Collected fiction, p.24
Collected Fiction, page 24
“We have an animal like this,” says Riley, pointing. “We call it a whale. When an Earth whale dies, the body falls to the bottom of the ocean. This helps other animals. We call this whalefall.” The topic of whalefall is not at the top of the priority list, but sometimes the most interesting facts come up as their conversations meander.
“Here, too,” says Yyfal. She rumbles her word for whalefall. Riley adds it to the lexicon. Words added today: five hundred and one.
“I want to understand,” says Yyfal.
“Whalefall isn’t what I study,” says Riley. “Natalia would know more about it.”
“Not whalefall,” says Yyfal. “You.”
“I want to understand you, too,” says Riley. And she does. More than anything.
“Natalia is an important node?” asks Yyfal.
No matter how Riley tries, Yyfal will not refer to the other crew members as anything other than nodes. “She’s important,” says Riley.
“You have taken from the planet to understand me. Ferns. Butterflies. My substance. Can I take to understand you?” Yyfal asks.
“I can give you whatever you need,” says Riley. She offers food, lab books, clothing. The many artifacts of their existence.
“I must ripple,” says Yyfal.
Riley still doesn’t understand rippling. Whenever they try to define words related to it, Riley gets lost.
“I enjoyed talking about whalefall,” says Riley.
“Yes,” says Yyfal. “Also.”
Forty Days and Four Hours After
Yyfal cannot take the Natalia node. That node is too important to Riley. When the Jason node comes out to collect ferns, she wraps him softly in limbs made of her gentlest substance.
“Do you need soil too? And water?” she asks, but the Jason node only makes a loud, bleating noise that she has never heard before, one she cannot translate.
Forty Days and Thirteen Hours After
Riley knows something is wrong before she comes into the clearing with the buried nectarine pit. A subsurface tremble runs under her feet, so soft she isn’t sure if it’s there at all.
In the clearing, Jason is sprawled in a cage made from Yyfal’s body, barely breathing. His legs are caked in dirt. His shirt is ripped down the middle, revealing a gash across his chest. His hair is drenched. When he sees Riley, he tries to call out, but the sound of his voice is lost before it reaches her.
Riley runs to him, pushing her hands through the folds of his cage.
“Are you okay?” Riley asks, even though it’s clear he’s not.
Jason gasps, unable to answer.
“What did you do?” Riley asks Yyfal, terrified and unable to convey her terror. She does not have the words for anger, for sadness. “No,” she says, again and again. Then, the word she has used so often. “Why?”
“I wanted to understand,” says Yyfal.
“You do not understand.” Riley feels for Jason’s pulse, easing her fingers against his neck.
“I asked for another node,” says Yyfal. “I asked many times.”
“Give him back.” Riley is worried that Yyfal won’t, but the stone shifts and untangles until Jason lies against soft ferns, until Yyfal disappears into the surface of the planet.
Riley messages Natalia, who rushes from the spaceship, her lab coat covered in the purple mist of butterflies. They apply nano-patches to Jason’s chest and limbs. Gently, they lift him onto a plexi-stretcher and carry him away.
Forty Days and Fourteen Hours After
Yyfal surges against the ocean, crashing down like a wave. Water coats the crevasses of her body. Salt sticks to the inner coating of her primary substances. She senses every instance of whalefall against the ocean floor. In the water, she feels the living whales brush against her, but they do not notice her. They have never noticed her. It is the same with the butterflies. The same with the grass minnows and the flowering lizards. She has never been able to communicate with the great thinking structure that must connect the whale nodes to each other. When the grass minnows chirp, all those nodes sounding at once, she has never been able to join their song. So much movement and life surround her, yet she has been so lonely.
What right does Riley have to be upset? Yyfal had permission to take what she needed. Riley waited 32,009 seconds before retrieving the “Jason” node, although she must have instantly felt the loss of him, plucked from her matrix. If Riley had missed that node, why did she not come sooner?
