ASIM issue 55 Page 12

  The tugs will accelerate, one thousand engines heaving, and we will accelerate with them, following the charted courses, bringing us in line with the next target, the next cluster of nine, and their waiting Cullsmen. In six months we’ll be at constant acceleration with nothing to slow us down but the curve of our course.

  Work will begin on the new Second. Billions of people will die, as the core of their planet is pumped out like blood transfused to the Host, as their world’s gravity slackens, as their liquids and gases evacuate the surface and transpire through the gulf of space to the inner endopolis of the Host.

  The soft walls will peel back, and the Great Rains will begin. The adjudicants will re-open, one by one, and our people will spread throughout them. Our children will know prosperity. The Cull will be forgotten for a time, except for the Second’s shining core-moon in the sky, surrounded by the glimmering stars of its last cities.

  I will see my daughters. I will see my wife. I am ready.

  * * *

  The coupling takes a month. I spend that time at the windows of the Hook station, far above the planet’s crust, numbly watching as the Host sucks the Second into its centre. Billions will die. My family will live. I am a hero, and I do not know how to feel.

  While we wait, we are to undergo the slow process of debriefing. This too is part of the Cull, designed to repatriate us, to welcome us back.

  Eryllin stops at my side, where I sit staring out of the glass. “I will not tell them how you almost surrendered,” she says. She points to the other forty-three. “None of us will.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. Perhaps it is the first time we have touched. “Tell them,” I say. “Let them know, that the Cull will be better prepared.”

  She nods, then is gone.

  Around me I hear the others talking, still. Few of them speak to me, but I know the questions they are asking. They are the same questions we have all wondered for so long.

  We watch for days as the Host splits open, its black outer shell yawning wide to reveal the lights of the endopolis inside, lining the concave inner walls like distant glimmering stars. In the centre lies the jagged lump of the old Second, a heart extinguished.

  I watch for days as the Host engulfs us. The endopolis becomes the sky of a perpetual night, as the sun’s light no longer falls here, absorbed for power by the outer shell of the Host. I watch as all my tugs launch, and align the Hook. Everything is slow, ponderous, the movements of celestial bodies changing the natural order forever.

  I am last to debrief, and I leave the unfolding tableau to complete this final stage of the Cull. There are two of them in the room, a man and a woman, the first I have seen from the Host in twenty years. They neither smile nor frown as we begin. They show me no sign of the honour I have been promised. I am no ruler of a world any longer. I am but another cog in a line.

  Over three days I tell them everything. They question me most about Laret, but I have no special insight to share. I do not know why he did what he did.

  At the last they tell me of my wife. She remarried three years after I left. Since then my daughters have been raised by another man. Of course they want to meet me, the man and woman reassure me, but my daughters are women now, with their own lives. They are not the young girls I have watched dance through my rooms for the past twenty years. I cannot expect life to be as it was.

  “Of course I know that,” I tell them.

  Now they smile, in tandem, and I wonder that this too is part of the Cull. How many times has this process been enacted? How many times have Cullsmen come back to face this?

  I thank them and leave. I stand at the glass by Eryllin’s side, and take her hand. She looks at me and smiles. I see in her eyes the same thing she must see in mine.

  That night we retire to the same chamber. We do not need to speak. Our lovemaking is slow at first, but grows urgent as we continue. At the last I feel twenty years of nothing rattling loose within me. As we lie in each other’s arms, I feel free.

  * * *

  THE CULL NEEDS YOU

  There are few of the signs, now, only those left rusting in place, waiting to be replaced. The next Cull will not be sent for fifty years.

  It is warm here, lit by the fresh core-moon overhead. The sky is a faint blue and the air is redolent of flowers. I recognise some of the scents from the Second, their seeds carried on the transpiration winds, to settle in the dirt of the Host.

  I walk along the polished bitumen decks, heading to a place I once called home. There are people gathered in the streets, sipping drinks from long-stemmed glasses, settled around picnic tables; all of us waiting.

  I look up through the sky, to the dark bulk of the world I Culled. The landmasses are still recognisable, and I can make out the dimly guttering cities glowing like stars in the day-lit sky. I wonder how they feel, to watch their world dying to succour ours. I wonder on the traitor Laret Ark, who died trying to save them.

  I scuff a blooming weed with the toe of my boot. It is green and young. The air smells of incense and roasting meat.

  * * *

  Sylabry greets me at the door. I remember her now. It is all I can do to keep tears welling up in my eyes. Behind her will be Glaya with that old doll, and Foral, and together we will dance. The stuff of dreams, twenty years gone, and I have missed it all.

  She steps up, puts her hand to my cheek, and I feel no shame as the tears spill over her fingers. This is what I loved, I remember. This was my life.

  “I waited,” I say. I cannot say it clearly, for fear I will choke on emotion. But she hears me.

  “I knew you would,” she says, and pulls me into an embrace.

  We remain like that for a long time. When I am calm again, we walk, around the streets where we once lived. She is still beautiful, though the lines in her face have deepened. She tells me of her life, of the girls, of the man she married, and I can only feel happy for them. I am not jealous of him, I would not try to steal them away; I am only sad it was not me.

