Dead Astronauts Read online

  “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: <>

  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.

  <> 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.

  <>

  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.

  xii.

  to be both receiver

  and received

  Moss against Moss, when it happened, rare, was like intricate garden combat. Between plants. Between obstinate weeds. Pugnacious. Sped up, slowed down. First one in retreat across a dusty yard full of skeletons and then the other. Add a third, a fourth Moss, drawn to the same reality, and there was in the confluence, the flux of outspread filaments and curling grasp nothing but the bliss of tiny flowers and exploding spores.

  Until, finally, there was no difference between attacker and attacked, and no shame in cease-fire, because Moss could not tell herself from her self. From that place of comfort, the comfort of being greater than before, Moss could rise again in human form. One Moss. Ever divisible. Under no god. Under no rules of ungoverned, forgotten countries.

  Many times—not this time, when Moss had stolen out to parlay with a fish—the mission meant Moss consolidated would stand leaking green mist out of the helmet of her contamination suit, as the three lurked in the shelter of the ravine. Leaking in loops and spirals that settled thick to the ground, began to form a hazy emerald specter that resembled Moss. When Moss closed her suit, it was done. There,
before them, would stand what appeared to be another Moss, fuzzy at the edges, but the same warm smile. The same inquisitive look.

  A gaze that transmitted light from one semblance of an eye to another. All of Moss was eyes. None of Moss was eyes.

  Moss would talk to her doppelgänger and her doppelgänger would set off on the mission, accompanied by Chen, who could navigate the wasteland to the holding ponds and who turned on camouflage so, in his suit, he could not be seen except by arcane means. While Moss’s doppelgänger, this pointillist portrait of her, disassembled and reassembled by Chen’s side, in a shimmer of molecules that leapt out across the sky, circled back, formed a film creeping fast forward across the ground. Chen would wait at the holding ponds, while the wraith of Moss-like would spiral past and visible-invisible to the Company sensors, penetrate the Company building and complete Moss’s mission for her.

  Or that had been the plan. In the past.

  It wasn’t safe for Moss to get closer, for Moss was the way out. Without Moss, they’d never make it to another City if they failed.

  Moss did not just tend tidal pools. Often, before Grayson, Moss sent ripples across those still surfaces. About the creatures who lived there and what their lives were like. She looked up from the pools, become what lived there, staring as the giant looming down to peer in, to be both receiver and received. In an endless amplified loop. Slipped across realities. Very tactical, as Grayson had said, and yet infinite. Each time it changed them, just a little. But Moss couldn’t remember what they might have been before, at the start. None of them could.

  Moss couldn’t extend the field. But, at a price, she could become a door—they walked through her and she followed, and wasn’t that the definition of sacrifice?

  As much as clinging in a film of green to the back of Botch as he dove so far and so deep, and twisted and bucked to dislodge what could not be dislodged, for Moss’s grip extended beneath Botch’s scarred skin, hooks in deep. Even as bits of her tore away from the violence of Botch’s panicked tunneling into the depths. Into the darkness.

  But she could see what lay there. The skeletons in a familiar tableau. The memories she should not have. Made manifest by the nature of the mission, the nature of her body.

  Hush now, hush now.

  Soon you will be free. I will make you free.

  But could Moss make her free? Could she free them both?

  No, but I can …

  This was the part where things began to fall apart, because they were meant to fall apart, because they were meant to fall apart because they meant to fall apart. The ways they’d been cut off. How Moss had not yet shared that she could reach one more City, and maybe one more after that, if lucky. But the respite the three had always had before, retreat to the tidal pools of the coast for a time … that was closed to them now.

  The Company had snuffed out the gaps. Redrawn the map, smaller and smaller. The end would come soon. And, too, because Chen was falling apart and though Moss could hold him together, against Charlie X’s curse, that, too, would come to pass, inevitable.

  There was no path by which she could un-curse a genetic code so intimately tied to breath.

  Nor could she deny what the fox had told her, what had finally decided her. They were running out of Cities, of Companies. Realities were finite. The fox had found their limit out on the edge of beyond, had let her into his mind enough to see. Slivers that ended with seven. All the slivers you could want, that math could provide, but only up to seven. And perhaps seven brave acts were necessary, too. Not just three. Infiltration from the sky, yes, but from the very rotting bones of the land. The carcass of a behemoth falling apart, rising up to meet the rain.

  Reaching the outermost point, or at least the farthest that could be borne. In a suit, looking at rock, rock underfoot. Unsure if the formation was the suggestion of a helmet, of a face. Or just a coincidence, an outline that meant nothing.

  Would never know.

  But Moss knew.

  * * *

  Botch stopped writhing and twisting, settled unsettled deeper in the mud. But still she could not relax. There were things to plant in Botch’s brain and body that would feel for a time like worms eating flesh but were only Moss’s map. Were only a version of Moss.

