Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (618 page)

Thick white slugs, gorged with wounded tree flesh, oozed through black cracks in the bark, like pus. Looking at the charred trunk and boughs made old scars on my breasts and thighs throb. I stroked the man gled tree and disentangled the knapsack from split branches. It weighed almost forty pounds—heavier than I expected. In the top compartment I found a clean tee shirt, packets of dried fruit, which I gobbled down, and Soya Power Bars, which I saved for later, despite how hungry I was. Three bottles of Fluid Mineral Recharge, bug juice, antiseptics, and bandages made me feel well prepared. The bug juice smelled like millipedes’ stink glands. Remembering the curled up ants, I sprayed myself liberally.

A thrill danced up and down my nerves as I pulled out a plastic map and an electronic compass. No aimless wandering—I had directions. I longed for a mirror to glimpse what I looked like this time. I took off the jacket and pulled on the tee shirt, which was way too big, then cleaned and bandaged my arm and leg. I splashed antiseptics on the rest of my wounds and squirmed at the sharp pains. One bottle of Recharge was all I’d allow myself before looking over the map. No global context, just local frames of reference—this was a map for somebody dealing in secrets. I wanted to find my way out of secrets. The oxbow and the path I stood on were marked in green. An arrow pointed beyond a ‘circle of death’ and a ‘forest of ancestors’ to ‘the final shore.’ I lingered over the map, memorizing its details and imaging the journey before folding it carefully and tucking it into my pants.

The main compartment’s zipper snagged on threads from the seam, and after a few half-hearted tugs, I almost gave up. For someone hungry for clues, I was procrastinating, because I just knew…One sharp tug ripped it open and revealed thin metal cylinders bundled in groups of twelve, each held together by what I guessed were timing devices.

A backpack of explosives with fancy detonators.

I didn’t have to follow this body’s terror story, I could rebel, invent a new scenario or…A sound behind me, something splashing in the water, made me spin around, pull the pistol out of my pants, and throw my self to the ground. My raw skin screamed, but I ignored that and the acid sweat dripping in my eyes. In the distance, water sloshed against the swampy oxbow shore, vines swayed against one another, and a breeze in the treetops made spears of sunlight dance through the mist. Shadows played in shadows. The pistol shook in my hands and tears dribbled down my chin. I didn’t want to go back and hunt for spooks. I wanted to move forward, get on with the Mission—mine and hers. Griots were storytellers, whatever the story. The detonators and explosives made my heart race. Now or nothing: experience this life, gather its secrets, or in the chaos of memories, cease to exist. I heaved the pack onto my back and started walking the route out lined in green on the map. If I only had twenty-six hours, I shouldn’t waste time. There were worse things than being a terrorist, and I’d been them all.

* * * *

I tried not to think, just walk the trail. No underbrush kept me occupied, no wild animals came out to challenge me. All I had to do was put one foot in front of the other. Maybe it was the heat and swaying vines or the chemical haze that set me adrift, I couldn’t say. My feet were still on the spongy ground, but I was lost in bits of memory—from the Edges.

I’d dropped into a tree once, somewhere cooler than this jungle. The first Edge was a sapling, shaken, uprooted, and stripped bare, then a canyon of memories too deep to reach, and finally I was a giant tree—nothing between me and the sky. I didn’t have eyes, but I could drink a trillion points of light and stroke out the right vibrations, red and violet vibrations that sent excited electrons dancing with new partners. A giga watt blast of lightning surged through my body, shattered my woody spine, and set me on fire. Miles of roots smoldered in the dirt. I fell over and burned to death in a rainstorm.

So many fires and storms.

I flashed on a hillside battlefield pummeled by balls of hail. A master samurai had run an enemy through with a sword. I dropped in the body, and his death wounds healed before the samurai’s eyes. With hail cracking against my skull, I picked up a curved sword and swung it through the air at no one in particular. The samurai muttered a prayer and chopped off my demon head to make sure I stayed dead. He was safe. No griot could reclaim a body twice. We only got one dance.

