IGMS Issue 22 Read online

  I didn't know what to think, not any more.

  At length, Father put the instrument back into the box and piled the papers on top of it. He looked old and grey and fragile; infinitely more tired than I'd ever seen him. He stared inside the box as if it held the answers to everything he'd ever longed for, and there was such pain in his face that I wanted to run to him, to kiss him and tell him everything was going to be all right.

  I did none of this; like a dutiful daughter, I crept back into bed and lay for a long while, trying to lull myself to sleep.

  Uncle Hervé never came back home.

  After a few days, Aunt Albane came to our flat, tall and unbending -- but somehow walking even more slowly, even more painfully than usual. She spoke in a low voice with my parents; and they all left. When they came back, it was with a soft-spoken man who said he was a policeman, and who asked me dozens of questions about Uncle Hervé and what he'd said. He was ill at ease during the whole interview, I could tell; and when I spoke of our home, he turned away, as if I were still a child who had to be managed.

  He never came back; and neither did Uncle Hervé.

  Jamila wasn't surprised. "Men will be men. Always ready to do the stupidest things."

  "Uncle Hervé isn't like that," I said, horrified.

  "Toufiq isn't like that either," Jamila snapped. "And yet here he is, bringing us this tosh about proper women remaining inside -- about how it's all in the Qur'an, and we've been living like heathens here." She brought her dark hands together forcefully. "Sorry, Em. That idiot boy's been driving me crazy."

  "Don't worry. It doesn't matter," I said. But Toufiq wasn't Uncle Hervé, who had lived there under the sea; who knew all the ways to snatch fish from shoals, all the hiding places under the rocks, the ways to forage, away from the cargo ships and super tankers that had claimed the sea's surface. Surely he wouldn't go back, just to die.

  But then, if he hadn't died, what was I still doing here?

  The first hint we had that something was wrong with Father was when he fainted in the kitchen. He'd never been quite himself since Uncle Hervé's departure, but I'd thought it was grief, or anger, or a mixture of both. We tiptoed around him, sister-in-law and mother and daughter; but when he swayed, and fell in the midst of a conversation with Mother on a bright Sunday afternoon, we knew it wasn't grief.

  The SAMU ambulance was quick to arrive, and Mother and I rode the metro to the hospital. She was silent by my side, her head bent, her long, tapered fingers joined together in what seemed to be a prayer. She smelled of sour fear, of water imprisoned in some lake or pond, stale and unmoving. I'd have prayed, too, if I'd know which gods were mine anymore.

  At the hospital, they took Mother aside to give her the diagnosis. I only caught snatches of their conversation, with words like "tumour" and "operation" wafting up to me, freezing my heart in my chest; but when Mother came to sit by my side she was as much as she'd always been, her eyes remote, the same pearly-white as dead things.

  "He isn't well," she said.

  "How unwell?"

  "I -- I don't know. There --" She inhaled; the gills on her neck distended, sharply. "You know your father was in the sea, when he was very young."

  "When he saved you."

  Mother grimaced, but nodded her head in a jumble of iridescence, and went on. "He caught something then. It lay low all those years, like a slowly-festering wound. It . . . it's spread."

  "Can they do anything?" I asked.

  "They'll open him up and cut it out," Mother said. "But there's so much of it --" Her voice drifted away -- focused again, and her eyes shifted from dead-white to grey. "He'll be fine. You'll see." She didn't sound like she believed any of it.

  It was the Dark King again, reaching out, spreading his shadow over our family, even from the past. "In the sea --"

  She raised a hand. "Don't. I know what your aunt and uncle have been telling you, the wild tales they've filled your head with. It's past time for those."

  "Then what time is it?" I asked, almost screaming. "You've never told me anything, anything at all!"

  "Émilie." Her voice was firm. "The time for being a child is past. Now, will you be a good girl and fetch me some things from home?"

