Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104 Read online

  The plane finds a boat and prepares to unleash another blast.

  “Do you want to come with me?” I say.

  The boy’s chin trembles.

  “I don’t want to die again,” he says.

  I smile. Pain needles my lips.

  “Hold still,” I say. I peel the breather bud from the back of my hand. The boy’s eyes widen. I set the breather over his nose and mouth. The breather’s edges pulse along his flesh to find the shape of his face. His eyelids pinch together with the sensation. I hold tight to him. The airplane flies toward us. A low hum grows in the air and threatens to roar.

  “Bite down,” I say. The boy misses his opportunity. The breather dives into his throat. I stop the boy from clawing at his neck. The waves toss us around. The airplane nears. I stroke my breather so it will sit over my mouth and nose. I shift the boy to my back. He clings to me like I might let him go. The plane slows to hover. The boy’s fingers dig into my scalesuit. The benthos calls to me. With the boy, I dive.

  Water gasps and echoes around us. Light dims. Alive, we sink toward the benthos.

  My scalesuit protects me from the ever-colder water layers, but the boy has nothing to keep him warm until I can get him into my emergency scalesuit back in the Nidaria. More pain lies in his future. His new-grown breather pulls oxygen from the water and stops his lungs from compressing, but his eyes and ears have no such protection. Barotrauma is inevitable.

  We reach the ocean floor. I turn on my greenlamp and squint into the depths. A field of trash shows, but not AMX-5. Surface waves must have pushed me away from the cable. I swipe my scalesuit to search for AMX-5’s magnetic field. It should be detectable within three kilometers. Nothing shows on the display. I can’t have moved so far in such a short amount of time.

  Something about the snails on the cable earlier nags at me. I’ve never seen them gorge so deeply, like they’d been eating algae and sheathing for hours.

  Finally, I understand. The cable’s power isn’t intermittent. It’s completely gone. The power station must have been damaged on the inside. Despair bubbles through my thoughts. My podsisters at the outpost don’t know what’s happened on the dry land, and neither does Sylvia City. Preparations haven’t started.

  The boy’s hold at my neck loosens. The rash, the cold, and the water pressure are taking their toll on him. I have to find the cable and the Nidaria beside it. I need to warn Sylvia City about the new war.

  I bite back my breather and try to think. The murky water torments me. Somewhere, the cable is waiting.

  One direction seems to hold a little less trash. I swim that way. With an arm on the boy at my back, my progress through the water is slow. My greenlamp eats the darkness and extrudes it in my wake. The density of trash lessens. I’m drawn toward the swath of ocean floor I cleaned.

  AMX-5 comes into view. Something hits me from behind. I’m knocked forward. I lose hold of the boy. I reach for my compressor gun. It’s still primed to fire. A reef shark circles. The mutated creature is over three meters long. It turns toward the boy, who drifts like he’s unconscious or already dead.

  I point my compressor gun at the shark and fire. The blast hits the shark in the gills. The stunned creature swims away. I slot the gun into my masticator, bulging with snail sludge.

  I swim toward the boy. He’s not moving. The shark returns. The compressor gun is charged. I hope Sylvia City will understand what I have to do. I fire.

  I blow the shark apart. Blood clouds the water. Fish chunks spin past. I cup a few large pieces and press them into the masticator. I start the energy transfer to the compressor gun again. The blood scent will attract other predators, but I’ll be ready if anything else emerges from the depths.

  The boy and I have to get out of the water. I need to find the Nidaria. The boy’s eyes are slits. He doesn’t react to my touch. I tuck him under an arm and swim back to AMX-5. I take a chance and swim downslope.

  At last, the depths give up the Nidaria. She’s just as I left her, except now she’s the boy’s lifeline. And Sylvia City’s.

  I open the Nidaria’s hatch and pull out my emergency scalesuit. I slide the boy into it. Burst capillaries dot his face. I set another breather over his mouth and nose. Edges seal. The scalesuit expels water and shrinks to fit the boy’s shape. If not for the boy’s stunted limbs, he could be any Benthan child behind wide scalesuit eyes.

  The boy and I only just fit into the Nidaria, which is designed for one Benthan. Luckily, they’re taller than drylanders and bigger-boned. The hatch sucks closed behind us.

