Mothership Read online

  And where were we off to? Iceland.

  All the black folks in the United States were moving to Iceland because no one lived there anyway. This was a dream, remember, so forget the gaps in logic. Finally I got on a catamaran. I stayed out on deck even though it began to rain. It was okay because suddenly I was wearing a yellow slicker, just like the others. The engine was so powerful I felt the vibration up through my shoes, strong enough to shake me.

  The drawbridges along the canal had been lifted, not so much for clearance but to wave goodbye. As our boat pulled away we passed the garbage transfer stations and old warehouses that had yet to be refurbished. They were slagged apart, walls falling, broken down and decrepit. I could see into each one as we went by. As we moved I was overjoyed. We all were. Imagine that: a happy story about black people.

  As we sought larger bodies of water our boat passed a warehouse as ramshackle as the last ten. But this one was full of gold. Not just gold. Honey, too.

  Honey in jars and bowls. Two hundred clear containers. Honey spread sticky across the wooden floorboards. Yellow candles were lit and flickering. I heard the wind against the side of my face. Rain slapped my temples, but I felt warm.

  Gold coins were gathered into piles two feet high and just as far across. Yellow fabric was strung up on the walls, tied into enormous bows. It was a majestic and reassuring sight. As if we were being told—by who, I don’t know—that we were doing the right thing. Not running away, but running toward something. A fate we couldn’t imagine. I understood, in that moment, that this dream was meant for me. A message.

  Go.

  When I woke up I booked my ticket.

  Near the top of the mountain Gorroon fell farther and farther back. Maybe he was heavier than he looked. My own thighs were boiling from the exertion. I was nearly jogging to the top. On the path I passed no one. A ribbon of clouds descended over me. A mist came down from the gray sky until it touched the peak of the mountain. Then it descended farther, consuming the earth quietly until the trail behind me was obscured. There was still the trail ahead. Around the next curve of the mountain path I finally came to view the great glacier. Skaftafellsjokull.

  I still wasn’t anywhere near it. The ice sat miles away from the mountain, but I saw it clearly. Sunlight reflected against ice particles in the air, surrounding the distant glacier with pixie dust. This was the place where I’d meet my fate. Nowhere could be better. Once I understood this, I calmed. Even took out my camera and took pictures of the world while I waited for Gorroon.

  When he arrived I saw that his beard had grown since I’d last seen him an hour ago. Now it had reached his navel. He stooped deeply as he walked, resembled the old Chinese women at the Canal Street train station. I always wanted to protect their fragile-looking spines from injury, scoop them up in my hands and carry them to a room full of cushions. For an instant I felt the same affection toward the troll.

  Our breathing was different. His was much louder.

  “Not used to the climbs?” I asked. I actually taunted the thing. I snapped his picture with my camera.

  His cane had a blue stone embedded in the handle, which he rubbed with his fat, yellowed thumb. “I’m having a hard time with this part,” he admitted. “I really didn’t expect you to go all the way up.”

  I smiled about it, even laughed at him.

  But once he’d recovered his breath the troll stopped seeming like a fool. As soon as he could stand straight he was next to me. I didn’t even feel the movement, like water trickles through a closed hand. From ten feet away he’d seemed like an old man without the sauce to catch a cab. Now I could see his mouth quite clearly, he was that close. His teeth were tiny. Splintered bone fragments. Hellish. Hideous.

  “Hello again,” he said.

  He bent down, almost like a bow. Instead, he grabbed my left leg and pulled it from under me so that I fell backward, landing on the stones and snow. My camera went tumbling along the path.

  Wow. He had small hands, but a strong grip. One hand on my left ankle, one on my left knee. I struggled, but it was a cursory movement. Just to say I tried. He pulled my knee toward him and pushed my ankle the other way. The pressure was instant, amazing.

  I looked down thinking, Will my knee pop out of the skin? Will my ankle turn to splinters? Gorroon patiently insisted that my lower leg snap.

  Then my left hand moved into his long hair.

  I hadn’t meant to do it. I wasn’t thinking, just suddenly fighting.

