Uranians, page 19
Inside the wardrobe, Arrigo is curled into a corner, his chest pumping with rapid breaths.
“Jesus, already?” Lana says.
Down the hall, Mike Faustino turns a corner. They see each other, and Mike holds up his hands: I come in peace.
“Is he in there?” Mike calls. “I couldn’t keep up with him.”
“I needed to get away,” Arrigo says, panting.
Here is what Arrigo knows: that his work for the last sixty years has been to unwrap from the structures he clings to for support, or they will be wrenched out from under him. What he has failed to learn in time is that his vision of Qaf as a misfit paradise was one more trellis he’s held on to for too long. Now he is left a disaster; now his life is a lonely, ridiculous thing; now he knows the only way this farce could have ended is in a heap of bodies on the stage.
Crying suits Arrigo. He has the face for it, with his high watershed nose and weeping-willow curls. His eyes are red-rimmed and his voice has dropped an octave. “I’m missing memories of Earth,” he says, the words breaking across sobs. “Can’t remember my old house, my room, what pictures were along the stairs. I can’t remember Boston at all. I have, like, this sticky sense on my skin of summer air along the Charles . . .” Lana has never met any man less interested in holding back tears; it’s a superpower. Arrigo’s crying and rambling overtake each other, he rushes through the one to make room for the other. “And that’s it. Bodies of water. Miles and miles of it. The way they blinded you in the sun with diamonds—” His eyes squeeze shut and overflow.
Mike and Lana help him to his feet. Arrigo runs his fingertips under the wardrobe’s hanging flowers.
“You should come with us to greendeck,” he says to Lana, hiccupping.
“Later, maybe. I’ve got to talk to the committees about moving up rapid-response measures, then organize the biome walk-through, then check the auxiliary systems . . .”
“No, no, you need to come to greendeck.” Arrigo turns to Mike. “She’s doing that thing where she acts as if she’s responsible for everything and makes herself busy so she doesn’t have a quiet moment to feel as terrible as she does.” Arrigo is still crying, but he has a wild, unaimed perceptivity he swings around him. “This clematis needs pruning.”
Lana softens. “I’ll go,” she says.
The crew now knows to gather on greendeck during a MSME. There is a chosen spot, under St. Leo’s abandoned pillar, where people congregate. Where they can feel hard earth under them and listen to the wind in the tall grass. La ligne des larmes, it’s called. The wailing line. It’s night when the three of them arrive. The sunline is shielded, but the day-side’s albedo is bright as a moon, making the packed sand between the chaparral glow white. People make their way from across the ship, tall shadows parting the grass. They drop and breathe in its hay-like musk. The nones pass between them with tea thermoses and linen bags of crackers. Their robes whisk over the stalks. Crickets sing, not far away. A none’s shaved head gleams as she bends to a hand lifting out of the grass.
The Vine’s severance didn’t stop these episodes, but it forced everyone to confront the phenomenon more nakedly. No better teacher than silence. There’s a super-structure to them, just as M.E. suspected: coherence obscurely ordered, hard to explain, but it’s there. Like the enigmatic large-scale cosmic structures that span the universe, galactic clusters and superclusters separated by billions of light-years forming even larger cosmic filaments and knots, into an unthinkably giant web, structure at the scale of the whole observable universe. There is nothing sane about such distances. These structures speak to interconnectedness not as a sentimentality, not as a virtue to practice or fail to practice, but as a matter of nature, of inevitability. Shapefulness and mutual influence are cosmic law, change and churn spoil apartness, and things cannot help but fall into being. Just so, there is a coherence between every living particular being on the Ekphrasis, human, bird, mangrove, worm, spanning the mutual incomprehensibility of other minds, nothing magical, but a subtle rhythm of networks, a scheme of faint harmonies, the way yawns are contagious, in the same way so is grief, so is courage, so is the vital force.
Arrigo cries in a ball in the grass until he’s shivering. Lana runs her hand along his back. Shadows of feral cats dart across the desert scape like shooting stars.
“So, how are you doing? Honestly,” Mike says to her.
“About Qaf?”
“This has to be, what, your worst nightmare? You OK?”
“It’s a challenge,” Lana says. She sits cross-legged in the grass and squints up at an acacia forest suspended on day-side. A breeze rolls through its bright treetops and the grass around her ripples as if in echo. “Not my worst nightmare. Not for a long time. This dumb bottled biome and I have been through so many nightmares together. You OK?”