  Alone at home, I crept into my parents' room, expecting at any moment that someone -- Father, Mother, Uncle Hervé -- would stop me, grab me by the shoulders and turn me around and ask me what in the name of the Abyss I thought I was doing.

  But there was only silence; and the sound of my breath, stretching the gills in my neck. Carefully, I wedged myself under the bed and pulled out Father's box.

  It had no lock and opened easily, as if eager to disgorge its secrets. Inside were all the papers Father had pulled out, with diagrams and crosshatched maps, and formulas that swam under my eyes. There was a diagram of the instrument, too, and meticulous explanations on its making and mass production -- talk of pheromones and mating season, and other words that made no sense.

  I read a few more of the papers: the language was equally archaic, like that of old romances, and speaking of things like the spread of pollutants and the growing rate of mutations and the number of years left before the seas became unviable for plankton, for fish -- for mermen.

  Aunt Albane had called them clever; but all I saw, in those words and sentences I could barely understand, were yet more explanations from a foreigner's eye, from someone who hadn't understood a thing about the sea or the blessed Abyss; of what it meant to be a merman. From someone who had married a merwoman and done his best to turn her human -- and done the same to her child in turn, telling her nothing of the past or the lost country.

  At the bottom of the chest were two things: Father's armour, a green-and-grey suit cut for a much thinner man than the one he'd become over the years. It clung to my skin when I unfolded it; and the hood had a small mask inside, which released oxygen when I pressed it against my skin.

  And the sword.

  It sang when I lifted it -- a sound without sound that vibrated in my bones like the sea's embrace, as if I had become the instrument's resonance box myself. Slowly, carefully, I ran my fingers over the handle, seeing reflections form under my fingertips, memories of mother-of-pearl and fish-scales -- and all the while the sound grew, until it seemed to fill me from end to end.

  With this, Father and his companions had sung the mermen out of the sea, and tied Mother to the shore. With this, our exile had started; and I was nothing but the product of it -- someone who would never be at ease on dry land, in choking air. I could live out the rest of my life like Mother, dwindling further and further away from the sea and what she had been, or . . .

  Or, like Uncle Hervé, I could have faith in the blessed Abyss, and follow the way home.

  In my mind I heard Mother's words: the time for being a child is past.

  And she was right. I had been sheltered; I had been frightened; I had been lost.

  But no longer.

  I thought to call Jamila, but it was past the point when she'd have understood any of it.

  Instead, I dialled Aunt Albane's number -- it seemed to ring for hours while she dragged herself to the living room to pick it up. "Em?" she finally asked.

  I didn't leave her time to think. "You know where he went."

  "I don't approve," Aunt Albane said.

  "Please."

  When she didn't answer, I said, "He went home, didn't he? Back to Brittany."

  There was silence on the other end of the line, and it told me all I needed to know. "You know home is here," Aunt Albane said.

  "I know I should have a choice. No one gave me any."

  She made a sound in her throat, like the whistle of a fish, but by then I was already hanging up.

  Home. He'd gone home -- to wind and surf, to brine and fish -- to the familiar currents and the never-ending pull of the tides.

  I would find him, and everything would be right again with the world.

  I gathered Father's maps, my heart hammering against m
y chest -- and went to look up the train timetable to Brittany.

  I left the small duffel bag with Father's armour and sword in a locker at the Montparnasse train station, and made my way back to the hospital with the things Mother had asked of me.

  They'd moved Father into a large room where other people lay sedated, moaning quietly in their sleep. Partitions of cloth were all that gave the illusion of privacy.

  I found them by the smell, which I could find even through the sour ones of sickness and rotting bodies -- a hint of sea-salt, of brine-laden wind, like a caress; like a promise, once broken, now made whole again.

  Mother sat in a plastic chair, half-turned away from me. I walked noiselessly and she didn't turn when I arrived. I slid the bag down to the floor in silence, groping for words I could say -- for excuses, but there was nothing left.

