Cloud Country (5 page)

“The margin of similarity isn’t one set thing,” Saru said, half to herself. “There’s not one margin. It’s in everything—everything has a margin. It’s a question of scale. In a cell the margin is chemicals and molecules and shit. And in a person it’s their cells and their DNA. And if you scale it up further, to the whole planet, then it’s the animals on the planet that make up the planet’s margin. And there aren’t any animals on Earth except for rats and cockroaches and us.”

The revelation struck Saru like a blow.

“It’s us,” she said, softly. “We are a margin. Our bodies. Our cities.
We’re
the fucking margin. The Uau is using humans to take over the fucking Earth. That bastard, that bastard ElilE—he knew there was a goddamn monster living under the city, he had to know!”

Saru thought of the pit of writhing bodies under Philadelphia, the cathedral of living flesh, and the centipedes with human torsos for heads. It was a chimera, a bastard hybrid of her universe and the UausuaU. Okay, she could buy that, the damn thing was bizarre enough—but what was the chimera doing
there
? Right under Philadelphia. Why wasn’t it five hundred miles away, somewhere secret? Why have your chimera in the most likely place you could ever be discovered? She had been going about it the wrong way, thinking the Uau needed to hide from humans. But no. Humans were their nectar, the petri dish in which they grew. Of course ElilE had known the Uau chimera was there. Saru had given him the benefit of the doubt—maybe he really was stupid enough to not have a clue. But again she had been approaching the whole problem backwards. She had assumed ElilE was trying to protect humans from the aliens, but it was just the opposite!

“Your job,” Saru said. “The Gaespora. Your job isn’t to protect humans. It’s to protect the Earth
from
humans. To protect your friend Ben here from
us
.”

And she understood the hate of the chimera beaming up at her from below, and the fear, not of her, but of what she could become if she succumbed to the lure of the Uau.

“The creature of human flesh you described could only have been a holodomor,” John said. “A chimera of the UausuaU. Your reasoning strikes truth. Human civilization is shifting Earth’s margin towards the UausuaU. Humans are a biological exploit. The Gaespora fight to arrest this corruption.”

“Holy shit!” Saru said. Her heart was racing. Her fists clenched and unclenched. The veins on her wrists popped taut. And on the heels of that first revelation came another:

“The thing that looked like a giant chandelier, the thing that shot a laser at the holla, hollow—”

“Holodomor.”

“Hollerdermor. Holodomor. That thing was the Blue God’s chimera, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. A scintillant. The Gaespora have known of SaialqlaiaS’s presence in this universe for some time. Its scintillants live within the radiation of our stars. They first appeared in the sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that appears to humans as blue light. I did not know there was a scintillant growing within the light of our sun. Perhaps it was known to others within the shared consciousness.”

“Ten million bucks says ElilE fuckin’ knew.”

“SaialqlaiaS is still a great mystery to the Gaespora. There is overlap between the mechanisms of the Gods, but not enough to reach conclusions through extrapolation. The relationship between native host and chimera is symbiotic within the Gaespora. My erstwhile brethren and I strove to protect our chimeras, and they in turn protected us, and we all lent the labor of our minds to the shared consciousness. Within the UausuaU the relationship is parasitic, with the holodomors dominating their servant hosts—the elzi and the feasters.”

“Great! I could have a parasitic alien God growing inside me.”

“It is a possibility. The relationship is unknown. You demonstrate critical thinking and willpower. These are the armaments of the independent mind. Do not squander your energy on fear.”

“Yeah well—” Saru stopped. She was planning on saying “easy for you to say,” but it didn’t quite work. John had been there. He’d been part of the alien scrum. He knew the feeling.

“But here’s what I don’t get,” Saru said instead. “Individual people must have a margin with the UausuaU, right? Or else it wouldn’t make much sense that our whole civilization does. And so that means I must share a margin with the UausuaU. But I also have these magic blue eyes. And this magic flower of the Slow God.” She plucked the flower from her hair and studied it. “So I must have multiple margins.”

“Humanity lives within the Gaesporan collective,” John said. “Our biology shares margins with many beings, and the makeup varies from individual to individual. Some will hear nothing. Some will hear the song of the Slow God, and some the song of the Sad Gods. Loudest of all is the song of the UausuaU, which drowns out the lesser voices. You are one of the few who can hear the song of SaialqlaiaS. This allows you to hear the other voices more clearly. Your connection to SaialqlaiaS acts as a ward against the song of the UausuaU.”