  The stuff on his head rivaled his beard for length. It wasn’t as greasy as it looked. It crackled in my hands, like straw. I grasped closer to the scalp until I found a patch that wasn’t brittle. My leg began bleeding down into my left shoe.

  Once I had a tight grip I leaned back so all my weight was pulling at his skull. His skin tore away from his scalp. He started panting.

  Had I hurt him?

  The mountain, the glacier, they seemed to be waiting for an answer. Which of these two do we get?

  “You can’t have it,” I told Gorroon, but he wasn’t listening. I don’t think I even understood what I meant. There was blood on my shoe, yes, but there was blood in my left hand as well. His blood.

  My right hand went for his beard, and the left was doing so well that I decided not to intervene. My body knew what it was doing. You might even call my determination happiness. He’d take my leg, but I would steal his face.

  As my right hand came near his whiskers, Gorroon opened his mouth. I thought I was far enough away that he couldn’t bite, but he had a jaw like a shark’s and the teeth popped past the lips to reach me. The outer edge of my hand was there for him to rip, so he tore into the flesh and then pulled backward, peeling the skin and taking some meat. My right pinky curled down on itself and wouldn’t straighten. I still had feeling in the rest of that hand.

  I thought maybe I should just roll and take us both over the precipice, but the point wasn’t to kill him anymore. I’d begun to doubt that such a thing was possible. Kill a myth? I’d watched enough horror movies to know that an unwatched monster always returns. So instead, the point was that I should live. I refused to die. If I had to stay here with him, on our backs, for fifty thousand years then that’s how it would be. Think of all the travelers, men and women, who would be spared Gorroon’s attacks if I did. Wouldn’t that count as something good? We’d be here, locked in battle until our bodies calcified, until we became another landmark on the mountain, one more folktale.

  My leg wouldn’t break. It was obvious from the troll’s frustration. He might have liked to scare me by appearing triumphant, but when he attempted to laugh it made his shoulders buckle. It seemed like he was stifling a sob.

  Meanwhile my grip had locked onto his scalp, all nine of my usable fingers pulling there. Who knew I was such a wonderful, stubborn bastard? In my experience there seemed to be only two kinds of men—brooders and brats. I’d come all this way, hoping to discover a third option. I’d never cared if I turned out to be rich, or brilliant. More than anything I just wanted to prove to myself that I could be brave. That, unlike when I left that good woman behind, I wouldn’t run from the hard tasks of life. I’d messed up before, but I wouldn’t do the same this time. I would persevere. My fatigued brain was commanding my hands to release, relent, surrender, but they refused.

  I refused.

  My camera was found by a pair of Belgian kids out hiking two days later. They uploaded the pictures to the internet, even the last few, where Gorroon’s face was captured. Our thrashing bodies, with the glacier in the distance, filled the last clear shot the camera snapped. Generally, the pictures were dismissed as mere online hoax. Most commenters on the page said they could create better images without leaving their homes, right on their laptops.

  But if you’re one of the few who felt compelled, somehow lured to Iceland, maybe by those photos or even by a dream, then follow the journey I’ve laid out here. When you reach the top of the mountain and see the glacier in full view, there�
��s a short tongue of land that juts forward. It’ll seem a little dangerous to walk out there, but step onto it anyway. At its edge you’ll see an enormous boulder. It’s as big as two men. Come close. Press your ear to the cold stone. Forget the doubts of nonbelievers. Quiet your breathing. Listen. Yes.

  I am whispering in your ear.

  Too Many Yesterdays, Not Enough Tomorrows

  N.K. Jemisin

  The alarm clock buzzed at 7:00 a.m., right after reality rolled over. Helen tapped the snooze button for ten more minutes. When the alarm went off again, she believed for a moment that a man was in the room, creeping toward her. She sat up ready to lash out with nails and fists and feet, then memory returned and she chuckled to herself. A dream. Habit. Too bad.

  BLOGSTER login: Welcome, TwenWen!

  [Thursday, ??? feels like 10 p.m.]

