Dead Astronauts
Jeff VanderMeer
Under the watchful eye of The Company, three characters — Grayson, Morse and Chen — shapeshifters, amorphous, part human, part extensions of the landscape, make their way through forces that would consume them. A blue fox, a giant fish and language stretched to the limit. A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden. Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth – all the Earths.
Copyright (#ua5f24917-9ce1-5b23-a5ee-c0bf78fc1996)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2019
Copyright © 2019 by VanderMeer Creative, Inc.
Cover illustration © Maalavidaa
Cover design © Jo Walker
Lyrics from “Suicide Invoice” copyright © 2002 by Rick Froberg (lyricist) and the Hot Snakes.
Frontispiece and ornament illustrations copyright © 2019 by Mario Tauchi.
The salamander-language diagram was drawn and provided by Jeremy Zerfoss.
Jeff VanderMeer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008375324
Ebook Edition © December 2019 ISBN: 9780008375348
Version: 2019-11-08
Dedication (#ua5f24917-9ce1-5b23-a5ee-c0bf78fc1996)
FOR ANN, ALWAYS,ACROSS ALL THE WORLDS
Epigraph (#ua5f24917-9ce1-5b23-a5ee-c0bf78fc1996)
And when I dream
I keep my promises to you
I really do.
—HOT SNAKES
7 “What version is this?”
7 “Zero. It’s version zero.”
7 “Do you trust me?”
7 “I do.”
7 “Do you love me?”
7 “I do.”
7 “Hold on to me, then.”
7 “I will.”
7 “Even when I’m not me.”
7 “I will, Moss.”
0 “And I will always be there.”
Even before I know you.
Even after I’ve known you.
Even then.
CONTENTS
Cover (#u249a171e-2fc8-5e88-8d7f-d5137d3e7bc1)
Title Page (#udc3f6557-37e8-55ff-aa46-e06721282307)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1. THE DREAM OF THE BLUE FOX
2. THE THREE
3. BOTCH BEHEMOTH
4. CAN’T REMEMBER
5. LEVIATHAN
6. THE BODY
7. CORPSE
8. THE DARK BIRD
9. CAN’T FORGET
10. THE DEAD ASTRONAUT
0. A SCRAP OF PAPER FOUND IN CHEN’S SUIT
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author
Also by Jeff VanderMeer
About the Publisher
1. THE DREAM OF THE BLUE FOX v.1.0 (#ua5f24917-9ce1-5b23-a5ee-c0bf78fc1996)
So they ran threaded through the breaches, found the seams. So they ran with a memory of the City without buildings. So they navigated two worlds: the new and the old. When the ancient seabed had been green with reeds and lakes and the low salt-poisoned trees with their thick moss-encrusted limbs upon which they might sleep.
Now they must come to rest on half-collapsed roofs and in the shadows of the great rocks out in the desert. Now they must dream where they could and trust in the lookout who would not sleep. Must trust in how thought danced from mind to mind. How there was nothing but a lightness to that. How they knew each other’s will.
They were the color of sand, which might shift and stall, pass between the paws unnoticed, but would never not be there. Would never become weathered down because it was already what it was meant to become.
One from another in the night they snapped at the winking rescue lights of giant fireflies. Savored the crunch of wing, the collapse of carapace. Let in the coolness of the dark. Played games in the aftermath, searched for hidden water, dug their own shallow wells. Licked at the salt when needed. Mated and had cubs. Sometimes looked up at the stars distant and for a moment contemplated what lay beyond. Even though it meant nothing more to them than the fireflies.
Until Nocturnalia.
Until the blue fox.
For one night there came a flare of blue across the heavens and a nimble quicksilver thought in their heads that was both familiar and strange. They sat at the border between the desert and the City. Hearts pumping fast. Motionless but ready to leap, to run, to bite.
Out across the desert came the Source. At a trot. With a familiar grin of fangs. The blue fox. Larger than them by half. Projecting to them what he wanted to project.
Love. Power. Fate. Destiny. Chance.
Showing them another world. Another way.
But why should they have a leader? Why should they not roam like wild things? For they were wild things. Why should they have a purpose? For they were wild things.
I will tell you why said the blue fox as he approached. I will tell you why it matters. To you.
Soon under the glancing moon, the blue fox stood before them. He stood mighty before them. He stood respectful before them. He stood before them.
Came a mighty yipping and barking from the multitudes, the gathered folk that were foxes but not foxes as had been known in the past. For what had a fox been but what a human thought it was?
The blue fox said:
There shall come scavengers to the City from far away. They will call themselves the Company. They shall have no face. They shall have no body at which to strike, but many limbs.
There shall issue forth from the Company beasts and monsters and creatures that shift their form in ways that you cannot imagine. There shall come threats you cannot imagine.
The little foxes seethed, withdrew, seethed around the blue fox, moving like a memory of the sea. Cusp of a new thing, considering what the blue fox showed them.
And by the time the foxes left that place, the blue fox was their leader, and although not one of them could say why this should be, it felt right. It felt true. And in no particulars could it be said that their lives changed in the short-term. In no particulars were they not themselves after. Yet in their hearts they felt the change.
There will be a terrible price to be paid. But I will pay it. If you follow me.
It made them braver. It made them fierce. It focused their thoughts through the prism of the blue fox’s mind.
Now their play had purpose.
There shall come three humans across the burning sands …
2. THE THREE v.3.1 (#ua5f24917-9ce1-5b23-a5ee-c0bf78fc1996)
i.
came unto the city
under an evil star
A glimmer, a glint, at the City’s dusty edge, where the line between sky and land cut the eye. An everlasting gleam that yet evaporated upon the arrival of the three and left behind a smell like chrome and chemicals. Out of a morass and expanse of nothing, for what could live beyond the City? What could thrive there?
Then scuffed the dust, the dirt: A dull boot, a scorpion-creature scuttling for safety much as a human would had a spacecraft crash-landed there. Except the owner of the boot knew the scorpion was unnatural and thus anticipated the scuttle and crushed the biotech beneath one rough heel.
The boot-scuffer was the one of the three who always went first: a tall black woman of indeterminate age named Grayson. She had no hair on her head because she liked velocity. Her left eye was white and yet still she could see through it; why shouldn’t she? The process had been painful and expensive, part of her training a long time ago. Now she glimpsed things no one else could, even when she didn’t want to.
Kicked a rock, sent it tumbling toward the thankless dull scrim of the City. Watched with grim satisfaction as the rock, for an instant, occluded the white egg that was the far-distant Company building to the south.
The other two appeared behind Grayson in the grit, framed by that bloodless sky. Chen and Moss, and with them packs full of equipment and supplies.
Chen was a heavyset man, from a country that was just a word now, with as much meaning as a soundless scream or the place Grayson came from, which didn’t exist anymore either.
Moss remained stubbornly uncommitted—to origin, to gender, to genes, went by “she” this time but not others. Moss could change like other people breathed: without thought, of necessity or not. Moss could open all kinds of doors. But Grayson and Chen had their powers, too.
“Is this the place?” Chen asked, looking around.
“Such a dump,” Grayson said.
“Old haunts never look the same,” Moss said.
“Would be a shame not to save it, no matter how shoddy,” Grayson said.
“Shall we save it, then?” Chen asked.
“No one else will,” Moss said, completing the ritual.
All the echoes of the other times, what they said when things went well, scrubbing what they’d said when it didn’t.
They did not truly speak by now. But thought their speech into one another’s minds, so that they might appear to any observer as calm and impassive as the dirt atop an ancient grave.
How could they dream of home? They saw it continually. They saw it when they closed their eyes to sleep. It was always in front of them, what lay behind, overwriting the places that came next.
Chen said they had arrived at the City under an evil star, and already they were dying again and knew they had no sanctuary here—only accelerant. But the three had been dying for a long time, and had vowed to make their passage as rough, ugly, and prolonged as possible. They would claw and thrash to their end. Stretched halfway to the infinite.
None of it as beautiful or glorious as an equation, though. All of it pushed toward their purpose, for they meant, one of these days or months or years, to destroy the Company and save the future. Some future. Nothing else meant very much anymore, except the love between them. For glory was wasteful, Grayson believed, and Chen cared nothing for beauty that declared itself, for beauty had no morality, and Moss had already given herself over to a cause beyond or above the human.
“While we’re only human,” Grayson might joke, but it was because only Grayson, of the three, could make that claim.
This was their best chance, the closest to the zero version, the original, that they might ever get, this echo of the City. Or so Moss had told them.