  You do not need to pretend with me.

  Direct, into Botch’s brain. She could see into there, knew Botch pretended dumb animal but was not really that either.

  A kind of shuddering shrug from the fish.

  <>

  Moss projected a scene in Botch’s head. Just Botch wandering between the holding ponds. Just old reliable Botch, looking for food. Gobbling up misshapen mudpuppies and toads and worms and fellow fish. Just happy to come closer and closer to the Company. And who would really be able to tell the sheen of green atop Botch’s scales? A coat of algae picked up in some other pond. That sweet-sharp smell that wasn’t meant but similar. Should Botch smell good? And then the green mostly gone and Botch long since well away from danger.

  <>

  To live. To thrive. To continue to rule over all of this. Botch could not botch that habitat more than the Company. It was contaminated, wild, always polluted but always resisting. Botch would grow huge and rule over all, a benevolent tyrant, and if, in the process, the Company—contaminated across all the versions—fell away, then maybe the foxes would dance across the floor of the dead Company building, but they would never have a use for the holding ponds.

  Best you be ruled by your own.

  <>

  Yet there came the nod in her mind that told her Botch would not fight them. That Botch feared the unknown watchful preternatural nature of Moss more than the known cruelty of the Company. Mistrusted her less.

  Botch let Moss in and they were both by the sea, by Moss’s tidal pools. Under the ruined arches. Botch was small again, Botch was so very small smooth still in a tidal pool and Moss, giant, peered into that pool and shone down like the sun on Botch. Covering Botch. Beaming love down on Botch in rays of calm.

  Botch’s one eye milky and closed. Opened. Moss knew now that Botch had been born that way. Knew that the eye saw more than the other one. Knew Botch would not remember their parlay because she would give him the mercy of forgetting something so human. Give herself that mercy.

  <>

  Was that Moss or Botch? For some part of Botch would forever be with Moss now. Part of Moss would, clandestine, contaminate all the tidal pools. If they were lucky.

  Botch was very large, towering over her reflection in the glimmering water, and she was small and tired.

  Goodbye, Moss said to her doppelgänger or her doppelgänger said to her. Goodbye and hello.

  The body did not exist separate from the soul because the soul didn’t exist. But the future never left the past behind, either.

  Her doppelgänger peered out from a burning shed and said nothing more. Shut the door, with her self inside. Taken by the conflagration. Burning at the heart of Botch.

  The duck with the broken wing had not appeared during their parlay; the duck was nowhere nearby. Relief beneath the weariness of what she’d lost to Botch. What she’d conceded to the fox. But she never thought about why, until later.

  That perhaps the duck had already been there.

  xiii.

  disposable and finite

  and vulnerable

  There wasn’t always mission for the three. You couldn’t mission forever, Moss would say, or there would be no mission. Building an image from before as prod and tease: When she had hopped between the tidal pools and had run onto the beach just to pretend she had legs, to pretend she was not a wall of onrushing onrushing wall onrushing.

  Danced on the beach, all alone. Had made play into a game of tag that wanted to be caught, to be it. Nothing must be glum. Nothing must be serious, even if it was serious. Not all t
he time.

  “This is what we would look like as fish.” (Chen’s idea, laughing as he said it, but Moss had nodded serious, still recovering from her mission. “I would bob near the surface, Grayson would be some kind of barracuda, and Moss would be a school of minnows hiding in seaweed.”)

  People were serious, but the world wasn’t serious. Not the drunk, lurching beetle that had feasted on the remains of an alcohol minnow. Not the seaweed that brilliant and wet-slapped displayed its color and its texture there, against the silly sea anemones blazing forth their tentacles. And if there were fewer creatures on this Earth man had made, then still they took time to be still. To be thoughtful. To frolic. Before returning to the eat, drink, forage world.

  The three played cards sometimes to take the edge off. They had an old battered deck. Or played catch with a worn tennis ball.

  Or, as here, as now, standing outside the south entrance of the Balcony Cliffs, each aware of the slant of ravine and half-dead trees through which they could still see the Company, for purest white did blaze.

  Grayson’s eagle eye trained on the holding ponds, that she might determine from some break in routine or intervention if the Company had sussed Moss’s secret meeting the night before.

  Moss: “Never liked team sports, though.”

  Grayson, affectionate: “You are a team sport.”

  Chen found this so funny he could not stop laughing. It cut through his disapproval of Moss sneaking off, which evaporated as he would too, one day.

  They had been in this spot before. Sometimes this was where they found the dollhouse, half-crushed, the one they used to strategize, and brought it back inside, repaired it. Best they could.

  This time they had found what Grayson called a Frisbee.

  “What’s a phriz bee?” Moss asked.

  “This.”

  “This plastic disk.”

  “And you throw it.”

  “Why?”