Cloud Country (12 page)

The vision faded and Saru stood in blackness. What had she learned?

“In the first vision, the city was burned to ash. In this vision the city was destroyed by the same magical orbs that Ria used to destroy the monsters of the Uau. They can’t both have happened so…so…it’s…the future…”

A sensation like chill liquid spread from her neck down through the rest of her body. The future. She was seeing the future. An uncertain, possible future. It had to be. Why else would these visions be showing up? For fun? For shits and giggles? Not likely. The Blue God was thinking about Earth’s future. Planning its future. And so far the two she’d seen did not look super great.

“And in the very first vision Ria was a monster…”

Ria. Something was wrong with Ria. Ria was becoming a monster and that was leading to a future where Philadelphia was destroyed. After all, the UausuaU lived in the human body. Its nests were the cesspools of human civilization. Could Ria no longer tell who was human and who was part of the Uau? Could Ria’s cephereal actually not tell the difference between a plain ol’ regular Joe and a monster?

“Bullshit,” Saru said, trying to convince herself. But now that the idea had entered her mind she couldn’t shake it. Ria had a lot of good reasons to hate the Uau…and if she couldn’t tell the difference anymore? If every human she looked at started looking like a feaster, what would she do? And if Ria’s cephereal was looking at her and saw her turning into a monster, what would it think of humans then? If its champion, if its chosen hero was succumbing to the Uau, then how would it react to the ordinary suckers below?

“Fuck,” Saru grumbled.

A new light appeared and Saru ran towards it. The vision enveloped her instantly. She stood where she had stood before on Broad Street, but she barely recognized the place. Silver-green vines wrapped like veins throughout the street, cracking through the asphalt, bursting through the bellies of abandoned cars, climbing the buildings, crashing through windows, boring through stone, and stabbing into the sky to spread boughs in a canopy of white bell flowers. Grass and moss and trees sprouted everywhere, so it was more forest than city. Through the peepholes in the canopy, Saru saw the sky was clear and blue, and rays of sunlight cast freckled spotlights on the ground. Birds flew and perched and sang in car-alarm voices—and not just crows and pigeons. There were red birds and blue birds and red-blue birds and yellow birds and white birds, and so many Saru gave up trying to catalogue them. The air smelled sweet, but not too sweet, soaps in a fancy store, and her breath came easy, without any chemical bite or particulate slime when she spat. It was still, and quiet, save for the birds, and the rustling of unknowns in alleys turned to gardens. A clear-water creek babbled through the broken streets, forming pools at the bends, and carrying along rafts of leaves and flower petals. She waited for a helicopter to roar by or a siren to sound or a gunshot to ring out, but that was not the truth of this vision. It was quiet, and she was alone.

Saru kicked off her boots and dug her toes into the moss. She skipped to the stream and dunked her feet in the water. It was cold, refreshing, and wonderful. The sun shifted, and she found herself trapped in a ray of warmth. It made her laugh. It was peaceful, absurdly peaceful. She lay back and lifted up her shirt, and rubbed her bare skin into the dirt and grass in a self-service massage. Her eyes drooped, and when they reopened, the light had changed. An amber glow of sinking sun now ruled the scene, with dabbed-in purples and pinks. It was cooler, but not uncomfortable. Bugs were flying around with asses that blinked on and off, so many of them, like a tiny galaxy of gold stars come to drift among the trees. Saru was no longer alone. She saw the faces of people peaking from behind tree trunks, or crouched among the bushes. They watched her like she was something unknown, with wariness, or dumbness, or just-not-sure-what-to-thinkness.

“Hi,” Saru called out, in her friendliest tone. It sounded too loud in this quiet place, aggressive. The people vanished.

Saru pulled her shirt back on and took a walk. The people were still there, one or two always, never a crowd, peaking out from shadows and nooks and windows, clinging to the vines like they were their momma’s tits. The sunlight grew to deeper hues of orange in thinning rays, and then vanished. Moonlight shimmered in its place, and she found her way easy to make.