Grayson, the restless one, the leader, if leader they had, took point, and her blank eye was her gun, her hand her gun, and no aim ever truer. But all three had restless, dangerous thoughts. All three had minds that reeled from the imprint of strange constellations and distant coordinates. Hell lay behind them on that map—blood and murder and betrayal.
And because the three were home, and because they strode toward the City, which was everywhere the property of the Company, the enemy came for them. Tripped an invisible wire.
Apparitions sprang from the sand, dust devils formed like sand but not sand that took the shape of vast monsters with glittering eyes: Bio-matter with nanites instead of intent, to bring down upon them punishment for their rebellion. A digging gap-jawed leviathan that ate the soil and vomited it back out, transformed. A flying creature with many wings that blotted out the sun. Claws and fangs were to be expected and a lust to kill, grown more corporeal with each staggering step the creatures took, so that what might seem ghost matter or star matter gathered with a great soughing sigh and low guttural groan as it became strong where once it had been weak.
Only Moss ever found them sympathetic, and that was because she was closer to them in her flesh than to Grayson or Chen. Phosphorescent, dripping a mist of near-weightless biomass in emerald and turquoise torrents, as if they had emerged not from desert but from some vast and ancient sea. The brine of them hit the three in a wave, and the taste of them registered Paleo-Mesozoic, worthy of the respect one gave to old bones in a museum.
But these monsters had been made to combat some other enemy than the three, and not a one of the three hesitated in their step or paid these apparitions any heed—ignored the terrifying sounds, the slavering jaws, the shadow rippling across the heated sand—and when the molecules of the three met those of the defenders, the defenses fell away and again became like sand.
Sometimes this was not the case.
Sometimes, when they were not the three but just the one or the two or in some other guise and thus weakened, the sentinels devoured them, ripped their flesh and cracked their bones. Rendered their corpses down into dust, and then quarantined the dust and salted it, as if knowing how dangerous even the DNA of ghosts could be. They had taken readings, logged the evidence of this, knew it to be true.
Here, in this City, there came a second wave in the form of a giant lizard and Grayson dealt with the surprise with a leap and a swipe of her arm, for there appeared a blade at the end of her hand and then a red line across a scaly throat. This lizard erupting from the sand was not biotech but natural bred and thus natural dead in disposition.
Yet it hid the preternatural, for one limb of the lizard made as if to flee into the sky and became a wing that might flap and soar. A wing turning into a full-fledged bird that might report back to the Company.
But for Chen, who whipped his left arm up toward the heavens and allowed that part of him that identified as “hand” to leave him, to spin up to the wing as a sharp spinning star and to intercept the flying thing—and to shatter it to pieces, which fell like shards of green glass or some brittle candy.
While the star of his hovering hand shone golden there in the great empty sky, like a beacon.
The monsters were gone; they had passed the first trial. Yet it was different than before. More difficult. Each of them felt that, in some hard-to-define way.
“They will track us.”
“They always track us.”
“The duck with the broken wing?”
“Already here.”
Sometimes it took longer, but true: The duck with a broken wing watched their approach from a dusty pool in which a dark smudge was all that remained of water. More reptilian than duck. Saurian. Teeth. Semblance of a duck. But only from afar. Up close, all that registered was monster. Sometimes they called it “the dark bird.”
The duck always waited for them in the City. The one constant, like a fixed compass, one that was broken or made to be false. The duck waited for them through all the versions, all the years.
The mantra went: “First the duck, then the fox,” and, lately, “then the fish.” (Or, sometimes, “the manta,” which soared off above the dry seabed like a memory of plenty.)
The first question, when they arrived: “Is the duck on our side or against us?”
For if the duck was against them, disaster became more likely. Perhaps the duck had seeded the earth with the monsters just defeated, but worse were the times when it stood before them upon first approach, analyzed their nature, and disgorged more specific weapons, and then they knew the duck truly opposed their purpose.
A presence existed in the ground below the duck, shadowed the duck from below and gave it power. They had never glimpsed this something, only felt it, like a curse.
“The duck is on our side here,” Moss said.
“You sound uncertain,” Chen said, other arm extended like the weapon it was, ready to inflict his mark upon the duck.
“It is at least neutral,” Moss conceded, but she still did not sound sure.
Which concerned Chen, concerned Grayson.
In the past, Moss had always known and was always right, they had discovered. When the duck appeared smooth in Moss’s mind, the duck would not hurt them. When the duck appeared rough there, the duck would hurt them. That was the only way she could explain it.
To Grayson the duck before them manifested as a tiny sun aswarm with rippling maggots of cascading light. Her special eye could not analyze it or penetrate that blinding aura, could not thus break down the elements of the duck. Could not say whether it was a pillar of salt or a cauldron of flesh. No percentages scrolled across her vision.
This was itself relief from the sight she could not now turn off, something gone faulty, the world so much incoming data that it was no data at all, and she must always recuse herself, tamp and withdraw when she could, for her sanity.
But Grayson welcomed the duck with the broken wing because it reminded her that even something broken could have a use. That nothing should be wasted. And that what might appear broken might in fact be whole.
“Then the foxes first,” Grayson said. “We parlay with the foxes.”
The ritual. If ever broken, what else might break?
The three picked up their equipment and as one they advanced across the sands into the City. While they felt as one the weight of the duck’s skeptical eye, recording all.
Their shadows were long and dangerous, flickered and seemed to catch fire as the light faded, and still they trudged forward, inexorable as any three people who had loved one another fiercely and seen nothing but the best in one another. Across so many years, and now with nothing left to lose.
They had failed in the last City, and the one before that, and the one before that. Sometimes that failure pushed the needle farther. Sometimes that failure changed not a thing.
But perhaps one day a certain kind of failure might be enough.
ii.
they needed no fire
for the fire burned
within all of them
Chen could see bits and pieces of the future, “but only in equations.” A frequent lament. Numbers could attack the flesh, the will, but rarely built it up. Morale for them never lay in the numbers. He made poetry out of his premonitions, his equations, because they’d proven useless to him as fact, because he was never sure whether he was actually seeing the past. A past.
Chen liked to play the piano and to down a hearty meal with a beer. Meals because he spent prodigious energy keeping his form. The piano because it made him remember to be careful—how watchful he must be of his own thick fingers. Or this is what he said, “It makes me limber-er,” when mostly it was a link to his history. Or what had been implanted in him as history.
There had been little enough of either lately. Pianos and hearty meals. He must take his sustenance from the molecules of the air with which he often felt interchangeable, and he compared notes with Moss, because their moves through fluid states were similar, even if his was a kind of fight against evaporation or ejection and hers an overabundance of accretion, a building up.
Flesh was quantum. Flesh was contaminated, body and mind.
Chen dealt in probabilities on one side of his brain and impossibilities on the other. Because the probability was always that he would disintegrate into his constituent parts sooner rather than later. He had come to think of himself as a complex equation and a symphony both, and, really, what was the difference?
The equation of the Company eluded Chen, perhaps because he had been lost within it once upon a time. Or as he said sometimes, the system abhors source, makes its mapping into a maze, a mockery, and the more you think you understand it, the more you are colonized by it. And lost.
As they walked, suspicious of the shadows within every husked building:
“It was never real.”
“It was real.” Chen or Moss, it didn’t matter.
“Not real in the sense of lasting.”
“Nothing is real, then.”
“Real enough.”
Real enough was the anchor that kept them from falling apart. Through all the versions.
The glowing star of Chen’s hand had begun to burn before the drift, so that it did not plummet but, light, hollowed out, it caressed the air as ash in hand-form, disintegrated before it could reach the ground. Almost as if the hand could not believe in its own engineering. He would grow another by morning.
Yet still he felt the hand as it floated, as it drifted, as it became nothing. Loved the weight and certainty of that dissolution.
The hand laid bare the one who had created it, along with Moss: Charlie X, whom Chen thought of as the missing fourth member of their party. Vain hope. Nothing across the versions to support it. Nothing that could have registered on Grayson’s radar, just in the form of a bullet she would like delivered to Charlie X’s brain. Even though it was too late.
Charlie X was on some part of the blackboard that had been smudged and no one could solve the equation now. Just knew the original answer had been incorrect.
“What’s my point?”
“Are you losing your point?”
“Your point is your defense.”
“I still have three points to use.”
Were they all losing the point along the way?
If so, Moss least of all because she didn’t have the luxury. She was the map, the way in and the way out, the leader of the heist and its blueprint.
Chen’s equation was a wall of circles with plus signs between them, and then some basic geometry that proved he was more than the sum of his parts. Held together by math.
But Moss? Messier. Moss liked, well, moss—and lichen and limpets and sea salt and the beach and guessing the geological scale of things. And strawberries—she loved strawberries now that there were none anywhere they went. Also, Moss liked to rescue whatever animal or plant needed it. She believed they had earned it.
