Realms 2: The Second Year of Clarkesworld (Clarkesworld Anthology) Page 4

  I thought snatching the gun would make it like one of those childhood games, where I grant myself invisibility so he gives himself invisibility goggles, I call lightening so he turns himself to metal—perpetual one-upmanship until one of us runs out of ideas. Andy stares down the river, naked and silent. Every so often he shuffles his feet, or peers down farther, as if readying to jump that never comes. My hand aches from holding the gun, and the cuts on my feet burn. Andy ignores me, frozen between fear of the river and fear of not finishing the game. Is he out of ideas?

  I keep telling myself a little longer, just stay a little longer, but finally I give in. I hunt and gather my clothes from the scrubby field; Andy is still standing on the ledge when I finish. I dress behind him, shaking the dirt off my underwear, easing my shirt over my bloody shoulder. Andy twitches once or twice, but otherwise does not move. I force my bloody feet into their shoes.

  I pick up Andy’s pants from the pile of clothes and fish out the car keys. I jingle them, to see if that catches his attention. He peers down into the rushing water again. I think about climbing up on the ledge with him to see what he’s looking at, even bending my knees, diving in. But I called bullshit on the game, and it felt wrong to step back in.

  I looked back at him, once, on my way to the car. He raised a hand. At first, I thought he was waving me back, and I stopped in my tracks. He was waving goodbye.

  I take the rental car back to Andy’s house on the east side of town. He lives in an ancient craftsman bungalow with a long low porch and two giant palm trees in the front yard. I walk in the screen door and find his wife playing Tetris, crumpled tissues surrounding her in white clumps. I try to introduce myself, but when I open my mouth, she rolls her eyes and thrusts the other controller in my direction. I sit down next to her on the couch and play at manipulating shapes, finding a place for everything. Andy’s wife kicks my ass at this, but that’s kind of the point.

  Around three AM, Andy comes in. He’s sopping wet and, weirdly, drunk.

  “I got cold,” he says, as if this was an explanation.

  He shuffles into the kitchen before I can even open my mouth. His wife doesn’t look away from Tetris, as if her husband shows up soaked and wasted on a regular basis. He comes back with three beers and hands them out. I have ignored my side of the game, and bricks are choking the top of my screen.

  Andy looks as if he’s undergone a religious conversion. Perhaps it’s just the wetness, my mind adding in a false baptismal glow. Did he really go in? My whole conception of Andy changes, struggling to imagine him diving into the river, fighting the current, pulling himself ashore. But he had been naked, standing on that edge. I try to imagine him stepping down, putting clothes on, and getting back up. Maybe he was afraid of losing them?

  No, Andy is still just Andy.

  He plops down on the easy chair by the couch and, without a word, flips the TV off. My disaster Tetris, and his wife’s high score, disappear. We sit in silence. Not-new Andy, his sniffly wife, and me.

  “How was the water?” I say to him.

  Andy takes a sip of beer. “Excuse me?” he says, as if I was some rude stranger.

  “How was the river?” I repeat, trying to sound casual.

  Andy takes a swig of his beer and looks at the blank television. He takes on an expression he imagines is deep. “Real,” he says.

  “Oh really?” I said. “How’d you get back here, then?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Andy says.

  “A real river would chew you up and spit you out—”

  Andy looks away, as if ignoring me will make me disappear.

  “Do you know why he’s like this?” I say to his wife. She’s blowing her nose, and looks at me from behind her tissue. I take off my shoes, my socks, and show her my filthy, scabbing feet. I pull back my shirt, where the blood on my shoulder was starting to soak through. “He did this and then tried to get me to jump in this . . . river. Now he’s pretending like he went in, lying to us—”

  “I’m not lying!” Andy says.

  “Why in the hell are you clothes wet?”

  “I took them with me,” Andy says.

  His wife stares at her husband. “What is she even doing here?” she says, guesturing at me with her controller.

  “Returning your car,” I say.

  “She stole it,” Andy says, as if this trumps anything I might say.

