Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (34 page)

“What if every goodbye is really the last one we get?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You talk about fragmentation. Every time you stuff a new gadget into your brain, you fragment away from the human race, right?”

Lisa shrugs. “Sure.”

“I don’t think you need a gadget. Every time you leave the room, you come back a different person. Ten times a day you fragment away from me. A hundred times. Every time you walk out the door, I’ll never see you again.”

A thousand times I should have said goodbye to you. A thousand times, as I lost the woman that I loved.

“That’s great, Rico.” Lisa chuckles. “We’re human fractals, huh?”

“Yes.”

Loosely coupled fractals — that’s what we are. We split and divide, hoping that the near-random walk of our fragmentation will bring us close enough to interact. To procreate. To love.

Once Mom is conscious and ready for upload, I ask Lisa to leave me with her.

“I’ll see you at home,” she tells me.

I’m not sure she will.

Mom lies entangled in wires and IV lines. She was never a small woman, but the operating table dwarfs her. She looks out of place and powerless and scared.

But a faint smile curves her lips as I approach. “Today’s the day, huh?”

I sit down by her side and take her hand and tell her the truth. “I’m not ready to let you go.”

“I know.”

“See what I built for you, Mom.” I press a few buttons, and the circular walls of the OR light up.

A house with an elegant colonnade, its doors a rich green. An indoor patio lit by a soaring skylight, with dark wooden rocking chairs and a blinding white canvas stretched on an easel. A bedroom with tall windows that look out on the sea — they hold no glass, only wooden shutters to close against the evening chill.

Wonder touches Mom’s eyes. “It’s beautiful, Rico. Just as I remember it.”

I get to my feet, my heart pumping fast. “You want to go there, Mama?”

“This house belongs to the girl I was.” Mom sighs. “That girl is gone.”

“But Mom, you love this house—”

“Don’t you give me black soles!”

My hands drop to my sides. “I’ll do whatever you decide, Mom. I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy. A little bit afraid, but happy. I’ve got no more goodbyes to say but one.” Mom smiles. “You can keep me in that house if you like. It won’t be me, not really — but you know that, don’t you?”

“I need you.” I blurt out the words before I can stop myself. Then I stand there, my face flushed, as vulnerable as I have ever been.

“Where’s my sketchbook?” Mom asks.

“It’s outside. It’s not sterile.”

“What does that matter?”

So I bring it in. Mom gestures for me to open it. With trembling fingers, I flip the cover.

I stare for long moments at the drawing that faces me. Then I turn the page. And another.

I leaf through the sketchbook in a confused daze.
This
is what Mom’s been working on?

“I draw what I see,” she says.

What she saw was a hundred figures. A hundred middle-aged men. In t-shirts and business suits and bathrobes and beach shorts. Some tired, some eager, some angry, some sad.

All of them me.

I recognize none of them.

That’s fragmentation too. It’s not just the people around you who change.

I’m not the boy who loves Mom’s rice and beans.

I’m not the guy who loves Lisa.

I’m the man who can’t let go.

“I loved every one of you,” Mom says to me.

I cling to those words like a lifeline. Here’s one constant throughout all my splintering changes. It’s not fair that I must give that up.

“I said goodbye to every one of you,” Mom says to me.

I stare at her for moments. I stare at her for a long time, even as her breathing grows labored and her heartbeat uneven.

The decision races at me full speed.

Can I give her up?

Can I keep her bound? Constant, unchanging from year to year in her virtual prison, while I fragment and break and splinter away?

Will she love me if I do?

Will I love her?

Or will I let dust gather on the screen of her viewport?

I only know this:

In a while, Mom will take her final breath.

In a while, I’ll make a decision.

And then, whatever that decision, I’ll say goodbye to her for the last time.

About the Author

Tom Crosshill’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award, and has appeared in venues such as
Intergalactic Medicine Show, Beneath Ceaseless Skies
and
Lightspeed.
In 2009, he won the Writers of the Future contest. After many years spent in Oregon and New York, he currently lives in his native Latvia. He’s a satellite member of the writers’ group Altered Fluid. In the past, he has operated a nuclear reactor, translated books and worked in a zinc mine, among other things.