Moss lived based on a kind of crime that Chen had witnessed part of but neither had shared with Grayson, as if it were a wound that would bleed out if offered up. Moss kept that wall high and inviolate; for someone who shared herself so utterly, how could Grayson begrudge this one withhold?
Yet sometimes, Grayson’s bad/good eye gleaned hints, the eye so exposed to the alien that it had shut down and opened up, both. Grayson’s eye saw: Moss through a swirl of snowflakes, emerging from a tunnel, emerging from a burning shed, as if she leaked memories without her knowledge. Or was this something she projected onto her? How to make sense of that?
For Chen, Moss was a wall of circles or zeros tumbling over one another, and from each a different Moss peered out. That kept being divided by themselves until there was no room for the rest of the equation and the parentheses grew into vines and cracked the blackboard and made math into something that could never be solved. While Moss escaped through one of the circles. For Moss could bud another Moss off her big toe if she liked—as she was fond of saying.
Chen had been beholden to Moss’s kindness, in ways Grayson would never understand. You had to be there. You couldn’t conceive. Empathy wasn’t enough. Imagination wasn’t enough.
By contrast, Grayson was a single circle from which radiated calculations like the sun’s rays and a latticework of numbers between each ray. She liked to be as direct as a fist to the face. She had survived that way out in space for so many years that there was no other solution for her. She knew the stakes of their mission because she’d had so few choices before Chen, before Moss. Chen tried not to diagram her or turn her into poetry, even though it was in his nature. Did not want to solve her, for fear she’d tumble like Moss’s zeros, but, not used to it, shudder apart, disintegrate. No matter the grim set of her jaw.
Chen, Moss, Grayson. They each only used one name now. Had been winnowed down, become too familiar, had not the need nor the want for the territory of two names. When encamped, they lay heedless and seamless huddled all three together. Hard to pry apart for the comfort of it, the touch of another. They needed no fire, for the fire burned within, warmed them even in the deepest cold. And the source was Moss.
“Good night, Moss.”
“Good night, Chen, Grayson.”
Just a mutter from Grayson, but they knew she loved them.
Each had had the experience of self-annihilation. Chen had killed Chen. Moss had absorbed Moss. Grayson had killed them both. Moss had killed Chen, Chen Moss. Thus their intimacy had become exponential, along with their sadness and their regret. And it was cocooned within that, that they lay together, so close, to treasure the Chen, the Moss, the Grayson, that still lived.
While all three could feel the duck with the broken wing watching over them from afar. For better or worse.
The dark bird.
iii.
the way his face yet reflected
nothing of terrible experience
The City and the Company went by many different names in the Splinters, as Chen put it. In the Mains, it was just City and Company, as the Company preferred, the edges rounded off; no purchase. In the Mains, the risks were greater, but so were the rewards. Splinters could sting, distract, and that was all.
But versions of the City weren’t the only variable that Chen calculated, that Moss embodied. Time was a second variable, and time was not inexorable. Some Times it seemed as if they sped forward into their own future, and those were the worst moments.
The City glittering upon the plain inviolate—and terrible for it, the Company building grown so fat and thick and all tributaries leading into it, with no wastelands or outliers. Smell of blood. Just the Company and no City at all. These maze-versions they turned their backs on in haste, turned their backs on their own mortality and uselessness. For nothing could be gained, only lost.
The City, smoldering upon the plain violate—and terrible for it, the Company building dead husk and the tributaries dried up, all wasteland and outliers. Just the City and no Company at all. While shape-shifting creatures with camouflage like cuttlefish and chameleons expressed as enormous wildflowers transformed whatever raised its head from refuge. The smell of death as a rich, velvety sigh.
These versions they turned their backs on slowly, after days in their contamination suits, careful not to breathe the air. You could regroup in such a place, but you would find no sanctuary, nor an adversary. You could be lulled, or culled, and a lull was like death in the end. Woken from a dream of blossoms into a swaying disintegration.
For that was what bodies wanted: To come to rest. To know no more.
This City was like all the Cities: the observatory to the northwest, the factories to the northeast, against the polluted sludge path that was the river; the vast complex of pockmarked half-derelict apartments to the south of the factories, where the Company housed the workers; and to the southwest the white smudge of the Company building.
What varied most was the expanse between factories and Company, across the diagonal, the ancient seabed. Sometimes this was an utter ruin. Sometimes an estuary rich with holding ponds that led to the encircling river. Sometimes it served as satellite to the Company and, at least at first, industrious if not prosperous. People in numbers, making a sort of living, perhaps even selling food they’d grown to those who came out from the Company.
Grayson in particular distrusted those visions. Everything the Company did destroyed someone, killed someone, even if it helped someone else. All the rest was subterfuge, and no suit to protect against it.
“That wasn’t there in mine.”
“Was in mine.”
“In mine there were only mines. There.”
And there and there and there.
Not mines that could blow you up. Mines that could destroy your mind, change your body. Make even the thought of you never exist.
A dark joke. An old joke. Useful to remember, until you could no longer remember … anything.
Other times, they moved backward and the Company appeared in stages of construction, with such activity and so many guards that they could not even comprehend the depth of the danger and challenge before them. In that false promise you could lose your self, could be convinced the futures were glorious … if you hadn’t already seen the futures. Everything that promised glory become gory, spreading death underneath, death preferring to dive before erupting back up at the end of days.
Thus Moss, who used Chen’s equations to hone her internal compass, so that her foldings in on herself spared the three the impossible ones and chose only those Cities where the bitter possibility of collapse, the cusp of the possible, provided them with a corridor, a moment.
While Chen, bound by Moss, would calculate rates of decay and acceler-deceleration. Would add in relative unknowns like the cataclysm/catechism of the duck, other Chens, the likelihood of one day meeting a hostile Moss, or meeting another Grayson at all.
What it would mean to meet up with a Charlie X who had not become deranged, expunged his memory. What it would mean for Chen not to hate Charlie X or to remember the feeling of Charlie X’s gaze upon him. Moving backward to a point where Charlie X would be young and almost featureless in his innocence, the way his face reflected nothing yet of terrible experience.
What Chen never added to the equation.
What Charlie X, in rags, had told him, as something clicked into place behind his eyes. Would click off again, for in those days and those versions Charlie X could never hold on to his self for long.
That one time. In that one place. With Moss and Grayson preoccupied and Chen a fortress-sentinel.
“I remember you. I remember you. I remember you. You were just a dream I had. A dream I made. That’s all you are.”
Chen had trembled, tamped down the urge to dissolve and in that dissolution take Charlie X into the dark with him.
For that would be surrender.
Moss had put forth the rules to govern Chen’s more useful equations. Moss’s “tidal pool rules,” which included: Stay still, be small, bring the right camouflage, know good hiding places, become a symbiote or parasite, be poisonous or venomous, be able to regenerate body parts.
If you wanted to survive, reduce all motion to zero over long stretches of time. Trust the current. The current. The current. The species already there. How at high tide the water rippled across all of the tidal pools, even those that had been inviolate, their own tiny kingdoms, before.
If this were the purest City. The one that most rippled through all the others and the Source. If this was the one, then the effect would be greatest here.
But: Be tiny, be motionless. Take your time. Perhaps it would not be the first wave or even the thousandth. Because direct was defended. You contaminated the wall of globes inside the Company, then went to the Source. The portal wall, the magic mirror that led back to where the Company came from. You let it trickle in, like a slow-acting poison that was actually:
Life, again.
She could feel herself, sometimes, using the tidal pool rules to do the things she wasn’t doing here. Phantom sensations. Of standing in the ravine. Of watching her doppelgänger set off, with Chen by her side.
Memory of Grayson turning to her and saying one of these three things:
“This time. This time. I feel it.”
“Someday. We’ll go back to your tidal pools.”
“How many times has it been now?”
Say a number that felt low. That felt hollow.
Like one of Chen’s equations was screaming to get out. Like one of Chen’s creatures, trapped in the wall of globes.
iv.
for you cannot give us
what we already have
In this City, as in all Cities, the three knew they would find the foxes. Moss loved the foxes, while Grayson suspected them—thought them already too clever, believed, perhaps, the foxes had led to their failures, as much as the insidious nature of the Company had.
Chen had no opinion, for in his calculation the foxes must always be part of the plan. So he wasted no emotion on them one way or the other.
On a cracked dead bridge splayed in segments across a riverbed of rocks and weeds, the fox met them. They had been clambering across the gully, headed southeast, toward the Balcony Cliffs apartment complex. They wore now their camouflage, so that they appeared only as a glimmer against whatever backdrop they moved across. Faery mode, Moss liked to call it.