Saru walked up Broad Street to Vine Street (true at last!) and saw the expressway was now a river. Broccoli-stalk trees lined the bank, dipping their roots. Fins and shadows swam in the swift-moving waters. Saru followed the river a while, trying to identify the fish or whatever was swimming there, but all she could see were smooth backs below the fins, slipping in and out, and never leaping up to make it easy for her. Nineteenth Street was a giant root, as high and wide as the elevated train, and she scrambled up the side and walked along, and sometimes skipped as her shadow played behind her. A few blocks—or fields—north she turned and marveled at center city, a black mesa in the dark, the hundreds of vine-wrapped buildings and canopies merging to form a squat, city-sized tree. She sat and marveled harder. It was beautiful.

Saru continued north, wondering how far the vision went and for how long. What were the boundaries? Philadelphia? The world? The solar system? Could this vision last for days or weeks or a lifetime? Could she live here with these naked wimps hiding in the trees? Could she make moonshine from vision potatoes, rope herself a vision man—perhaps literally—and grow old with him in a vision house? And why did that seem to be not so bad a way to waste a life?

Insects chirped a background lullaby. Small shapes flit through the sky. The trees and grass rustled and clacked. A pair—no, pairs, no, pairs of pairs of eyes, like a scoop of caviar, gleamed from a puckered-mouth hole in the asphalt. The eyes watched Saru and Saru watched them back, but nothing in her tingled or jumped into alarm, and she sensed there was no danger. The creature sensed it too, and came crawling from the hole into the moonlight. It was a cricket the size of a motorcycle, with a bendy lizard body, and two arms poking from its chest. The arms were fingered and humanoid, but longer, and thin, and with drooping hairs, and they brushed across the ground like fronds. More clacking, more clicking, more creatures emerging from holes only now seen, from cracks in the expressway wall, from burrows in the ground, and piles of crap in the surrounding marshes. They crawled across the vine, faster than Saru liked, but they gave her a wide, double-arm’s-length berth.

One of the creatures rippled over the root edge with an armful of trash—water bottles and beer cans and condom wrappers and cigarette packs. The creature hugged the trash to its chest like a hoard of gold. It skittered to a nearby hole, where it began to eat, fanning the trash into its multi-pincered mouth, and then vomiting a gray goo into the hole, packing layers around the entrance like mortar. Saru crept closer and peered over the edge of the root, and saw other structures, fancier houses than this one, elephantine, yarn-ball nests of regurgitated trash. It was a town, a neighborhood, a whole city block piled with testicular trash-cricket nests. Saru watched them build for a while, admiring the work ethic, finding the process oddly captivating, and then walked on.

Saru walked until she came to the Philadelphia Library, a grand old temple of a building, more or less intact. Blimp-sized dandelion tufts sprouted from the roof, bobbing gently in the breeze. A vine branched from her highway root and curled onto the roof, and she followed it, gripping with her thighs and monkey-climbing up. The library ceiling had caved, forming a courtyard. It was full of people, or as full as full could be in this quiet world—there were thirty of them, maybe. They were naked, with skin white and black and yellow, which seemed to glow in the moonlight. Saru crouched behind one of the giant puffs and spied on the people below—hey, how do you like it? They stood or sat or lay in beds of moss. Some of them appeared to be sleeping, a few were having sex, shameless, couples just feet from one another and switching partners even. None of them spoke or even moaned. They were quiet.

There were children playing, running and tagging each other, and wrestling on the ground, and they would sometimes shout or cry or laugh. Even these were quiet sounds by child standards, and Saru guessed it was something they’d grow out of. She willed her eyes to be sharper and they obliged; she was able to zoom in and out at will, and focus on minute details like she had ocular implants. One by one she checked the people out. They were beautiful—not movie-star or glamor or sexy beautiful. Just…beautiful. They all looked healthy. They all looked calm. They all wore white flowers in their hair. Saru returned her eyes to normal, and ran a hand through her hair, plucking out her own white flower. She twirled it between her thumb and forefinger, and then tossed it away. No big deal. It would be back.

