Dead Astronauts

by Jeff VanderMeer

  v.6.4

  Blink back in:

  v.6.3

  Disappear:

  v.6.2

  Reappear:

  v.6.1

  Again,

  v.6.0

  again.

  v.5.9

  Again.

  v.5.8

  A few feet away.

  v.5.7

  Atop a hill.

  v.5.6

  Down in the ravine, barking their way back up.

  v.5.5

  In the shadow of the Balcony Cliffs again.

  v.5.4

  Register: Delirious faux-fox surprise. Deliciousness of tiny journeys, miniature doors in the air.

  Thus Grayson knew they were scientists in their way, performing their research in the laboratories of their own bodies. That they were serious as death underneath the frivolousness.

  She did not hate them for their meal. Moss as Grayson had known her was no longer there. But Grayson still had to look away. Focused on the far horizon. Focused on Chen.

  Who was beyond Grayson’s ability to repair. Whose hand she held as long as it remained a hand. Took from it the scrap of paper Chen offered up to her, put it in her pocket unread.

  * * *

  It was then that the blue fox found Grayson, there in the shadow of the Balcony Cliffs. The blue fox was much larger. Almost wolflike. The blue fox’s eyes glowed and glittered with stars. Wept tiny stars like tears, which fell onto the sand and disappeared. By which Grayson knew it was illusion, some aftershock, some trauma pouring out not from the fox but from her.

  “You are a little late,” Grayson said, not without bitterness. Although she knew how illogical it was to think of the fox as an ally.

  “I am exactly as early as I should be,” the blue fox said, and right into her mind. “That you might understand you are not the future when you offered me your gifts.”

  Grayson knew the true gifts were what was left of Moss.

  “What am I if not for the future?” Chen managed to say, choking on his new brethren, which made of him such a meal that it was a wonder he could say anything at all. So divided of mind he had become. Salamanders writhed within the jaded helmet. Played there in an ecstatic myth and muddle. Equations searching for the right detonation.

  “A good man, for a human,” the blue fox said.

  “No. I am not.”

  Last words. First words.

  * * *

  Chen had been beyond help before the foxes devoured Moss. Even donning his hazard suit for containment, Chen had begun to come apart in ribbons and rips of salamanders. Slipping through ever-larger rips in the fabric. Joyous in the agony of his dissolution, so weightless in the extremity of his need to become himself.

  Grayson watching over his transition, wary of another attack, could still see Charlie X out on the plain to the west of the ravine. But only with her human eye. The other still flickered in and out, shut it against distraction.

  Chen, who might at the dawn of some new decades-distant golden age know a form of Moss. The form of Moss still trapped within Botch, for Grayson knew that the past that rose up could be a hopeful future as well. She hoped for it, for the tatters and remnants of Moss within Botch. She hoped for it hard, although she knew she might never see it. Hoped for it despite betrayal.

  Chen’s pain was now extraordinary, but his alone, for without Moss, Grayson could not feel it direct. But wished she could.

  Only Chen could feel the pulling apart. Every splayed and grinding detail of it. How the stars within him became the joined feet of the salamanders. How they disengaged and thus rent him and hurt him, and him still trapped in the carcass of a man.

  Chen let out a cry of anguish, but not from the physical pain. Could not bear, in the beginning or the end, that he had traded one life for another in trying to hurt Charlie X. No way to make it right that he could see, even with his equations.

  “Hush. Hush now.” Grayson to Chen, meaning to get through this last thing. To go out to the farthest point again, to see the rock that might be a face staring back in the dim reaches of the universe. To return yet again from that, but this time bracing for how to do that in minutes, not a century.

  Chen tried to say to Grayson, could not, in the end, say it at all, trapped inside without Moss to set it free: “At the wall of globes. It said to me. It said to me, it said, ‘No comfort. No forgiveness. No rest.’ And it was right. He was right.”

  Grayson had meant to give some final comfort. Chen knew this. He knew her intent. But now there were only writhing green bodies within the suit.

  Moss, to Chen long before, as they surveilled Charlie X from afar and she had noted Chen’s shiver, the tremor in his step, the approach from the far horizon of his fate: “It will be like snapping pea pods in half. Or husking corn. It will be sharp, intense, invasive. But then the numbness will set in. And you will fade out, and something else will fade in. You will not know this by then, but you will still be there.”

  “Where we are weak, we are strong.”

  Sad wonder as Chen’s suit filled with writhing green, and because it no longer mattered, pushed the faceplate open and the salamanders dissolved into floating spirals that rose in a column of green smoke. Dissipated into the sky.

  Everything was contaminated. Nothing was.

  All that would remain of Chen in time was a rain of tiny salamanders. Green, yellow, orange, red, and then black. Then they would come no more.

  Always reduced to nothing by the morning, to be taken up by the sky, to rain down once more. Each time removing more toxins from the air, the soil, the water. The penance he had chosen, for it went with his nature as Charlie X had instilled nature in him.