Mike gestures up and down his own uncooperative body. “I think I relate. Yeah.”
(Do you want to know Mike’s worst nightmare? It has always been this: that Qaf would turn out to be the same Earth he’d left. Call it parallel planetary evolution, call it determinism, that’s the thought that terrifies him. A perfect double of Earth, another Earth-like civilization. Another New Eden, Arizona waiting for him. With white, tidy houses on well-paved streets lined with maples, and front gardens shining with every bloom and sweet herb, waiting.)
Old man Mike lowers himself gingerly into the grass. He coughs and cackles as his seat drops the last inch.
“Guess no walks on the beach—” Arrigo tries to joke, but his voice fails.
“Hey.” Mike leans and takes Arrigo’s hands in his. “Who are we? We’re faggots. The world doesn’t have to be good for us to be alright.”
Mike’s hands are cold and tough like a branch. The knuckles are knobby and the frame of fingerbones palpable through the skin. Time is a wind and Mike has grown resilient in it.
Beyond their little circle, St. Leo himself comes forth out of the desert to join the nones’ work along the wailing line. Mike exclaims wordlessly, and Arrigo feels his tired skin rouse into goosepimples. No loincloths, no camelskins; Leo’s beard is light and thin; but he moves through the grass with the feverish grace of a glorified soul, a beauty weathered and dense with credible gospel. Watching him, Arrigo understands why he brought Elkeid to see Leo on his pillar so many years ago. The lesson wasn’t about acceptance, but magnificence.
Arrigo and Lana catch each other having the same idea.
“What?”
“You go first,” Arrigo says.
“I was thinking,” Lana says, “it’ll be years before we know for sure—but even if Qaf is as barren and hellish as the new telemetry says, I want to see it. See its acid clouds, its volcanos, all of it.”
Arrigo nods emphatically. “It’s going to be astonishing.”
“And if we can fall into a stable orbit, we’ll still have fuel to power the sunline for decades more. Maybe photovoltaics or harvested atmosphere could power it even farther. We could maintain the biome indefinitely.”
Leo, breaking from his rounds, joins the three of them and they make a compass in the grass. Arrigo picks a bug off Mike’s shoulder and sets it in the dust. Leo is musky and ripe, his white shirt stained with dirt and green matter and his bare feet browned and thick with calluses like hooves. Mike is shy around him, but Lana asks, with more than a little bluster, Well, did you find God? and Leo says, Oh, yes. Then he decides to play along: Funny, it’s always the last place you look, isn’t it? Leo has thrived in the wilderness. There’s starlight in his eyes. He’s showing us it can be done, Arrigo thinks. We’ll circle the scorched planet, apart but connected, anchored in Qaf’s gravity but riding our own velocity, not belonging to any paradise but the one we’ve created on the ship.
Mike, too, studies Leo. He takes a deep breath and faces each of them in turn. “Harvesting atmosphere,” he says. “Lana’s right—it could power the sunline. It could power a signal, too.”
Some time back, he explains, he and Carolyn Red Deer, experimenting with optical data transmission systems for the Hoopoe probe, realized that if they pointed a laser of sufficient power at Earth, they could re-establish a data link—in that direction, at least—sending messages by rapidly flicking it on and off, like old electrical telegraphy, or signal fires.
Arrigo stares. For Mike to even theorize about reconnecting to Earth suggests an interior shift that would have been impossible when he knew him. It’s bittersweet, that this reconciliation happened away from Arrigo, likely by necessity; one more price for his lack of trust. But, here they are now. They haven’t let each other’s hands go. Something golden shuttles between them through their palms’ contact, palms’ heat, their solid longtime grip.
The problem was fuel, Mike says, and attention. Most interstellar optical signal designs relied on series of nanosecond bursts so that the laser wouldn’t require an outrageous amount of energy, but that assumed a receiver watching for an extremely brief, faint signal, with extremely sensitive telescopes. Catching the attention of people on Earth who weren’t expecting anything would take more energy than the ship had to spare. But with an unlimited supply of combustible gas—that could work.
“What would that look like?” Lana asks. “On Earth?”
“Any observatory looking at Canis Minor would catch it. It helps that Luyten’s Star is so dim. Then they’d notice a pattern—we’d put a pattern in it, and say: Here we are.”
“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” Arrigo says, smiling.
“Oh my God, shut up,” Lana says. “Mike—what if there aren’t functioning observatories? What if something terrible did happen, and humans on Earth are back to living as nomads and subsistence farmers?”