In a sense, the fox had ambushed them by taking the high ground of the bridge. This startled them. It had never happened so soon, or in this place.
The blue fox stood perfect-still, regarding them. It was as large as a wolf and Grayson felt the threat of its regard. Could see with her eye the peculiarities of its brain. Just could not tell if the fox had been born that way or tinkered with.
“You are a long way from home,” the blue fox said.
“This is our home,” Moss replied.
“Not all of you. Not this City. Our City.”
“The Company’s City.”
“Not forever.”
Moss was their receiver, and it was through Moss that Chen and Grayson heard her parlay with the blue fox.
“Will you accept a gift from us?” Moss asked.
“I accept no gifts from strangers.”
“But we aren’t strangers. You know us.”
Moss was letting the blue fox into her mind. The farther into that labyrinth the fox explored, the more of the gift the fox would receive. For it would understand their mission, gain more understanding of the Company, and also see how the foxes had helped them across so many Cities. That was the hope.
(What bled through, into the head? Where did they travel all unknowing? This in Moss’s mind as disturbance, registering in Chen as a possibility: v.2.1 = 2.2 + 2.3 + 3.0 + the things that could pull a mind apart if examined close up.)
“Neither shall I set foot on strange paths without a map,” the fox said or thought, and in real time it was neither but an image the fox showed Moss—of the fox come to a halt at the entrance to a dark green maze of vines, and the maze was Moss and the fox would not enter the maze. And Moss put this image into words for Grayson, for Chen.
Words ripped smooth by repetition. What Moss had said many times before: “The Company will kill you without our help.”
“The Company already kills us, and yet we are here.”
All around, from every hiding place, peered the sandy-colored small foxes that were the blue fox’s comrades.
“We can make it easier, faster, for you.”
The fox considered that, looking out over the City as if the fox would rule the City one day.
“I will give you this much: There is no Moss in this City. No Moss at all. You should consider that before all else.” Moss by then was a conduit as well as a person, and even as a person she was an accumulation of Mosses, all of whom lived inside her. Every time Moss encountered another Moss, across timelines, they merged, and she had become more powerful because of it.
Then the fox trotted off the bridge, out of sight, and his followers melted away as if they had never been there.
“That has never happened before,” Chen said. He had noticed how the fox looked covetous at Moss, as if she were a tasty morsel. That had not happened before, either.
“Give it time,” Moss said, even though Time was a joke. Even though they had less of it with no Moss in the City. No new partner, no new joining.
“How much time do we have?” Grayson asked.
(What came back to Chen was how 7 became both lucky and finite, not a door but a wall. Without an anchor at 6.999999999999. But the fox was the master of it and thus in a way Chen could not see in the numbers … their master, too.)
As they met the fox ever earlier, so too would the Company be drawn to them that much faster. This they knew. And Moss knew one thing more the other two did not: that she would see the fox again, soon.
I think you are beautiful, Moss thought hard, at the space the fox had disappeared into. I think you have always known the future. I think this time I might trust you.
But she always had done that in the past, too. Because she meant it.
Where had the blue fox come from? The vexing question, the one they had stopped trying to answer. Moss said that the blue fox had not been born in the Company or borne by the Company, or they had so forgotten it that there was no residue. A rogue lab, Chen guessed. Or some spontaneous mutation. Neither probable.
Moss believed: The blue fox was aware of its brethren across all the paths. Moss believed: The blue fox often knew them before first encounter.
Once, Grayson, after analyzing the blue fox and finding only … fox … pressed the creature.
The fox replied, “I came from where you come from, Grayson. I come from up there.”
The sky. The stars. The leap of startled recognition in Grayson before she realized the fox was joking. That the fox was telling her she had been read, down to her core.
“How do you know?” Grayson had asked. Could not help that reveal.
“You stink of space,” the fox said. “You stink of stale air and the burn and countdowns to false zeros, and places not of Earth.”
But Grayson thought the fox lied and there was some other reason.
Chen said: Any theory at this point made as much sense, since no theory made sense. That the fox could be inhabited by an alien intelligence. Or it could be a particularly devious AI wormholing back under the power of a self-made destiny. If the paths were open, porous, then other sorts of doors could open as well. Even though Grayson, the only astronaut among them, said aliens had never been encountered by humankind out in the universe. That human beings never mastered AI.
Grayson, uneasy every time, instinct telling her she knew the blue fox from somewhere. Always on the cusp, never able to recall. Distrusting the emotion behind it, careful to keep the fox at arm’s length.
The probability was that they would never know. The way most never knew half of anything and had to be content.
“Catch me if you can,” the blue fox sometimes said to Moss in joyous reverie. “Catch me if you can.”
But they never could.
v.
the first glimpse
was always the most fatal
Only Chen had ever worked for the Company. Some version of it he had left far behind on the map. And so, the first glimpse of the Company building each time was always the most fatal for him. The trauma of it had been known to pull him apart at the seams, it left to Moss to hold him together, for he had the power to dissolve into the sky almost against his will, leave Grayson and Moss on their own, nothing ever his problem again.
Before the tidal pool rules, the three had smashed in the front door of the Company. They had laid siege. They had attacked from afar, through proxies. They had lured Company lackeys into sabotage. They had led uprisings of biotech. They had done this and they had done that. They had been wounded and changed and poisoned and defeated too many times, only got out because of Moss. All the Mosses. Could only regroup because of her.
Had to wait. Try more circuitous ways. Come back much later. After the damage had mostly been done. Irredeemable. Irreparable. Yet they still meant to repair it.
Each time: What next? What now?
Each time, the obstacle seemed more insurmountable.
Chen: “Couldn’t you find a future that’s a paradise, where we could live out our days together?”
But that was a joke. Because Chen knew none of those timelines contained a Moss, a Chen, a Grayson. Because those timelines did not exist. The Company had tick-engorged itself across all timelines.
This was the problem. You could try to live out your days and years in some remote corner, but even that place would be blighted by the Company, by what happened in the City. They would find you, in time. You would be reminded of your own unwillingness to fight against your fate. The three would become one and one and one, and then none.
Grayson: “There will be a next time.”
Moss never replied. She would be thinking of what she had received from Grayson because she loved her, too much. How without Grayson she would not have known to resist. Because Moss had been too close in, too close to Charlie X and, by extension, the dark bird. How Grayson had been like original sin, how Moss was now more fully herself than before.
That they might next succeed. That failure might no longer be about a semblance of the future. That, in the end, they were three, not an army.
The Company always looked basically the same: whether an enormous white egg or a vast gray triangle or a ziggurat or a series of spires, like a fractured cathedral. Holding ponds for biotech rejects always hunched up against the side, a convenient hell or purgatory, full of dying life, and then lines of invisible defenses across the wasteland beyond. Sometimes things flew through the air that should not have been able to fly, molecules of iridescent blue and green that scintillated and changed shape, ever vigilant.
This version retained the white-egg structure but had curved lines running through the architecture so that it resembled a giant egg slicer with a metal egg sliced within it. A lazy riddle interrogating itself about some other, unrelated question.
This version had propagated the holding ponds across the entire expanse of what was normally desert, and still was, in a sense.
“How did It escape?” Grayson would ask as they stared at the Company.
“We never escaped; It was always there.”
“Can It be put to the good?” Grayson would ask.
“No, It cannot. It must be burned to the ground.”
“But could we persuade It?”
“Only if you could find a human heart to persuade.”
“Only if you could find something other than a human heart.”
“What will replace It if we succeed?”
“Anything is better.”
But without the Company, they could not have fought the Company.
But this made them at times suspicious of their own three selves.
But they had no choice now but to go on.
In this version, birdsong filled the City, but it was just an echo of nanites created to give the illusion of bird life through ghost calls.
“What will you miss?” Grayson would ask, already knew the answer.
I’ll miss you.
vi.
no one should feel responsible
for the whole world
Grayson’s past lay very far from home, always sending data and signals without knowing if they made it back. Just one of three vessels forging ahead. Two destroyed by asteroid strike. Her crew dead from all the ways space could murder you: lack of resources, bad decisions, disease, freak injury, the cosmic scale, sun flares, infighting.
Reaching the outermost point, or at least the farthest Grayson could bear. In a suit, looking at rock, rock underfoot. Caressed the outline with one thick glove. Unsure if the formation was the fossil of some alien intelligence, the suggestion of a helmet, of a face. Or just a coincidence, an outline she wanted to see. Would never know.