Draftyhouse

Erik Amundsen

Shenroos is a lucky man. He can relax at a fireplace in green velvet on the moon. He is lucky because he has solitude. Eight days, he has been the sole inhabitant of Draftyhouse. Just him, the Bridgeway, a well-stocked cabinet of floral liquors in every shade between green and purple and all the matching flavors of intoxication and a hundred million places where the air is leaking from the great stone mansion into the void. The man in the moon is having a private party, celebrating his eviction, six days overdue but not yet enforced by the Colonial Army. There is a three-hundred-year-old ghostwood coffee table in front of him, his marching orders open on it, a coaster for his collection of glasses and empty bottles.

Draftyhouse gets like this. Lonesome but never alone. No one has come to take his place, so Shenroos feels justified in squatting. There must be someone here to mind the spiders and husband the flies.

The spiders work by instinct trained into their line over many generations. They are sensitive to the places where the air seeps out and driven to spin webs there. Feeding the spiders falls to the flies, and feeding the flies falls to the carcass of an elk brought over the Bridgeway in Shenroos’ wheel-barrow, upended into the crackling room with its slats like the exposed ribs of the carcass, named for the obvious.

Hauling the carcass of an elk must fall to an astronaut, therefore a gentleman. Common folk aren’t fit for outer space and so, in leathers and a helmet and bearing a cart full of ripe elk, comes Shenroos: twenty-eight years of life and twenty-one spent in the walls of this house with the Bridgeway supplying food and water and air. He owns seven rooms of Draftyhouse. Lord of the manor by three rooms and by noble obligation, the only one who sticks around.

Draftyhouse is larger than some sublunary villages, encased in tall blocks of angled stone. There are a scattering of luxurious, dangerous windows, like arrow-slits from the ancient castles, poured thick with distorting glass. The house breathes a long sigh, exhaling the air that flows across the Bridgeway into space. Every change in that stirring of air registers in the hairs on Shenroos’ neck. A breach would slam the great door shut, sever the Bridgeway and abandon Draftyhouse to Mother Moon. Drink does nothing to dull that sense of doom, nor sleep, nor any task.

Shenroos is a lucky man because he is aware of death in every twitch of his every nerve, every division of every cell. The surface of the moon is littered with many other places so abandoned and walkers who go outside sometimes come back from those places with the remains of foreign outposts and foreign dead to decorate the house. Shenroos’ ancient wheelbarrow has brought more bones than just elk into Draftyhouse.

Shenroos, when he stirs, presses his hand or his ear to the walls, places carved with mottos and poems, bas-relief and pattern. There are no walls in Draftyhouse not in the work of astronaut hands or old hunting tapestries for the privacy of the spiders beneath, weaving, listening. They all listen to the slow language of the walls, the drone of earthy consciousness, telluric current pulsing in the stone like sap through a slow, ancient tree. It is that current which keeps Shenroos close to the floor and his limbs the proper weight. The attraction weighing him and anything it touches down, the shared circulatory system of a composite entity.

Shenroos studied the principles and equations behind it, not for scholarship but self-discovery. You do not jump in Draftyhouse, unless you like a close view of the vaulted ceilings. When you sleep, you sleep on the floor, like a monk.

Shenroos reels through the chambers of Draftyhouse when he is not reading ghost stories. He’s drunk and uninspired. Shenroos has composed stillborn, premature poems, bitten off at their cords and his mouth is rusty at the corners from the birthing. Epics in old traditional styles about hunters tracked by ghosts across snowy hills, priests giving prophecy, their sleeves and pockets stiff with gore. Then he finds the ghost. He has been looking for words worth carving into these walls and a place to carve them. There are places, spaces, nooks and crannies accreted over the place like luster on a pearl, some well hidden. None untouched. Shenroos is looking over those overlooked corners when the ghost rides through, slouched on the spectral body of an elk in the leathers and helmet of an astronaut.

Shenroos mistakes its scratching for the sound of a rat. Wise rats do not come to the moon, foolish ones get hunted by all present in grand affairs that go on from the first sighting of the little animal until its death. The thought of a rat of his own to hunt and stalk is enough to perk his sodden sensibilities. His eyes seek out movement in the dim of the house, pale glow of the cold-lighting, but what they see isn’t movement, just an image that Shenroos’ brain wants to make into a shadow of a curtain and the silhouette of a hunting trophy. This is not what his brain wants there to be. The ghost becomes clear.