  “What did you do, rent one of the public showers?” I say. “Jump in the ocean? You kinda smell fishy—”

  His wife groans and drops her controller. “I’m going up to bed,” she says, standing up. She leaves her pile of tissues on the couch.

  Andy’s head snaps up. “So am I,” he says, and gets up a little too fast. She looks at him like he’s crazy, but doesn’t say anything to deter him. He pretends to ignore the look. His wife walks a step ahead of him towards the stairs so she can’t see him following her. Their feet move in perfect unison up the stairs, step. step. step. Andy’s footsteps squelch. Neither of look down at me, once.

  This was my cue to leave, but I stay on the couch. I turn the TV back on and watch Tetris bricks pile up on both our sides. I find it comforting to watch it play itself. When both sides clog up, I hit the controller with my least-cut toe to start another round.

  Plunk. Plunk. Plunk. Plunkplunk plunkplunkplunkplunk plunk. GAME OVER. Click.

  Andy and his wife start snoring upstairs; Tetris keeps dooming itself. I feel like an asshole. Why do I even care, if Andy lies? Why waste my time, barge in on his wife?

  I wonder if the river’s still there. I wonder if I could make myself jump. Would I float out somewhere, wet but still me, still here? Would I drown? Or would I dive for the dark, rushing water, and hit a dirty puddle on concrete?

  Meghan McCarron’s work has appeared in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, and Best American Fantasy. She has been a rare book wrangler, a Hollywood assistant, and a boarding school English teacher. She has just moved to Brooklyn, where she will be something else completely.

  BLUE INK

  Yoon Ha Lee

  It’s harder than you thought, walking from the battle at the end of time and down a street that reeks of entropy and fire and spilled lives. Your eyes aren’t dry. Neither is the alien sky. Your shoulders ache and your stomach hurts. Blue woman, blue woman, the chant runs through your head as you limp toward a portal’s bright mouth. You’re leaving, but you intend to return. You have allies yet.

  Blue stands for many things at the end of time: for the forgotten, blazing blue stars of aeons past; the antithesis of redshift; the color of uncut veins beneath your skin.

  This story is written in blue ink, although you do not know that yet.

  Blue is more than a fortunate accident. Jenny Chang usually writes in black ink or pencil. She’s been snowed in at her mom’s house since yesterday and is dawdling over physics homework. Now she’s out of lead. The only working pen in the house is blue.

  “We’ll go shopping the instant the roads are clear,” her mom says.

  Jenny mumbles something about how she hates homework over winter break. Actually, she isn’t displeased. There’s something neatly alien about all those equations copied out in blue ink, problems and their page numbers. It’s as if blue equations come from a different universe than the ones printed in the textbook.

  While her mom sprawls on the couch watching TV, Jenny pads upstairs to the guest room and curls up in bed next to the window. Fingers of frost cover the glass. With her index finger, Jenny writes a list of numbers: pi, H0 for Hubble’s constant, her dad’s cellphone number, her school’s zip code. Then she wipes the window clear of mist, and shivers. Everything outside is almost blue-rimmed in the twilight.

  Jenny resumes her homework, biting her nails between copying out answers to two significant figures and doodling spaceships in the margins. There’s a draft from the window, but that’s all right. Winter’s child that she is—February 16, to be exact—Jenny thinks better
with a breath of cold.

  Except, for a moment, the draft is hot like a foretaste of hell. Jenny stops still. All the frost has melted and is running in rivulets down the glass. And there’s a face at the window.

  The sensible thing to do would be to scream. But the face is familiar, the way equations in blue are familiar. It could be Jenny’s own, five ragged years in the future. The woman’s eyes are dark and bleak, asking for help without expecting it.

  “Hold on,” Jenny says. She goes to the closet to grab her coat. From downstairs, she hears her mom laughing at some TV witticism.

  Then Jenny opens the window, and the world falls out. This doesn’t surprise her as much as it should. The wind shrieks and the cold hits her like a fist. It’s too bad she didn’t put on her scarf and gloves while she was at it.

