by Neil Clarke
Pinned-ears looks me up and down. “Main house. Top floor.” She adds as I start to walk, “You look like him.”
I don’t know what I’m expecting inside the house. There’s what looks like another mandala in the foyer, this time in brightly colored sand that’s been tracked over several times, and a rack of servers in the dining room, with fans running next to them. I step around the mandala, thinking that the one rack probably has all the computing power of my mother’s old research center. Changes, not all driven by the Coronals.
Two people are arguing in Urdu on the second floor. I catch the gist of it: wide-band transmission versus focused, which way to point. One of them sees me and waves absently, as if I belong here. In another life, I might have. But not now. And not Wallace.
I pause halfway up the last set of stairs to catch my breath. Someone’s painted in straggling letters: WE REMEMBER WHAT HAS BEEN FORGOTTEN. I can’t carry him out of here; haven’t been able to pick him up since he was six. I could, I suppose, call the authorities and try to have him involuntarily committed, try to have them all committed. Better that than the quiet circle of poisoned bodies. I tell myself that, and know I’m rationalizing whatever unforgivable action I’ll take.
I can’t stop crying. It’s a gift, I suppose, that I can do it without my voice going all to pieces, but it’s noticeable, and the audience’s silence has an embarrassed, horrified quality to it. “It became clear what was happening soon enough. Even if we denied it. And now we were stuck behind the glass, watching this new civilization, this new contact, these new friends we’d come to study and mimic and love—watching them die.
“And we could do nothing. We weren’t just separated by some metaphorical glass. We were separated by time. Everything that had happened had happened four hundred years ago. Scream and cry and pound on the glass as much as we tried, the Coronals were already dying. Already dead. And we heard every moment of their deaths. The wars. The plagues. The pleas for help that never came. The litanies of the dead.”
Someone in the back of the auditorium makes a sound like a sob. I blow my nose, but my eyes are still streaming. “I still remember when one idiot physicist made a comment that, well, at least the Fermi Paradox still held; it’s just that sapient races kill themselves off before they develop space travel. Gallows humor, but he still took quite the hit from that, professionally speaking. But he wasn’t wrong.”
My son is alive when I see him. He’s also wearing only pajama bottoms, hunched over a keyboard on his lap, typing with one hand and eating cold scrambled eggs off a scratched camp plate with the other. He must have shaved his head not long ago; it’s all bristly now, like when I gave the boys buzz cuts after their brush with head lice in elementary school.
His entire back is covered with mandalas, one after another, all the different interpretations of the Coronal descriptions. Burned—branded—on top of them is a hand holding a torch.
My step creaks the floorboards, and he waves one hand behind his back, scrambled eggs falling from his fork. “Harris, can you tell Zahra that I’ve almost got the reambiguation figured, if she’ll just give me another week?”
“Wallace,” I say. I don’t even have to take a deep breath to do it.
He drops the fork and spins around, kicking aside plate and keyboard alike. He stares at me for a moment, then scrambles upright. He’s not as tall as Randall, never has been, but they’re both taller than me. “Ma.”
I’m too worried to smile. “Yes,” I say, and stop. What do I say? I’m here? I found you? Please don’t go, the Coronals aren’t worth it?
His shoulders go down, just a little bit. “Randall told you I was here, didn’t he?”
“He did,” I say. “He worries.”
Wallace shrugs. “It’s what he does.” He bends and sorts through the mess at his feet, finding a shirt with TOUCH THE STARS—8TH ANNUAL silkscreened onto it. “I think he thinks we’re some kind of death cult.”
He straightens up as he says the last, and he sees my face. “You’re not?” I manage, because he’s already seen as much in my expression. “The mandalas—”
“The mandalas are important, Ma. That we may remember what has been forgotten.” The last has the sound of catechism, and I can’t help rolling my eyes. He looks up at the ceiling, and I think of far too many Thanksgivings where we talked past each other. This is going to be another one of those fights. “You seem so determined to forget that you’re willing to let them close the department.”