  The unconscious boy’s body presses against my legs. I set his scalesuit to parent controls and hydration. His body twitches under the prick of tiny needles filled with water, antibiotics, and nutrition. His scalesuit will warm him and serve as a barrier to stop his primary rash from spreading. The rash my scalesuit and I are carrying won’t spread because they’re secondary. I instruct the boy’s scalesuit to sedate him. I don’t want the boy to wake frightened and in pain. I want the next day of his conscious life to begin healthy in Sylvia City.

  I set the Nidaria to follow AMX-5 down the continental shelf to the outpost.

  We glide through the water a few feet above the ocean floor. The Nidaria’s pace is slow. Her gills are designed to keep herself and one person, not two, oxygenated. I tune the Nidaria’s hydrophone to the strongest signal it can find. The saddest whale song I’ve ever heard pulses into my ears. The auto-translator picks out the notes that whales use to refer to Sylvia City and sanctuary.

  Darkness armors the benthos. Ahead, a thin school of fish comes into greenlamp view. The Nidaria swims through the school, which takes refuge in her wake.

  I scan the field of trash. Soon, new carbon ash will coat it all. Not yet though. On the sea floor beside a twisted metal frame, a threadie lays immobile. I’ve never before seen one motionless. I swipe off the Nidaria’s anterior light and reach for my compressor gun.

  Reason prevails. Instead of shooting through the Nidaria’s window, I back the vessel up. I turn the greenlamp on again and swing the Nidaria in an arc wider than a threadie blast zone.

  Farther along AMX-5, another unmoving threadie comes into view. I keep the Nidaria clear of it. A third threadie appears and a fourth. By the time the darkened outpost resolves, I’ve counted a dozen newly-fallen drones.

  A crater’s been blasted from the ground beside the outpost. The building’s exterior is damaged. I try to breathe and see what’s there and not what I’m afraid of, but it’s hard. My podsisters could be floating dead inside, their scalesuits only partially on when the water and the pressure came. I coax the Nidaria into a circuit around the outpost. I search for breaches where water’s flooded in.

  I find none. Instead, a light inside the building turns on. Fatima is standing on the viewing deck and staring at the Nidaria. Her raised hand shields her eyes, cast in the same blue-white as those of the abyssal fish. She and Dannie don’t need greenlamps to see in the deep ocean. Fatima turns on an exterior light. The bottom of the threadie-made crater still isn’t visible.

  “A threadie landed on the roof,” Fatima says.

  Her hydrophoned voice inside the Nidaria is a relief.

  “Are you hurt?” I say. “Or Dannie?”

  “No,” Fatima says, “the threadie didn’t explode when it landed, but I thought the core might leak radiation, so I used the grapple to send the toxic thing sailing. It exploded when it hit the benthos. Did you see any other threadies on your way back?”

  In my thoughts, something phosphoresces. It’s a grain of sand, then a rock, then a ledge rising up from the ocean floor. The thought shimmers like a beacon from Sylvia City. I understand what I need to do. I still have one more repair. My scalesuit will be good for a few days.

  “Yes,” I say. “I saw some threadies. I’ll be in soon.”

  I bring the Nidaria close to the outpost’s waterlock. Instead of docking the vessel inside, I rest her on the benthos near where the outpost’s commu
nication line connects to AMX-5.

  I extract myself from the Nidaria and step onto the ocean floor. AMX-5 has never before looked so vulnerable. In one swift motion, I slice all the way through the cable. The primary carbon rash that must be spreading along AMX-5’s new algae can’t have arrived at the outpost before the Nidaria even if she was slow. Now, the rash will never reach Sylvia City. I cauterize each end of the cable and set the stumps back on the ocean floor. This is only the beginning.

  I crowd into the Nidaria again and dock her inside the outpost. Dannie’s waiting for me on the other side of the waterlock door. Her big-boned face, colored like the gray sand around Sylvia City, is visible through the porthole between the waterlock and the outpost’s interior. Worry tightens Dannie’s expression.

  The waterlock drains. So does the Nidaria. I make a mental list of what I’ll need: nano-nets, the heavy grappler, another compressor gun, and as much bioremediant and dispersant as I can strap to the Nidaria’s exterior.