  The woman offers a hand. She isn’t wearing gloves. Nor is she shivering. Maybe extremes of temperature don’t mean the same thing in blue universes. Maybe it’s normal to have blue-tinted lips, there. Jenny doesn’t even wear make-up.

  The woman’s touch warms Jenny, as though they’ve stepped into a bubble of purloined heat. Above them, stars shine in constellations that Jenny recognizes from the ceiling of her father’s house, the ones Mom and Dad helped her put up when she was in third grade. Constellations with names like Fire Truck and Ladybug Come Home, constellations that you won’t find in any astronomer’s catalogue.

  Jenny looks at her double and raises an eyebrow, because any words she could think of would emerge frozen, like the world around them. She wonders where that hell-wind came from and if it has a name.

  “The end of the world is coming,” the blue woman says. Each syllable is crisp and certain.

  I don’t believe in the end of the world, Jenny wants to say, except she’s read her physics textbook. She’s read the sidebar about things like the sun swelling into a red giant and the universe’s heat-death. She looks up again, and maybe she’s imagining it, but these stars are all the wrong colors, and they’re either too bright or not bright enough. Instead, Jenny asks, “Are my mom and dad going to be okay?”

  “As okay as anyone else,” the blue woman says.

  “What can I do?” She can no more doubt the blue woman than she can doubt the shape of the sun.

  This earns her a moment’s smile. “There’s a fight,” the blue woman says, “and everyone fell. Everyone fell.” She says it the second time as though things might change, as though there’s a magic charm for reversing the course of events. “I’m the only one left, because I can walk through possibilities. Now there’s you.”

  They set off together. A touch at her elbow tells Jenny to turn left. There’s a bright flash at the corner of her eyes. Between one blink and the next, they’re standing in a devastated city, crisscrossed by skewed bridges made of something brighter than steel, more brilliant than glass.

  “Where are we?” Jenny asks.

  “We’re at humanity’s last outpost,” the blue woman says. “Tell me what you see.”

  “Rats with red eyes and metal hands,” Jenny says just as one pauses to stare at her. It stands up on its hind feet and makes a circle-sign at her with one of its hands, as if it’s telling her things will be all right. Then it scurries into the darkness. “Buildings that go so high up I can’t see their tops, and bridges between them. Flying cars.” They come in every color, these faraway cars, every color but blue. Jenny begins to stammer under the weight of detail: “Skeletons wrapped in silver wires”—out of the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees one twitch, and decides she’d rather not know—“and glowing red clocks on the walls that say it’s midnight even though there’s light in the sky, and silhouettes far away, like people, except their joints are all wrong.”

  And the smells, too, mostly smoke and ozone, as though everything has been burned away by fire and lightning, leaving behind the ghost-essence of a city, nothing solid.

  “What you see isn’t actually there,” the blue woman says. She taps Jenny’s shoulder again.

  They resume walking. The only reason Jenny doesn’t halt dead in her tracks is that she’s afraid that the street will crumble into pebbles, the pebbles into dust, and leave her falling through eternity the moment she stops.

  The blue woman smiles a little. “Not like that. Things are very different at the end of time. Your mind is seeing a translation of everything into more familiar terms.”

  “What are we doing here?” Jenny asks. “I—I don’t know how to fight. If it’s that kind of battle.” She draws mini-comics in the margins of her notes sometimes, when the teachers think she’s paying attention. Sometimes, in the comics, she wields two mismatched swords, and sometimes a gun; sometimes she has taloned wings, and sometimes she rides in a starship sized perfectly for one. She fights storm-dragons and equations turned into sideways alien creatures. (If pressed, she will admit the influence of Calvin and Hobbes.) But unless she’s supposed to brain someone with the flute she didn’t think to bring (she plays in the school band), she’s not going to be any use in a fight, at least not the kind of fight that happens at the end of time. Jenny’s mom made her take a self-defense class two years ago, before the divorce, and mostly what Jenny remembers is the floppy-haired instructor saying, If someone pulls a gun on you and asks for your wallet, give him your wallet. You are not an action hero.