  She was watching Father's still form, her whole body taut with a terrible intensity. In that moment she looked like a princess from the depths, wild and terrible and elemental, with the fury of the sea in her grey gaze -- and then the moment was gone, and she was only a frail old woman in a hospital room, waiting for death's visit.

  I turned, without a word, and left -- running towards my train, and the waiting sea.

  Exiles of Eden

  by Brad R. Torgersen

  Artwork by Scott Altmann

  * * *

  She was gorgeous, and didn't look a day over twenty-five. Her honey-blonde hair fanned about her head as she lay beside me on the limestone sand of the beach. Two suns -- one white and the other orange -- baked our bellies. Occasionally a bubbling wave of warm seltzer water rushed in from the lifeless sea, coating us pleasantly. Her deep blue eyes blinked as I adjusted my position and gazed at her.

  The blonde's smile was fixed, like the Cheshire Cat's. She looked and felt almost as good as I remembered a real woman should. Almost. I wondered if I'd ever get the algorithms just right -- hers or mine.

  A set of bare white feet suddenly appeared, just at the edge of my peripheral vision.

  I froze -- so far as I knew, I was the only person on the planet. What the . . .?

  I rolled onto all fours and looked up.

  It was another woman. I knew her. Wanda. She stood four meters further up the beach. She smiled down at me, her brown hair cut short, just like I remembered it. She had on a pair of black short-shorts and a white tank top which hugged her athletic figure. Why hadn't I detected her coming into orbit? I smiled sheepishly at my old friend.

  "Nice toy you built for yourself," Wanda said.

  "How did you find me, Wanda? I didn't sense your ship coming in."

  "One can never be too careful, Rordy. You should know that. Lucky for me I remembered you telling me once that you'd discovered a fantastic piece of beach circling a binary. You even gave me the rough coordinates. I gotta say, you were right -- this really is excellent real estate."

  "Just wait until I've finished seeding the tidal regions with xenophytoplankton," I said. "That rust color in the sky will be blue within a thousand years. Then all this place will need are palm trees."

  "Sounds perfect," Wanda said, surveying the carbon dioxide horizon.

  "Interested in a swim?" I said. I looked down at the blonde I had built, then back up at Wanda. "Sorry I can't offer you equivalent companionship."

  "Not a problem. I'm not here to relax. Something has happened, something important. I had to tell you."

  "What?" I said.

  "There are still people in this galaxy."

  "Yeah," I said. "You, me, Ormond, Bana --"

  "No, Rordy. I mean real people."

  I forgot the blonde.

  "That's not possible," I said, standing up.

  "I've been to their planet. I've seen them for myself."

  "Where?"

  "About 3,500 light-years further out along the Sagittarius arm from here."

  I walked slowly -- not caring about my nudity -- until I was face to face with Wanda. Like me, her body was a mechanical illusion, something she'd constructed to look like her former self, using the universal factories onboard her ship. Some of the others had taken great liberties when building their simulated bodies. Wanda and me -- we'd kept it real.

  "I can't believe it," I said.

  "I didn't want to either," she admitted, throwing her arms out in a gesture of resignation. "When Carlos found me slow-coasting through the Perseus arm, he had to argue hard to get me to take his claim seriously. But he and the others were right -- there are humans on Eden."

  "Eden?" I said.

  "That's what the others call it. It seemed like an appropriate name."

  I stared, not sure I could let myself believe what I was hearing. The blonde had picked herself up and wandered to my side, glancing briefly at Wanda before looping her arm through mine. The three of us began walking.

  "It's a wonder the Swarmers haven't jumped on this before now," I said.

  "We can't really be sure what the Swarmers know," Wanda said. "But we're gathering -- everyone who can be found -- to make sure Eden has a proper defense. Because if we know anything about the Swarmers, it's that they'll find Eden eventually."

  "What about these humans, aren't they armed?"

  "The inhabitants of Eden are in no condition to fight."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Easier if you see for yourself," she said.

