Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104

  Clarkesworld Magazine

  Issue 104

  Table of Contents

  The Garden Beyond Her Infinite Skies

  by Matthew Kressel

  For the Love of Sylvia City

  by Andrea M. Pawley

  Mrs. Griffin Prepares to Commit Suicide Tonight

  by A Que

  Ossuary

  by Ian Muneshwar

  An Evolutionary Myth

  by Bo-young Kim

  Solace

  by James Van Pelt

  Tyche and the Ants

  by Hannu Rajaniemi

  Destination: Mars

  by Andrew Liptak

  Neither Here Nor There: A Conversation with Cat Rambo

  by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

  Another Word: It's Good to Be Lazy and Foolish

  by Ken Liu

  Editor's Desk: Overload!

  by Neil Clarke

  Io Emissary

  Art by Julie Dillon

  © Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015

  www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

  The Garden Beyond Her Infinite Skies

  Matthew Kressel

  Aya floated over endless effervescing worlds, seeking anomalies. There were a hundred thousand Farmers of the Branch, but Aya was of the best of them all. Her fields were the healthiest, her realms the most pure. Even the Supervisors said she had an uncanny ability to spot the malignant, when others saw but purity. How she longed to find those sickly realms sprouting in her fields, where the oddest things arose, things not found anywhere else on the Branch. Finding one was enough to make her long workdays worthwhile.

  She flew low over her fields. Beneath her, a trillion realms sprouted from the ground, spheres budding spheres. Like fattened wheat, the realms leaned tall in the graviton breeze, their thick fingers grasping for the Expanse, while beneath their knuckled bases, tilled to perfection, lay fertile ground. Alone, Aya expressed herself naturally: a ball of prickling white energy, she scintillated. She searched all day, but did not find one anomaly among countless identical realms.

  Perhaps, she thought, I have destroyed them all.

  Repentance Day was nine days away, when all the Farmer Folk would gather to play games of history. Who could remember all the First Ones? Who could reap the neatest row? They’d join to sing the ancient songs, to shout the chorus to the Tall Ones. “Oh, the endless rows! Oh, such majestic beauty!” And Aya played the games and sang the histories, but only because to refuse meant being shamed by those whom she loved.

  If only, she thought, I could write my own lyrics, what stories I would tell them.

  She sighed a cloud of tau neutrinos and watched them tumble into the Expanse. Pulled by the graviton wind, they were lost in the blue haze. What would it be like, she wondered, to float off with the particles, to visit those strange, far off places? But her courage fled with them, as it always did. She couldn’t survive in the Expanse, where the winds blew fierce and terrible. She belonged here, on the branchlet. And she would die here. And that made her saddest of all.

  She floated above the realm tips, where the ground appeared flat as she hugged it close. But when she soared high, the branchlet’s curve became visible. Far upstalk, the horizon bent into itself and formed a tube. And this tube kinked and split into more tubes farther upstalk. And these split even farther up, until the myriad branchlets vanished in the Expanse’s blue haze.

  And downstalk, her branchlet joined a greater, which joined one greater, which joined one yet greater, and so on, until endless fathoms below all branchlets merged with the Prime Stalk of Thept, blessed be her endless reaching.

  Aya flew as high as she dared in the graviton winds, wishing she could see Thept in her gargantuan glory, but the haze obscured all but the nearest branchlet.

  Then she dove between rows of baby realms, where myriad spheres still glowed from their inflationary periods. Their pastel globes lit the way for her spiraling journey upstalk.

  The Eighty Eight Lights had just begun their climb up the Prime Stalk, swathing ghostly green swatches across the sky, so that when Aya reached fields of more ancient realms, the landscape plunged into twilight. But even among these brooding shadows, spudded realms winked spectral diamonds from the countless galaxies whirling within them all.

  Tiny treasures, she thought, are hidden inside all things.

  Like Old Gia, who lived in a deep hollow that had been carved into the branchlet. Gia was once a Farmer like Aya, but after long eons, she had grown tired. And as a reward for her service, the Supervisors had given her this home. Old Gia liked to watch the shadows unfold across the Expanse as the Eighty Eight Lights made their daily climb. She hated to be disturbed.

