Broken: A Plague Journal (18 page)

Some months, some times.

Jud tapped her fingers on the table.

“He’s the only god here, you know.”

“Well, fuck me in the ass, Frenchie.”

Jean Reynald shrugged his shoulders. “It’s true. You’re a name. A placeholder. You’re the focus of his divinity. Without him—”

“Without him, none of you’d be here today.”

West grumbled. “Stop this shit.”

Sapphire and Jade Jennings West sat on either side of their “father.” Like almost all of the others, they’d been retrieved from the enemy line just before the hells Paul had written. They both made to speak at once, both looked at West, both let mouths close and fingers interlace.

West, the twins. Jud and Reynald. Honeybear and Banana Tits. Arik Mandela, a circle of a dozen others, each noting the echo of staccato fingertaps across the chamber as Jud thought.

“He’s falling apart.”

“He knows we’re here right now.”

“Don’t be too sure of that. He never saw the Delta crossover coming. It was—”

“If he’d looked hard enough, he’d have seen it.”

“Stop.” West rose, paced. A thought and the A/O line appeared at the center of the table. “Only thing that matters is that it happened, we’re trying to fix it, and the focal point of our existences is losing his fucking mind. We can’t get a solid lock on Delta within fifteen points. We can’t—”

“You sure that’s not just the loss of your maths girl?” Reynald considered, turned to Alina. “No offense intended, dear.”

“None taken. I suck at ‘maths.’”

“How many times do we have to do this? Without even knowing how or why? He hasn’t told us nearly enough for us to succeed once he—”

“Once he loses it completely,” Jud sunk farther into her seat, “We’re dead. You know that. Simple as that. Once he forgets us, we’re gone.”

“Then what’s the point of this?” Alina looked up from troubled brows.

“Killing time.” Reynald cleared his throat. “We’re just killing time.”

“Lights.”

West’s whisper echoed out across the liquid expanse, his bootsteps following not far behind. The chamber door snicked shut behind him, adding to the building bounce of sound. He tried to walk quietly, but doubted it really mattered.

He sat down on the pool’s elevated lip, triple-checking his seals before making any contact. His atmosphere chilled; he could see his breath attempting to fog his lookers.

They’d started harvesting as much silver as they could filter from the combat zones. Paul hadn’t been taking many trips out of Judith ME. A lot of people had died to bring him his silver in drips and dots at a time. He thought there was an answer in the machine ocean; West thought it was a pointless indulgence.

Paul’s nose was the only thing breaking the surface of the pool. He didn’t appear to be breathing, but upon closer inspection, West saw the faint ripples of exhalations. More and more often, he’d find the young man here in the silver pool, his patented hawking Hughes Nose the only indication that he was there.

West knew Paul knew he was there. He needed no words; the tug and release was enough.

Paul lifted himself to a sitting position, swung forward to a crouch, the silver sliming from his nude form. When he stood, the fluid pool solidified under his feet, a mirror field. Trailing rivulets of the invasive metal dripped down from Paul’s ears, nose, eyes.

He always scared West after his swims.

“How’s the meeting?” His eyes were silver, were motion, were mud hazel. The last of the silver evaporated (absorbed) from (into) the tangles of his chest hair, pubic hair.

West shrugged, popped his seals and removed his helmet after the silver was gone. “Not a lot of faith.”

“Fuck faith.” Clothes over flesh. “Give me time.”

“That’s the thing, boy. We don’t have time.”

“We—”

“You’ve been in here more and more often. People are starting to talk. They think that shit’s getting into your head. They think—”

“It’s already in my head. Where do they think it came from in the first—”

“We’re ready to strike. With Reynald in now, good leads on Zero-Four and the Windhams—”

“That’s the wrong way to approach this.”

“That’s the only way we
can
approach this.”

“I just need more time.”

“I know.” A tender, fatherly gesture: a reassuring grip of Paul’s shoulder. “But—”

“Tell them I’ll be out soon. Rest up.”

“Yes, sir.”

Paul grinned. “Don’t call me that, old man.”

Alina shifted in the sling from right to left, from sleep to wake. Sandwiching her, the West twins inhaled in unison, a slow, tentative feeler into consciousness quickly overruled by collapse back into dream.

She didn’t know why the girls were so drawn to her.

Their extraction had been unpleasant. The Mara had been deep within a fleet of shredded and disabled Judas vessels, a horde of Enemy projections flashing in and out and through them. Jade had been a simple grab from the exterior; Phire had had to be pried from the can with Arik Mandela’s deft touch.

Paul hadn’t helped on that run. He was taking a silver bath again.

Alina wondered if he

and stopped.

She guessed they liked her because she was the only really approachable human female operating in the inner circle of Judith ME. Jud certainly wasn’t nice to kids, and that’s what they were, a decade younger than her twenty-five standards, a year younger than their respective enemy line deaths, Jade uploaded into Program Seven, Phire taking her own life just before the first Jag war. They couldn’t have known, so she never told them.

They were both so skinny. Pale. Children of the space between stars and times.