Feeling in an irrational way that she was looking at her fate if she continued outward bound. Weary. Sick of no grass, no trees. No horizon other than the dark or artificial light. Paltry samples. Paltry evidence.
Knowing that humanity was alone. That even a sea of water could not produce advanced life-forms unless the exact conditions were right. That she didn’t in the end care for the microscopic depiction of life. That bacteria warring with bacteria could not evoke in her any kind of awe, that she should stop taking samples of water traces.
She tried to feel for a tremor or warmth in the stone beneath her glove, but the fabric was too thick for anything but the pulse of her own breathing.
Time to return.
Only to then spend a century finding her way home, through all the strange wormholes in the universe. Come to think of it as a useless mission. Come to think of herself as a ghost during that time, lost among the stars and star matter, haunting herself, haunting dead space, haunted by her many selves. Left behind: the dead crew, buried beside the fossil that might be in her head.
Did she deserve to live after the death of her crew? She had no answer, had decided for no good reason that the atoms of which she was made were not yet ready to disperse to form someone or something else.
Thus, Grayson wandered alone and in her own thoughts, at times in danger and at times held in thrall to such cosmic places full of wary (cold) wonder that she could not find the words, and so words fell away from her for a time … because they were useless.
Fell away along with so much else that by the time she found the moon base, she would not have recognized rescuers as fellow human beings.
If there had been anyone living on the moon base.
If it wasn’t clear all the astronauts were dead.
If she hadn’t known home still lay below her.
Grayson returned to a version of the City that held no life. The blackened, flame-eaten forms of people and animals were strewn everywhere. Caught in mid-flight or huddled in corners. The runneling of flesh that forced some flush against the ground, as if returning to the earth might save them.
Fire and chemicals formed a kind of haze over the bodies, an unholy mist. Hiding and revealing and hiding again as it lingered over the dead. As if the Company had sent the mist to hide its crimes.
Roamed that landscape in shock, unaware of just how much time had passed since she had gone into space. Roamed the City as an astronaut might, still in her suit, in constant contact with the life pod.
Grayson had had perhaps a decade of solitude and air left at the base to look down on Earth’s ravaged face and try to convince herself that all would one day be better. But instead she’d returned to Earth, burning enough of the pod’s remaining fuel on reentry that she could never go back. Her reasons were sound enough: She felt too alone, more alone than just being one person. Too much carnage in memoriam there.
Eye reporting data dispassionate, she had sorted through the City’s wreckage much as a parent might go through a child’s messy room. A child missing or passed away. What was valuable. What had been cast aside. What overused. But unable to put it back in order.
In space, discipline meant life or death. Here, there had been no penalty for freedom until the end.
In the twisted remains of the Company building, Grayson found evidence that some had survived and fled west. So she had taken her life pod west, headed for the coast, adrift and aimless. Or maybe not so aimless. What Grayson had planned to do there, she did not know. Perhaps she would have explored until the pod’s fuel ran out. Perhaps she planned to die. Perhaps she had some better idea that never came to pass.
But it was there she found a treasure, beneath the broken pink stucco archway that once greeted tourists to a marine amusement park. In its crumbling state, the broken-down cement walls and rising seas had conspired to create artificial tidal pools full of strange life.
Tending to them was Moss.
Grayson found Moss early in the morning, the air fresh enough that she had taken off her helmet. Moss crouched by a tidal pool, cataloging its contents, regulating temperature, encouraging some organisms, discouraging others.
Moss presented ethereal. She presented as naïve, with green eyes that blazed at Grayson as she turned from her crouch, startled at the appearance of this sudden visitor.
Moss had not spoken to another person for months. Grayson recognized a fellow explorer; she saw in those tidal pools an infinity. Stars reflected there.
“You don’t come back often,” Moss said. “Sometimes I search for you. But most times you die up there.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Soon enough, she would.
“And I’m sorry,” Moss said. Staring so nakedly at Grayson that she looked away.
“For what?”
“That you’ve seen so much you loved destroyed.”
“Hasn’t everyone.”
“You’re an astronaut,” Moss said, turning back to her work. “The scale is different.”
“We each handle what we can.”
“No one should have to feel responsible for the entire world.”
Grayson had no answer to that. She considered Moss again. There was a hard edge to Moss, she decided, despite her empathy. What some might call hidden depths. Nothing simple about a person who loved the sea so much she couldn’t live without it. Nothing simple about Moss, as Grayson discovered over the next few weeks: cheerful, bright-eyed, optimistic. All of that was difficult; pessimism was easy.
But Moss was purely tactical, tending to her tidal pools. Perhaps Grayson could convince her to be strategic. Once she understood the woman. Although, for a time, it was Moss who convinced Grayson. For a time, Grayson was content living by the sea.
That first day, when Grayson couldn’t meet Moss’s gaze, she already knew she had fallen in love. Didn’t know Moss had taken human form that first day just for her.
And, in the end, it was Moss who found the way, who had always known the way.
Who was the way.
vii.
by these signs
they knew they were home
The Balcony Cliffs building was much as Chen remembered it—so much so that Moss and Grayson went on ahead to ensure that Chen did not already live there. But Chen’s old apartment was empty, rich with trash and giant silverfish. The silverfish danced and paraded and showed no fear, as if the three truly were ghosts.
Moss didn’t consider the apartment abandoned. She had always loved seeing silverfish. While they offended Grayson’s sense of a recoverable future. It was a visceral reaction—her brain always reminded her that every living thing was sacred now. That any life was a good sign.
“In the end, the silverfish shall inherit the Earth,” Moss said, content. “And they shall build towers in the desert and create a great civilization.” For that was one of the myths told in the City.
But the point was: No Chen that they could find, and the fox had told Moss that no Moss grew here, in the City. Perhaps Moss grew farther afield, but this was no help to them.
Grayson had yet to encounter another Grayson in their travels, felt an irrational sense of loneliness when the other two told tales of their doubles. Because what no Grayson meant was that she had perished across most timelines before she made it back to Earth. Because no Grayson could flourish out there for long. A gloved hand across unforgiving stone.
Chen and Moss both welcomed finding the Balcony Cliffs’ swimming pool again, deserted and full of brackish water without much alive in it. Moss would fix that, not because it affected the mission but because it was in her nature. Because she always hoped to leave things behind that were better than she had found them.
They would claim an empty apartment near the southern edge of the Balcony Cliffs, with an ease of exit toward the ravine that served as preamble to the Company lands. They would be silent and incognito and try to blend in with the others who lived in that space.
“I lived here in mine.”
“In mine, I never knew about this place. I lived in the ruined observatory. In the basement. Before I met Moss.”
“I visited a friend here, once.”
“You had a friend? Doubtful.”
A sculpture of a giant bird. The corpse of a dog. A ruined dollhouse.
By these signs they knew they were home.
Their tenth City.
After the Balcony Cliffs’ attack beetles had been repulsed, after the scavengers received the message, the three regrouped behind a door blocking off a corridor near the southern entrance. Easily defendable. The door’s graffiti featured laughing foxes playing in the desert, each with but a single eye. Chen drew in the second eye on each to balance the equation. Moss reinforced the microbial sensors. There should be no tickle, no trace so light that Moss should not know it in time.
Grayson distrusted the lack of resistance; they had repulsed multitudes in past versions. But though she trained her eye across beams, blueprints and ghost layers bursting across her line of sight … she could parse no threat beyond the usual.
Still …
“We should move up our timeline,” Grayson said.
“But not blind. Not from panic.”
“It’s not panic. It’s common sense.”
“What if the fish is stubborn? What if the fish resists?”
“I’ll go,” Chen said. “I will convince the fish.”
“No,” Moss said. “It must be me or some part of me.”
“Then I will stand watch.”
“We must just go in and do what we came here to do.”
“I’ll go,” Chen repeated, with the force of a slammed door.
But the door had already been shut. Grayson and Moss ignored him.
Soon they would need the blue fox to say yes to them. They would need to be sure the duck with the broken wing didn’t interfere.
Soon, too, their faery mode might not be enough. Sometimes they had to wear their contamination suits. Depending on Moss’s senses, Grayson’s eye, Chen’s prophecies. What did contamination mean in this City, and which way did it flow?
Each Company building was different. But recon had diminishing returns and too many risks. So they rehearsed their plan, with the aid of the old dollhouse found by Grayson (once again). The Company had seven floors, but it was still easier to visualize using dolls and furniture and rooms than diagrams scratched in the dirt. Some things never changed.
They must get some version of Moss inside the Company building, to compromise the portal wall, to infiltrate the wall of globes.
But they’d been wrong about one thing.
Chen was still there. Chen had been lying in wait. Chen had never ambushed them before. Chen had either been there or not been there. That was all.