  Aya shrunk herself into a respectful torus, taming her wildest energies, as she entered Gia’s hollow.

  “Go away!” Gia shouted. A colorful and reactive mess of anti-quarks pooled on the ground before her. “I said, go away!” Fits of radiation spluttered from Gia’s body, a pallid and diffuse ball of energy.

  “But it’s me!” Weak blue light from the opening crawled and died a short way in, so that the rear of the hollow was as black as a dead realm.

  “Aya? So it is. I don’t sense well anymore, child.”

  “No, you don’t. I’m no longer a child.”

  “When you reach my age, Aya, everyone becomes a child.” She spat out a thin spray of down quarks that drifted to the floor, sparking as they joined the viscous pool. “What brings you here?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me another story of the First Ones.”

  “Ah, the young farmer grows lonely again.”

  “I’m not lonely,” Aya said. But she wasn’t sure if that was true. Out the opening, bleak shadows reached across the Expanse, vaguely menacing. The silence seemed to choke the space, but she couldn’t think of anything meaningful to say that had not already been said, as if she was searching for a language she didn’t yet speak.

  Gia grumbled and retreated into her hollow, revealing a faintly glowing structure that had been hidden behind her. Packed tightly together in a polyhedral pattern was a collection of lights, each a dim pink sphere, like a cold baby realm. Each held a memory. “Your journal has grown,” Aya said.

  “My memories,” Gia said, “have become like a sky full of dying suns, slowly winking out. This is my bulwark against annihilation.”

  “May I view one?”

  “Never. They are too personal. But I’ll describe one to you.”

  Aya shivered off a muon cloud of excitement as Gia plucked a sphere from her journal and absorbed it into her energy-body. The sphere flickered inside her. “I was so young then, barely weaned off ultraviolet milk! I’d forgotten this day. How could I forget? Mama was so colorful, so free.”

  “Describe her!” Aya said, unraveling her wildest energies.

  “She was very different from today’s Rearing Mothers. You’d think her energy-body was untamed, her spectra feral. But that’s how we expressed ourselves then, expansive, radiant, wild. Mama took my sisters and me upstalk, all the way to a tip.”

  “Tell me what it was like!”

  Gia paused, shivering as if reliving the memory. “Such a sight! I was terrified, but the tendrils mesmerized me. I was surprised because the tendrils didn’t bravely reach for the Expanse as I had thought, but cowered from it, as if the Expanse was…cold.”

  “Cold?”

  “These baby tendrils were cowards, Aya.”

  Perhaps Old Gia was misrememb
ering. The tendrils held the vanguard against the blue Abyss. Or so the songs went.

  Gia continued, “Their fear was unhealthy. Mama told us the branchlet had to be excised before its disease spread. We had come to sever her from Thept. Mama showed us how to focus our energy-bodies into Z-beams. And we helped her to . . . ” Gia paused, and shivered. “We cut the diseased branchlet free.”

  Unexpectedly, she vomited the sphere out. It plopped to the floor in a pool of wild particles.

  “Gia? Are you all right?”

  Gia dimmed. “I’ve had enough for today, Aya.”

  “But what did the tendrils look like? How many were there? What did the—”

  The X-rays smacked Aya hard. It was just a flash, all Old Gia could muster, but the blow hurt regardless.

  “Sentimental child!” Gia snarled. “Why are you here, dreaming when you should be out farming? Get back to work, you wretched tangle of radiation! Get out!” Gia retreated into her hollow, small and dim, barely recognizable as a living creature among the sea of particle noise in her hollow.

  Aya’s body stung where Gia had struck her, but she took the blow without reaction, as all good Farmers were taught to do. The pink sphere lay beneath her, an ancient world that might never be seen again, if Gia had her way. Such a shame to let it wink out like a dying star.

