of the corona’s necks had turned to rubber sleeves and new muscle.

  Fresh easy food lay everywhere, and she feasted in ways no corona could: the heads bolted down dead soldiers and several mortally wounded soldiers, and one dead general, and all of that monkey meat was suffused inside a vast new body that was barely begun.