21st Century Science Fiction (75 page)

“
Damn
you’re good,” I say. “I didn’t even see that one coming.”

“Please, don’t leave. Let’s—”

“Don’t worry, I’m not leaving yet.” I’m at the door, pulling my backpack from the peg by the door. I dig into the pocket, and pull out the brochure. “You know about this?”

Alice speaks for the first time. “Oh honey, no . . .”

Dr. Mehldau takes it from me, frowning. On the front is a nicely posed picture of a smiling teenage boy hugging relieved parents. She looks at Alice and Mitch. “Are you considering this?”

“It’s their big stick, Dr. Mehldau. If you can’t come through for them, or I bail out,
boom.
You know what goes on there?”

She opens the pages, looking at pictures of the cabins, the obstacle course, the big lodge where kids just like me engage in “intense group sessions with trained counselors” where they can “recover their true identities.” She shakes her head. “Their approach is different than mine . . .”

“I don’t know, doc. Their
approach
sounds an awful lot like ‘reclaiming.’ I got to hand it to you, you had me going for awhile. Those visualization exercises? I was getting so good that I could even visualize stuff that never happened. I bet you could visualize me right into Therese’s head.”

I turn to Alice and Mitch. “You’ve got a decision to make. Dr. Mehldau’s program is a bust. So are you sending me off to brainwashing camp or not?”

Mitch has his arm around his wife. Alice, amazingly, is dry-eyed. Her eyes are wide, and she’s staring at me like a stranger.

• • • •

It rains the entire trip back from Baltimore, and it’s still raining when we pull up to the house. Alice and I run to the porch step, illuminated by the glare of headlights. Mitch waits until Alice unlocks the door and we move inside, and then pulls away.

“Does he do that a lot?” I ask.

“He likes to drive when he’s upset.”

“Oh.” Alice goes through the house, turning on lights. I follow her into the kitchen.

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right.” She opens the refrigerator door and crouches down. “He just doesn’t know what to do with you.”

“He wants to put me in the camp, then.”

“Oh, not that. He just never had a daughter who talked back to him before.” She carries a Tupperware cake holder to the table. “I made carrot cake. Can you get down the plates?”

She’s such a small woman. Face to face, she comes up only to my chin. The hair on the top of her head is thin, made thinner by the rain, and her scalp is pink.

“I’m not Therese. I never will be Therese.”

“Oh, I know,” she says, half sighing. And she does know it; I can see it in her face. “It’s just that you look so much like her.”

I laugh. “I can dye my hair. Maybe get a nose job.”

“It wouldn’t work, I’d still recognize you.” She pops the lid and sets it aside. The cake is a wheel with icing that looks half an inch thick. Miniature candy carrots line the edge.

“Wow, you made that before we left? Why?”

Alice shrugs, and cuts into it. She turns the knife on its side and uses the blade to lever a huge triangular wedge onto my plate. “I thought we might need it, one way or another.”

She places the plate in front of me, and touches me lightly on the arm. “I know you want to move out. I know you may never want to come back.”

“It’s not that I—”

“We’re not going to stop you. But wherever you go, you’ll still be my daughter, whether you like it or not. You don’t get to decide who loves you.”

A
LAYA
D
AWN
J
OHNSON
Born in Washington, D.C., Alaya Dawn Johnson lives in New York City, where she studied East Asian languages and cultures at Columbia University, and where she has worked as a journalist and in the book publishing industry. She has traveled extensively in Japan. Her short fiction began appearing in 2005. Her latest book, a YA novel, is
The Summer Prince
(2013).

“Third Day Lights” starts as fantasy and becomes SF in the manner of “planetary romance,” the Leigh Brackett and Michael Moorcock tradition. In a very far future, humanity is destroying universes to drain as power sources for a huge posthuman project.

T
he mist was thick as clotted cream, shot through with light from the luminous maggots in the sand. And through that mist, which I knew would entrap almost any creature unlucky enough to wander through it, came my first supplicant in over thirty cycles. He rode atop one of the butterfly men’s great black deer, which greeted me with a sweep of its massive antlers. His skin was as pale as the sand was black; his eyes were the clear, hard color of chipped jade. A fine, pale fuzz covered his scalp, like the babies of humans. He had full, hard lips and high cheekbones. His nose had been broken several times, and was quite large regardless. His ears protruded slightly from his head.

