Cloud Country (17 page)

“No,” Saru said, thrusting away from ElilE. “No!” she said again, louder. “I will not be afraid!”

Saru felt the fear inside of her, like jags of mercury in her veins. It was her personal fear, her personal contribution to the world’s slow rot. God she was afraid! She was fucking terrified. So much to fear! They had all done so much to her. Creatures had sucked her blood and tried to eat her alive. They’d broken into her brain and smashed up all the furniture. She’d thought she’d gone insane, and what scared her most of all—that she wouldn’t die. That she couldn’t die. That if her body died her cephereal would just haul her ass back to life in some insane, half-baked, corrupted version to prove a point, and she’d be stuck knowing,
knowing
what had been done to her, alive forever as a retarded ghost in an alien mind. The fear was present, living, constricting her throat, wobbling her bowels, trembling her legs, jeering and goading her into her own self-annihilation. Flee you wretched creature! Flee to the safety of oblivion!

She thrust her hands forward—out! Get out! I can’t live with you anymore! And she
saw
the fear, saw it as metal drops, forcing it, squeezing it out through her pores, and to her amazement it came, the fear, manifest, oozing mercury across her skin, and she laughed, straining her muscles and the muscle of her brain, forcing, forcing it out of her so the fear lay like a stink across her skin, a sheen of sweat that she flicked away. The drops of fear formed a spinning halo, hovering off the ground in front of her. She moved her arms, not knowing what she was doing, but using the motion as a prop for her mind, giving weight to her intent, and the drops responded, coming together to form a single, shimmering globe.

Saru clenched her fist, constricting the globe, cramming it in on itself so it shrank and concentrated into a black pearl. She beckoned and the pearl obeyed, floating to rest upon and fuse with the silver chain of a necklace that now wrapped around her neck. She stroked the pearl, feeling the fear, the cold heat of it there so strong and fierce, a part of her and apart, separate now, yoked to her control. It was thrilling. Lightness filled her, a buoyancy of energy, like she’d lost a hundred pounds or been drained of sour blood.

Saru locked eyes with ElilE. He was calm, and still, and yet she felt within him an awe so clear his eyebrows might as well have jumped off his forehead. She sensed that he had seen it all, seen her shape the fear and master it like a spell, create her own glane without quite knowing how, and this was a form of magic even he could not comprehend. And with that the fear struck back, the necklace drawing tighter, but still separate. Thoughts were sliding between her and ElilE, conveyed in the vibrations of their pulsing blood, the flicker of cells in their eyes, the photons of light like couriers relaying parcels of meaning back and forth.

“Alright,” Saru commanded. “Get my plane ready.”

12. Starter Home

A star appeared through the cockpit window, leaping flamboyantly into the darkening sky. In a screen to her left Saru watched the aircraft carrier shrink. It was a castle in the twilight, gray towers, decks jutting at all angles like drawbridges and balconies, and a moat of circling jets. Black smoke still poured from craters across its armor, merging with the shadows. Flames twinkled like torches amidst the rows of stately lights. Saru kept the nose of her plane pointed away, holding her breath, keeping her fingers crossed, wondering if and why she was actually doing this. The aircraft carrier became a blob in the background, and then a splotch, and then nothing. Still she held her breath and kept her hand on the throttle, urging the plane faster, so fast that the blood was forming a swimming pool in the back of her skull. At last, an hour, two hours, ten years later she relaxed, and slowed, and trusted herself not to turn around in defeat.

“Well, John,” Saru said, nodding at the empty seat next to her. “I am an idiot.”

She twirled the ring on her finger, hoping to hear an answer, but none came. She leaned back and fished around the restocked mini bar. Her hand flit across a bottle, and a bar, and a bag of something or other. She tore open the bag and munched on what turned out to be chocolate-covered chips. The bottle was water, the rich-people water with the tropical island on the label that she’d used to build her mirthul. She studied the image—gosh it was so pretty. No wonder she’d wanted to escape to there.

Saru shivered and put the bottle back so the label was hidden. It felt like a virus, the idea jumping from the artist’s imagination into hers, and she wondered what other ideas from what other sources had penetrated her, lurking in her mind unchallenged, like sleeper agents, and what control she had against them, if any. It was dismaying to think of how accepting the human mind was to random ideas, no matter how weak or vile, snuck in at birth or fucked into the brain with the force of repetition. She grit her teeth so hard she thought her molar might crack again, and then let out a deep breath. Her fingers gripped the controls, aching to land, to crash-land even, to find any excuse at all not to go on.

“What do you think, John? Should I go through with it? Decisions. Options! Right? How did you do this?”