“Then all the margins are completely random. If you become an elzi or a hip—it’s all just fate.”

“No!” John shouted, his calm shattering. He slammed the dashboard with his fist. “Fate is a retroactive narrative, a trick of the brain to condense information. It is beneath us. We are conscious beings with free will. Our biology and the accidents of our births may determine how our margins begin, but it is our
actions
that determine how they end. Humans are not victims of fate. We are conspirators in our own oblivion. Take care, Saru Solan, for you do have a choice, and the evil of the UausuaU is seductive.”

“Oh yeah? Well, what if I choose to ignore it all? To not have any margin? To quit all this bullshit!”

John opened his mouth and closed it a couple times. His anger sputtered out and he lost focus.

“I was a Gaesporan,” he said, half to her, half to himself. “I served loyally for years. I could have tried to rejoin my brethren. I could have stayed with the mistress. I chose not to. I chose independence.” He finished in a murmur. “Independence,” he repeated to himself, as if he couldn’t quite believe it.

He grew agitated, twitching, and tapping the dashboard with two hands, and mumbling nonsense.

“Shit,” he breathed, and jerked the control column, so their plane blasted above the smog cover. The cockpit shook with the turbulence of the maneuver. Saru looked at her lap and found to her surprise that she was holding the sword again, running her fingers up and down the flat of the blade. Her reflection was caught in the sheen of the metal, and her eyes were a searing blue.

*

Hours passed, slogging or racing by alternatively, so that it all averaged out in the end. Neither of them spoke. Saru pored over what John had told her, trying to understand it, mostly looking for excuses to ignore it. It was all so far away from her own problems—the struggles of her species, and her planet, and the integrity of the universe. Why should she care? Why should she be the one to deal with it? Because you’re special, hon. Because your eyes glow blue, and magical flowers grow in your hair, and some aliens like the way you jive. Ha. So what? I didn’t ask for that. Didn’t want any of that. I just wanted to drink and fuck and feel good about myself every once in a while. So much for that dream.

They came upon a break in the clouds, a golden rust circle. John plunged their plane inside, down through the column of sunlight it formed, into a desert where the golden rust became sand and the spines of dunes. Drinking from the light was a field of crystal flowers, with flat leaves nearly transparent, and silver stalks like antennas bursting up from their centers. John brought the plane so low Saru felt she could have reached through the invisible walls and brushed her fingers against the tips of the antennas. As they neared she saw that each plant was the size of a house, and the antennas at their thinnest were thicker than her waist. Insects buzzed through the crystal flowers, glowing in the sun rays, forming mesmerizing heartbeat patterns that Saru imagined were the rhythms of the plants themselves—that these insects fucking and feasting around them were simple extensions of the plants, and that more wondrous organs burrowed and carved deep below the surface of the dunes.

John landed the plane on an outcropping of rock, what Saru hoped was a safe distance away. She followed John out of the plane, and was hit with the heat and the dryness and the stillness of the desert, a brand-new sensation among her trophy rack of novel pains. There was a smell in the air she couldn’t place, something moldy and sweet, and as it tickled her nose, images formed in her mind of a world far different from her own. She saw deserts that rose and fell, high and low, in ribbons and ridges and contours like the valleys of a brain, the sand held fast by the warped magnetism of the alien core. Flowers like these, but grander, and larger, and varied to infinity, covered the entire arid surface. John looked at her, his eyes less open in wonderment, and she saw this smell was the language of the plants, and they spoke to her with their stink.

It was her planet, yes, but there, staring across the field that reached nearly the limits of her vision, endless crystal plants stinking words to one another and sharing touch with their commingling insect organs, she felt herself in an alien place, a tourist. She saw in her imagination that just as the great American explorers had set out in their ships and planes to colonize the inferior cultures of the Earth, so too had come these aliens to her planet, across oceans of time and space and bizarrities of physics. The time a sentient species spent alone was the mere incubatory period of its life, the days spent nurtured in the womb, and the length of its adulthood was shared with other sentient beings, all with their own ideas of how things should be, and what life had a right to exist.

