Cloud Country (16 page)

“We can do nothing.”

“Fuck that!” Saru yelled. She hurled her glass at the wall.

“We do not intervene. We do not interfere.”

“You took over a goddamn aircraft carrier just to rescue me,” Saru yelled. “How is that not interfering?”

ElilE said nothing.

“Oh, I get it.” Saru grinned, humorless. “You don’t care about the little old humans do you? You’re too caught up in all this galactic shit to care that your own fucking city, maybe your own fucking race is about to be wiped out.”

She walked up to him, getting her face close, pretending to peer inside his head through his eyeballs.

“Anybody in there?” she asked, knocking on the side of his head. “Any humanity left in this alien whor—”

ElilE grabbed her arm and threw her away so fast she didn’t quite know what was happening. She tumbled to the floor, elbows clattering, arm taut with pain, nearly wrenched from its socket. Her teeth scissored her lip, and a coppery warmth pooled in her mouth. Saru grinned up at ElilE, tossed her hair, and spat a spray of blood onto the floor.

“There you go,” she laughed. “I knew you had it in you.”

ElilE’s face was swollen, ripe with rage. His chest heaved up and down, and up and down, and slower and slow, sucking in all his anger, wrapping up his emotions in twisty ties, and stuffing them into his colon, probably. Saru could almost see him as a thought wave, see him dissolve into a cloud of atoms, the bands of his control forming glyphs within the chaos.

“I want the human experiment to succeed,” ElilE said, not quite under control, a morsel of bitterness sprung free. “But my wants are irrelevant. We do not intervene. We do not interfere. Our interactions with the Gods span universes. What we do in one world resonates.”

“What are you talking about?” Saru picked herself up off the floor. “Space politics? Aliens a billion fucking miles away? I’m talking about Earth, the people,
us
, you know? Here, now, everything and everyone you know
gone
. Who the fuck cares about the rest of the universe?”

“It is that smallness of thinking that leads humanity always to crisis,” ElilE said, with the hint of a sneer.

“Oh yeah, great, feel superior, jerk yourself off while the world ends.” Saru spat again, a pink foam, wanting to spit right in his eyes.

She glared at him and he half-glared back.

“Arguing is pointless,” ElilE said. “We will do nothing. We can do nothing.”

There was finality in his voice; the words were like a death sentence. Saru stumbled to the wet bar and poured herself another drink, not paying attention. The alcohol stung the cut in her lip, and the pain was sweet. She wandered to a couch and leaned against the side.

“I’m not an idiot,” she said. “I’ve got most of this figured out already. I’ve been learning a lot, you see? I know I share a margin with the Blue God. I know the Gaespora can’t risk pissing off the Blue God. I know that means I have to do your dirty work. But what I can’t figure out is why you couldn’t just tell me all this from the get-go. You know—before we were on the brink of crisis? Before the Blue God blasted a hole in my city? Before a bunch of innocent people got killed?”

“Would you have believed us?”

“No dice!” Saru yelled. “John told me a whole bunch of crazy shit, and you know what? I believed him. I
trusted
him. He was honest with me. Is honest with me. Running into the feasters and Ria helped a bit, but you know, John showed me Ben and Tess and some other chimeras and that was pretty convincing…”

Saru trailed off. The answer was there, hiding in that sentence somewhere, just on the tip of her tongue.

“Running into the feasters…” she repeated. And what had John said?
It’s our actions that determine the extent of the margin.

“Wait…” Saru said. She started to pace. “This doesn’t make any sense. If I shared a margin from the beginning you wouldn’t need Ria because you’d have me…except…it wasn’t enough. I wasn’t connected to the Blue God yet. I didn’t have enough of a margin. The margin changes…and my margin expanded after I ran into the feasters…”

Of course. Her margin had started to expand after she met with Friar. The first time she went to her mirthul was after touching a feaster. And then when she’d found the holodomor she’d been able to wield the weapons of the Blue God for the first time. She stopped pacing and stared at ElilE in disbelief.

“You son of a bitch,” she said. “You did this on purpose. You were
trying
to expand my margin. That’s why you hired me for your damn case.”

ElilE didn’t react, not even the half-blink signal of surprise. Maybe he was expecting this. Maybe he’d expected her to figure it out sooner.

