Descended from Darkness: Vol II Page 13

  The week after the thorn incident, for instance, he grazed the back of his neck on barbed wire---I had no idea how---and came to me to clean up the wound. I asked him if they didn't have iodine at home, and he shrugged and didn't reply. In fact, he never talked about himself, beyond---more or less---the medical reasons for his current visit. Every week he visited me, with one reason or another, as he grew up from a boy to a teen and then a man, still thin, still curly and bespectacled. When I opened my own clinic twelve years later, Benjamin was my first client.

  His medical problems were always a little odd. He was bruised in unlikely places---his right ear, for instance; suffered diseases like an arthritis that had the same symptoms as gum disease, didn't respond to medicine, and disappeared after a week; and indeed always healed miraculously and returned to me to verify the fact and perhaps discover some new ailments in the process. It is possible other doctors would have ridiculed him and his various ills, and certainly my cooperation with it and with him, but I couldn't bring myself to be so cruel to him.

  The coils, however, despite our long history together, were something new. I had sent him for an X-ray several days before, at his insistence. He brought the prints back to the clinic in the brown paper folder of the National Health, searched through them for a minute or two, and then found what he was looking for. I spread the print over the white fluorescent board designed for that purpose and examined it, not expecting to find anything out of the ordinary, or at least of the ordinary as considered in the case of Benjamin Schneider. But, to my surprise, something was there. Two greyish coils, half-transparent, testifying that whatever they were made of was not solid enough to completely block the X-rays. And there was something else that was odd in the picture, but to begin with I couldn't figure out what it was.

  "Does it hurt?" I asked. He shook his head. His arthritis had already disappeared. I examined the wrist myself, but externally it was not possible to discern anything out of the ordinary. I told him I had to think about it, and to come back to me in a few days. I looked at him, worried he might be upset by that, but he just nodded and left, satisfied, to all appearances, that his fate was in good hands. How little did you know, Benjamin. How little did we know.

  I had quite a lot of work to do in the office that day, so I took the print home with me afterwards. I didn't have a fluorescent board at home, so I hung the print before a desk lamp. I looked at it all through dinner, and for a change didn't wait in vain for the phone to ring. The coils were odd, but there was also something familiar about them, and these were two separate things, the strangeness and the familiarity. After a while I lost my concentration and watched a little TV. One of the channels was showing a horror B-movie, and I watched it disinterestedly as my mind floated here and there on its own without my being fully conscious of it. It's a way as good as any of dealing with problems, but this time the solution came not from that, but rather from the tiny part of me that was actually watching the television. One of the monsters there was sawing through the arm of another monster, and I noticed immediately the cheap special effect---the saw and the hand about to be cut were two separate images filmed at different times and joined artificially. It was easy to see that the saw didn't really touch the arm. And it was the same phenomenon that I could see in Benjamin's X-ray---the coils looked like an artificial addition to the picture.

  There was something calming about this, of course. Incidents like this are not common, but sometimes, despite all precautionary measures, they happen. A foreign object finds its way between the camera and the subject, the result being spread in all its glory before my reading lamp. If Benjamin still needed it, I would send him for a repeat scan, and if not, all to the better.

  And still the coils seemed familiar.

  On his next visit I explained all this to him, apart from the strange feeling I had about the coils, and he seemed pretty happy. Another problem occupied him by now. He had something in his eyes. That's how he put it, and I couldn't get a better explanation out of him. I examined his eyes and could see nothing out of the ordinary, apart from a redness that could have been caused by a thousand and one things, most of them not worthy of attention. But when I examined his right eye through an ophthalmoscope I saw it: a tiny grey circle, barely seen against the redness of the cornea.

  There was one in his left eye too.

  They both seemed familiar, just like the coils. They also seemed, as hard as it was for me to believe when watching something that was real and not a scan, unconnected. If the coils in his arm seemed like foreign bodies that had entered by mistake into the field of vision of the X-ray camera, then the circles in his eyes seemed like foreign bodies that had entered by mistake into the field of vision of reality.

  I think I managed to hide the shock I felt. I gave Benjamin eye drops, closed the clinic early, and went home to rest. And watch TV. And think.

  In the morning I arrived at the clinic two hours before opening time and dismantled the ophthalmoscope. I examined all the parts through a magnifying glass, but found nothing to explain the little grey circles that were similar to the little grey coils that were similar to nothing I knew even though my brain insisted otherwise.

  I didn't know how to reassemble the device and decided to just buy another. I had money, after all, and besides, it was tax-deductible. I spent the rest of the time before my first patient's appearance in thoughts of this nature, which were relaxing in their simplicity and mundanity but which led me nevertheless, in one way or another, to the mystery of Benjamin's grey parts; thoughts that were only halted with the appearance of the patient himself.

  "Benjamin," I said, surprised. He never came to me two days in a row. "Is everything all right?"

  Usually, he would merely point at the source of pain or discomfort, speaking as little as possible, and let me complete the diagnosis on my own. Not today. "I have a crop circle," he said.

  "Excuse me?"

  "A crop circle. You know. Like the ones aliens make."