The force of Yyfal’s anger contaminates her thoughts. She ripples several times against the salty water before she reaches a quorum.
She has not taught Riley the words for despair, or obstinance, or foolishness. They have not discussed the concepts of curiosity, hope, or faith.
The sky darkens and fills with stars. It is so much easier to define a star, with its physicality. How can she expect Riley to understand the word for trust when there is nothing in the physical world that Yyfal can point to?
They do not have the words to apologize. They do not have enough words at all.
Forty Days and Sixteen Hours After
“She tried to bury me,” says Jason. He sits in the medical compartment, shivering in fresh clothes. Sticky residue from the nano-patches coats his body, smelling like disinfectant. “She tried to drown me.”
“I don’t think she meant to hurt you,” says Riley. Her stomach pulls in on itself, until it feels like it’s the size of a nectarine pit. How can she truly know what Yyfal meant to do?
“It doesn’t matter. She almost killed me,” says Jason. His mouth sets in a grim line. Anger burns through him, replacing his fear. “We are leaving this planet. Now.”
“We don’t understand what’s going on yet,” says Riley.
Natalia looks at Riley with pity, and this is worse than Jason’s anger. “You know the protocols,” says Natalia. “This was clearly an act of aggression.”
“Let me talk to her,” says Riley.
Jason nods, but it’s obvious that he won’t change his mind.
“If you aren’t back in an hour, I’ll come find you,” says Natalia. The implication is clear. Riley might need to be found, if Yyfal snatches her too.
They let her go.
Her vocabulary is insufficient. Her lexicon not nearly complete. Riley pushes aside these thoughts. She doesn’t have time for despair, only the work ahead, of communicating.
Forty-one Days and Seventeen Hours After
Soft ferns brush against Riley’s arms as she runs through the clearing to the dark earth where the nectarine pit is buried. The sun cuts cool against her skin. Words jumble in her mind, rearrange themselves, and fall. She doesn’t know what she will say to Yyfal, and in that gap between words and meaning there is only a longing. Riley starts to doubt that words have any meaning at all. How can two people come to a precise definition of anything? How can one syllable hold within itself a complexity of concepts? In the place where no words exist, there is only silence, and perhaps this is a truer communication than any sound.
As Yyfal rumbles and shifts and comes up beside her, Riley tells herself she is not afraid, but she cannot control the rapid beating of her heart.
“I don’t understand,” says Riley.
“You think it was not good,” says Yyfal. “You said to take, but now to take is bad.”
“He is a human. Like me.” Riley pulls up a handful of ferns, ripping the fronds off one by one. “You should not have taken him.”
“But you are taking ferns,” says Yyfal. She points with her human construction at Riley’s hands. “You are destroying.”
“The ferns aren’t sentient,” says Riley, before realizing they have not defined the word “sentient.” She tries again. “The ferns don’t have words.” But this isn’t right at all. Silence can hold its own sentience. What Riley really wants to say is that the ferns cannot think.
“The ferns are of me,” says Yyfal. “My body-home. And the Jason node is of you.”
“Jason is not part of me,” says Riley. “We are separate.”
“I do not understand,” says Yyfal. “He is your node. He is of you.”
“Did you mean to harm him?” asks Riley. But she realizes she has not defined harm for Yyfal. Riley doesn’t have time to wander down a maze of definitions. “Whalefall?” she asks. It’s the closest she can come in meaning to death.
“Only to understand,” says Yyfal.
“We have to leave,” says Riley. She knows, back at the spaceship, Jason will be drafting his report, marking Ekara C as hostile to warn other explorers. Natalia will be running down the takeoff checklists.
“Going?” asks Yyfal. Her body trembles and reforms. She is, for a moment, the shape of a whale, then a spaceship, then a form that has no name. Yyfal’s body slowly melts into the dirt, but she is all around Riley. For one moment, Riley understands that Yyfal is everywhere on this planet.
“Should I give you back the Orb?” asks Riley.
“Keep,” says Yyfal.