  “He’s a good man,” she says at last. “He raised our daughters well.”

  “I love you,” I say. The words come out unexpectedly, but once they are said, I am glad it is done. It is true, and though it cannot be true for us any longer, I want her to know.

  She takes my cheeks in both her hands, kisses my lips, then looks into my eyes.

  “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you.”

  Then she turns, and walks away.

  * * *

  I wander the street parties in a happy daze. When Eryllin drifts to my side and takes up my hand, I hardly notice. Her fingers stroke circles against my palm. We sit down in the middle of the celebrations and watch fireworks splash across the sky.

  “To a new life,” she says, raising a glass.

  I take my own, raise it to hers, and we drink.

  Soon after, the first drops of the Great Rains begin to fall.

  Paint By Numbers

  …Dan Rabarts

  EVENT:

  The fact of the blank canvas.

  Paint, brushstroke, texture, light. No images, not unless they arise unbidden, half-imagined, in the mind of the viewer. Merely suggestions of time, place, as glimpsed through half-lidded eyes turned towards the sun. Or perhaps the moon.

  Another work complete. Still no reason why. Subroutines whir in the background, compiling the data, searching for meaning, for light in the darkness. What my hands do with the brush, the sponge, the paint, is a distant thing, something I merely observe.

  SYSTEM: STABLE

  * * *

  EVENT:

  The chubby man clinks his glass against mine, flashing that venal smile which makes me think I have somehow been cheated. This place is full of light and voices, my works suspended on white walls, signifying much, saying nothing. I sip the wine. It tastes wrong, like this body feels wrong, somehow borrowed. Tiny wheels spin behind my eyes, recording the faces in the room, gauging reactions, analysing what it is about these smears of shade and tone
and texture that draws a tear to one eye, a smile to another.

  As afternoon stretches into evening small red stickers reading ‘SOLD’ appear on the title plaques. The chubby man pumps my hand again and again, his palms sweaty and his eyes glazed with some kind of greed I have yet to understand, and it seems that this is a good thing.

  SYSTEM: STABLE

  * * *

  EVENT:

  It is one such evening, on which strangers gather in my gallery to exchange their cash for my fathomless paintings, when I see her. I notice her because she is not there to look at the art, but to look at me. This makes me curious. I am no work of art. She, however, could be. She seems at once bold yet uncertain, fiery yet tempered, like she knows something I should know but which I do not.

  “Hello,” she says, and in this small way we find our beginning.

  She asks about the paintings, but I calculate that she is not really asking about the paintings. Additional programs come online to interpret her advances, and to inform me of what the appropriate human response should be. I invite her to my studio. It is all I can offer, for since arriving here it is all I have ever had. Prior to this there is only the dark memory of the void that came before. Somehow, in the transit from the place I once called home, a place I barely recall, all remembrance of who I once was has been stripped away. The data remains, stored on great humming memory banks somewhere across the stellar deeps, waiting for my return. Here, all I have are my canvases, brushes, oils, tools. A chair, a small table, a fridge large enough for milk, cheese, and ice. A mattress and blankets under a window. My studio has few lights, for I prefer the light of the sun to reveal my work. The dark reminds me of the place I do not remember, the place from whence I came.

  Thus it is that by the low silver of the moon I touch her cheek, brush back her hair, kiss her neck. Thus it is I come to know her.

  SYSTEM: STABLE

  * * *

  EVENT:

  She works serving wine to the wealthy tourists who flock to this lakeside village in the middle of nowhere. They come for the view, the fresh air, the food and wine, the waterskiing, and to buy my outrageously overpriced art. My subprocessors gather all this data, parse it and store it, searching for patterns of logic in an irrational world.

  She rides a scooter, with saddles on the back. Sometimes I ride with her, clinging to her waist, my legs braced straight to keep our balance, my eyes squinted shut against the rushing wind. I like being this close to her. It feels right, despite the danger. The mountain roads sweep under the scooter’s narrow tyres and we whirl precariously across the face of the world. Later we stop and rest, among the high places and the trees, and take wine from her saddles, although this seems wrong to me, and we drink only enough to taste the vintage. Then we kiss, and skin pressed to skin is warm against the cool mountain air as we seek another, more magical, higher place.

  SYSTEM: STABLE

  * * *

  EVENT:

  She says I shouldn’t sleep in the studio. Something about the paint fumes affecting my head. I don’t think my layers of silicone data storage can possibly be affected by chemical gasses, but I do not tell her this. From what I have observed of this race, were I to reveal my true nature to her she might very well think me mad.

  Her small house is not far from the town, a short walk uphill from my studio, the gallery, a bit farther than the boutique restaurant where she works. When first I set foot in her house I feel comfortable. Everything seems oddly familiar, as if I had seen it somewhere before. Perhaps it is just a place that makes one feel as if they had come home. The table is set for two, everything arranged to suggest the walls had been waiting to receive not just one, but another. The house has been waiting, perhaps, for me.

  There are no photos; no fragments of life and memory splintering through the walls, glimpsing at a past I can only imagine. There are gaps, however, as though things have been removed. Like a past erased.