The smell in the air changed to that of death, rotted corpses, the vacated bowels of the newly dead, choking, suffocating death, so thick Saru thought she might vomit. The leaves and stems rattled, a rainmaker sound, filling the air, generating a breeze that swept back her hair, carrying the stench of death. She saw again the planet of dunes, saw the flowers now pestilent, horrid tumors and boils of pus, and living worms formed of their very nerves spreading out and stabbing into one another with infection and pain. The pus oozed from their flesh to stain the ground and they melted in the acid of the plague and merged. Their minds were bound still to the flesh, like a mess of brains sewn and soldered together, and somehow living. And from the tumors of the melding flesh came a new smell, a smell that was a picture and a sound, or a fragment of a sound, the opening cough, the orchestral warm-up of the leviathan song that wound its way through world after world to swallow all other notes within its putrid whole:
uausuausuausuausuausuau…

The stink overwhelmed, forcing its way into Saru’s eyes and down her throat, to drive out tears and coughs, and clammy sweat, and bile-tasting dry heaves. Images paraded through her brain of the planet devoured, of the torture and pain of the plants, and of their vast terror at what was happening. A thousand equivalent years of the mysterious rot, their unconcern until it came and ate them all. And then it was quiet and the smell was gone. The scenes of alien death faded. The breeze had stopped. The glowing insects had disappeared. Saru stood there with John in the absolute stillness of the desert, ears and nostrils straining, and there was nothing. It seemed that the silence was a warning, a message as clear as the stink of shit to these plants, but the message passed right over her head without the slightest hint as to its meaning.

All Saru knew was that this was still not the chimera John was looking for. It was just another telepathic red herring, the equivalent of a bad tip from a crackhead in a growing-hopeless investigation. They boarded the plane and flew away.

5. Moonlit Stroll

John was looking ragged. He’d eaten nothing, despite Saru’s attempts to shove some peanuts down his throat. The most he would allow was a sip of water that the bottle proclaimed was from a tropical island paradise—it looked familiar somehow. John’s face had grown gaunt and the wrists poking from the sleeves of his caji suit were skeletal. Shit, they hadn’t been flying that long. The best guess Saru could muster was that John’s psychic straining was burning up all his fat reserves, like an implant hijacking the body’s calorie fuel.

“How you doing, bud?” Saru asked. Her voice felt too loud. There was an awkwardness between them, a feeling of too much information on both their parts, and the only privacy they had was in the quiet of their own heads.

John opened his mouth and then shook his head. He closed his eyes and resumed his search. Saru closed her own eyes, trying to nap, but sleep wouldn’t come, only visions of bodies and viruses and cities spreading like a plague over the Earth.

John gave a start, like an old man farting himself awake, and then made some hacking sounds that might have been laughter. He grinned at Saru, wide-eyed, and offered a thumbs up. The hack sound came again, and his lips fish-sucked up and down.

“Got it,” he dared to whisper, as though the vibrations of his voice would snip whatever psychic tin can telephone he’d found. His breathing slowed until it settled into a recognizable tick-tock regularity. He kept just the tip of his pinky on the controls, guiding the plane with soft motions invisible to her. Saru tried not to burp, and sat still as possible, so her robed ass didn’t squeak against the tiger-skin leather of her seat. Her lips twitched into a yawn, and she let it out slowly to generate no noise. After about forty years she noticed the plane was going in spirals, the sun glare switching sides. The spirals closed tight, and the plane cut through the smog, and fluttered to the ground like one of those leaves that looked like a helicopter.

They landed in a dump. An open-sky middle-of-nowhere littered with rusty oil derricks, truck bones, and chapped asphalt. Getting out of the plane the smell was a tarry reek worse than the gossiping alien plants. Saru kicked at a can. A tumbleweed of chicken wire and plastic bags rolled by in some kind of hurry, like its favorite show was on. The sky was dark with the approach of night or maybe acid rain, and the hills rimming the distance sported black-cloud afros. John was tippy-toeing around with elongated bird steps, and scratching at the ground with his feet like a chicken, apparently unafraid of the rusty nails and broken glass and tangles of barbed wire.

“What’s up?” Saru asked him. Her voice was small. John ignored her.

Saru watched him dance around like a chicken for a while, and then found some rocks that she chucked at an oil truck plopped on its side, abandoned after whatever drunken accident or shenanigan. The rocks made a satisfying
gong
as they hit, almost religious, in tune with the piss-whistle of beer bottles, and the chemical incense of decay. She guessed this place had been some sort of drill hub, abandoned with a dip in prices, or raided by outlaws or a competing firm. It felt old, ancient even, a roughneck burial ground from the early Americans. Cowboys and immigrants.

She
gonged
harder, launching heavier rocks and cinderblocks, then the wind picked up and brought her the sound of humming. John had scratched out a circle in the dirt and was sitting cross-legged, mumbling snatches of a Pop40 song to himself:

“You make me wanna jump and scream. You’re my favorite nasty dream…”

“Hey!” Saru yelled.