“I don’t see how that’s relevant,” I say, but it’s a sore point, and I take the bait. “Besides, it’s not about forgetting.”
“Then what’s it about? You’re just turning your back on what we have of the Coronals? You’re letting the university—”
“There are other Coronal Studies departments.” Withering, yes, but holding on in the same way that departments allow specialized study of Ottoman textiles or obscure Scottish poets. “And don’t change the subject. My job is my own. This—” I gesture at the mess, “—is, I’m assuming, your new job.”
He glares at me, nudges the plate of eggs away with one foot. “Yeah. So maybe it is.” I brace for the defense, but he doesn’t bother with it, instead straightening up as if he were giving a presentation. “Ma, I need a favor. I need access to Granma’s cloud.”
“There’s nothing in it. Nothing that isn’t public.”
“No, there is. I need the initial signal. The originating one, the one that rewrote her research center, before it went dormant.”
I think of my mother, of the cancer rewriting her DNA. “There’s nothing there.”
“That’s only what you say because you don’t see.”
“I don’t need to see! There’s nothing to see! You can re-run the translator as many times as you like, and it’s not—”
“Ma—”
“It’s not going to show you anything new! It’s just going to give you the same old signal, the same things we heard, the same things that aren’t there any more!” Now I’m shouting. Guess it was my turn to start this time. “You can’t tune it, you can’t adjust it—it’s done, Wallace. It’s done, and maybe your friends here with their mandalas and their slogans, they can screw around with their cosmic bullshit, but you are better than that! I will not let you waste yourself like that!”
“It’s not a waste, Ma!” He puts his hands to his head. “It’s never a waste! Jesus, why is this so hard to understand?”
“There’s no one there!” The words come out, and I put both hands to my mouth, as if I’ve said something obscene. The argument downstairs has stopped; I’m pretty sure they’re listening. “No one,” I repeat. “It’s all silence now.”
Wallace shakes his head, slowly, the way I would when I was sick of the arguments. His turn, now.
I make myself stop, make myself draw a new breath. “Could someone shut off the slides? Thank you.” One nervous laugh, somewhere at the front. Everyone else is silent. They don’t like seeing someone cry in public. Nobody does.
I think about what I want to say, what I’ve said already elsewhere. “It’s all silence now,” I say. Somewhere in the auditorium, I’m certain people are shaking their heads, not quite the way Wallace did but with the same determination.
“The air is no longer full of voices.
“Or, rather, not the same voices.
“This is the one thing the Coronals did for us that we don’t even think about any more. Every one of you, every one who has bothered to do more than a cursory study of Coronal infospace, is a polyglot. We had to be.
“This is the gift they gave us. Not the knowledge that we were not alone. We have never been alone. To understand them, we had to understand each other.”
Wallace shakes his head, slowly. “It doesn’t have to be silent.”
I’m about to snap at him, to tell him that I have spent my life on the Coronals and if anyone would know silence, it is me. But I don’t. I don’t know why I don’t. Maybe I’m just tired fro
m the drive. “There aren’t any other transmissions in infospace,” I finally say. “I know whole arrays that have been searching for anything since before the Coronal collapse. There’s nothing.”
“Not from them. From us.” He nudges the keyboard with his feet. “We’re—all of us, here, we’re trying to repurpose the original code. So we can send out our own into infospace.”
It takes me a moment to realize that he’s not talking about every other attempt to use the code, to strengthen it or tune it or seek out more information, more voices in the static. “You want to broadcast,” I say slowly.
“Not quite. We want to repurpose their tool and make it ours, and then broadcast. I mean, they’re dead, and we signed on much too late, but if we—if there’s someone else out there too, maybe they can hear us.”
I stand very still for a long moment. Below us, I hear the Urdu argument start up again, not nearly so vehement now. “Have you thought about the entity extraction issue?” I say finally.