  The blue woman says, “I know. I wanted a veteran of the final battles”—she says it without disapproval—”but they all died, too.”

  This time Jenny does stop. “You brought them here to die.”

  The woman lifts her chin. “I wouldn’t have done that. I showed them the final battle, the very last one, and they chose to fight. We’re going there now, so you can decide.”

  Jenny read the stories where you travel back in time and shoot someone’s grandfather or step on some protozoan, and the act unravels the present stitch by stitch until all that’s left is a skein of history gone wrong. “Is that such a good idea?” she asks.

  “They won’t see us. We won’t be able to affect anything.”

  “I don’t even have a weapon,” Jenny says, thinking of the girl in the mini-comics with her two swords, her gun. Jenny is tolerably good at arm-wrestling her girl friends at high school, but she doesn’t think that’s going to help.

  The woman says, “That can be changed.”

  Not fixed, as though Jenny were something wrong, but changed. The word choice is what makes her decide to keep going. “Let’s go to the battle,” Jenny says.

  The light in the sky changes as they walk, as though all of winter were compressed into a single day of silver and grey and scudding darkness. Once or twice, Jenny could almost swear that she sees a flying car change shape, growing wings like that of a delta kite and swooping out of sight. There’s soot in the air, subtle and unpleasant, and Jenny wishes for sunglasses, even though it’s not all that bright, any sort of protection. Lightning runs along the streets like a living thing, writing jagged blue-white equations. It keeps its distance, however.

  “It’s just curious,” the blue woman says when Jenny asks about it. She doesn’t elaborate.

  The first sign of the battle, although Jenny doesn’t realize it for a while, is the rain. “Is the rain real?” Jenny says, wondering what future oddity would translate into inclement weather.

  “Everything’s an expression of some reality.”

  That probably means no. Especially since the rain is touching everything in the world except them.

  The second sign is all the corpses, and this she does recognize. The stench hits her first. It’s not the smell of meat, or formaldehyde from 9th grade biology (she knows a fresh corpse shouldn’t smell like formaldehyde, but that’s the association her brain makes), but asphalt and rust and fire. She would have expected to hear something first, like the deafening chatter of guns. Maybe fights in the future are silent.

  Then she sees the fallen. Bone-deep, she knows which are ours and which are theirs. Ours are the rats with the clever m
etal hands, their fingers twisted beyond salvage; the sleek bicycles (bicycles!) with broken spokes, reflectors flashing crazily in the lightning; the men and women in coats the color of winter rain, red washing away from their wounds. The blue woman’s breath hitches as though she’s seeing this for the first time, as though each body belongs to an old friend. Jenny can’t take in all the raw death. The rats grieve her the most, maybe because one of them greeted her in this place of unrelenting strangeness.

  Theirs are all manner of things, including steel serpents, their scales etched with letters from an alphabet of despair; stilt-legged robots with guns for arms; more men and women, in uniforms of all stripes, for at the evening of the world there will be people fighting for entropy as well as against it. Some of them are still standing, and written in their faces—even the ones who don’t have faces—is their triumph.

  Jenny looks at the blue woman. The blue woman continues walking, so Jenny keeps pace with her. They stop before one of the fallen, a dark-skinned man. Jenny swallows and eyes one of the serpents, which is swaying next to her, but it takes no notice of her.

  “He was so determined that we should fight, whatever the cost,” the blue woman says. “And now he’s gone.”

  There’s a gun not far from the fallen man’s hand. Jenny reaches for it, then hesitates, waiting for permission. The blue woman doesn’t say yes, doesn’t say no, so Jenny touches it anyway. The metal is utterly cold. Jenny pulls her fingers away with a bitten-off yelp.

  “It’s empty,” the blue woman says. “Everything’s empty.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jenny says. She doesn’t know this man, but it’s not about her.

  The blue woman watches as Jenny straightens, leaving the gun on the ground.

  “If I say no,” Jenny says slowly, “is there anyone else?”

  The blue woman’s eyes close for a moment. “No. You’re the last. I would have spared you the choice if I could have.”

  “How many of me were there?”