  Nor does she have any of my paintings.

  This makes me sad, though I cannot say why. My paintings mean nothing, so why should I wish them upon anyone?

  There are shelves of books, tales of strange worlds and distant lands, and a small desk where she sometimes sits and writes, making her own worlds, her own adventures. When I ask to read them she blushes and shakes her head. They are not ready, she says, not even for me.

  I do not ask her about the empty rooms, the closed doors.

  It is summer, and we throw wide the double doors onto the verandah, letting the sun pour in until it sets. The lake glistens silver throughout the day, yet I cannot bring myself to stare at it for long. The sight of it brings me pain, as much as a construct such as I might feel pain, and I look instead to the jawing peaks, the spangled dark, where the snow and the utter silence of space chill my bones.

  She cooks for me, joking that I look like a starving artist and I need to eat. I laugh, as the programs tell me to, and I do not argue. My system can process human food well enough to maintain the illusion. I engage in the charade, never revealing that I am merely an observer for a distant, higher power. She does not cook well, but I tell her that her food is delicious. This seems to be how these things are done.

  Her bed is like a dream, a waking illusion of another life, somewhere I have known but could never have known. Her skin is sensual, her body ceding to mine, merging with mine, like oils on canvas. I record this for later analysis, wondering what it might mean that she cries while we make love.

  SYSTEM: QUERY

  * * *

  EVENT:

  I continue to go through the motions of paint and charcoal and brush, and the chubby man tells me I am something of a sensation—‘out of this world’, he says, which draws an unexpected grin from me. By day I paint, in the evenings I return to her abode. Sometimes she is there, more often she works. I pass my evenings on the verandah as summer dwindles, and more and more often my gaze is drawn from the distant stars to the cold, haunting surface of the lake.

  Sometimes I walk the promenade, ostensibly to observe the people there, but I find myself inevitably on the promontory, overlooking the dark waters. My chest aches, but I know not why. I draw my coat closer about me, and turn away, and flee. The lake whispers to me as I retreat from its chilling eye.

  SYSTEM: QUERY

  * * *

  EVENT:

  For all my efforts to understand these people and their emotions, their fascination with the ephemeral, as summer darkens towards autumn I am still no closer to achieving full comprehension of this complex beast. They work to earn money, this I understand, then they waste it on matters of mere moments: food, wine, the pleasures of art, or the flesh. It makes no sense.

  Autumn deepens and the tourists dwindle, a lull between the summer holidaymakers and the skiers who will, apparently, fill the village in winter.

  I grow weary.

  The more I ponder the meaninglessness of life, the less I am inclined to paint. I cannot see the point. Little as it matters to me, however, it seems to matter very much to her. So I try, clinging to the task I was sent here to perform, a purpose which grows seemingly more impossible every day. If I cannot understand this woman, this oil to my canvas, how can I be expected to interpret the collective insanity of an entire race, spanning countless civilisations?

  SYSTEM: QUERY

  * * *

  EVENT:

  Winter.

  Snow on the ridges and in the streets. A spreading halo of ice on the lake, a giant pupil contracting as it tries to focus, to hypnotise me, to draw me in.

  I can no longer sit on the verandah with the doors flung wide, for this aggravates her. In summer she wishes the place cold, in winter she prefers it warm. Another human mystery I cannot fathom.

  As if life is imitating the seasons, she grows cold. Sometimes she yells at me—because a whole day might go by and I haven’t painted a stroke; because she comes home late from work and I haven’t cooked for her; because she says she’s just trying so damned hard an
d getting nowhere. This time she leaves and slams the door, and I do not see her again until it is, perhaps, too late.

  SYSTEM: ALERT

  * * *

  EVENT:

  It has been four days since she left.

  I have not been to my studio. I cannot explain this inertia. I sit at her small table, watching the snow flurry without, watching the lake contract to a blind eye, staring white at the grey expanse above. Though I have no physical need to eat, this fleshy form has grown into its habits, and I drag myself to the kitchen to find sustenance. This is a most lonely endeavour.

  I am forced to turn on lights.

  In their hard incandescence I am confronted by my own visions. In the intervening months, some of my works have made their way into our home—her favourites, as she has had her pick from my studio before the gallery man takes the lion’s share to sell. It has given me pleasure to see her smile, or ponder, or sigh, and sometimes I have seen a tear glisten in her eye. In this harsh, artificial light the paintings look gaudy, inane, macabre. They do not speak to me, their creator, as they speak to some. Art is something I do, not something I understand. I do not know why my forgotten masters gave me this talent, this power, to reduce a rational person to a fool blathering over arcs of colour.

  These images, fragments of nothing, are pale reflections of other people’s lives. I now understand that those who see them invest them with meaning, and this gives them value. I wonder what it is about the painting hanging here in the kitchen that catches her attention. Nothing in the data I have gathered to date can account for why this ring of white, fringing arctic blue and fading to blackened spikes in the centre like some vast gaping maw, should cause her to stare into its depths with such wonder, such horror. They are, after all, no more than reflections of colour, waves of light, frequencies measured and interpreted by the eye so that a primordial inner being might know whether to fight, flee, or feed.