An evil star.
Perhaps they should have aborted the mission right then, moved on, found another City, another Company.
viii.
like two people trying
to become one person
Chen ambushed Chen in a corridor distant from their apartment, near the swimming pool. Chen did not reach out to Moss or Grayson, who were already in the apartment; the danger seeped into their minds instead as an unease, took a long time to coalesce. Then burst forth as a star as radiant as Chen’s hand drifting bright across the horizon.
It happened too often. This withholding by Chen. This self-sacrifice. They could not tell if this was out of loyalty to his other self, from his pervading guilt, or the simple logic that it made no sense for all three of them to risk harm. Yet each time was more dangerous, for it had come to seem the Company sensed their presence, their mission, on some subconscious level. Thus cast out all Chens, or, in some cases, killed them, snuffed them out. Or made them more belligerent.
This Chen roared, brought down heavy fists on Chen’s back, cursing his own name, as Chen smashed into Chen’s midriff, already enraged by his termination.
They remained close as wrestlers, clasping each other’s shoulders with meaty hands. The sweat, ache of muscles, and desperation that choreographed their movements. Chen was confident and resigned; he knew from prior experience he likely must fight to the death, as much as he wished not to. Locked now in a fatal embrace, both sets of legs churning, wide stance, looking from above like some bizarre crab or starfish in two parts or like two people trying to merge and become one person.
“Submit,” Grayson’s Chen muttered in Chen’s ear.
“Never. Abomination. Traitor,” came the reply.
“Get out. Stop helping them. Stop the hurting.”
“Die die die.”
Felt the dissolve, fought it, came back into focus.
Chen, between grunts, tried to tear off Chen’s left ear with his teeth. So he let his ear fall off, spin across the empty ground, pick itself up, and lurch out of harm’s way.
Grayson’s Chen knew the panic, understood it: that this Chen could not conceive of the truth but knew another truth. The Company could make people if it wanted, and the thrashing, terrible intensity of attack, the visceral nature of it, meant that Chen, seeing Chen, understood this, too.
All the memories of Chen—of family continents away, of work history, of hobbies, of relationships—that this was a sham and a shame and that the only way to keep some sense of personhood was to destroy the invader. In some Cities, some Chens might fold under that weight, but most of the time it made the Chens fight long and hard and dirty.
Except Chen didn’t care if he was a made thing or not—Moss had cured him of that neurosis—and he had the advantage of having fought Chen before. He knew all of his moves, knew all the ways to end it, including how he had learned to adapt his flesh from Moss, that he could detach his hand and turn it into a dangerous flaming star flying through the sky.
Yet still Chen muttered at Chen as they struggled, pleading with this other self to submit, to give in, that they could work together if only Chen had a chance to explain. Trying again.
“Submit and join us. Two are better than one. What do you owe the Company?”
“Submit and the Company will welcome us back in. Submit and we can both have the life you had before.”
“A dead life?”
“Something to hold on to.”
But had Chen said that or had Moss’s Chen thought it? Who was lying to whom?
As Chen fought back and refused to submit, Grayson’s Chen grew weary. Not of the fight, for he had learned to love fighting because at least it ended in a vanquishing that denoted a kind of progress. But as he traded blows with himself—rabbit punches, kicks to the groin—Chen felt something sanded down finally and forever. As his fist struck Chen’s jaw and Chen’s fist struck him in the stomach. As they stumbled in the grapple, neither quite going to the ground, Chen realized he was weary of killing himself. He was tired.
This was the fourth time.
With a great spasm and twist of self-loathing, Chen moved to the side and locked his arm around Chen’s throat in a choke hold, clambered onto his back, and clasped Chen’s torso tight with his legs. Chen fell with Chen on top of him, bucking, trying to get at Chen with elbows, then trying to dislodge Chen’s legs.
Chen managed to twist enough to get his fingers under Chen’s choke hold and flip so that they were face-to-face on the uneven floor, in the dust and dirt next to the swimming pool. Now each had hands around the other’s throat, those bull-like necks, so close they could have kissed or spat or done anything.
Moss had altered Chen’s oxygen capacity, or taught him to do so. He never remembered what was augmentation and what was just training. So Chen was content to choke Chen, until Chen passed out and there was a moment when Chen had always, would forever, continue to apply pressure to the throat and Chen would die.
But this Chen, too, must have altered oxygen capacity, or was working from a different equation, and did not tire and did not pass out or die, but only squeezed harder on Chen’s neck, too. Which alarmed Chen, and then all the solidarity with his own flesh that he had built up over time … gave way.
Grayson’s Chen burst at the seams. Became a mound of writhing green salamanders, in a sigh, a deliquescence. Slipping from Chen’s grasp as he gasped and stepped back. In surprise or disgust? For salamander-Chen still formed a rough composite of Chen’s form. Slouched over on the ground, the salamanders fierce-eyed, determined to pledge allegiance to an equation made obsolete.
Stared up disoriented at Chen through the array of a thousand eyes and, with a shudder, misdiagnosing, thinking he was back at the wall of globes in the Company building, he screamed. Chen shrieked. The salamanders wailed with him in an uncanny chorus. Even as locked together they clung, embraced, their feet like hooks, a community of flesh desperate not to succumb to a more nomadic impulse. How lonely that would be. For everyone.
Then Grayson was there, enveloping Chen and keeping Chen whole, putting him back together, subsiding the frenzy of the salamanders.
Then Moss was there, subduing the other Chen. Muffling the Chen in waves of green particles, come a little undone herself to undo Chen.
Who, stunned, stumbled now as if through a dream or nightmare. Grappled with this nothing dissipating through the air and made despairing sounds. Subsided, rendered frozen by the pinpricks of Moss’s transference of her defensive blood. Moss recoiling at the feel of Chen’s blood in contact with her particles.
Grayson found rope in Chen’s pack and bound Chen’s hands and feet.
“I have you, Chen.”
“I have you, Moss.”
“Another time, Chen. Another time. But not now.”
Chen outside was Chen again. Could not describe the feeling of being so distributed: to have so many bodies at once and so many eyes, and so many beating hearts and breathing lungs. A legion of tiny lives that could not be reduced to equations, that existed in every moment, each unique, nothing about math or structure. He needed music. He needed a huge meal. He would get neither, just the relief of his own labored breathing. Singular.
Charlie X had altered Chen to fail because he was disposable. Moss had made him fail in a way that allowed him to live, that gave some comfort, that was not really failure. That allowed Chen to atone, that manifested in his flesh.
Grayson and Moss looked down at Chen. They could see the imprint of salamander bodies like a fading tattoo. They could see it, so Chen could too. Feel also their concern.
“Should you do it or should I do it?” Grayson asked Chen.
Kill the other Chen.
Chen said, “No! Keep him alive. He might have value.”
Chen had never had value because Chen never knew as much as Grayson’s Chen. Chen had never suggested saving Chen. It was too dangerous.
Moss put a hand on Chen’s shoulder.
“You said the duck is on our side,” Chen wheezed out through the retreat of salamanders in his throat. “We can afford to.” Just to say something. Just to be normal. Which was impossible.
“The duck was at our side,” Moss observed.
True: The duck had appeared next to the swimming pool, watching them. Had it been there the moment before?
Then it was gone again.
The duck had seen Chen explode into salamanders. It had seen Moss help reconstitute Chen.
What else had it seen?
ix.
a creator who no longer
remembered the creation
How to explain the weight of the duck with the broken wing? In truth of flesh and blood and light, though it could not fly. The wing deliberate, part of Charlie X’s plan, that the duck might always be cast out from the Company. That the duck might register as prey. As low and cast out and as prey.
To the three when they encountered the duck, it was as heavy as if made of brass or steel or gold. The duck’s gaze was impervious to the years, pinned them down with that weight. Always when they arrived: that urgent, nagging question. Is the duck with us or against us? Does the duck recognize us?
The duck represented a paradox. It roamed where it would, and wherever it patrolled for the Company it also negated anywhere within its shadow the Company’s surveillance. The duck could do that, to lesser and greater degrees, across all of the Cities.
“Schrödinger’s duck.”
“Heidegger’s duck.”
“Swedenborg’s duck.”
“Seneca’s duck.”
Charlie X’s duck.
The worst versions of the duck: Carnivorous, enflamed, the cruel lizardous eye. Oozing a thin crust of blood that dried on the mottled white. Oracular stigmata, appraising. Price of seeing too much of the future. Most often observed replicating the murders of birds of prey—bill sharp, serrated in microscopic detail. Buried in a limp rat-thing, tearing out the guts. Gulping them down like a ghoulish stork. Gnawing on what was left in an artistic way, the delicacy in how long the duck could leave the recipient of its attentions alive.