  He would rain down upon the City for a hundred years or more. Lifted up and diminished and lifted up again. He would become a part of the landscape in a way that Grayson was incapable of. He would be everlasting.

  Grayson had fewer options.

  Maybe only one option.

  xx.

  beneath the stars

  beneath the planets

  v.1.0

  Grayson, limping as she walked, torn at from the storm, numb, lost. As if none of it had happened or all of it had happened at once. The farthest-most point. The most intimate. Had she truly reached it yet? Her eye clicked, whirred with dust, with stress. Heat signals jumbled. Almost useless. Night vision the reason not to tear it from the socket, start over. As if her life pod had crashed in the desert and she was making her way clear of the wreckage. An acrid, terrible smell in her nostrils.

  Left arm hanging loose. Bandage across the elbow. Right arm still resolute, holding the gun. She had broken down weeping, twice. Had lain against the cooling sand, unable to move. The second time, she’d opened her pack for water, found Moss’s special supplies. The seeds and sprouting tendrils Grayson had been told to plant so long ago. In the event. Not to bring Moss back but to let the natural part of her live on.

  Stared at a promise from so long ago. Destined for some other Grayson. She could not bring herself to see Moss there. Bear false witness. Oracles that misled.

  Picked herself up, in time, as the sun faded, into that new world. Hoping it was the same world. Hoping it wasn’t. Trudged under a hellish red moon, the Balcony Cliffs well at her back. Alert for the return of the blue fox.

  Her first impulse had been thwarted. She had wanted to rage, to kill. She would storm the gates of the Company. She would murder them all. She would be a cleansing fire. All would part before her anger. To assail the Company. To breach. To be in breach. Find the portals. Destroy them. Or be destroyed. What did it matter now? No thinking in that, no equations, just to stop the awful emptiness in her head where Moss and Chen had been.

  That she could live with herself. That there would not be so much failure. That her thoughts a chaos, her gait, injured, might mean something.

  But there, in the mouth of the ravine, had stood the blue fox. Barring her way.

  She raised the weapon of her arm.r />
  The fox was no longer there but somewhere else. Turned to follow but the fox was in two places at once, then none, then three.

  “Let me pass,” Grayson said.

  “That is not to be.”

  “Let me pass.”

  “I’m not in your way.”

  A lie.

  “I never saw anything like you out there.” Waving at the sky. “But you don’t belong here, do you? Never saw anything like you even as a hallucination. Are you a hallucination? Did Moss make you up?”

  “We were always here,” the fox said. “You never noticed. So we made you notice. We made it so you had to notice.”

  The fox’s pink tongue lolled from its mouth and it appeared to be laughing at her, or at a joke she didn’t understand. Which made her angrier.

  “Sometimes it was just the Company,” Grayson spat out. “And sometimes the Company and the duck. And sometimes the Company and you. But never all three. Until now.”

  “Probability. You were only ever three.”

  “Conspiracy,” Grayson managed. “You betrayed us. You tricked Moss. You did.”

  “Probability was against you,” the fox replied. “And Moss knew this.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  “It’s a beautiful truth.”

  “They can’t get away with this.” Anguish broke her voice wide, made her throat sore. The sting of words still bleeding. The way she felt full of broken glass yet walked on broken glass, too.

  “They already have.”

  “I’ll kill you.”

  But the blue fox had grown yet bigger and Grayson felt herself grow weaker. Loss of blood. Hallucinations. Loss of loss.

  The blue fox drew near. She could feel the coarse softness of his blue fur. Could feel the liquid heat spurling from him. Could not meet the directness of that stare.

  “Do you want to die?” the blue fox asked her.

  Sensed the regret living within the pulse of the body made manifest before her. Sensed, too, the determination. The patience.

  I was out there with you, Grayson. Though you didn’t know. That I was there. That I came back with you. That I was a burning star. The blistering rage of centuries of looting and death. I’m as old as you, Grayson. I am.

  No, she didn’t want to die.

  Not yet.

  With the straining credulity of her damaged eye: Watching the rejects pour out of the Company door, way down beyond the plain. Out into the sudden shadow and grit of sand and holding ponds and the leviathan there to gobble them up. Bewildered by their own killing. Bewildered by so many things. To be dead without ever having lived.

  She watched for a while, until she was satisfied the monster bore no trace of her beloved. Not in a form she could care for. Then turned away. Saw inside, deep, how the version of Moss that remained here was not for her.

  Something that would never know her, never recognize her, and she could spend a thousand thousand days shadowing the leviathan and nothing in that milky gaze would connect to her. There would be no recognition. There could be no recognition.

  v.2.0

  In the end, I loved the world, so I remained in the world.

  Had the fox said it or thought it to this Grayson? Or had she said it to the fox? The dead astronaut didn’t know.

  v.3.0

  Headed the other way, through the City, toward the desert. Of her own volition? Herded by the blue fox? Either way, the blue fox would not leave her alone, kept shadowing her even when she threw rocks at him. Futile. The first and now the last. Was he the last, too?