“Yes, dance life!” an old priestess in a Sea Island village shouted. I can still feel her voice in my throat. “But if you trip and stumble, then sing life!” She danced down her gods, called them to ride her body, while she healed a sick child. Feet, hands, head, and belly moved to different beats, a polyrhythmic prayer that wore out her heart. With her last breath, she left her story behind, a blessing for the future. I dropped in, ready to ride clear, new flesh, but her last breath caught in my throat. She refused to leave, and we were stuck in one body—she at the edge of death and me on the verge of life. In the final moments, when I was on my way out, the priestess was still with me, a mad woman lost to herself, begging me to let her crossover, to let her be a song on the wind. Suiciding precious resources, I walked her into the sea, headed across the waves to the motherland, and the priestess blessed my future.

Even now, I was blessed with an ache of loneliness for her, for the healing we did: my cool hands on hot cheeks, on the soft heads of newborns pressing into the light; my strong hands clutching the dry fingers of an old man no longer afraid to die and grasp ing my granddaughter’s sticky fingers when she pulled me close to whisper the secret of the tiny bird we’d rescued. “Iridescent hummers are the only ones who can fly backwards.”

I stumbled, and the deep memory scattered. My brain was frying and so were my feet. The swampy smell was gone, and the sun blasted the blank earth from a white sky. Behind me the jungle was a thin swatch of black on the horizon. I pulled out the crushed sunglasses and cursed my laughing Gods. Not a sight, sound, or scent of life ahead of me. My nose and throat ached in the hot, dry air, and I could have used six bottles of Recharge. I scooped up a mound of white dirt, not sand. It blew away in my hands. A row of signs planted fifty feet apart warned me to turn around: “Biohazard! No Trespassing!” Still in English, but this time with an atomic symbol at the center. I wondered how contaminated I was.

To the west, where the jungle reached a claw into the white desert, an exploded van still smoldered. Déjà vu brought me up short. The person, the body I’d been before my current terrorist self couldn’t be far, couldn’t be long dead. Sifting through the fragments of my mind, I didn’t find an Edge with an exploding van story. When very full, body historians remembered distant Edges better than one or two lives ago. I made a Mission detour to check out the site anyhow. Pieces of the driver and melted gear spiraled out from the wreck. Naked dog prints crisscrossed human boot shapes. Half of a purple beanbag lizard stared up at me with empty eye sockets. I stuffed the blind survivor in a pocket with the unscathed one. My lips trembled. Rescuing a half-dead toy made no sense.

A coconut-sized ball of mahogany fur tugged a chunk of human gore toward the trees. It paused to gnaw and chew. I didn’t want to watch this meal, so I consulted the map. According to it, this expanse of white dirt should have been rainforest for many more miles. Not a root, bone, or fragment of life—whatever happened since the map was drawn had killed even the soil. Using the compass, I got myself back on the map’s green path, moving across dead earth toward the ‘forest of the ancestors.’ I slipped a cough drop in my mouth and took a swig of Recharge. In the whiteness, I thought I would go blind.

The cell phone jangled in my breast pocket. When it hadn’t stopped after ten chimes, I pulled it out and answered. “What’s up?” I whispered, like somebody was spying on me.

“Renee, I got a message for you from deep time.” A female answered, American contralto with inner city chop. She was breathless and hoarse. “Are you ready?”

So maybe I was Renee. “Who is this?”

“If you’re alive again.” She talked on top of me in a gurgling voice.

“What?” I walked faster. This barren landscape made me an easy target.

“Don’t answer, just watch out for the landmines at the Edges of things.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong. . .”

“Two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen. Memories spilling out? Are you tired of dropping into lives and not committing to them? It’s our choice, you know.” She talked on top of me again, wheezing and chasing her words like they’d get away from her before she got everything said. “You’re bouncing across the desert, a baby in your mother’s arms, reaching for her breast, when she thought her little boy was already dead from whatever war does to babies. She couldn’t bear to leave your tiny body behind and now you’re alive again, a miracle in her arms. You feel her joy spurt hot milk onto your tongue. A taste you’ll never forget.”

Indeed I remembered a stream of sweetness and salty sweat from under her breasts, mixed with the tangy thrill of being a miracle in someone’s arms.

“But Mom’s still running from bombs, from men with guns, tanks, and missiles. She steps on a mine that shatters your life with hers. Of course you drop into the mother, she’s so close, so deliciously complex. What griot could resist her story? The drop-in heals her shattered flesh and then you’re running again, clutching a dead miracle against throbbing breasts.” She paused. “You’re a terrorist now, Axala.”