  "Benjamin---" I said, but he had already launched into an explanation that was exceptional both in its length and its content. Crop circles are giant circles, and sometimes more complex shapes, that are formed in wheat or corn fields by the pressing down of the stalks. All kinds of attributes are ascribed to them, and stories are told of strange things that have happened to the stalks. There are people who believe that they are proof of the existence of aliens. The rest of the world, of course, assumes it's merely a practical joke.

  "Fine," I said. "I don't really believe in aliens either, but let's get back to you, Benjamin."

  He looked at me. "I have a crop circle," he said again. "On my tummy."

  I stared at him, thinking about whether I needed to send him to see a psychiatrist. Then I had him lie down on the examination table, turned on the strongest lamp, and opened his shirt. I asked him to point to the place where the circle was, and he did.

  Despite everything, I needed all my willpower not to laugh.

  "Benjamin," I said, "that's your navel. Your belly button."

  "It's a crop circle. Look at the hairs there, see what happened to them."

  "It's only natural that the hairs around..." I said, and then I saw.

  They were bent. Or stood, erect, in unnatural angles. Circles within circles, around the navel. But more than that---they were grey.

  I passed my hand over his stomach, touching them. I wasn't sure I was touching them all. It seemed to me that some passed through my palm, as if they were air. As if I was air. It was not a pleasant feeling. Under my hand, Benjamin shuddered. I felt a kind of electric current, something passing between us through my spread fingers, touching-not-touching his crop circle. Many things were suddenly clear. Many things. Little clues, grazed necks, strange illnesses, illogical pains. Aliens.

  "What do you think?" he said. "Am I going to be all right?"

  I looked at him, straight into his eyes. They were grey. There were strange geometries behind his eyes, and I thought I unders
tood them. I didn't say anything. His eyes grew large. Only after a moment I realised he was afraid. And only a little after that I realised he was afraid of me.

  "You too, Dr. Katz," he said. "You too!" And he passed out.

  I climbed on the chair, and from there onto the table, and stood there, high, looking at the thin, silent man who had spent the majority of his life with imaginary diseases that were, at the end, quite real. Maybe he was in love with his diseases. Maybe he was in love with me. It didn't matter. Not now, with the aliens controlling him---and me. I gritted my teeth and jumped, head first, into the crop circle, into his navel.

  He still comes to visit me every week. Right after they released him from the hospital, he came to see me. How nice of him. Maybe he's still in love with me, even after I jumped into him. They told me the doctors managed to recover his digestive system. My head, though...

  He comes to visit me every week, and the little greys are in his eyes, on his hands, forming and growing, growing and spreading, all over his body. I have no mirror here, and I can't look at my body, but I think it's the same with me. I think I hope it is so. It's hard to be sure, with a head like mine.

  I think I see the world in black and white, or grey. Apart from Benjamin, no one would understand, of course. I know exactly what the medical thinking is. I know exactly what the people who surround me would think of anything I would say. I know what I would have thought. I'm well-behaved, but that doesn't help. Only Benjamin, only Benjamin can help me. He and the little greys, the growing greys, the great big greys. Now, when I see the look in his grey eyes, when I imagine the touch of his hands, the coils in his wrists, beyond the reinforced glass window separating us, beyond the jacket enfolding me, I know that he loves me.

  I love him too.

  But most of all I love the greys.

  After the Fire

  Aliette de Bodard

  In her dreams, Jiaotan saw Father: hands outstretched, the flesh of the fingers fraying away to reveal the yellowed, tapered shape of bones, the deep-set eyes bulging in their sockets, pleading, begging her to take him away.

  "You're dead," she whispered. "Rest in peace, with the Ancestors---watch over us from Heaven."

  But the Ancestors were bones and dried sinews, shambling upright from the wreck of their graves---anger shining in the hollows of their eye sockets as they walked past the devastated gardens, the withered trees, the dried-out waterfalls and rivers. And clouds marched across Heaven, a billowing mass of sickly grey spreading to cut the path of The Red Carp as it rose away from Earth...

  Jiaotan woke up with a start, instinctively bending over to cough out the fluid that blocked her lungs. But something held her, pressed against her as tightly as the embrace of Earth.

  Where... She tried to pull herself upright---to breathe---but she was still held. She couldn't---

  Father...

  "Shun Jiaotan," a voice said with the cultured accents of the Court, loud enough to cover the frantic beating of her heart. "Stand by for awakening procedure."

  Something shifted, and she was upright, the fluid choking her. A cough wrung her body, spraying the obstruction out of her lungs. She inhaled in huge gulps while the light around her slowly grew, the stale air searing her throat.

  Where...

  But she remembered. All the dreams---the grinning skulls and the withered flesh on brittle bones, the forests coated in liquid metal, the wind that bore the rank smell of carrion...

  When the hibernation couch released her, Jiaotan stumbled out on her knees and bent over, racked by coughing fits, feeling as though she was going to spit everything out, lungs and liver and stomach. But the only thing that came out was more of the hibernation fluid, a grey ooze that spread across the pristine metal surface of the ship's quarters.