Mike considers. “Then we’ll be a new star, with a flickering light.”
Leo breaks into an innocent grin. “A new star of Bethlehem!” he exclaims, and everyone groans, but Arrigo’s pleased, because after forty years in the desert, Leo is still the guy who takes things too far.
A long time ago, Leo asked him how queerness propagates, and this is Arrigo’s answer: aesthetically. Our thriving produces beauty and that beauty signals to others that there is life in this way of being. That’s how we persist across generations, by inspiring others like us into self-honesty. So, it’s important to show Earth that we’re alive: look, it can be done, we got here, we are thriving, we love you, hello. Whatever struggles you’re facing on Earth, look up. Behold. A beacon, a star to catch the eye and set the mind to wondering. A scented handkerchief, “designedly dropt,”
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that one may see and remark, and say Whose?
In the distance, a figure scales Leo’s pillar in a ballgown. The desert night turns its wearer into a giant bird ascending. When Elkeid reaches the joggy platform, he balances and stands upright, and sings the Act III finale from Melsinger’s opera, not Violetta’s part but the chorus of shades’ odd, atomic scribbles of melody. Without the soprano’s through-line, these pieces sound more like birdsong than composition, and the grief-stricken in the grass pause and crane and listen with the consolation of expecting nothing, understanding nothing. Except now Arrigo hears it—what Melsinger wants him to hear—faint triads emerge out of the scattered elements, nothing declarative, but a gentle web of coherences in—F major, he thinks, the key of the “Di quell’amor” theme, that love which is the heartbeat of the entire universe . . . As Elkeid sings, Arrigo—and Lana and Mike, and Leopold, and all the expedition gathered—are witnessing some new song form out of the desert.
Slowly but firmly, the ground tips under them, pointing them down, forward, into their new world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to my editor, Deborah Ghim, for her wise and rigorous shepherding of this book into its best form, and to my agent, Kirby Kim, whose faith in this book and tireless advocacy made it happen. Thank you to Signe Swanson, Alexis Nowicki, and the entire Astra House team for your stellar work, and to Rodrigo Corral and Jeanette Tran, for the cover that thrilled me at first sight.
These stories owe a great deal to their original editors, C.C. Finlay, John Joseph Adams, Wendy Wagner, and Carmen Maria Machado, and to my cohorts in the Clarion workshop in San Diego and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver. Thank you especially to Ren Arcamone, Amanda Baldenaux, Patrick Doerksen, Amy Parker, C.S. Peterson, and Sanjena Sathian for reading (far too many) drafts of these stories over the years, and for your friendship. Additional thanks to Rae Carson, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Jenny Offill, and Shelley Streeby for your guidance on these stories.
For their generosity in answering my increasingly absurd research questions, thank you to Matthew Aucoin, Jaime Hernandez, Anju Manandhar, Nicasio Reed, Kirstie Bellman, Patrick McCombs, and Chris Landauer. I am indebted to the research of Peter Wilson, Annulla Linders, and Julian Go on early twentieth-century policing and capital punishment; Timothy Teyler and Jerry Rudy on memory indexing; and, of course, Jack Halberstam’s incomparable queer scholarship. Sarah Pinsker’s superb generation-ship story, “Wind Will Rove,” was an invaluable touchstone for my own thinking.
My path to writing fiction was a circuitous one, and I never would have made it here without the love of literature, technical craft, and audacity that I learned from formative teachers and friends, especially Kathryn Shevelow, Sharon O’Callaghan, William Haywood Henderson, Emily Sinclair, Alexander Lumans, and Robin Black. Thank you to Andrea Dupree and Mike Henry for fostering the community at Lighthouse that got me to take writing seriously, and to the Clarion Foundation for keeping its workshop vibrant and accessible to wide-eyed miscreants all over.
Finally, there are the people whose wisdom, influence, and encouragement helped me bring these stories to their present life: Mom, Dad, and Chris, Michael Kalikow, George Hodgman, and Doug Grand, thank you. And thank you to my love, friend, and partner Rony Lenis, whose fearlessness and artistry gave me the courage to pick up my pencil, and whose support, faith, and patience made this book possible at all.
PHOTO BY CARLY TOPAZIO
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Theodore McCombs’s stories have appeared in Guernica, the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the anthology Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Born in Thousand Oaks, California, he is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego; the University of California, Berkeley School of Law; and the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. He lives in San Diego with his partner and their surly old cat and practices environmental law, with a focus on climate change.
Theodore McCombs, Uranians