  “You could have trusted us. In your plans,” Grayson said. Didn’t care now. Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.

  “You would never have followed us,” the blue fox said. “You wouldn’t have listened.”

  “Do you have a plan that includes the human?”

  “It includes people. Are you a person?”

  “Once, I was several.”

  “Do you trust me?” the blue fox asked.

  “No,” Grayson said. “But I don’t need to anymore.”

  Then she was silent. For before her lay an abandoned courtyard and in the middle of the courtyard were three dead people in the hazard suits so familiar because all three had worn them. Skeletons within. But still something of the familiar peeking through. The green resided across the indistinct features of one, whose bones were looser, whose features had dissolved into a mask of a face made of dead lichen.

  The rage at seeing them there, but also the love.

  “Why didn’t you tell us.”

  “Maybe this time you would have succeeded,” the fox said.

  “But you know that is not true. You helped make it not true.”

  The fox said nothing.

  “We had already failed,” Grayson said.

  “Not you. Not exactly you.”

  Grayson could not deny they lay peaceful among clumps of desert flowers and grasses. Some of which sprouted from those helmets.

  Dead her.

  Dead Moss.

  Dead Chen.

  “There is nothing we could have told you that would have made a difference,” the fox said. “Nothing at all.”

  “You’re a monster just like the rest of them,” Grayson said.

  v.4.0

  Swift and fast. The blue fox became the rain. Became implosion. Became explosion. There was no air. No way to breathe without a helmet. There was light behind her eyes that was meant to be behind his eyes. There were thoughts that went hunting and hurtling through her, killing things she thought she knew or believed in. Loping forward to the next thing.

  v.5.0

  Hell of a nothing that prattled that pried and the fox’s face floated down upon her life like a sun and all else blankness and a voice came that she would not remember later—the words. And all she could do was fall to her knees, fall to the sand at the onslaught, and the fox hovering there, revealing himself to her. All of him.

  She cried aloud at the miracle of it and the fear of it and the awe and the terror, and the fox could have held her in that moment forever if he’d liked. While all that was not her that she could not conceive of riddled her body and interrogated it and made of it a receptacle for a divine blue flame.

  You have done enough and are done.

  How could she stand against that fierce power? How could she not submit?

  v.6.0

  The universe spread out before her and her above and within it and the fox like a map, a compass.

  The presence left her, the terrible blue star left her.

  Now do you understand? Do you see?

  But Grayson had no mouth to answer, no thing to say.

  Do you see?

  Can’t remember. Can’t forget. She saw the blue fox’s fate. How his part too would be tortuous. That he would relinquish so much. That, in the end, the blue fox must care nothing for his own life. That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.

  The burning halo of the blue fox.

  The drifting flare over the desert, lighting her way in the darkness.

  A weight that was warm and thick and ferocious.

  But when she lifted her head, the blue fox was gone. It was just her and the last of their supplies and she remembered only vaguely that she had met a fox.

  Down so many pathways.

  Down through the uncut grass.

  Down the well-trodden path.

  Down to the tunnel under the bridge.

  Where the river had once run. Where there had once been a forest. She could see it all. And that was all.

  “Come to rest, then. Come to rest,” she thought the blue ghost had whispered, after. “Under the moon. Come back to us.”

  But she couldn’t.

  v.7.0

  Somewhere out in the City, the rest of the foxes were playing. Learning. The duck still stood sentinel. The leviathan lumbered between holding ponds. She spun out into the desert. Blind.
Unaware. Reckless. Stripped of sense. Unable in that moment to recover herself. The three dead astronauts behind her.

  Her mind would be empty, the fox had told her. By the time the dead astronaut remembered “Grayson,” she would be well out in the desert. The City would be gone. The City would be a mirage in the back of her skull, blooming ever fainter.

  Funny. How everything changed so quickly. She could keep going, but only if she headed away from where Moss had left her.

  The coast beckoned. Maybe Moss was there. Another Moss. Except this time, she would lift no finger to bring Moss into her plans. No, they would ignore the world. Shut it out as long as they were able.

  “Do you know if it will be enough? In the end?” the dead astronaut had asked the fox.

  The blue fox regarded the dead astronaut with a curious gaze. As if looking at something unknown and trying to identify it.

  “We’re not like you. We won’t be like you.”

  The dead astronaut dropped her gun into the sand.

  “If we die, we die.”

  She loosened the straps of her pack, let it drop to the sand.

  “But we will be joyous in our death and laughing and light of foot.”

  She took off her coat, left it there, behind her.

  These seeds in her pocket—what use now?—and so she let them fall, too.

  All the useless things. The signature of purpose. The imprint of grand design or any design at all.

  Walked out into the desert. Did not look back. Beneath these stars, those planets, as the night sky opened up. Intimate coordinates. Intimate destinations. Such tiny fractures in reality, and yet all of them growing.

  She did not know then if it was a problem with her eye or with the world.

  How long would it take to find the end? Grayson didn’t know.