“You make me wanna cut and bleed. You’re the only one I need…”

Saru winged him with a pebble. It bounced right off his head with a wooden
donk
. Huh. He didn’t even open his eyes. The pop song was dissolving with his repetition, the words turning into sounds without meaning, an unending, rhythmic hum.

Surrendering to John’s madness, Saru wandered around for a bit, killing time, kicking at hoses and gears and other technological carcasses. A wheel-less Cadillac with a hood that wasn’t complete rust slumped ass-up in a ditch, and she crawled on top and stretched. It wasn’t too uncomfortable, no worse than passing out on the streets, and the metal was still warm from sitting in the haze all day. The breeze was kind of nice, tickling across her skin, and she opened her robe and flashed the sky, and thought of other times and other places she’d lain naked with better company. The memories brought smiles and frowns and sighs, and longings to be home. Somewhere among the familiar streets and faces, the outside touches bled away, and the memories turned to dreams…

*

Damn it was cold! Saru shivered and yanked the flimsy robe up around her shoulders, provoking a squeak and scurry of rats. She banged down on the hood for a good long minute to make sure all the little bastards were gone, before slipping over the side and feeling her way in what she hoped was the direction of the plane. It was dark, way too dark, and she yelled every form of shit and fuck she could invent at John, who shouldn’t have let her doze off in a creepy-ass junkyard. The only light was from a sky glow (the moon?) diffused throughout the smog cover, so she could see shapes and mounds in different shades of black and almost-black. Fuck, damnit, hell, damn, John! A sandal caught on something and then tore away. She swept her naked foot around to find it and snagged her toes on a coil of barbed wire. Fuck! She sat and cut her thigh on a rusty jutting something—goddamnit!—and then wound up wobbling on one leg while she plucked the teeth of wire from her feet. An agonizing, blind-woman shuffle brought her at last to the plane, which thank God the door was still open, and she poured the last drops of vodka onto her new cuts—goddamn fuck! She slammed the door—or tried to; it would do nothing but glide gently into place—and crossed her arms and sulked.

John was nowhere to be seen or heard, and she spent a solid chunk of time cursing his stupid ass before the anger fizzled into worry. What if he’d wandered off? Was he coming back? Should she go look for him? But it was cold outside. And what if he hadn’t gone anywhere—what if he’d stubbed his bare toe on a saw blade and bled himself to death while she was napping? Or—or…had he killed himself? Was he that rattled? It was hard to tell. She didn’t know much about Gaesporans other than the few times she’d been forced to interact with ElilE, and the craziest he’d ever gotten was to yell at her and break things. But even glimpsing ElilE’s human side, there was no missing the alien power, the strength and control, and just the gut-cry
feel
that here was something different. John, he’d lost that underlying sense of control. He felt like a human to her. Acted like a human. He didn’t sparkle, didn’t shine. Voices in his head had led him to this junkyard, and if it wasn’t the ‘place’ he was looking for—which it obviously wasn’t—then would he just give up?

Fuck it. Saru yanked open the door (tried to) and got out. The wind was gone but still it was freezing, which made no sense to her. Why would it be hot in the day and then cold at night? Why was everything so complicated?

“John!” she yelled to the air, fruitlessly. Nothing. “John!” Nope. “John, you fucker!” Of course not.

She grit her teeth and shivered, and then rummaged in the plane for something to wrap around her feet. Nothing but chocolate wrappers and vodka bottles—not even a flashlight.

“Fine! Fine then!” she yelled.

She set off tiptoeing, careful, probing steps, shying away from the jagged and rusty armor of the ground and easing her weight in gently, step by baby step.

“John! Joooohn! Don’t do this to me, John!”

Saru thought of going back to the plane and abandoning John to whatever dumbassery he’d brought upon himself. She could fly it easily enough—the plane was for rich idiots so its controls weren’t much more than a stick and a wheel, with the computer handling the rest. But the truth was she really didn’t want to be alone. She was a fugitive, hunted by scions and aliens and Gods, and that was a pretty shit deal. At least with John she had someone who had a pretty shit deal himself—worse, even, because he hadn’t yet realized that life was a liquory tilt-a-whirl of fuck-yous and go-to-hells, and he still seemed to be surprised by it all.