  Gia was already dozing, spluttering fitful rays, when Aya snatched the globe and darted out the opening. She sped across her fields and flew until she was sure she wasn’t followed. Then she set down between a parade of realms that leaned heavily into the Expanse. Shadows tumbled over the ground as she absorbed Gia’s memory sphere into her body.

  She felt Gia. She became Gia.

  Her energy-body danced with excitement at being so far from home. And what love for Mama who sprayed off vivid nebulae as she spun up the branch! Its circumference was so thin that she and her sisters could loop around the branchlet in an instant. The ground sparkled a brilliant blue with the glittering particle dew that dusted the surface. No realms had yet formed here. The branchlet was only just born itself.

  Gia dared not take her gaze from the ground, because the hideous blue Expanse surrounded her. She wanted to hide inside Mama’s energy-body. All the children did. They begged Mama to return home. But Mama called them cowards and smacked them with harsh rays.

  “Look!” Mama said. “Look how the tendrils cower from the Expanse, just as you cower now. Your fear is weakness! You must cut it from yourself!” The children whimpered, and she beat them again until they fell silent.

  I’m a coward, Gia thought. I cannot look!

  Mama showed them how to form beams of Z-particles with their energy-bodies, then started the cut. She ordered the children to join her. It took effort, enormous concentration, but soon a furious beam erupted from Gia. All her bottled up rage and terror and sadness leaped out from her. She and the children cut, and the Expanse flickered with the reflected light.

  The beams screeched and wailed. But Gia realized the screams came from the branchlet itself. The tendrils cried as the Z-beams moved through them. The sound sickened her, but she didn’t stop until the children had severed it through.

  Loose from its mother, the baby branch tumbled into the Expanse, tugged by the graviton breeze. It gave such a wail, and giant Thept quivered beneath her as the tendrils reached back for their mother. But it was too late. The branchlet disappeared into the haze of the endless blue sky.

  The memory ended. Sickened by the memory, Aya spat out the pink sphere. In a torrent of particles she tossed it far into the Expanse, wishing the feelings would vanish with it.

  For a long time she remained in the field. That horrid screeching . . . Those desperate tendrils, reaching for their mother . . .

  If only she’d never experienced Gia’s memory. If only she could take it back and forget. But she knew she never would.

  Thept, bless her endless reaching, had millions of sisters across the Expanse. The Tall Ones grew out beyond the blue horizon, and countless baby realms were born from their myriad branchlets. And far below, their massive root systems plunged into the great ovum called Yi. Just as the realms arose from Thept’s body, so the Tall Ones grew from Yi.

  Yi herself was one of sixty four ova gestating inside Delicate Womb, the reproductive organ of Mother Lily, who gloriously blossomed inside the 501-dimensional field, Sky of Skies, who accelerated madly inside the meditating Z-space, Incomprehensible Mind, who lived inside another being who had a billion names and even more descriptions, none of which sufficed to circumscribe it. Always, the smaller grew in the larger, on and on eternally, blessed be the All.

  The All was eternally full of noise.

  Messages trickled down from above like the particle rains. Most were gibberish to the Farmer Folk. But once in a long while, a message became clear. Some ineffable being had told Incomprehensible Mind, who had told Sky of Skies, who had told Mother Lily, who had told Delicate Womb, who had told Yi, who had told Thept, who had told the Supervisors, who had told the Farmers, to farm and tend the branchlets where countless realms bubbled up from the surface, to keep them free of disease and entanglement so that Thept’s growth might continue forever. That message came eight trillion Great Cycles ago, a great long time, even here.

  And so the First Ones had razed and tilled Thept’s branches, and through generations they’d uprooted corruption, eradicated disease. They had forced the knotted realms into endless neat rows. It had taken eons and countless prunings, but they’d tamed Thept’s wildest tendencies. Now, all was arrayed harmony.

  But Aya found no beauty in the monotony. In her youth, Rearing Mother had taken her and her sisters to the Tangle, a knot of branchlets downstalk. The First Ones had left it in place to show what would happen if branchlets were left wild.