He was too beautiful. I did not believe it. Oh, I had, in my travels, seen men far more attractive than he. Men who had eagerly accepted me in whatever form I chose, and had momentarily pleased me. But I had never seen this kind of beauty, that of the hard edges and chipped flakes of jade. That aura of bitterly mastered power, and unspeakable grief subdued but somehow not overcome. He gave the impression that he was a man to respect, a man who would understand my own loneliness despite my family, a man who might, perhaps, after so many cycles . . .

But I have not lived for so long away from my Trunk by believing in such things.

Eyes never leaving mine, he touched the neck of the deer and it knelt for him to dismount. His bare feet should have frozen solid seconds after they touched the sand, and the maggots begun devouring the icy flesh, but instead he stood before my staircase, perfectly at ease. From within the hostile mist, lacy hands and mouths struggled towards him but never quite touched.

That is how I knew he wasn’t human.

I anticipated with relish the moment when he would speak and allow me to drop him on the other side of the desert. But he stared at me and I glowered back and then I understood: he knew what I was. He knew
who
I was. At the time, I thought this meant that he was incalculably old. Now, I am not so sure.

“Why do you stand before my gate? Tell me your purpose.”

He stayed silent, of course. His impassive expression never wavered, and yet—perhaps from his slightly quivering shoulders or faintly irregular breathing—I had the impression that he was laughing at me.

It had been a long time since I had been the subject of even implied ridicule. Not many willingly mock a demon of the scorched desert. I had chosen one of my more forbidding guises before I opened the door. My skin was black as the sand, my naked body sexually ambiguous and covered with thousands of tiny horns that swiveled in whatever direction I looked. The horns had been one of Charm’s ideas—the kind he gets when he’s drunk on saltwater. At his request, I wore them on this occasion—the one day each cycle when I accept supplicants. I had thought that my appearance be appropriately awe-inspiring, and yet from the look in the not-quite-a-man’s eyes, I realized that he had not been inspired to awe. I growled to cover my uneasiness—
what creature is this?

I stormed back inside the house, sulfur gas streaming from between the growing cracks in my skin. The mist groaned when it touched me and then receded. I didn’t need to look back at the man to know that he hadn’t moved. Inside, door shut, I changed my appearance again. I became monstrous, a blue leviathan of four heads and sixteen impossible arms. I shook my wrists in succession, so the bracelets made of human teeth clacked and cascaded in a sinister echo off the walls of my castle.

Yes,
I thought, faces snarling,
this should do.

I stepped forward to open the door again and saw Mahi’s face on the floor beneath me, grinning in two-dimensional languor.

“You look nice,” he said. “Some upstart at the door? Drop him in the maw, Naeve. I’m sure it’s been some time since she’s had a nice meal.”

The maw is Mahi’s mother, but she rejected him because he can only move in two dimensions. She considered him defective, but I have found his defect to be occasionally very useful. He vents his anger by suggesting I toss every supplicant across the scorched desert into her mouth. I did once, nearly three hundred cycles ago, just for his benefit, but we could all hear the sound of her chewing and mating and screaming in some kind of inscrutable ecstasy for days.

Two of my faces snarled down at him, one looked away and the fourth just sighed and said, “Perhaps.” The maw is all the way on the Eastern border of the desert, but that day her screams pierced as though she were gifting it to our ears—some property of the sand, I suppose. Charm, Top and I nearly went crazy, but Mahi seemed to enjoy it. My family is closer to me than the Trunk ever was, but I know no more about their previous lives than what they choose to tell me. I often wonder what Mahi’s life was like inside the maw.

He faded into the floor, off in some two-dimensional direction I couldn’t see. I stepped back outside.