  Almost four thousand light-years later Wanda and I stood on an altogether different beach, along with a few of the other two dozen who had answered the call. Our mechanical eyes gazed across the white-capped expanse of a kilometers-wide bay, to the tiny collection of bodies moving on the other side. If the natives of Eden could see us, they didn't show it. They were naked and mocha-colored with proud long faces like Native Americans and hair so light it was almost white. Even the children. The men had beards and the women were pregnant. They appeared to be collecting nets and baskets filled with some sort of sea life, all from the prows of dugout canoes.

  "How many are there?" I asked.

  "Taking a planetary census wasn't easy, but they appear to number several hundred thousand strong, scattered in tribes across every continent and most of the islands."

  "Tribes," I said. "Is that your way of saying all of these people have reverted to a pre-technological state?"

  "I don't know if reversion is the right word, Rordy. There is every indication from the archeological sites we've looked at that these humans have been on Eden for a very long time, and have never risen much beyond a stone-age level of sophistication."

  "They're mystics," said Bana, whose artificial body mimicked a Hindu painting: blue skin and multiple arms, an androgynous face and no external genitalia. "They have no use for science."

  "What about medicine?" I said.

  "There isn't a single terrestrial virus or microbe on this planet," Ormond said. When biologically alive, he'd been a research physician -- a smallish white man condemned by age to a wheelchair. Now he possessed a towering three-meter frame and skin like brushed copper. "These people live at least a hundred or more of our years before even beginning to show signs of geriatric disability. Whatever force brought them here, it did them a favor in the process."

  "So they are truly human?" I said.

  "DNA shows a bit of cleaning up," Ormond said, "but yes, they're human. Enough so that if any of us were still biologically intact, we could breed with them."

  "But how?" I asked, sweeping my arm towards the far side of the lagoon. "None of the colonies survived. Earth? Gone. Everywhere humans put down roots, the Swarmers located and destroyed them."

  "Like I said," Wanda repeated, "evidence indicates that these people have been here for a very, very long time. Someone -- something -- brought them here."

  I wondered who could have survived an era of interstellar flight long enough to avoid annihilation at the hands of the Swarmers, much less discovered humans and gone to the trouble of seeding us on a world so wonderfully and rarely like our own; before it too was
destroyed.

  The Swarmers hated all intelligent life that was not their own. I knew first-hand. I'd found the nebular remnants of the other systems the Swarmers had obliterated -- inspected the crude probes those vanished races had flung into the void, unaware that their end was near.

  If your radio broadcasts didn't tattle on you, eventual discovery of the transluminal Link would. Earth and her colonies had discovered this the hard way.

  "So what are we doing about early warning?" I asked.

  "We're synthesizing a series of passive transluminal event detectors in this system's Kuiper region," Carlos said. He looked mostly like his original self, though he'd opted for skin black as midnight. "We also need to think about re-seeding some of these people to other worlds while we have the opportunity."

  "Earth tried that," I said. "The Swarmers found all our Easter eggs, and smashed them."

  "The colonies," Carlos replied, "were not aware of the Swarmers until it was too late."

  "They also retained Earth-level technology," Wanda said, "including constant Link to Sol. They'd have survived longer if the Link hadn't pointed the Swarmers to every world."

  "Which explains why Eden has survived unmolested for so long," I said. "If these people have remained at this basic level for the entirety of their existence, it's kept the Swarmers blissfully ignorant of their presence."

  Wanda simply nodded.

  I watched the Eden humans move their baskets up the beach, and into the trees. There was a village set back, away from the shoreline, and several tiny columns of smoke began to curl up into the breezy tropical air. Cooking fires? How long had it been since I'd eaten meat from a barbecue? The very thought gave me memory pangs of my last trip home to see my sister's family. Her husband had broiled New York strip steaks in the back yard, the glorious smell of beef wafting in through the open kitchen window.

  Damn, it seemed just like yesterday.

  Only now there were no more cows. Not even cow DNA from which to synthesize a new breed. The supernovas created by the Swarmers had taken care of that.