Couples broke apart their sexing, children slowed, and stopped, and all of them stood still and turned their heads up to where Saru crouched. They watched her dumbly, like animals, aware and unable to move to the next thought. And then they sang, words, but more than words, twisting, DNA helixes of words that strained through Saru’s brain into pictures. In the words Saru saw fire and death, the city, perhaps the whole Earth razed in violence. She saw that this vision was of the distant future, long after the civilizational reset of a cataclysm. All that remained were the hips, the worshippers of the Slow God.

So. Was that how the Slow God earned its name, playing the long game? Let everyone else duke it out. Let the ambitious suckers run around and kill themselves while you dig in your roots. Just like the hips, keeping to themselves, keeping their heads down, never doing anything too grand, but
surviving
. Wasn’t survival the only fair way of keeping score? Not money or art or possessions, but the number of years your culture and your genes swam on. Who cared how potent your species
had been
? All that mattered was the carrying on. Still being around after the firestorm. The idea felt right, like for the first time she was on the road to understanding the Slow God, and how it operated.

Saru realized then what an intricate game these Gods were playing. It was just like the Gaespora pitting the scions against one another to achieve their ends, except on an intergalactic scale. The Gods were everywhere, in every planet, and galaxy, and dimension, all jostling for position, battling directly or through proxies, manipulating the species that served them. The forest she’d seen in the last vision was a way for the Slow God to meddle in the affairs of the Blue God, not an attack, but a passive-aggressive maneuver that would keep the Blue God from wiping out this particular ecosystem. Would the Blue God risk war, here or elsewhere, to perfect its annihilation? Clearly not. And how had the Slow God been outmaneuvered in other contests on other worlds? What other machinations were at work within the Earth? The hesitation of the Gaespora now made frustrating sense. If you relied on visions like these and other muddled forms of communion with your God, you wouldn’t want to take too many chances. Who knew what the consequences would be?

“Eureka,” she snorted, in celebration of her own brilliance. I am the greatest detective there ever was, or in Philadelphia, at least. It was a dark thought. Nothing she was learning was happy news.

Saru leapt from the roof and willed her body to straighten from flip-flop to toe-first drift, landing without so much as a bump. The hips were gone, scattered at the slightest show of action. She stood alone in the courtyard, the moon yawning overhead, milky stain of stars laughing at the impotence of her species. She laughed back, bitter echoes bouncing through the empty halls, and then she screamed a challenge at the stars, and at the future, and at the aliens and fools and anyone who dared to get in her way.

Saru thrust a fist in the air without thinking, and a jut of stone burst out of the ground next to her like a missile. She gawked and then laughed, and then thrust her hand up again, and another burst of stone came, this time from under her feet. It was a pillar, raising her up, up above the ruined walls of the library and the bobbing dandelion balls, jerking to a stop when she realized what she was doing and her concentration broke. A mad thought crossed her mind—how far can I go?

Saru sucked in a breath and thrust both hands up like she was cheering for a goal, and the pillar of stone beneath her rumbled and launched into the air. It grew wider and taller, and the library shrank to a doll house. Still she rose and rose, willing herself up into the clouds, into the sky, ready to take on the stars and the universe, until she came to her senses and dropped her arms, and the pillar stopped. She stood amongst the clouds and stars, on a tower of her own making. She walked to the edge and peered down, and saw that the clouds formed a sea around the pillar, and she understood that she had brought herself to a new place, a new part of the mirthul. There was no simulated Earth below, no vine-wrapped Philly, no naked hips in their pathetic cage. She spat.

A book dropped from the sky and landed with a thud on the stone in front of her. It was an old book, an antique paper type, the kind that Eugene pretended he read and insisted on giving her. The cover showed a dancing lion in old-timey watercolor, and the title read
Larry the Lion
. She flipped through the pages and read aloud to herself:

“Larry was a happy lion, the happiest in the wood, and every day, he’d dance and play, just like a lion should.”

Her eyebrows wrinkled into a full-face frown, and she hurled the book over the edge.

“Take that, Larry!” Saru yelled. “How happy are you now?”