“It’s not as much of a problem as you might think. Here, take a look.” He picks up the keyboard, pulls down a screen, and code fills the air. “The original signal was expansive-reductive, taking one set and expanding it to many. We think if we can train it another way, it can work with many sets at once, so we don’t have to restrict our infospace broadcasts to one language. It’s semisapient, so it really is like training, but the base code . . . ”
He goes off, and I think about my mother staring at her own lines of code, convinced it was all a hoax but one she’d go along with for now. It’s opaque to me, but Wallace swims in it.
“We’re getting close—well, closer. Beatriz thinks we have only ten years to go, instead of twenty. But if we had Granma’s records, it’d give us a clearer idea of how the signal is supposed to behave when it’s active, instead of its dormant state, which is all we have to work with now. It’s only a, a receiver. We need to make it a transmitter again. A whole technician, if we train it right.”
He looks alight, the same way Randall does when he’s with Brendan. I step back. “I’ll deed you the cloud access,” I say. For a moment I consider inviting him to drive back with me, but eight hours in the car are pretty much guaranteed to destroy any détente we currently have. “Let me know if you need anything else.”
Wallace stops abruptly, as if he’s just remembered who he’s talking to. “You don’t have to go.”
I smile at him. “Did Randall tell you what I’m doing, now that the department’s closing down? I’m going back to school. For a fine arts degree. Poetry.”
“That’s . . . not what I would have expected.” He stops, takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Good luck.”
“I’d like to speak to the other half of the audience now. Those of you who grew up in a world where we knew for a fact we were not alone.”
Randall, Brendan, and their girls. Abrams and Lucienne from the department, Sadako who is our last Ph.D. student and has still soldiered on, Martinez with the giant paintings, and Park with the Opera based on Coronal texts. All the ones who passed through my hands, who went on, who continue on without me.
Wallace, my Wallace, so sad and determined. I am so proud of you, of all of you.
“You have never known a world in which Earth held the only life in the universe. Everywhere, you have heard the voices of a world far away. Now you have to hear the nearer voices. I want you to hold on to that knowledge, that certainty that we are not alone. We have never been alone.
“We will never be.”
I step down, out of the light. My glass vibrates, and I check it to see a set of messages turn up.
W: good speech ma randy sent me the flow
R: did not. the girls got to listen. Sinny drew a new picture for you.
W: i have some old antholgies if you need textbks
It’s a start. I lower my glass and let the organizers walk me back out on stage.
About the Author
Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, as well as a number of short stories. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.
Things With Beards
Sam J. Miller
MacReady has made it back to McDonald’s. He holds his coffee with both hands, breathing in the heat of it, still not 100% sure he isn’t actually asleep and dreaming in the snowdrifted rubble of McMurdo. The summer of 1983 is a mild one, but to MacReady it feels tropical, with 125th Street a bright beautiful sunlit oasis. He loosens the cord that ties his cowboy hat to his head. Here, he has no need of a disguise. People press past the glass, a surging crowd going into and out of the subway, rushing to catch the bus, doing deals, making out, cursing each other, and the suspicion he might be dreaming gets deeper. Spend enough time in the ice hell of Antarctica and your body starts to believe that frigid lifelessness is the true natural state of the universe. Which, when you think of the cold vastness of space, is probably correct.
“Heard you died, man,” comes a sweet rough voice, and MacReady stands up to submit to the fierce hug that never fails to make him almost cry from how safe it makes him feel. But when he steps back to look Hugh in the eye, something is different. Something has changed. While he was away, Hugh became someone else.
“You don’t look so hot yourself,” he says, and they sit, and Hugh takes the coffee that has been waiting for him.
“Past few weeks I haven’t felt well,” Hugh says, which seems an understatement. Even after MacReady’s many months in Antarctica, how could so many lines have sprung up in his friend’s black skin? When had his hair and beard become so heavily peppered with salt? “It’s nothing. It’s going around.”
Their hands clasp under the table.
“You’re still fine as hell,” MacReady whispers.