Alina was losing her Ft. Myers sunwindburn.

Each night, they’d cuddle with her in Sam’s command chamber, away from the cold halls of the ME, the sterile rooms and flayed god, the birthing fields, the libraries upon libraries of catalogued nevers.

They’d never known West. Although he tried at first to communicate with them, he was nothing more than an alternate to the father they’d left behind with their silver mother in a swarmed When. He eventually gave up; he’d never known their West, their Patra. His yesterdays were Abigail and the farm and the war, a different war, silver skies and children.

They inhaled as one, exhaled as one. Al had never before seen a twin bond so tangible, such a blessing. Such a curse? She could tell them of histories of loss, of ruin.

It was better that she just hold them both in the sleeping egg until morning came, bringing with it new insertions, new faces.

They were safer in her warmth, in what little comfort and solace she could provide, knowing what they’d been extracted to do, knowing what tomorrows would bring to shatter that gentle breath of dream.

Alina fell back into sleep.

If the Self is defined in its interactions and oppositions to and through external stimuli, and those stimuli are grouped in contextual accordance to the shifting nature of existence, we can define the Self as the opposition to environmental stasis.

How can we delineate and nominate that particular stasis? What collection of sensations and memory compose a being? How do we define Home? Is it the place where one exhales and doesn’t fear for the next breath? Is it indeed easier when nowhere and no one feels like home? Is home a place, a collection of interactions, a veil of memory constructed solely within?

To Maire, the concepts of home and pain were one. When something such as the concept of home, something so traditionally regarded with quiet desire, respect, even reverence becomes intrinsically linked with a deep, inherent negativity, things happen. As we now know, things happened to Maire.

It wasn’t that her planet was a bad home, but in the vast scheme of intergalactic destiny and solar-systemic politics, bad things happened there.

Sometimes a species outgrows its collection of rocks.

Would she have defined home as I did, as a loose collection of images and sensations, centered on those who inhabited that same space? In the sterile cool of the ME, I tried not to think about home. Tried. Hard. Didn’t work.

Home was unappreciated farmers, those sixty- and seventy-year olds still working eighteen-hour days, permanent sun across noses and cheeks, burst vessels beneath the skin, white whiskers poking through until the weekly shave before going into town: a new fencer, ten rolls of sisal twine, doses of Today and Tomorrow, defined not as divisors of time, but by the product names of dry cow and fresh cow treatments, slow visits by neighbors, sharing forecasts and anecdotes, busting through frozen bolts, tearing flesh on rust, the scent of sweat and hay and milk spoiling from where it spilled on ancient jeans ten hours before, then exposed those ten hours to sunlight, to humidity, to manual labor. Grease guns and kittens, hay hooks and goldenrod and vetch.

Home was the desolation of a post-industrial world, abandoned paper mills, a population displaced from suburban hold by the necessity of the commute in too-big pickup trucks, status-symbol sports utility vehicles, the embarrassment of the family mini-van, the occasional Freudian commentary that was the convertible, men who’d drive to service jobs, mill work in other towns, re-education as a mid-life crisis when plants closed, environmental regulations tightened, their wives taking jobs, nurses and day care providers, pathetic local politics of heightened local importance.

Home was hick bars and dirt tracks, girls knocked up before high school graduation, sexual assaults in the nearby barracks, Canadian dance clubs, the polarization and fragmentation that the adolescent clique system embedded: some spoke with accents, some struggled to excel in sports, some wore only black, fancied themselves gangs, just white kids with access to drugs and knives. Four had stabbed a middle-school friend half a hundred times; I’d sat at the other end of their lunch table: the outcasts, and later, some would embrace the mythos of bisexuality, homosexuality, painted nails and dabbling in their own sex, as if it were the popular thing to do, anything to distance themselves from tradition: jocks and cheerleaders, band geeks, farmer’s kids, racecar drivers and those who chewed tobacco in the parking lot, spitting brown into the previous weekend’s collection of floormat beer cans, the cheapest yellow shit marketed widely, and there were the sneakers, by brand they judged worth. I wore Voits.

Home was bonfires in the woods, cool kids fucking in Daddy’s sedan; they never escaped those early designations, and as such became a part of home: unchanging, stagnant, dead already, those who never wished to escape, those who never tried.

Maire’s home? Interwoven with that particular brand of revision that torture induces in the tortured, it came to me in razor-edged shards, horrible images, many without a suitable vocabulary with which to describe them.

Maire’s home? Just a rock, far out from One, far enough so that the first machine wars had barely scratched its surface, but close enough to experience the desolation of the century-long Silence during which the victors re-engineered the inner worlds to suit their desires, abandoning the outer worlds to their own devices: the horrors of famine, drought, pollution, a cultural and political isolation so devastating that planets burned out there, their own squabbles raging into limited conquests, subjugated populations put to the sword, the light, the dinner table. Taboo became norm in that vast starvation, that vast cesspool of decaying genes, mutation and stench, moons spun out of orbit in desperate gambits to win wars the underlying flashpoints of which no one any longer remembered.