  I peel off my breather and push the top of my scalesuit back so it rests at my neck. I squeeze out of the Nidaria. Dannie swishes open the door connecting the dock and the outpost’s living spaces. The same whale song the Nidaria found fills the outpost and pours into the waterlock.

  “You’re never late coming back,” Dannie says from the doorway. Her voice trembles. “We didn’t know what happened to you.”

  As gently as I can, I pull the scalesuit-covered boy out of the Nidaria. He’s slippery as a fish. I turn toward Dannie. She draws in a quick breath. Her gaze rises from the child.

  “Is he alive?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to your lips?”

  Fatima slides past Dannie and into the waterlock.

  “It looks like secondary carbon rash,” Fatima says, “which probably has something to do with why the cable’s been down for hours.”

  I hand the boy’s sedated form to Dannie and tell her and Fatima what happened. Before I’m done, tears are running down Dannie’s cheeks, and Fatima’s gaze is turned inward, probably with thoughts about how quickly the outpost will need to be evacuated. For the journey back to Sylvia City, my podsisters and the boy will be safe in the Fulton, the outpost’s other, more traditional vessel.

  I won’t be going with them.

  Dannie steps inside the outpost’s living spaces and lays the boy down on a cushion. I begin to gather up all the nano-nets in the waterlock.

  “We won’t need those for the journey back to Sylvia City,” Fatima says.

  “I know,” I say. “They’re for me. I’m taking the Nidaria. I’m going to blow up the dryland power station. With each threadie capable of making a crater the size of the one outside, I’ll only need a few. After that, I’ll dissolve the cable all the way from the shore to the outpost. Farther, I hope.”

  Fatima’s blue-white eyes widen.

  I set the nano-nets beside the Nidaria.

  “That’s crazy,” Fatima says. “Have you seen your scalesuit? The rash it’s carrying will kill it in a few days. If you get a primary rash, your scalesuit will die in a few hours. You’ll drown inside the Nidaria or on the benthos, or carbon weapons fire will kill you.”

  She’s right, but that won’t stop me.

  “With the power station gone,” I say, “and the trash drifting back over signs of the cable’s path, it’ll be years before the drylanders can find Sylvia City again. Maybe they never will.”

  “Yes, but . . . ” Fatima’s lips twist around like they’re searching for the words to stop me. None exist. She sighs. It’s a plea. She says, “Take the Fulton instead. The bridge has a waterlock and can be drained. You won’t need a scalesuit.”

  “The boy needs the Fulton,” I say. “It’s the only ship big enough to get all three of you back to Sylvia City before the boy dies. He goes with The Fulton.”

  Dannie pulls up alongside Fatima.

  “No,” Dannie says. Her voice is only just louder than the whale song. “You can’t do this. It’s too much for one person.”

  “It’s not for one person,” I say. “It’s for Sylvia City. It’s my last repair.”

  “You don’t have to do it alone,” Dannie says. “I’ll come with you. We can both fit in the Nidaria, can’t we?”

  I shake my head.

  Fatima says, “A few hours in the shallows will blind you permanently, Dannie. You’re no good for this task. Neither am I.”

  “I don’t care!” Dannie says. “I can—”

  Fatima lays a hand on Dannie’s shoulder. Dannie knocks it away.

  “She’s going to die,” Dannie says. “We can’t let her go.”

  “Someone should get rid of the power station and the cable,” Fatima says. “It’s the right thing to do. The drylanders could already be planning their descent. We can’t go into the shallows to stop them, but there are other ways to help.”

  Fatima shrugs off her scalesuit. It falls to the floor. In dark brown underclothes, Fatima stands next to Dannie. I’ve never seen Fatima’s bare gray arms before. She steps out of her scalesuit’s foot coverings and picks up the protective layer that’s traveled with her most of her life. She holds her scalesuit out to me.

  “You’ll need this,” Fatima says, “and my emergency scalesuit, too.”

  My voice catches like a breather’s stuck in my throat. At last, I say, “But if something goes wrong on your way back to—”

  “It won’t,” Fatima says. “We’ll be fine on the Fulton’s bridge.”

  Dannie’s just as fast removing her own scalesuit. She holds it out to me.