What was that? Something shiny, glinty, glowy? And again. Radiation? A little puddle of cancer for her to step in? Or an acid bath for her cuts? She probed her way closer…closer…closer—

“Fuck!” She stubbed her toe. It was too dark, like having a quilt thrown over your head and trying to follow the ray of a penlight.

“John! John, is that you?”

No of course not. It was…grass. A splotch of grass, little feather tufts just poking their heads out of the ground. And glowing for some reason. And another one a few feet away…and…a tingle ran up her spine, that magical tingle of alien bullshit at work. She walked to the next splotch of grass and then the next. The splotches grew bolder and larger, and more frequent, so they formed a path of sorts, wiggly out into the desert. John.

Saru followed the tufts of grass, which were now bright enough to cast light around them and warn her feet away from the poky things on the ground. The tufts grew denser and merged and became islands of grass, and that was the new standard unit until the islands merged and formed a river of silver light, flowing out into the dark. Each step the world was brighter, the grass with its glow, and the clouds overhead thinning and fading until the moon, gross and pale and terrible, rose overhead. Saru froze where she stood and stared, captured by the light, amazed at its majesty and the unknowable (to her, at least) forces of the universe that could burn such a silver circle in the sky. And around the moon, the stars, bashful in the nearness of her light, and proud at a distance, a twinkling wreath, like frozen drips of rain.

Saru walked on, following the river of grass, feeling a comfort as the soft blades tickled her bare feet. The grass moved in strange ways, not the straight bend back and forth at the mercy of wind, but winding and dancing in slow curves like falling silk. The blades pecked and massaged her feet, lingering, caressing, and became thicker as the river widened ever more, to form now an ocean of grass, so broad it no longer served to aim her in one direction or another. She kept on straight, in slow, deliberate steps, feeling like some fairy queen with the grass her subjects, and her lovers the moon and sky. The grass was now so thick it writhed around her shins, shivering up and down with each step, light kisses and gentle touch, rising and melting away in tandem with her steps so that it seemed to give her strength and ease her passing rather than impede.

The moon was right overhead—she could feel the warmth of its rays—when she found John. He was naked and still, legs together, arms outspread, head back, eyes closed, drinking in the moonlight. His skin shimmered as though it too were partly light, and he seemed taller, stretched, like a tree. The grass had wrapped itself in strands to his navel, and she saw that it merged with his skin, the tips entering him seamlessly, fusing with veins, beating softly, feeding him or drinking from him, or she did not know what. The grass tickled up at her legs, more kisses, probing for an entrance, or an invitation, but she walled it off with a hard thought, a stiff awkwardness like a teenager tensing at an unwanted touch. The grass took the hint and receded.

John opened his eyes and smiled at her. He stretched and shook like a tree in the breeze. The grass around his legs slid out of his veins and away, leaving no mark or scar or clue they had ever been together.

“Hello,” he said—or did he? Had his mouth moved? It seemed to her that human sound would be unpleasant here, loud and out of place, and his words came to her through the breeze, or ricocheted among the lights, or whispered up from the grass.

“Hi,” Saru said. She was angry at him for some reason, but it was hard to remember why.

“This,” John gestured to the moon grass. “Is Tess. Tessenesszbeth.”

“Yes,” Saru said, though she understood that was not the name the chimera used for herself, and merely the crude linguistic contrivance of the humans who had first felt her stirrings, mashing together the sounds that could best approximate her pattern. Tessenesszbeth was a being that could not fit in the shoebox of words, could not be illuminated in the bonfire of every word in every human tongue. Names were tricks, tools that humans used to cut, and carve, and bludgeon ideas into the neutered stupor of their comprehension.

“Tess is like Ben,” John said. “She is a chimera of the Gaespora. Tess is fond of humans. She will protect us.”

“If you say so.”

“Listen,” John said.

Saru listened. Quiet. Nothing. She found her gaze drawn up again, to the tyranny of the moon and stars. And then she heard the song, a quiet song, a very sad song, the song of a single violin with broken strings, of dying flowers and loved ones melding with the earth, of grief tears, and friendships dissolved by time, and fists shaken at the sky, and hollow oaths, and the wrathful misery of impotence. It was so faint she could not hear it in whole notes, so faint that as soon as her brain caught and spooled the sound it was gone, so it could not be remembered or spoken or sung by her own lips. She shivered, cold, and rubbed her arms. John’s smile was bright as the moon and so sad, he was crying, the tears running in silver trickles down his face, the grass rising up to comfort him.

“You hear,” John said. “It is the song of the Gaespora.”

“Yeah it’s…very sad.”