  Hel, you had the rapist dream too? Thought I was the only sicko! Y’know, back in college psych they said those kinds of dreams are a representation of your subconscious yearning to be rescued from your out-of-control situation. (That, or you want a penis. ^_-) Usually I try to keep mine going awhile, see if he actually manages to score. Never does. Figures; even my Freudian fantasy rapists are pissant schmucks.

  In browsing news, surprise! There’s yet another spec-thread running among the BumBloggity brats. “The government did it” version 2,563,741. Wish they’d get back to aliens or God; those are more fun.

  BTW, gang, meet SapphoJuice (his blog). He’s in a snowy reality. Has a studio, poor guy.

  Hey, anybody heard from MadHadder lately?

  Life, post-prolif: she climbed up from the futon and shuffled across the room, her feet chuffing along the tatami-matted floor. When she reached the kitchen she took care to yank the fridge door open so that the glass bottles would rattle and clink. Noise made the apartment seem less empty. Then she slapped onto the counter the items that would comprise her breakfast: a cup of yogurt and a cellophaned packet of grilled fish. She rummaged awhile for the stay-fresh drink box of chai tea concentrate; she knew where it was, but rummaging helped to kill time. The milk was as fusty as ever. Irrationally she always retained the vague hope that if she got up soon enough after the rollover, it would taste fresher. Mixing it with the chai covered the not-quite-sour taste, so she microwaved that for three minutes and then used that to wash the fish down.

  Chewing, she paused and grinned to herself as she felt a bone prick the inside of her cheek. She’d eaten the packet of fish seven times lately without finding it. The bone was always there, but tiny and easy to miss. Finding it made her feel lucky.

  It was going to be another beautiful day in infinity.

  BLOGSTER login: Welcome, SapphoJuice!

  [Cinco de myass, the year 2 bajillion and 2]

  SPINNYSPINNYSPINNY

  Hi, all. Thanks for the warm greetings. My daily routine includes two hours of spinning around in my desk chair. My mom never used to let me do it before, so…whee!

  Yes, Marguille, your guess as to the origin of my username is correct; I am indeed a squealing Herbert fanboy (sorry, Conty, not a lesbian =P). Only got Children Of in my studio, though. Sucks donkey balls. Big hairy fat ones.

  Ah, c’mon, Twen, specthreading is fun and oh so good for you. Granted, it’s pretty much a complete waste to wonder how and why the quantum proliferation occurred because we can’t do dick to fix it…. And granted, the BumBloggers do seem to have the same arguments over and over (and over and over) again…but hey, there’s comfort in the routine. Right? Right? ::listens to crickets::

  Hel: wow, Japan? You must have been quite the adventurer, before.

  Jogging; she loved it. The rhythmic pounding of the hardpack under her sneakers. The mantra of her breathing. She would never have taken up jogging if there’d still been people around to watch her, maybe point and laugh at the jiggly big-boned sistah trying to be FloJo. Before the prolif she’d only just begun to shed her self-consciousness around the Japanese. They rarely stared when she could see them, and her students had gotten used to her by then, but on the street she’d always felt the pressure of the neighbors’ gazes against her back, skittering away from her peripheral vision when she turned. The days of Sambo dolls at the corner store were mostly over, but not a lot of Japanese had seen black people anywhere except on television. My parents must’ve felt the same during grad school in Des Moines, she’d always told herself to put things in perspective. It hadn’t helped much.

  Now, free from the pressure of those gazes, she could run. She was fit and strong and free.

  Around her the barren, cracked desert stretched unbroken for as far as the eye could see.

  BLOGSTER login: Welcome, KT!

  [Saturdayish, The House That Time Forgot]

  Fighting the lonelies. Everybody still out there? Conty? Guille? Hel? Twen? (Hi, Sapp.) I haven’t heard from MadHadder either. What if the silence got him?

  Don’t want to think about that. Topic change. Did you know Mr. Hissyfit keeps going through the rollovers, too? I guess cats do think.

  Sappjuice, it sounds like you’re living in Fimbulwinter (sp?). I’ve got grassy plain. It’s boring, but at least I know it can’t kill me. You have my e-sympathies.