“You and the other blue-eyed women shared a set of genetic and environmental facilitators that rendered you potential hosts,” ElilE said. “We calculated that confrontation with the feasters would catalyze an expansion of your margin. The case was one of numerous possible triggers for confrontation.”

“That’s not an answer!” Saru yelled. “You strung me along like a jackass while I poked goddamn alien monsters in the eye.”

“We helped you as we could,” ElilE said. “Had you hidden or run from the feasters they would have found you and destroyed you as they did the others. Our actions allowed you to expand your margin. We gave you the tools that were your only hope of survival.”

“Fuck you,” Saru spat. “You could have told me. Coached me a little. Maybe asked me if I even wanted an alien living inside—” She stopped, a new realization dawning. “Oh. Of course. You couldn’t tell me. Because if I got caught, or became a part of the UausuaU, then the Hungry God would learn everything you told me.”

She marveled at ElilE’s deviousness.

“You’re a real sly motherfucker,” she said, planting her hands on her hips.

“Caution demands that we compartmentalize information,” ElilE said. “It is no different from any other intelligence apparatus. We told you all we could within the realm of prudence. Our knowledge of the Blue God is incomplete. We calculated that of all the women in Philadelphia who shared a margin with the Blue God, you had the greatest chance of survival.”

“Well did you calculate this, huh? The Blue God attacking Philadelphia? Was that part of your plan?”

“It was a risk,” ElilE said. “We warned you that the Blue God did not understand humanity, that it could react with violence. With both you and Ria imperiled by the holodomor, it is likely your cephereals took drastic measures to preserve you.”

“You’re trying to blame me for the Blue God burning a hole in the city? I didn’t want that! I didn’t ask for that.”

“We do not blame you. Had you been killed it is likely the consequences would have been far worse.”

“How do you know that?” Saru yelled. “As far as I can tell, I don’t do anything here. I don’t add anything to the equation. Maybe I’m totally irrelevant. Maybe I’m making things worse, you ever think of that? Maybe I should’ve been killed! Maybe I should give up!”

ElilE didn’t hit her, but he came close. His whole body tensed, arm jerking out and back, leashed to his side with the force of his control.

“Think!” he spat. “If you had been killed it would have been proof humanity could not protect itself. The cephereals are executors of ideas. Ria was tortured and murdered by feasters. Based on your visions, it is clear that Ria’s cephereal believes humanity will succumb to the UausuaU and must be destroyed.”

“So what? What am I supposed to do about it?”

“Your cephereal showed you an alternative future. Your cephereal represents humanity’s ability to overcome the UausuaU. To shift our individual margins, and the margin of our species. Both of these futures cannot come to pass. One cephereal must destroy the other.”

“Oh my God,” Saru said. She took a step back, involuntarily. “You want me to kill her. You want me to kill Ria. First you want me to save her and now you want me to kill her? Are you out of your goddamn mind? I’m not an assassin!”

“It is the only path we see.”

“I run away. I hide somewhere. You can hide me.”

“It is true, you could hide. The Blue God may not act against humanity as long as your cephereal remains. But the power of a cephereal comes from the strength of its idea. The shared consciousness empowers strong ideas and purges weak ideas. Ria is corrupted. Her cephereal protects her, allowing her corruption to progress, demonstrating with clarity the danger that humanity poses. Your cephereal relies on you to prove its argument. It needs you to show that humanity can fight. If you run again, if you hide, it could weaken your cephereal to the point that it is destroyed. But even if you attempt to stop Ria and fail, that action could strengthen your cephereal enough to overcome Ria’s.”

“That’s a whole lotta supposition right there.”

“We cannot know for certain,” ElilE said. “My own experience is limited to the Gaesporan cephereals. I know how they behave, how they grow and die, and how the actions my brethren and I take can strengthen or weaken them. You showed me your visions. I can draw no other conclusion from what you have shown me. Our shared consciousness is in agreement. We see no other way.”

“Well try harder. I’m not killing Ria!”

“Ria is corrupted by the UausuaU. By now she could be insane, or demented, or monstrous. Release would be a kindness.”