Saru closed her eyes and tried not to think about anything in particular. Her fingers rested lightly on the controls, just barely touching, until they seemed to move almost by themselves. Quiet now. Calm now. Don’t think about anything. Of course it was impossible, thoughts popping up faster than ever. It started with low thoughts, dumb thoughts, embarrassing thoughts—the time she’d passed out in the street and woken up with an elzi tag in her ear, an ill-fated karaoke attempt, a one-night stand with a UniBank exec who’d tried to pay her after. They were flashy narcissisms, so strong in the moment and so worthless…she let them come and let them go, and tried to keep her mind in the space between the thoughts, so the space grew wider and wider, until a thought was an occasional thing, swimming by in the distance. Quiet. Calm. Control. The fear was there, a face in the window, mouthing violent gibberish, but it was muted. Saru held the necklace she had made, massaging the black pearl, focusing on the smooth ice of it against her fingertips, until the tactility bled away the focus from the fear itself. The necklace slackened. Quiet. Calm. Control.

Time passed, or the sensation of time, which Saru understood as the motion of quantum potpourri. Atoms wiggling in stars, merging and fucking and divorcing, blasting their friends across the universe in bits of light and matter, matter clumping into rocks, big balls of atoms with a hairy moss of life atop them, swinging around their mother stars. In the space between thoughts Saru could feel it, almost, the vibrations from one corner of her universe to another, all the atoms in their motion doing their own thing, and where the atoms moved frantically time for her was slower. She had a flash of clarity, seeing space-time itself as a current, sometimes moving rapidly when forced into a narrowness, and sometimes slow and wide, with infinite variations between the extremes of frozen still, and so fast that it became something new, atoms moving at such velocity they broke from one universe and flew free into the space beyond.

Saru held the vision and understood. And then it was too much and her concentration shattered. She opened her eyes. She was in a plane, flying up, up into the night sky, though “night” was just her planet turning coyly from its star. There was a dim memory of time and rivers and atomic watchamagoo, but she couldn’t remember the point or what any of it meant. She thought then that humanity might be cursed to understand just enough to not quite get the joke of existence, pretending to laugh along and knowing only they were posers.

The Earth was getting alarmingly far away, the clouds now as distant as the ground had been before. It felt like she was in a gap between two great disks, the disk of the Earth below, and the disk of the sky above. The plane was handling funny, not as responsive, unsure of itself. A light came on, one of the red ones, a flashy bitch with an accompanying
beep beep fuck you beep
. A display flickered on, simple enough that even Saru could capture its meaning. It showed her plane and the Earth, and some numbers that said the plane needed to return voluntarily to a safe altitude or gravity would do it for them. Did she want to engage the autopilot?

“What do you think, John?” she asked. “Fuck it? I think so too. Glad we’re on the same page.”

Saru switched off the display and smacked the override on the alarm. The beeping stopped, thank God. The button stopped flashing and started to wink slowly, on and off, a passive-aggressive reminder of its disapproval. In any case, the computer was right. There was no sense in leaving the atmosphere, up or down. Saru leveled the plane, and withdrew her right hand, so she could lean over and rest her cheek on it. She kept her left pinky on the control column. Doubt made a comeback, taking advantage of the boredom—whatcha doing, Saru? Gonna go fight the aliens? Gonna go save the world? Gonna go get yourself killed? And what if Ria doesn’t show up? What if you can’t find the scintillant? Are you just gonna circle until you run out of food? Won’t you feel silly flying back to ElilE. Whelp, couldn’t even find the chimera, sorry, guess I’ll just hang out and wait to be killed with the rest of you.

“Quit psyching yourself out,” Saru said aloud to herself.

The Earth was getting farther away again, and that damn display had popped up, but at least the beeping knew better. Saru tried to level out the controls but they were as level as ever. Was she drifting? Had she gone too far already and lost control of the plane? A jolt of panic gripped her; the idea of floating in this tuna can out into space, starving to death—how embarrassing. She could see a curve of space cutting into her periphery, the Earth no longer fat enough to fill the cone of her sight, no longer joined to her. She grabbed the control column and prepared to yank it down and slam the throttle, and meteor herself back to the surface, back to the safe blanket of clouds, but…no. No. This was right. This was what she wanted. Saru eased back on the control column, pulling up the nose of the plane, guiding it up so the Earth was no longer below, and she was aimed straight for the stars.

Even prepared for it she gasped. The scintillant was huge, larger than she remembered, larger than she could have imagined. It was a disk of color and light overhead, a galaxy floating above her, growing larger and larger, everything, drawing her in. She took her hands off the controls and sucked in a breath, fighting her instincts, run, run, run away you moron, jump, get out! The fear was creeping back, slithering up her spine to whisper its proscribed annihilations in her ear. Run, fly, jump! She clenched her teeth, concentrating on the pain from her aching molar, using it like a knife to cleave away the knots of fear.

Colors passed before her, rings, rivers, jungles of luminescence, flowing and pulsing, branching and connecting in patterns unknowable and brushingly familiar. Awe rose and jostled with amazement to rule, making her forget herself, her own small battles for a moment. Saru wondered what this ring did, or that branch of light, or that pattern of dancing orbs? Was that a wing? Or the heart? Or the kidney? Or the lungs? Or was it all just storage, energy trapped in light, light trapped in mass, fluid in this state, a possibility cloud waiting for the will of a cephereal to inject purpose?