It would look up from feasting with a mechanical grace and hunger, as if lusting for meat in a way that festered. Fostered the impression screams were more important than hunger.
Once, twice, the three witnessed the duck eviscerating a fox it had pinned to the sand, from back legs to snout, with the spurs on its scaly feet. And then the duck did bring down its head like a hammer that became an ice pick that split the fox’s head in a crack and splatter of blood and brain matter. A sound that carried over the sands.
But the duck ate no part of either fox. Perhaps wary of a trap. That the foxes might come free from the inside out, might somehow conquer it postmortem. That the foxes still spoke to one another when dead, voices floating in the air, seemed a desecration by the duck, but Moss could not be sure. All that seemed sure is that Charlie X hated the foxes. Or had once hated one fox.
Of the broken wing, the best that could be said is that the wing left a smile upon many a neck and torso. But never on a face. For the creature could in a motion reminiscent of some awkward bat unfold and unfurl and extend.
The wing by will locked in place. The edge knife-sharp and serrated. It with willful industry and psychotic intent vivisected and hacked apart scavengers as large as men and larger. With a zigzagging approach once taught perhaps but now as automatic as a stitched pattern.
Then came the sliding in a wet and separated slump to the dust, the dirt, the scavenger forever caught in a bloodstained, anguished look of confusion at the method of its own ending. Until the sun and smaller scavengers still did their work and turned the anguish into a smile. Because dead things felt only love for the universe.
Sometimes, the duck would distract with the voice of your beloved dead, plucked from your mind, and then dig into your brain like a worm or grub, and try to live in there for a while, eating out your thoughts until you were a husk that twitched and slobbered and spasmed in the sand. At which point, reduced to harmlessness, the duck would stab you with its beak wherever best to place a spigot. Bleed you out while eating you alive.
There came then, Moss knew, in some victims, the heights of ecstatic experience. A lightness that carried the mind off into the clouds to look down on the twisting and shaking mess of carcass without worry or care. Despite the pain that had arrived before that moment.
Oh happy memory for Charlie X, who had no memories anymore. Oh, happy days of youth evoked by the duck. The one he’d nursed back to health. The one he’d been given as a gift. The one he’d rescued from a zoo. The one he’d kidnapped at a park. Depending on Charlie X’s mood, the story changed, on a sliding scale of the sentimental that Chen could map to the cruel.
The one he’d told Chen about even as he created the demonic version, no space between the molecules of air that shouted Lie! and those that flowed from his mouth to tell what he thought was the truth, in that moment.
Who knew what was truth and what was story?
The logical next question, more remote because the answer was usually the same: Where is Charlie X now? Nowhere. Nowhere. Dead. Forgotten. Rags buried in sand, buried in the past. Just the duck left behind.
But that was not the case in this City.
Charlie X, a ghost given flesh, rising up impossible to meet them across the years. Yet they could not meet him. Must not risk that in his disturbed mind might still exist a memory of Chen, of Moss and the wall of globes inside the Company. And, so, seeing Charlie X from afar as they had headed for the Balcony Cliffs, by the polluted river … the three let him pass unhindered. Did not call out. Did not admit to the past. Hardly discussed it after.
They’d never turned him to their cause, either too broken or not broken enough. But here, and most places now, he had already long past been abandoned or been kicked out by the Company. Unable to use the micro-tears created by the portals that allowed Moss a way to come through. Burdened by the bat-like hardening of features that the Company had imposed on him. That never truly fit. That proclaimed mask or helmet or cage. And how he breathed uneven through it, rasping, and how the mice living in his throat bulged there, clung to soft tissue with their sanitized toes. How long it had taken Charlie X not to claw at his throat, for all that lived inside it? Knew, somewhere deep inside, that he always went mad, went bad, could not be trusted, lived in a place where the landscape had been stripped bare.
Yet still, sometimes, in some scenarios, Chen would pause in the shadow of some version of a ruined building as some version of Charlie X stumbled by. As some version of Charlie X cowered in an empty cistern. Or lay quiet under a trapdoor to catch his prey. Or sat in the dust and wept in a self-pity that Moss found intolerable.
“Should we end him?”
A pause.
“No.” This from Grayson. Always.
It would be for themselves, not for him. He could do no harm now that he had not already achieved. In the grand scheme, to the three he had truly become a ghost. What could they say but words over his grave as he walked away from them, mumbling to himself.
Besides, Grayson argued, there was the risk: They did not know what Charlie X’s death might mean to the duck.
Dark bird. Dark secret. They knew not what it hid, what was artifice and what was content. Peel away that layer, find a deeper monster still.
What did Charlie X scrawl in the sand with a stick? A design, a half-remembered purpose that they recognized because it was still, in part, their own. And, looking back when well south of him, through the binoculars, the wistful way the duck with the broken wing had halted in shadowing the three.
Out there on the broken plain, they could not encounter one another. Either the Company or Charlie X, in his last days before being cast out, had intervened, that neither should hurt the other nor acknowledge the other. Nor see the other. And if it should look like their paths might intersect, one or the other would step to the side and not know why, but continue on then, fellow ghosts ghosting straight through to the other side.
A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?
For each circling lunge, the duck had an answer and soon enough Charlie X had whipped up a cloud of dust in his exertions and his foul cursing, and when the dust settled, the duck had disappeared once more.
Escaped to shadow the three, made up ground in an uncanny way, as if when they looked back to chart its progress, the duck occurred in the City via time-lapse photography, so that it always resided several yards in advance of where it should have been.
Moss was a heretic. Moss sometimes thought that Charlie X had, in a way, brought them together. That somehow, with the duck as the fulcrum, Charlie X had unwittingly orchestrated their resistance prior to crumbling before the onslaught of his own trauma.
Yet perhaps Moss had the right to think this way. For Charlie X had created her.
x.
a shadow
of a vastness
That night, while Grayson slept and Chen recovered, Moss dimmed her thoughts from them, crept through their defenses, snuck out of the Balcony Cliffs. Chen and Grayson never really slept. Perhaps because they were too connected or just couldn’t pretend anymore. But she hoped they slept in some sense, that what she did now was muted to them.
Chen had kept arguing that he should be the one for this mission, that he could convince the fish to help them. But Moss had decided she couldn’t let him. Wasn’t as suited for it, taxed and tested by the other Chen, and having only his blunt, Company ways to complete the mission; just wanted to spare her being hurt.
Still, Grayson would never understand. Not the risk. Not the trade Moss might have to make. The decision she had come to.
So she followed the ravine, the trace of water down the center. In a trance. In a kind of ebb and flow as she abandoned human form. A carpet of moss roiling across the dirt, sand, and rocks. A screed that rewrote whatever it encountered, so the dirt had new properties and the sand burgeoned with new life and the rocks began processes that might not germinate for centuries.
An onslaught, a hidden invasion. Runneling like an unseen, weightless, slow-motion avalanche, her advance guard become her rearguard. Spreading out to the sides and then in again. Folding over and over.
Lingering in the roots of shattered trees and the neural networks of fungi. All of it battered, not at capacity but alive still. A shadow of a vastness. And she existed there, splayed out across those axes in a special kind of ecstasy. Remembered the other ways. Thought, perhaps, to close down human-type thoughts, to stay. To exist just in that moment and the next. To not go back or go forward.
Exhausting. It exhausted to be so close to Grayson, to Chen. Ecstatic. Amazing, that intimacy. To lie down upon a bed with two others enfolded there, not cheek to cheek but the same cheek as one. Yes, ecstatic, but exhausting, exhausting, exhausting. Never alone, and Moss herself so many Mosses and thus never alone in herself either.
Moss kept the human form for certain advantages, to live with Grayson and Chen. Because it helped Chen hold his body together. She did it for other people.
Become nothing or everything. Nothing that could be other than nothing. Nothing that could feel what Moss had felt at the hands of Charlie X.
To be something again in the end—something that would mean everything to Grayson. That was the price, the price, the price. And at the very end, to come back into the consciousness that human recognized as human, that she might parlay with the fish on their behalf.
At the bottom of the ravine, the blue fox waited, as she had known he would. And by that sign Moss knew she hadn’t slipped into another place, another time. For this would never happen again and had never happened before.
“Are you ready?” the blue fox asked.
“Yes,” she said.
No, she wasn’t ready, she’d never be ready. Ready would be too late.
Or so the fox had convinced her.
xi.
such savage mockery
of the tidal pools
In some Cities, the leviathan of the holding ponds had suffered at the Company’s hands. Open sores. Burns. In those places, Moss would sing to the leviathan to soothe it and dull its pain receptors and show it images of a limitless and fecund sea. Once, all she could do was ease the creature toward a merciful death.