  Iridescent worms wriggled between massively overbudded realms. Spiky balls of baryonic matter clung to the realm tips, popping to release flashing rainbows of particle spores. Anti-matter spiders of a thousand legs pricked realms with their sharp proboscii and grew fat with sucking. The realms formed hoary palaces, gnarled labyrinths and raveled jungles so thick that even airy neutrinos could only travel but a short way in before hitting something dense and impenetrable. And over all this rolled furious particle storms, bathing the fangled corners with strange, brooding energies.

  The Tangle was meant to evoke disgust. It was bizarre, Aya thought, but far from disgusting. For ages she longed to enter those twisted realms and dance its grotesque curves, to explore its vulgar corners and play with those exultant infestations of life. Instead, she was taught to revile it.

  She had never told Rearing Mother her true feelings. To express them was to invite a beating, or a furlough inside a dead realm, a place frightfully silent, dark, and cold. And she had never told her sisters either, because they betrayed her to gain Rearing Mother’s favor. Instead she found it safer to keep silent. And over time that silence had built up pressure, like a realm ready to burst into existence. It was her greatest fear that she could not contain it once it was born.

  But Gia’s memory gave energy to that silence, threatening to give it form. Aya dreamed often of that severed branch. While flying over her fields she thought she heard echoes of its ancient screams coming from out in the deep.

  She was floating low over her twilit, ancient realms one morning when she found an anomaly. And she gasped a bubble of charmed quarks. Here, growing among dark arrays, a dim realm curved back on itself, a hooked finger cowering from the Expanse. Or perhaps it turned inward to consider its own curious arising. But this was anathema. To grow inward, a sin. This disease had to be obliterated. A tight beam of Z-particles would do it, would reduce this gloriously wrong realm to a scintillating snow of ash, fertilizer for unborn worlds.

  Instead, she peered inside.

  Hundreds of billions of galaxies aligned themselves in fine, shining filaments like hoar frost across the hooked realm of 10-space. A tenuous galactic cluster huddled on a filament edge. And in
side this cluster, a galaxy furiously twirled. And in this galaxy, a giant red sun hurtled through the dark. And around this sun raced a green planet. And on this planet a purple and white quadruped leaped through a dense forest.

  More softly than a falling leaf, the animal tiptoed down to a narrow stream. Its head was long and sleek, its gray horns branching like a miniscule Thept. A breeze trickled through the trees as the quadruped sipped its fill, then gazed up at the orange sky to wonder at the coming dawn.

  But this wonder died before long. The creature was not quite self-aware. Full consciousness might take eons, if it ever happened at all. Even among the infinite realms, sentience was a fickle thing. How rare that the quadruped even wondered at all. Given enough time, she thought, what might this species become? If she let it be, she might live long enough to find out.

  “A farmer’s job is never done.”

  The voice startled her, and she turned to see the Supervisor expressing himself brightly beside her. She collapsed her energies into a shivering torus of high-energy leptons out of respect. “Supervisor,” she said, “I didn’t know—”

  “A trillion realms bubble into the Expanse by their own chaotic wills.” He spoke as if addressing an audience. “Without farmers, realms grow weedy and knotted. Disease spreads. Then we must raze and destroy to continue our long mission. Thept, bless her endless reaching, despises nothing more than a pruning. Tell me, Aya, what is it about this sickly realm that captures your attention?”

  The Supervisor’s name was Bu, but he made Aya always use his title. He peered deep into the hooked realm, far deeper than she ever could, as she shivered off a hadron cloud. What he saw, she couldn’t say, but she knew it wasn’t beauty.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I marvel at the manifold arising animals, Supervisor. They exult in the physical.” And because she couldn’t stop herself, she added, “I love how this quadruped moves so quietly through the woods.” It was a foolish thing to say, she knew, but there was no one else here to listen.

  “Aya,” he said, “you’ve always been an excellent Farmer. So I’ve tolerated your eccentricities. But what is another quadruped?” He sloughed off a sheath of indifferent neutrons. “I’ve seen quadrupeds arise on this branchlet nine quintillion times. This realm is crooked, inward-looking. A grotesquery. It must be destroyed.”