Forty-one Days and Twenty-three Hours After
Yyfal’s brain node nestles in the terrarium, seeing and hearing everything, unable to speak.
The brain node is no longer afraid. Her thoughts are limited by her separateness, yet clear in a way they never were when she was connected to the whole. Instead of having a crisis of identity, the node decides she is both Yyfal and not Yyfal.
More than anything, the node wants to explore.
Forty-two Days and Two Hours After
As Ekara C becomes a distant dot the size of a nectarine pit in the viewscreen, Riley thinks of the planet’s silence. An echo works its way through her chest. She has failed.
What did Yyfal want from her? Riley has only her intuition. She thinks of Yyfal emerging all around her. She thinks of the many ways the universe has produced sentience.
The Orb sits quietly in the terrarium.
Riley speaks to the Orb in the rumbling of Yyfal’s language. “Stars,” she says. She does not know if what she’s doing is right. It is only some innate quality of curiosity and an impossible hope that causes her to speak. “We are going.”
Three Years After
Riley has modified the terrarium, placing it on a set of wheels like a rover. The Orb comes with her on all of her missions. Together, they have seen the ocean cliffs of Otobol E, where sea stars swim below, and the dark, soft silence of the moons of Jupiter. They have slipped through the flower-strewn deserts and sand sculptures of Ultmi B, which stretch upward for kilometers, so lacelike it seems they should surely fall in the wind. They have heard the singing of the crabs of the Small Magellanic Cloud, and the close, quiet echoes of the sentient caves of Outer Tul.
Riley speaks to the Orb in Yyfal’s language and her own, even though the Orb cannot respond. If there is one thing Riley has learned in her travels, it is that there are many different ways of thinking and communicating. Silence does not indicate a lack of awareness. So many of the sentient species of the universe do not speak.
She thinks often of Yyfal and of the words she wishes they both knew how to say. She is not sure she is doing the right thing, taking the Orb with her on her missions. When she remembers Yyfal, Riley most often thinks of those moments in the rain, where they spent so long not speaking at all.
Four Years After
They stop at Otobol E for five months so that Natalia can study the luminescent crickets that bury themselves in the cobbled sand. The ship is much quieter without Jason (who they dropped off on Jupiter years ago), and that suits everyone just fine.
Riley and the Orb spend hours watching ocean waves brush tumultuous against the shore while Natalia searches for crickets.
Five Years After
The node lives a quiet existence. She observes with wonder. When alone, she thinks thoughts of great philosophical significance, so she is never bored.
The universe is vaster than the node had thought possible. With joy, she explores the stars and planets, the great variety of life contained within. She is hardly ever homesick.
Riley is simultaneously a node-of-kinship (Riley would probably use the term “friend”) and another avenue of exploration. Through the years, the node comes to learn Riley’s language and gains an understanding of the physicality of her mind, her separateness from others. They are alike in so many ways.
The node feels that when she becomes part of Yyfal again, absorbed into the whole, this information will be of use.
Eight Years, Ten Days, and Three Minutes After
Using her meticulous records and maps, Riley is able to land her spaceship in the same clearing on Ekara C where she first met Yyfal. She ignores the warnings that appear in her viewscreen chanting, “Hostile planet.”
She emerges with the Orb in tow, as they have done so many times before.
Riley is scared she has not done the right thing. She doesn’t know if she was supposed to return with the Orb, but she is determined to communicate with Yyfal. This time, she will not leave before they come to understand each other.
A nectarine tree stands in the clearing, leaves twisting gently in the wind. Fruit hangs from the branches like small, contained worlds. Riley touches a branch, the bark rough against her skin.
“This should be impossible,” she says to the Orb, her voice breaking. “How could anything so alien to this planet have grown here?”
Butterflies glide past on tessellated wings, stirring a metallic smell in the wind. Ferns brush against her ankles. The sky stretches wide above.