  It took her a while to stand, and a while longer for the images to stop hovering in front of her face---for Father's burnt face to disappear, back among the dead where it belonged.

  "Shun Jiaotan," the voice said again, echoing under the metal ceiling. "The Red Carp has need of you. Go to the navigation room."

  A quick glance around her confirmed that all the other sleepers were still in their couches; the ship around her was silent. What had happened?

  But she knew better than to ask. The only way to communicate with the ship's Mind would be to jack in physically, and that could only be done by the engineers and the pilots, those with the proper implants and authorizations.

  Why had they woken her up, then? What need had they for a poet, brought on the Exodus only as a favour to her sister?

  Her sister.

  Sukuang---she was the engineer, she was the one who truly mattered---the one they'd wake up if there was a problem.

  Something was wrong. Jiaotan pulled herself to the door, sliding it open with a touch of her hand, and moved into the corridor, trying to ignore the growing hollow in her stomach.

  Everything was deserted; everything gleamed with the coldness of metal. The light, reflected on a thousand surfaces, danced and coalesced into ten thousand patterns, ten thousand forms that might have been drawings or characters---the beginning of sentences hovering on the edge of significance, always dissolving before Jiaotan could focus on them. And there came no other noise but her own laboured breathing as her lungs struggled to re-accustom themselves to a normal atmosphere. She hadn't realised, before the Exodus, how huge The Red Carp was; going upwards, she passed row upon row of hibernation rooms, from the scholars to the officials, from the officials to the lower ranks of the Court---and further up was the highest room, where the Emperor, the Son of Heaven, the holder of the Divine Mandate, slept in his own couch. A little lower than this would be the navigation room, a reminder that the pilots of the Exodus were almost---yet not---as powerful as the Emperor.

  Jiaotan walked through the corridors, seeing everything merge and blur into an endless dream of metal.

  There was a wind, blowing through the ship---not the cold one between the stars, but a hot and rancid one, with a smell like spoiled butter, like curdled cheese left too long in the sun. The metal quivered and danced, became the red of flames which swept up, and Second Cousin Yu's skin crinkled and blackened like charred paper, and her eyes popped like chestnuts in the Fire's wake...

  Something swam out of the darkness in which she walked: a picture against a red background---a fierce, dark face with a beard and eyes like black beads. Batons, crossed in front of silk robes.

  A guardian deity, and his twin by his side, pale-skinned, his two straight swords drawn against threats. The doors they protected were tight metal panes, cold and reassuring.

  Jiaotan laid a hand against the doors, feeling the coolness travel up her arm---into her heart. If she closed her eyes, she knew, she'd see Father again, or perhaps Aunt Qin or one of the other concubines: all the dead she couldn't forget, an endless chain of ghosts stretching back to the wreck of Earth. Blood, stronger than mountains, more enduring than jade or cinnabar.

  Why had they woken her up? It should have been Sukuang at the door, not her.

  "I'm here," Jiaotan said aloud. "Now would you tell me what you want?" She moved her hand to the control panel, long enough for the ship's Mind to recognise her. The doors parted like the leaves of a book, and she entered the navigation room.

  Inside, it was cool and dark and silent. The air smelled of ginseng and pine essence---not quite enough to mask the staleness of the recycling.

  This was ridiculous. She couldn't possibly fix whatever was wrong. Couldn't the ship's Mind tell the difference between Jiaotan and her sister?

  Something shifted in the shadows---the sound of breathing coming in small, ragged gasps. Someone? Impossible. All the colonists slept in their hibernation couches; all the pilots were in their berths, augmenting the ship's computing capacity with their own minds. There should have been no one---

  "Jiaotan?" a voice asked.

  Sukuang. But she didn't have her usual confidence; her voice sounded empty, and a little sta
rtled, as if she'd been doing something that Jiaotan had interrupted---something reprehensible.

  Cautiously, Jiaotan approached. The hollow feeling in her stomach, if anything, grew larger.

  Sukuang sat on her knees at the foot of the pilots' wall. Above her, bulges in the metal marked the crew members' berths. The metal was translucent, letting her see the crew, resting as snug in there as in a hibernation couch. Their faces were pale against the grey fluid, their eyes bruised; their mouths were set in troubled grimaces. One of the control panels---that of the second-in-command---blinked dark blue, the sign of a problem.

  "I should have known they'd wake you up," Sukuang said, as Jiaotan approached.

  "I---" Jiaotan stopped, seeing what Sukuang had spread on the ground.

  A letter on white paper, stamped with the seal of the Courts of Hell, filled with scrawled, disorderly characters---and a welding knife, carefully set aside from the writing brush.

  That wasn't good. You only wrote to the dead Ancestors for one reason, and that was to apologise for the shame you would be bringing on the family.

  Such as the shame of not living on.

  "Aren't you supposed to be fixing the ship?" she asked slowly. All that Sukuang had to do was pick up the welding knife and open her own throat; and there'd be nothing Jiaotan could do---and nothing the ship could do either. It had been programmed to take care of itself and the passengers in the hibernation couches, but it couldn't act outside of that.