  “Wear this one when it’s time to come home,” Dannie says, “to Sylvia City.”

  Tears sting my eyes. I reach for my podsisters’ scalesuits. A tightness in my chest releases. I thought it would never go away.

  About the Author

  By day, Andrea M. Pawley and her unpoppable bubble of enthusiasm careen through Washington D.C. in defiance of Pierre L’Enfant’s plans, potholes and the small gods of sensibility. By night, Andrea writes stories, and the bubble shouts encouragement.

  Mrs. Griffin Prepares to Commit Suicide Tonight

  A Que

  When LW31, a domestic model robot, brought Mrs. Griffin’s dinner into her bedroom, it found her preparing to commit suicide. She was trying to tie a rope to the pendant lamp, but, at her age, her eyes were too weak and her hands were no longer steady. She tried again and again but she couldn’t loop the rope around the lamp.

  “Do you need any assistance, Mrs. Griffin?” LW31 set down Mrs. Griffin’s meal tray, then walked to her side.

  Mrs. Griffin put her hands on her waist. She caught her breath then handed LW31 the rope. “Help me tie this rope to the pendant lamp.”

  LW31’s waist spun on its axis. The upper half of its body rose until it hit the ceiling. At the same time, he asked, “What are you planning to do, Mrs. Griffin?”

  “I want to commit suicide.”

  “Oh, in that case, I should tie both ends.” LW31 nodded its head and said no more.

  It tied both ends of the rope to the lamp’s curved pendant holder, tugged on it with both hands and judged the knots sufficiently secure. It turned its head to her.

  “Mrs. Griffin, the rope has been tied. You may commit suicide now.”

  Panting with each step, Mrs. Griffin walked to just under the pendant lamp. LW31 brought her a chair. Trembling, she climbed the chair, feeling as though everything around her was rocking and swaying. Seeing this, LW31 stabilized her on the chair. Even though it’d been in continuous service for sixty-five years now and many places on its body have been corroded with rust, its mechanical arms were still steady. One hand pushed down on the chair and the other supported her at the waist.

  Mrs. Griffin stood still. She stretched her head then then strapped the loop of rope around her neck.

  “Wait, wait, Mrs. Griffin. I would like to ask you.” As it had always been, LW31’s voice was the smooth surface of water in an ancient well. �
��Why did you pick hanging as the way to commit suicide?”

  “Because it’s effective . . . and, to anyone who finds me, a hanging corpse won’t look so horrible.”

  “Oh.”

  LW31 raised its head. It was a black glass cover. Knives had cut facial features that formed a smiling face. But time had rendered them indistinct to the point where the smile seemed odd and harsh.

  It said, “Actually, Mrs. Griffin, you’re as mistaken as those who had thought the Earth was the center of the universe. As a matter of fact, hanging is the most shameful way to commit suicide. Once you kick away the chair, your bodyweight will crack your trachea and your cervical vertebrae will shift. It’s not like in the movies. You won’t have a chance to struggle. You’ll die in a split second. The problem is what happens after you die.”

  Mrs. Griffin firmly shook her head. “Don’t try to convince me. I won’t change my mind.”

  “After you die by hanging, your eyeballs will jut out like light bulbs, and your face will grow red from suffocation. As for the state of your body, if no one takes down your body within ten hours, the blood vessels in your face will break apart. Your head will be like a tomato, cracked to bursting. The most unseemly is your bodyweight will cause anal prolapse. Urine and feces will overflow . . . ”

  After two minutes of this, Mrs. Griffin climbed down from the chair. She sat on her bed, sobbing.

  “Why do you want to commit suicide?” LW31 approached her, uncertain.

  “It came to me all of a sudden. Everyone who ever loved me is dead, leaving my life friendless and wretched. The idea to commit suicide tonight, it just grew stronger and stronger in my mind . . . no one’s left who loves me. What’s the point of living?” Mrs. Griffin took a digital photo frame out of her pocket. Her aged fingers swipe across it and the transparent display transformed into pictures of people, one after another. “It’s been twenty-five years since my child died. Now, I can’t bear even one more day of life.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about those people who loved you, Mrs. Griffin?” LW31 said. “Once you finish telling me about them, then I can help you commit suicide.”