Higher the plane went, drawn further and further up. Saru wished the walls were still invisible, that she could look down and see Earth from this height with her own eyes. A screen showed the Earth now, a gray ball of yarn surrounded by a black tire of space. The display winked off and the hum of the plane went dead, and all the controls went dim. Saru tapped the throttle and the other controls, and they moved pointlessly, nothing happening.

“I am having some serious regrets about this,” she said.

Her voice sounded too loud in the plane, and broken, manic, like she was on the verge of laughter or tears. It was silent except for the noises of her own body, which were now incredibly loud.

“Don’t worry,” she said to herself. “You’ll be fine. Or…whatever.”

Onwards and upwards and upwards and onwards, still,
still
—how big was this thing? She passed cities and mountains of light, crystal rock faces, and oceans of gold, and orbs of silver, and prismatic squiggles. Light dripping up in hourglass pylons, wrapped with turnpike and roller-coaster rainbows, grids and golden pyramids of light surrounded by blue tundras of flame. Nothing that looked like life, except for the feel, the sense more than sense that here was life at a higher level. Saru could see patterns if she looked without prejudice or distraction, but she could not see what they spelled or what they meant, or what purpose they held, only that they
were
.

The space around the plane narrowed; the colors drew closer. She was in a tunnel. There was a cloud above her, a white, fluffy cloud like you’d see in a McChristian feed about heaven. Wisps of it broke against her windshield, coming thicker and faster until she was inside the cloud and could see nothing but white. Saru felt the plane righting itself and then stop and hang motionless. The cloud to her right thinned and revealed a balcony extending out under the plane. She waited a few seconds to see if anything would happen, and to contain the beating of her heart, which was trying its best to explode. Okay. I can do this.

Saru took a deep breath and opened the door. Nothing happened. No whoosh and decompression. No getting sucked out to space or sucker punched. No booming voice demanding she repent. She gasped out her held breath and gobbled up a new one and also didn’t die. It was air, gravity, or whatever environment she was used to on Earth, except it felt cleaner and fresher and also vaguely lemony. She stepped out of the plane and onto the balcony and did a little jump. The ground held her weight, though she got the strangest sense that the ground was made of light, and would remain a balcony only as long as it was told.

Welcome, Sister! Saru expected to hear, or something along those lines, but there was nothing. Silence, except for her footsteps. The silence unsettled her. It was too big, too loud, too strong, all this silence around her, like being center stage in a stadium full of mannequins. She felt herself turning to go back to the plane, then gave up on the idea, and then turned back to where she was, so the end result was just a slow pivot. That made her laugh, and the laughter echoed and bounced and frolicked its way through the silence. Not knowing what else to do, she walked forward.

*

After a few steps, the clouds parted and Saru found herself on a lawn—buzz-cut grass with finely trimmed bushes, alternating tall and squat. She stood on a path of red brick, laser-aligned, and the path led up to a sprawling mansion that looked vaguely…familiar. It was white with green trim, faux stone columns, tall windows, and an eight-car garage. The mansion was at once cheap and ungodly expensive, a techie house, or an executive’s, something shit out by a fabrication dozer on its highest setting. This was possibly the last thing Saru was expecting, next to maybe Ria sitting there with a blanket and a picnic basket inviting her to lunch.

It was quiet still, that looming, deadly quiet—Saru would have thought she’d gone deaf if not for the sound of her own racing heart. The lawn extended into a field of green hills against a vacant blue sky, picturesque to the point of feeling more like a picture than a place. It was huge, and also cramped, as if the sky and the field existed only as far as the human eye could see, and the next millimeter beyond was empty space.

Saru unlatched the gate of the white picket fence and pushed it open. The creak of it made her wince. Her legs moved reluctantly, please-I-don’t-wanna to the door—carved wood, overlarge, a pretense of rareness, produced in the thousands. There was a doorbell and she rang it. Ding dong, ding dong, dong ding, dumb ass. Huge and heavy notes crashing through the house, triggering the rabbit parts of her brain, making her want to dash back to the plane and fly the fuck out of this plastic suburban nightmare. No one answered, of course—what was she expecting? A butler? An intern to come to the door and let her in? Angry at her stupidity, and the general stupidity of the situation, Saru yanked on the door handle and pushed it open. The door swung in way too fast and banged against the wall, the bang echoing for centuries.

The inside was predictable—a foyer with twin staircases arcing up to the second-floor mezzanine, an open floor plan with hallways zagging left and right, glimpses of living room, Net room, kitchen. The materials alternated between marble and wood and tile all glossy. Everything was glossy and fresh and sterile, and it all felt so familiar—where had she seen this? Saru crept to the kitchen, footsteps echoing despite her efforts to step softly. The kitchen had sixteen burners and a squid-armed YourChef dangling from the ceiling, a walk-in fridge with comfort-control heating, three sinks, a brick-oven Pizzafast, and enough platinum counter space to land a helicopter. It was empty of course, of people, and food, though the appliances winked at her with the evil red eyes of their on buttons.