“Axala?” I stopped so quickly, my muscles cramped. How could she know me when I didn’t?

“A righteous murderer in a war that never makes the news. Griots of the galaxy dance in the dark. How long can we run around with dead miracles and do nothing? Amnesiacs—most of who we are, we don’t even know. What good is the story behind all the stories if you never really get to live fully? Never your story…” The woman struggled for breath. “What am I saying? Look, I’ve gathered the griots in the forest for the rendezvous with the mother ship…Follow the signs and don’t get blown up by mines. Across the water and you’re home.” She’d talked herself out of a voice, just a gurgling wheeze.

“Who are you?” I walked a circle in white dirt. “How do you know…” A single note droned in my ear. A dead line. “Shit!” I said to the phone and turned it off. Rendezvous with the mother ship meant life on Earth was almost over.

My body didn’t know enough to be scared of a voice from deep time, praise singing my former lives, questioning my future ones. For the Mission, my muscles ignored the weighty backpack and wounded leg, and shifted to top speed—as if racing through clouds of white dust would save me from a fucking griot mind field or human bombs buried in the ground. Part of me was dead certain there was nowhere to run except into a trap, but I ran until…

Crouching on the white expanse, sparkling like dragons with diamond-crusted backs, I saw purple bean bag lizards, red felt tongues dragging in the dust. Hundreds of them, a stop-action collage, crawling in my direction. Was this toy parade a joke? I considered stepping on one, but couldn’t bring myself to crush its cheery face into the white dust. Moving carefully through them, nothing exploded under my feet. Markers. In a minefield, what more could you ask?

The barren plain slipped into a valley. I ran down to a skinny stream. Fractals of white dust swirled out from crumbling banks, occasionally clouding the middle. The opposite shore of the fast-moving water was brilliant green. In one bound, I crossed out of the circle of death back into jungle. Standing under a tiny waterfall tributary, I swallowed a stream. As I shook the water out of my ears, I thought I heard panting and footsteps behind me, but of course when I turned to look, nada. Somebody chasing me in the white waste land would have been visible for miles. Fear made phantoms of wind and dust. I walked on.

Under the trees, I closed my eyes and savored the cool darkness, the pungent odors of life and decay, the branches and vines drumming with the breeze. It felt like family gathering me into her bosom. After wandering for millennia, I was home. When I opened my eyes, a lanky man with a shaved head, and a few days growth on chiseled cheeks stepped out of a vine-covered hole in an enormous trunk. Without a word, he yanked me inside the tree cave, put his rough hands over my lips, and nodded toward the direction I’d been heading. Squinting through a hole in an abandoned nest, I saw a squad of soldiers hacking through dense new growth one hundred yards away. Somebody’s private army and I knew they were gunning for us.

My companion and I crouched in the dark of the tree trunk and watched the squad cross the stream and walk up the side of the hill toward the minefield. We sat cramped against one another for several minutes, sweat and breath mingling, then explosions from the minefield knocked us on our faces.

“Dead,” he sighed, “And we didn’t even have to kill them.” I recognized his voice, the dinner-rendezvous man. He patted the knapsack. “You’re packing a lot of heat. Perez made the transfer. She give you the map, the code?”

I nodded, looking at myself in his deep-set eyes.

My mind flashed on another woman warrior blowing up her lover and herself in a tight spot like the tree cave, only outside was white hot, not cool green. She’d sacrificed herself to save her community from…

“Hey, don’t worry!”

I’d mumbled something upsetting. His hands hovered close to my cheeks. They exuded a damp heat and made the hair on my face stand on end. I closed my eyes, relaxed into his caress, feeling myself under his rough fingers. He jerked away from me.

“What’s the matter?” I said without opening my eyes, pressing my face into his hand, my body against his.

“What are you doing?” He tried to pull away from me, but he didn’t want to.

And I wouldn’t let him go. “What do you think I’m doing?”

“It’s been…a long time.” He was trembling.

I slid my hands along his smooth scalp. “Too long.” The whisper of growth on his head made my finger tips ache. I sucked in a breath of him through nostrils burnt and blistered from the white heat and chemicals. Even that didn’t dampen the flow of passion.