Do you see me? Here I am.
Casting out a line before ever she saw the beast.
Here, the leviathan had been smarter, luckier, more dangerous, adapted, been deemed useless by the Company. In truth the leviathan, pure, was natural to this place. Had not been created but had lived here all its preternaturally long life.
I am not a threat. Not a threat. Not a threat.
In this version of the City, the leviathan was almost one hundred years old. Called it Botch, after a long-dead painter. But it wasn’t Botched. That was just a personal lexicon, the dark humor of reluctant soldiers. In which they sometimes called the blue fox Flue or Flu or even Flow. As a contagion that spread among the foxes and perhaps others.
I am here to parlay. This is parlay. I will send you what parlay means.
Botch, Fish, Leviathan had one massive dead white eye that was always weeping salt. “Grayson’s fish,” Chen joked, gently.
Ancient and weathered and huge, and even then the veteran of a hundred battles. Had devoured so many Company rejects and regrets, even though itself rejected.
Your enemies are our enemies.
A lyrical music that came out of its ugly grouper-esque mouth. That at a low lull could mesmerize prey out across the water to drown in its maw. That, brought from beautiful to a sawlike piercing, could stun at close range. A defiantly ugly fish wandering between the size of rhinoceros and whale.
A ripe stench that would’ve wrinkled Grayson’s nostrils, sent a wince across her face. As if Botch brought with it an olfactory record of every chemical, kind of offal, algae, muck it had passed through.
Botch had formidable defenses. Gills that pivoted outward sudden into blades. Razor scales that could angle at signs of danger and gouge at the touch. The mighty jaws lined with diseased and glistening yellow teeth that spread illness as well as lacerations. Strong wide fins meant for both walking and swimming. If it ever made it to an ocean, the leviathan would grow and grow and become a despotic lord among fish. Freshwater or salt? It had a map in its head that yearned for any kind of water.
Things I can give you in exchange …
Botch, wallowing in the sucking mud of a bog-like pond tempered by patches of yellowing grasses. Such a savage mockery of her tidal pools. The dash-dots of flies skimming over meant as cameras once but now click-clicked more out of ritual than purpose.
Botch wallowing and Moss letting herself go wide and shallow to cover the mud pond in a sheen of tiny green-and-white flowers lashed together like chain mail, from which something vaguely like a face held court and hailed Botch as friend.
In the moonlight and the shadow, which neither registered, given excellent night vision.
Botch caught in some dreaming pattern as it gulped down a cache of screaming alcohol minnows.
A kind of response, interpreted in the flush of first contact as: <
>
The coordinates of control for a dreadnought like Botch were so different than for Moss. They spoke not in fish nor in the language of moss. Because they were neither fish nor moss. Not in person-speech. Because they were not human.
But not in something newly made or ordered. Not machine language or codes or mazes. It had to be translated on either side, strained through layers, halting, pushing forward. Sometimes what translated into supposed words was emotion or reaction. Approximates that had to be trusted in the moment, before these approximates became slippery and escaped into the mire. Because the translation was a kind of virus, and Moss trusted she was infecting the fish and not the fish Moss.
<> Botch didn’t say, would never say, and yet, in some sense, did say … but remained there in front of her. The stillness of Botch, staring out across the floating field of Moss-blossoms was her clue that he wanted to eat her. If only he could find a heart to rip out and devour among all those flowers.
This beast that could carry her, some part of her, some version. Could find a way or buy them more time, or times, of a sort. Not the mission as agreed to by Grayson or Chen. But what she had worked through with the fox. A way that appealed to the plant cells in her, the moss and the lichen. If nothing else.
She told Botch that she truly saw him. That she could trace Botch back through the outline of his scars. For there was not a part of Botch’s body that did not have scars and so he was now white as snow, white as preternatural, white as something that did not belong in the City. White had not the strength of stone nor the armor of death, of fossil. But was only weakness revealed, the language of the future.
Unwound each scar from Botch’s body, each as it had happened, and she told Botch, who had forgotten, what each scar meant, and how it had happened and why and what else had been in the world around Botch at the time. Each scar removed in this way that told the story of Botch’s long life, and with each story Botch gained with the loss, and at the end, bereft of scars and thus of wounds, stood before Moss shining with an original truth.
For an instant, Botch was new again and the eye was bright but the murder had left it.
I need something from you. Something important.
It was not a thing she could force, but Moss tired of force and felt diminished by force and wanted as little of that poison in her as she could manage.
Part of me will protect a part of you. I will protect you forever and a day as I am able. I will be a type of armor.
For no one had ever gleaned that such a monster might feel the need for protection. Somewhere deep down in the depths of it, in the sunless ocean within.
<>
But it wasn’t said. It wasn’t bellowed or sung. Yet Moss knew.
This is me.
This is me.
You are me.
Who are me? But she knew who are me. She knew. Down in the burning shed of her soul.
And let Botch in, even as Botch exploded through the mud, dove deep into the dark water, Moss leaping upon his back, dragged under, pulled below, breathing, not breathing, torn asunder, clinging in all the ways moss could cling, to the back of the beast that meant to kill her.
xii.
to be both receiver
and received
Moss against Moss, when it happened, rare, was like intricate garden combat. Between plants. Between obstinate weeds. Pugnacious. Sped up, slowed down. First one in retreat across a dusty yard full of skeletons and then the other. Add a third, a fourth Moss, drawn to the same reality, and there was in the confluence, the flux of outspread filaments and curling grasp nothing but the bliss of tiny flowers and exploding spores.
Until, finally, there was no difference between attacker and attacked, and no shame in cease-fire, because Moss could not tell herself from her self. From that place of comfort, the comfort of being greater than before, Moss could rise again in human form. One Moss. Ever divisible. Under no god. Under no rules of ungoverned, forgotten countries.
Many times—not this time, when Moss had stolen out to parlay with a fish—the mission meant Moss consolidated would stand leaking green mist out of the helmet of her contamination suit, as the three lurked in the shelter of the ravine. Leaking in loops and spirals that settled thick to the ground, began to form a hazy emerald specter that resembled Moss. When Moss closed her suit, it was done. There, before them, would stand what appeared to be another Moss, fuzzy at the edges, but the same warm smile. The same inquisitive look.
A gaze that transmitted light from one semblance of an eye to another. All of Moss was eyes. None of Moss was eyes.
Moss would talk to her doppelgänger and her doppelgänger would set off on the mission, accompanied by Chen, who could navigate the wasteland to the holding ponds and who turned on camouflage so, in his suit, he could not be seen except by arcane means. While Moss’s doppelgänger, this pointillist portrait of her, disassembled and reassembled by Chen’s side, in a shimmer of molecules that leapt out across the sky, circled back, formed a film creeping fast forward across the ground. Chen would wait at the holding ponds, while the wraith of Moss-like would spiral past and visible-invisible to the Company sensors, penetrate the Company building and complete Moss’s mission for her.
Or that had been the plan. In the past.
It wasn’t safe for Moss to get closer, for Moss was the way out. Without Moss, they’d never make it to another City if they failed.
Moss did not just tend tidal pools. Often, before Grayson, Moss sent ripples across those still surfaces. About the creatures who lived there and what their lives were like. She looked up from the pools, become what lived there, staring as the giant looming down to peer in, to be both receiver and received. In an endless amplified loop. Slipped across realities. Very tactical, as Grayson had said, and yet infinite. Each time it changed them, just a little. But Moss couldn’t remember what they might have been before, at the start. None of them could.
Moss couldn’t extend the field. But, at a price, she could become a door—they walked through her and she followed, and wasn’t that the definition of sacrifice?
As much as clinging in a film of green to the back of Botch as he dove so far and so deep, and twisted and bucked to dislodge what could not be dislodged, for Moss’s grip extended beneath Botch’s scarred skin, hooks in deep. Even as bits of her tore away from the violence of Botch’s panicked tunneling into the depths. Into the darkness.
But she could see what lay there. The skeletons in a familiar tableau. The memories she should not have. Made manifest by the nature of the mission, the nature of her body.
Hush now, hush now.
Soon you will be free. I will make you free.
But could Moss make her free? Could she free them both?
No, but I can …
This was the part where things began to fall apart, because they were meant to fall apart, because they were meant to fall apart because they meant to fall apart. The ways they’d been cut off. How Moss had not yet shared that she could reach one more City, and maybe one more after that, if lucky. But the respite the three had always had before, retreat to the tidal pools of the coast for a time … that was closed to them now.
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