Dead Astronauts

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?

For each circling lunge, the duck had an answer and soon enough Charlie X had whipped up a cloud of dust in his exertions and his foul cursing, and when the dust settled, the duck had disappeared once more.

Escaped to shadow the three, made up ground in an uncanny way, as if when they looked back to chart its progress, the duck occurred in the City via time-lapse photography, so that it always resided several yards in advance of where it should have been.

Moss was a heretic. Moss sometimes thought that Charlie X had, in a way, brought them together. That somehow, with the duck as the fulcrum, Charlie X had unwittingly orchestrated their resistance prior to crumbling before the onslaught of his own trauma.

Yet perhaps Moss had the right to think this way. For Charlie X had created her.

x.

a shadow

of a vastness

That night, while Grayson slept and Chen recovered, Moss dimmed her thoughts from them, crept through their defenses, snuck out of the Balcony Cliffs. Chen and Grayson never really slept. Perhaps because they were too connected or just couldn’t pretend anymore. But she hoped they slept in some sense, that what she did now was muted to them.

Chen had kept arguing that he should be the one for this mission, that he could convince the fish to help them. But Moss had decided she couldn’t let him. Wasn’t as suited for it, taxed and tested by the other Chen, and having only his blunt, Company ways to complete the mission; just wanted to spare her being hurt.

Still, Grayson would never understand. Not the risk. Not the trade Moss might have to make. The decision she had come to.

So she followed the ravine, the trace of water down the center. In a trance. In a kind of ebb and flow as she abandoned human form. A carpet of moss roiling across the dirt, sand, and rocks. A screed that rewrote whatever it encountered, so the dirt had new properties and the sand burgeoned with new life and the rocks began processes that might not germinate for centuries.

An onslaught, a hidden invasion. Runneling like an unseen, weightless, slow-motion avalanche, her advance guard become her rearguard. Spreading out to the sides and then in again. Folding over and over.

Lingering in the roots of shattered trees and the neural networks of fungi. All of it battered, not at capacity but alive still. A shadow of a vastness. And she existed there, splayed out across those axes in a special kind of ecstasy. Remembered the other ways. Thought, perhaps, to close down human-type thoughts, to stay. To exist just in that moment and the next. To not go back or go forward.

Exhausting. It exhausted to be so close to Grayson, to Chen. Ecstatic. Amazing, that intimacy. To lie down upon a bed with two others enfolded there, not cheek to cheek but the same cheek as one. Yes, ecstatic, but exhausting, exhausting, exhausting. Never alone, and Moss herself so many Mosses and thus never alone in herself either.

Moss kept the human form for certain advantages, to live with Grayson and Chen. Because it helped Chen hold his body together. She did it for other people.

Become nothing or everything. Nothing that could be other than nothing. Nothing that could feel what Moss had felt at the hands of Charlie X.

To be something again in the end—something that would mean everything to Grayson. That was the price, the price, the price. And at the very end, to come back into the consciousness that human recognized as human, that she might parlay with the fish on their behalf.

At the bottom of the ravine, the blue fox waited, as she had known he would. And by that sign Moss knew she hadn’t slipped into another place, another time. For this would never happen again and had never happened before.

“Are you ready?” the blue fox asked.

“Yes,” she said.

No, she wasn’t ready, she’d never be ready. Ready would be too late.

Or so the fox had convinced her.

xi.

such savage mockery

of the tidal pools

In some Cities, the leviathan of the holding ponds had suffered at the Company’s hands. Open sores. Burns. In those places, Moss would sing to the leviathan to soothe it and dull its pain receptors and show it images of a limitless and fecund sea. Once, all she could do was ease the creature toward a merciful death.

Do you see me? Here I am.

Casting out a line before ever she saw the beast.

Here, the leviathan had been smarter, luckier, more dangerous, adapted, been deemed useless by the Company. In truth the leviathan, pure, was natural to this place. Had not been created but had lived here all its preternaturally long life.

I am not a threat. Not a threat. Not a threat.

In this version of the City, the leviathan was almost one hundred years old. Called it Botch, after a long-dead painter. But it wasn’t Botched. That was just a personal lexicon, the dark humor of reluctant soldiers. In which they sometimes called the blue fox Flue or Flu or even Flow. As a contagion that spread among the foxes and perhaps others.

I am here to parlay. This is parlay. I will send you what parlay means.

Botch, Fish, Leviathan had one massive dead white eye that was always weeping salt. “Grayson’s fish,” Chen joked, gently.