In the three seconds before Yyfal appears, Riley cups a nectarine in her hand, staring in wonder
One Day in Infinity
Walrus reaches her hands down into a supermarket in Oregon, willing the roof translucent. Time is frozen like the fish sticks in aisle seven. She weaves her hands through shoppers, careful not to nudge the boy bouncing in the cart or the old man in front of the cake mixes. She breathes in the smell of cucumbers, a loamy quality that speaks of the ground they came from.
First, she removes salmonella from a carton of eggs, sucking out disease until only a swirl of white and yolk remains. She caresses the fish in the display case to tell them they are loved. Next, she sees if anyone is going to die.
Walrus is the goddess of supermarkets, self-service gas stations, and indoor swimming pools. Her hair is centuries long, floating out from her scalp. Her hands were forged in the crucible of a sun when the universe was new. Her power is like a wave, cresting and retreating.
She chose her name when the Earth was born, before there were supermarkets, gas stations, or indoor swimming pools. Before walruses. She has always wished for tusks, but knows she will never have them.
The supermarket is full of shoppers. Their thoughts glide past her–worries about mortgages, lines from a school play, the realization that to get to the next level of Panic in the Pulsar, you only have to walk past the triple-crested blue jay instead of fighting it.
Walrus is glad that no one can read her thoughts, because they are full of sad things. She hates today.
In front of the cereal aisle stands Matheus. He is thinking about which cereal his son will like, and if the one with the rainbow marshmallows has too much sugar.
Walrus sees his past unfold, opening like a water lily, one petal at a time. Matheus grew up in Curitiba, Brazil. He has read all the works of Jane Austen, even Lady Susan. Although he has never written a novel, he dreams of doing so someday. On a summer evening when he was sixteen, Matheus threw a soda from an overpass to impress his friends, causing a car to swerve into a tree. Instead of stopping to see if the driver was okay, he ran. He considers this the worst mistake of his life. Matheus used to volunteer at a science museum for kids, filling plastic volcanos with vinegar and baking soda, until he got too busy with his job at the biology lab, where he studies the proteins in yeast. Before having kids, his worst fear was drowning. Now his worst fear is the worst fear of every parent.
Walrus looks into the future. Matheus will buy the cereal with the marshmallows, although he plans to make vegetable soup for dinner to compensate. He will spend thirteen minutes in the checkout line. His death will occur three blocks from his house. Walrus feels the scrape of metal against metal, the impossible smallness of a car squished tight.
Omniscience gives Walrus headaches.
Since her omniscience is turned on, she knows Chad is coming before he shows up.
Chad arrives by stepping his big feet across the world, until he’s right next to Walrus. He pushes aside the rainbows that are circling his head, and says, “Well, shit.”
Chad is the god of laundromats and pet rabbits. She has never seen his smile, because he hides his mouth behind his hand when he laughs. Often, he gets bored, and when he does, he finds Walrus.
He’s here today because he knows she’s not doing well.
“It’s not always like this. Why didn’t you come yesterday? A seven-year-old girl in Angola swam in clear water, and in her head was a melody she sings to her baby brother at night. She’s going to grow up to be an electrical engineer.”
Chad catches a rainbow and smushes it down, then lets it spring out across the world. “You need me at the sad moments, too.”
“Yesterday the world was the same, so why do I feel like this?” In the supermarket, a basket of strawberries has started to mold. She shepherds the berries to the compost heap, then wipes rot from her fingers.
“Who’s that?” Chad peers down at Matheus, seeing different moments from Matheus’s past, but the same future. He nods once.
“Let’s not talk about him just now.” She doesn’t want to get to the next part of the conversation, which in some sense has already happened. “How is the experiment with the rainbows?”
“You put a rainbow out across the world and people look up. They see.” He hides his mouth behind his hand, smiling.
“Give me a back rub?” she asks, settling her bulk against the sky. They’ve known each other since the beginning of the universe and are comfortable enough together that she closes her eyes before he even moves. He wraps her in rainbows, which are heavier than she remembers.