Saru screamed at ElilE, not words, just a scream, as though she could blast the calm from his face with the force of her voice. She felt the floor beneath her buck, the glass shatter in her fist, delicious drip of blood. The floor bucked again. The glasses in the wet bar popped, bottles blasting, the transparent walls around them blossoming into cobweb fractures. Saru stared at ElilE, hating him, the hate a living, visceral thing. She gripped the hate in her hands like knives, saw the shadows of knives appearing manifest in her fists. She saw herself plunging the knives into ElilE’s heart, fast—that’s right, I’m faster than you—and seeing his blood gush from the wells in his chest, her tongue lapping, mouth guzzling the information within, feasting and laughing.

Horrified, she tossed away the imaginary knives, a shake of the hands, and the feeling deserted her like a one-night stand. She drooped, shoulders slumped, leaning against the wet bar and shivering. She had a sense of deja vu, a sense that she’d been here before, seen herself from afar breaking down like this. She stood, and straightened, and felt all her horror and despair and hate and rage slide into her belly, where it gelled into a hernial throb.

“There has to be someone else,” Saru said. “Some other blue-eyed girl in the world somewhere. Someone better than me.”

“Most potential hosts for the Blue God are hunted and destroyed by the feasters before their margins can expand,” ElilE said. “In Philadelphia, the Gaespora have labored to create an environment where hosts can survive through the force of apparent randomness. The presence of the Slow God also serves to weaken the feasters. Even so, opportunities to ally with SaialqlaiaS have been rare. We have taken a terrible risk with you, Saru Solan. We know too the terrible risks that you have taken, and which you must continue to take for the future of humanity.”

“I don’t even know where Ria is,” Saru said. “I guess she’s still in the scintillant, but I don’t know how to find it.”

“If you make clear your intent,” ElilE said. “Your cephereal will guide you to the scintillant.”

That was it. That was her last hope. There was no excuse to get out of this. Or…maybe she could make a run for the doors. Or break through the wall? How high up were they?

“I know you are afraid,” ElilE said, softly.

That caught Saru off guard. She opened her mouth, ready to tell him to go fuck himself, her whiplash response. But she said nothing. She returned to the walls and placed her palm on the fractured glass, staring out.

“I can feel your fear,” ElilE said. “It is in your memories.” He walked over and stood next to her.

“We are all afraid,” ElilE said. She could see his face in the reflection. It was troubled, and unguarded. He was breathing too fast and his eyes were darting. A bead of sweat plumped on his neck and trickled down a vein into his caji suit. For the first time she could smell him, smell his body odor, not good or bad, just raw, and human.

“Fear protects us,” he said. “It saves us from the acute risks of self-destruction. But fear beyond reason is paralysis, a gradual self-destruction. There were Gaesporan cephereals who thought an alliance with SaialqlaiaS was folly. They expired, slowly, year by year, turn by turn of the Earth. Their deaths mirrored the encroachment of the UausuaU. They showed that constant fear cannot sustain, and yet—you’re bleeding.”

ElilE was holding Saru’s cut hand, pulling free the shards of glass, and dabbing the wounds with a clean white handkerchief. There was gentleness in his voice, and in his touch, and Saru hated how much longing it stirred inside her, how starved and ready her body was to crumble at kindness. She fought it with a sneer, and then she grabbed ElilE and held him, and he held her back, and they held each other. In the touch, they were animals, free of all controlling molds.

The world around Saru dimmed. Sounds receded and merged into a low hum. Vibrations came to her skin, seemingly from far-away lands, and they felt familiar, confirmations of things she had known in her gut, that were just now meandering to the brain. Lots of niggling and nagging sensations settled into place, arranging themselves into a kind of sense. She could feel the
fear
. It wasn’t just her own fear, which was great, or ElilE’s fear, which was greater. It was the fear of the whole system, the whole planet, the whole human race, which dominated the mind of the Earth. The fear was written in their every word and act, in the way they spoke, and the music they played, and the books they wrote, and the feeds, and the films, and every creative reflection upon themselves. It was in the wars they fought, never ending, the massacres, the genocides, the lopsided imperial diversions, and the all-out, skull-on-skull death matches. It was in their blood, their genes, the people they bred with, and lived with, and barred with their pathetic lines in the dirt. They were afraid of the new and the different, the strange and the weird, and the Other. They were afraid of strangers on the street, and their bosses, and their children, and their husbands and wives, and the leaders they chose to herd them from one dominant fear to another. They were afraid to die, afraid to waste time and to spend it, afraid to live, and afraid to even try.