Ancient and weathered and huge, and even then the veteran of a hundred battles. Had devoured so many Company rejects and regrets, even though itself rejected.

Your enemies are our enemies.

A lyrical music that came out of its ugly grouper-esque mouth. That at a low lull could mesmerize prey out across the water to drown in its maw. That, brought from beautiful to a sawlike piercing, could stun at close range. A defiantly ugly fish wandering between the size of rhinoceros and whale.

A ripe stench that would’ve wrinkled Grayson’s nostrils, sent a wince across her face. As if Botch brought with it an olfactory record of every chemical, kind of offal, algae, muck it had passed through.

Botch had formidable defenses. Gills that pivoted outward sudden into blades. Razor scales that could angle at signs of danger and gouge at the touch. The mighty jaws lined with diseased and glistening yellow teeth that spread illness as well as lacerations. Strong wide fins meant for both walking and swimming. If it ever made it to an ocean, the leviathan would grow and grow and become a despotic lord among fish. Freshwater or salt? It had a map in its head that yearned for any kind of water.

Things I can give you in exchange …

Botch, wallowing in the sucking mud of a bog-like pond tempered by patches of yellowing grasses. Such a savage mockery of her tidal pools. The dash-dots of flies skimming over meant as cameras once but now click-clicked more out of ritual than purpose.

Botch wallowing and Moss letting herself go wide and shallow to cover the mud pond in a sheen of tiny green-and-white flowers lashed together like chain mail, from which something vaguely like a face held court and hailed Botch as friend.

In the moonlight and the shadow, which neither registered, given excellent night vision.

Botch caught in some dreaming pattern as it gulped down a cache of screaming alcohol minnows.

A kind of response, interpreted in the flush of first contact as: <<You think you are everything, everywhere. You think that the world is not everything, everywhere, around you.>>

The coordinates of control for a dreadnought like Botch were so different than for Moss. They spoke not in fish nor in the language of moss. Because they were neither fish nor moss. Not in person-speech. Because they were not human.

But not in something newly made or ordered. Not machine language or codes or mazes. It had to be translated on either side, strained through layers, halting, pushing forward. Sometimes what translated into supposed words was emotion or reaction. Approximates that had to be trusted in the moment, before these approximates became slippery and escaped into the mire. Because the translation was a kind of virus, and Moss trusted she was infecting the fish and not the fish Moss.

<<What can this be seen as but attack?>> Botch didn’t say, would never say, and yet, in some sense, did say … but remained there in front of her. The stillness of Botch, staring out across the floating field of Moss-blossoms was her clue that he wanted to eat her. If only he could find a heart to rip out and devour among all those flowers.

This beast that could carry her, some part of her, some version. Could find a way or buy them more time, or times, of a sort. Not the mission as agreed to by Grayson or Chen. But what she had worked through with the fox. A way that appealed to the plant cells in her, the moss and the lichen. If nothing else.

She told Botch that she truly saw him. That she could trace Botch back through the outline of his scars. For there was not a part of Botch’s body that did not have scars and so he was now white as snow, white as preternatural, white as something that did not belong in the City. White had not the strength of stone nor the armor of death, of fossil. But was only weakness revealed, the language of the future.

Unwound each scar from Botch’s body, each as it had happened, and she told Botch, who had forgotten, what each scar meant, and how it had happened and why and what else had been in the world around Botch at the time. Each scar removed in this way that told the story of Botch’s long life, and with each story Botch gained with the loss, and at the end, bereft of scars and thus of wounds, stood before Moss shining with an original truth.

For an instant, Botch was new again and the eye was bright but the murder had left it.

I need something from you. Something important.

It was not a thing she could force, but Moss tired of force and felt diminished by force and wanted as little of that poison in her as she could manage.

Part of me will protect a part of you. I will protect you forever and a day as I am able. I will be a type of armor.

For no one had ever gleaned that such a monster might feel the need for protection. Somewhere deep down in the depths of it, in the sunless ocean within.

<<I don’t know you. You know me and now I remember me. But I don’t know you.>>

But it wasn’t said. It wasn’t bellowed or sung. Yet Moss knew.

This is me.

This is me.

You are me.

Who are me? But she knew who are me. She knew. Down in the burning shed of her soul.

And let Botch in, even as Botch exploded through the mud, dove deep into the dark water, Moss leaping upon his back, dragged under, pulled below, breathing, not breathing, torn asunder, clinging in all the ways moss could cling, to the back of the beast that meant to kill her.

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