  She liked best the fact that the day started over after about ten hours. Incomplete reality, incomplete time. She’d stayed awake to watch the rollover numerous times, but for a phenomenon that should’ve been a string-theorist’s wet dream, it was singularly unimpressive. Like watching a security camera video loop: dull scene, flicker, resume dull scene. Though once the flicker passed there was grilled fish and stale milk in her fridge again, and her alarm clock buzzed to declare that 7:00 a.m. had returned. Only her mind remained the same.

  She usually went to bed a few hours after the second alarm. That gave her time to print out the latest novella making the rounds in cyberspace, read it in the bath, and maybe work on her own would-be masterpieces. It didn’t bother her that the poems she wrote erased themselves every rollover. If she wanted to keep them, she posted them online, where the mingling of so many minds kept time linear. But doing that exposed the fragile words to the scrutiny of others, and sometimes it was better to just let them vanish.

  She decided to post the latest one to share with her friends. The new boy wasn’t a friend, not yet, but maybe he had friend-potential.

  BLOGSTER login: Welcome, Marguille!

  [Sunday, 5 Marguille’sMonth, 2 years A.P., 2 a.m.]

  I agree with Twen; specthredding is evil. But I can’t help it; been reading the Bumwankers stuff (I know, I know). my vote has always been for the government theory. $87 bil. for an “emergency fund”? Shyeah. Probly only took half that to build some knd of new super-weapon, or hotwire a particle accelerator. “I know! Let’s shoot some protons at the terrorists! Yeah! Oops, we bro,ke the universe!”

  But seriously…I keep thinking that somewhere out there, normal reality still exists. no, scratch that — I know it exists, because it’s possible. Fun with quantum theory! ’Course, that means oblivion exists too. (This is what we get for letting that guy Shröedinger experiment on his cat. Should’ve sicked PETA on him.)

  SappJuice, don’t feel bad about your studio. Hel’s Japanese apartment’s probably half the size of yours. (What do you call half a studio? A closet? ::ducks rotten tomatoes from Japan::) Anyway, it’s not like the rest of us are so much better off. What difference does a few square feet make when they’re the same square feet every damn day?

  She got the email just before she would’ve gone to bed. The ding from her computer surprised her. Weblogs worked, as did other forms of public communication. Direct, private contact was impossible. Individual-to-individual relays— instant messaging, email—worked, but were always iffy. Most people just didn’t bother to try; too disappointing. And then there were the rumors.

  But she read the email anyway.

  “To: Hel

  From: SapphoJuice

  Subject: Hi

  Helen (seems so weird to sa
y your full name),

  Hope you get this. I read the poem you posted in your blog. I just wanted to say…it wasn’t beautiful, but it did move me. Made me remember the way things used to be, and made me realize I don’t really mind that the old world is gone. I got put in a garbage can by football players *every day* during my freshman year. My mom always used to tell me I’d never amount to anything. How could I miss that? Anyway.

  I guess the only thing that bothers me now is the silence. And sometimes I don’t even mind that, but sometimes the snow just gets to me. Why the hell couldn’t my pocket universe have formed around an *interesting* environment? I could dig an endless beach, maybe an endless forest. No, I get snow. It’s so quiet. It never stops falling. I can’t go out far without losing the apartment in the haze. Sometimes I want to just keep walking into the white, who cares? Then I read your poem.

  Sappy (yeah, I know)”

  She sat at her computer, savoring the newness of the moment.

  BLOGSTER login: Welcome, KT!

  [Ohwhocares? Someday, somewhen]

  Mr. Hissyfit got out. I tried to catch him but he just ran straight away into the grass. I keep going out to call for him, but he must be too far away to hear me.

  Stupid cat. Stupid goddamn cat. I can’t stop crying.

  She emailed SapphoJuice back and told him that she had feared the silence only once. That had been right after the prolif, when she’d still been adjusting. She’d started running and hadn’t stopped; just put her head down and cranked her arms like pistons and hauled ass as fast as her legs would take her, as far as her lungs could fuel. When she’d looked around the apartment was gone, swallowed into the cracked-earth landscape. Instant panic. The apartment was only a fragment of reality, but it was her fragment of reality, her only connection to the other incomplete miniverses that now made up existence. Even before the prolif she had been happiest there.