“You stop,” Hugh said. “I know you had a piece down there.”
MacReady remembers Childs, the mechanic’s strong hands still greasy from the Ski-dozer, leaving prints on his back and hips. His teeth on the back of MacReady’s neck.
“Course I did,” MacReady says. “But that’s over now.”
“You still wearing that damn fool cowboy hat,” Hugh says, scoldingly. “Had those stupid centerfolds hung up all over your room I bet.”
MacReady releases his hands. “So? We all pretend to be what we need to be.”
“Not true. Not everybody has the luxury of passing.” One finger traces a circle on the black skin of his forearm.
They sip coffee. McDonald’s coffee is not good but it is real. Honest.
Childs and him; him and Childs. He remembers almost nothing about the final days at McMurdo. He remembers taking the helicopter up, with a storm coming, something about a dog . . . and then nothing. Waking up on board a U.S. supply and survey ship, staring at two baffled crewmen. Shredded clothing all around them. A metal desk bent almost in half and pushed halfway across the room. Broken glass and burned paper and none of them had even the faintest memory of what had just happened. Later, reviewing case files, he learned how the supply run that came in springtime found the whole camp burned down, mostly everyone dead and blown to bizarre bits, except for two handsome corpses frozen untouched at the edge of camp; how the corpses were brought back, identified, the condolence letters sent home, the bodies, probably by accident, thawed . . . but that couldn’t be real. That frozen corpse couldn’t have been him.
“Your people still need me?” MacReady asks.
“More than ever. Cops been wilding out on folks left and right. Past six months, eight people got killed by police. Not a single officer indicted. You still up for it?”
“Course I am.”
“Meeting in two weeks. Not afraid to mess with the Man? Because what we’ve got planned . . . they ain’t gonna like it. And they’re gonna hit back, hard.”
MacReady nods. He smiles. He is home; he is needed. He is a rebel. “Let’s go back to your place.”
When MacReady is not MacReady, or when MacReady is simply not, he never remembers it aft
er. The gaps in his memory are not mistakes, not accidents. The thing that wears his clothes, his body, his cowboy hat, it doesn’t want him to know it is there. So the moment when the supply ship crewman walked in and found formerly-frozen MacReady sitting up—and watched MacReady’s face split down the middle, saw a writhing nest of spaghetti tentacles explode in his direction, screamed as they enveloped him and swiftly started digesting—all of that is gone from MacReady’s mind.
But when it is being MacReady, it is MacReady. Every opinion and memory and passion is intact.
“The fuck just happened?” Hugh asks, after, holding up a shredded sheet.
“That good, I guess,” MacReady says, laughing, naked.
“I honestly have no memory of us tearing this place up like that.”
“Me either.”
There is no blood, no tissue of any kind. Not-MacReady sucks all that up. Absorbs it, transforms it. As it transformed the meat that used to be Hugh, as soon as they were alone in his room and it perceived no threat, knew it was safe to come out. The struggle was short. In nineteen minutes the transformation was complete, and MacReady and Hugh were themselves again, as far as they knew, and they fell into each other’s arms, onto the ravaged bed, out of their clothes.
“What’s that,” MacReady says, two worried fingers tracing down Hugh’s side. Purple blotches mar his lovely torso.
“Comes with this weird new pneumonia thing that’s going around,” he says. “This year’s junky flu.”
“But you’re not a junky.”
“I’ve fucked a couple, lately.”
MacReady laughs. “You have a thing for lost causes.”
“The cause I’m fighting for isn’t lost,” Hugh says, frowning.
“Course not. I didn’t mean that—”
But Hugh has gone silent, vanishing into the ancient trauma MacReady has always known was there, and tried to ignore, ever since Hugh took him under his wing at the age of nineteen. Impossible to deny it, now, with their bare legs twined together, his skin corpse-pale beside Hugh’s rich dark brown. How different their lives had been, by virtue of the bodies they wore. How wide the gulf that lay between them, that love was powerless to bridge.