The ghost does not look at him; the elk does. Not one of the slate-furred animals of Shenroos’ native forests. This one is the color of an old scab, the color of a priest’s trailing sleeves. Shenroos knows better than to trust his eyes, the hour, or anything else but his feet. They are bare against the cold stone of the floor, and through them, he feels a thing, light, but present in the telluric current, in front of him, a thing moving, a thing with mass.

The ghost’s arms are tangled in the beast’s antlers, the head, a half-grinning, jawless skull nods in the helmet, the lines and ink of the astronaut’s facial marks transferred from the flesh to the bone. The flesh resolves between those markings, an astronaut family that Shenroos does not know, and the skull beneath.

When he was the only little boy on the moon, Shenroos learned to read lips. This puffy mouth, chapped with frost crystals, the swollen tongue, they ask a question before elk and rider vanish like a shape in fast-moving clouds.

Shenroos kneels, putting both hands to the slate of the floor to feel the current of the house. His hands come up black with a thing that bothers him more in its inexplicable presence than a ghost astronaut mounted on a spectral elk.

Shenroos puts his tongue to the pad of his hand and does not like the taste or the cloy of the stuff. This is not a residue of the house, this is novel, and novel is another word for lethal when one lives a few inches of always-more-porous-than-you-think stone away from the void. Shenroos tries very hard to explain this as a thing that one might see on the sixth day of hard drinking, an argument that he would find persuasive, but for the movement in the current.

Shenroos can tell his eyes they do not see a
shook
from the snowy forests of the afterworld bearing some poor bastard astronaut off to the cold hells on the moon. Shenroos cannot tell his current-sense, his house-sense anything. It tells him.  

Shenroos is in no position to listen. He drags toward his room and checks again that the current did register something besides him, somewhere in Draftyhouse did, in fact move. It did. Shenroos vomits and the moon spins. He checks again.

The astronaut has not been sleeping these last few days so much as losing consciousness. Shenroos is not surprised to find himself in a snowy forest. Shenroos is covered in blood and his feet are numb, but the blood isn’t his, so he goes forward, the pull of dream-necessity is too strong to recognize or fight.

The blue spruces and black pines give way to the mountains and mares of the moon, but the snow continues to fall and those red elk, the
shook,
are following, bellowing soundless cries in the vacuum, smelling the blood all the same.

In the ghost stories,
shook
have a bite like a tropical lizard; their stink gets in your blood and they can follow you anywhere. Shenroos is wearing his astronaut leathers, all treated and sealed against the void, but there is snow melting in his hair. His helmet is off. Shenroos can’t tell if he is breathing, if his blood is boiling, if his heart is beating out a futile rhythm against nothing. He is in the house and the snow is falling. The dead astronaut comes to him.

“What is the purpose of the Draftyhouse?” That was the question on the ghost’s lips. The snow falling in the house is ash and soot. Shenroos loses the dream to sleep and then sleep to dull pain and cold. He wakes, soot on his bedding.

Shenroos celebrates his return to sobriety with the last and best of his non-alcoholic rations. Tomorrow would normally bring food to the Bridgeway for the next week or so. The day after, they would check to see if it has been taken, and, if not, the third day would bring a party. Untouched supplies usually meant a suicide, something that happens when a lone astronaut stays to mind the house. Hanging has always been popular in Draftyhouse; the trick is to understand the length of your rope and make sure your toes are touching at all times.

No one in the history of Draftyhouse has ever just gone outside.

Shenroos repeats the ghost’s question; a popular question in the sublunary. Shenroos pulls out his family’s sounders, feels a stab of guilt at the dust on them and begins to set up an experiment. There is almost nothing left for him to discover with the antiques he fits together, nothing that he cannot learn just by walking barefoot in the chilly place, putting his hands to the stone. Shenroos has lived so long dependent on the Bridgeway and the telluric current-augmented gravity for light and air, water and the weight of the earth keeping his limbs and lungs strong, he is sensitive to it. Most marriages do not last so long.