The man was still there, absolutely motionless despite the veritable riot of mist-shapes that struggled to entangle him. My uneasiness returned:
what is he?
When he saw me, his eyes widened. No other muscles moved, and yet I knew. Oh, for that economy of expression. Even my malleable body could not convey with a hundred gestures the amusement and understanding and wary appreciation he expressed with a simple contraction of eye muscles. I did not scare him.

“Who are you?” I used my smallest head and turned the others away—the view of him through four sets of eyes was oddly intense, disconcerting. He didn’t answer. “
What
are you?”

I turned my head to the deer who was kneeling peacefully at his side. “Why did you bring him, honored one?” I said in the language of the butterfly men.

The deer looked up, purple eyes lovely enough to break a lesser creature’s heart. Before I saw this man, I would have said that only demons and butterfly men could look in the eyes of a deer and keep their sanity.

“Because he asked me,” the deer said—gracefully, simply, infuriatingly.

I went back inside. Because I only had one more chance to get rid of him, I stalked the hallways, screaming and summoning things to toss at the walls. Top absorbed them with her usual equanimity and then turned the walls a shimmering orange—my favorite color. Charm screamed from somewhere near the roof that he was attempting to rest, and could I please keep my temper tantrum to myself? I frowned and finished changing—it was a relief to have one set of eyes again. Some demons enjoy multiplicity, but I’ve always found it exhausting. Top turned that part of the wall into a mirror, so I could see my handiwork.

“It’s very beautiful,” she said. A hand emerged from the wall and handed me a long piece of embroidered cloth. I wrapped it around my waist, made my aureoles slightly larger and walked to the door.

The corners of his mouth actually quirked up when he saw me this time, and the understanding in his eyes made me ache. I did not believe it, and yet I did. I walked closer to him, doggedly swaying my mahogany hips, raising my arms and shaking my wrists, which were still encircled with bracelets of human teeth. This close I could see that his skin was unnaturally smooth—the only physical indication that he was something other than human.

“Come,” I said, my voice pitched low—breathy and seductive in a human sort of way. “Just tell me your name, traveler, and I’ll let you inside.”

I leaned in closer to him, so our noses nearly touched. “Come,” I whispered, “tell me.”

His lips quirked again. Bile of frustration and rage choked my all-too-human throat and I began to lose my grip on my body. I could feel it returning to my mundane form, and after a moment I stopped trying to resist. My skin shifted from glowing mahogany to a prosaic cobalt blue. My hair turned wild and red; my second arms grew rapidly beneath the first and my aureoles contracted.

My skin tingled with frustration and not a little fear—I didn’t
need
anyone else in my family—but I refused to show it as I took a passing glance in his eyes. No triumph there, not even relief.

I walked up the stairs, but I didn’t hear his footsteps following.

“Well,” I said, gesturing with my left hands, “are you coming?”

The man took a step forward, and then another—he moved as though he were exhausted, or the cold of the maggots and mist had subtly affected him after all.

“Go home,” he said to the deer, who had risen beside him. “One way or another, I will not need your help when I leave this place.”

His voice made me want to weep tears so large Charm would dance beneath me, singing as though nectar were falling from the sky. It was uncompromisingly strong, yet tender all the same, as though he had seen too much not to grant anyone the tenderness he had been denied.

Do not believe it,
I told myself, but I was already losing the battle.

“Are you coming?” I repeated, forced by unexpected emotion into a parody of callous disdain.

“Yes,” he said quietly. I do not think I could have stood it if all that unexpected tenderness were suddenly directed at me, but he seemed distracted, watching the mist long after the deer had disappeared.

“What is your name?” I asked, just before I opened the door again. An unlikely gambit, of course, but I had to try.

Amusement suddenly retuned to his eyes. “I’m called Israphel,” he said.

• • • •

Mahi had positioned himself in front of the door in his best impression of three-dimensionality. It nearly worked, if you didn’t look at him too critically, or move. He grew indistinct when viewed from oblique angles, until he disappeared altogether. His appearance was, in some ways, even more malleable than my own. For this occasion he had fashioned himself to look like one of the wildly costumed humans we sometimes saw in our travels: decked entirely in iridescent feathers of saffron and canary yellow, strewn together with beads that glinted in an imagined sunlight.