“This,” her father says, the stone a matte black promise in his hand, “is how your ship will travel.” With a bravura flick, he throws it out onto the lake, but all she can focus on is the spike of tendons in his forearms, the frail human machinery of him suddenly revealed in this one motion. She vows to hold the memory of it in her mind, because she will not see him again after this night. The stone blips across the water, one, two, three—and then the stone vanishes.
Her father is wrong.
The following day, the Mercury launches, and she is one of a thousand souls in cryosleep in its hold. The ship’swarp drives punch open spaces in stellar fabric, fracturing dimensions and passing through the wounds. It streaks through the first wormhole and the second. But some tiny unforeseen leaden vector of chaos knocks it from its path and the ship shifts in the innards of reality and is spat back out half-molten and by some miracle (or not) is spun out into the orbit of a planet light years from its intended destination: a harlequin world of light and glass and glittering life that watches what remains of the ship spiral down, the fires of its forbidden engines strangled by a merciful atmosphere.
###
It is an elaborate contraption of two interlinked discs, one within the other, that spins, settling on a symbol of what he does not know is a rendering of each symbol in the Rider Waite Tarot displayed within a jagged triangular aperture. The pendant is not expensive. It is not even worth the risk it took his mother to steal from a yard sale while the old lady was being chatted up, slipped into the pocket of her smoke-stenched nightgown as a gift for him; he saw her do it from their living room window and still played along at how happy he was when she presented it to him, because even that young he knew his mother had had more unhappiness than she deserved and needed no more.
At lunchtime, he sits in the very corner of a coiffed field of artificial grass, eating the few things he has packed to eat. Today he has taken a handful of mealies sprinkled with chocolate for sweetness. As he hurries each one into his mouth, there is the sudden feeling of someone watching him, and he looks up at a girl he has never seen before, or at least never noticed. Her hair is entangled in elegant braids about her face. There is a sorrowful bow to her brows. She sits down, folding one leg, deerlike, over the other. Both he and her are dissected by the sun coming through the chainlink fence that marks the limit of the school grounds; they both become bundled pieces.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, swallowing. “I know. Mealy grubs are gross.”
“They’re not so bad.”
That, and her clothes—when he pauses to look at them—eases his guard, just a little. She understands.
“I like your necklace,” she says. Directing her gaze solely at his sternum.
“It’s a pendant.”
“Does it spin? It looks like it spins. Can I spin it?”
“NO.” Then, crestfallen at her expression, “You can sit near me if you want, and I can do it for you.”
“I am sitting near you.”
“Nearer. To see the symbols.”
Her eyes narrow.
“You trying to be cute?”
“…no?”
“Well, you’re failing.”
Before he can realize that this is flirting, a girl is interested in me she scooches over to be next to him. His body will surely give him away. He breathes like cattle breathe, heavy and ungraceful. His pulse becomes treacherous. The pendant spins under the flick of his finger, whirring hummingbird wing-swift before the mechanism settles on a symbol. Other people, people who knew what the symbols meant, would express terror or joy or anxiety or disbelief at what the talisman revealed. The Tower. The Ace of Pentacles. The Hanged Man. The two of them at sixteen know none of this. So they make up a story.
“This one looks like my dad after he’s spent too long on his hololink,” the boy says, pulling at his face.
The girl holds laughter behind her teeth.
“Don’t be stupid,” she says with a nonchalance that convinces neither of them. “That’s a king. Look at the crown.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
He holds an invisible crown above his head and pulls a fiercer face, rolling the eyes up, gurning his mouth wide.
Laughter defeats her, finally and fully.
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
He spins it again. And again.
“Doesn’t it make a neat sound? The br-r-r-r-…”
She nods.
“You can spin it once, if you’re careful,” he says, before he can stop himself. The import of this is not lost upon her. Wiping her fingertip on her pants, she extends a nail so clean it almost glows, and sets the pendant into crackling revolution.
They both realize, then, that they are one and the same, and the pendant is a beacon. The way they know.
###
The Officer is one of the first to revive, vomiting gelatinous fluid and thrashing out of his cryococoon, sodden. Cold wind—wind!—and a shocking vista of planetary mosaic meets him; the ship is halved, the break bisecting the stasis rooms, and the floor and semi-shattered rows of tanks give way to ragged, steaming tongues of metal and naked air. The planet is painful to look upon: a world of bizarre structures coiling into the air, bases thronged with mad geometries hard to distinguish from one another. Jewelbox world.
Red and yellow and pink and green…
The air is peppered with grit and is hot upon his face, thin but breathable.
Then he hears the screams.
The passengers who have not been blown out of the ship are waking in their pods, some of which have drained and some not, some of which have shattered while others remain miraculously intact. A symphony of the drowned arises: pale limbs beat at unyielding lids, passengers clutch fistfuls of glass in bloodied hands and yaw pieces of it outward like hatching birds, gasping in air through lips glistening with translucent gel. The flames lick at some of them, and they pop like kernels, hyperoxygenated as the gel is. They make the perfect fuel cells. Arranged fireballs whorl and diminish. Screams. Stench. The atmosphere is too thin to sustain fire for long.
Charred bodies are strewn over the lip of the ship where it has broken, and along the descending expanses of it, dropping like locusts onto the glowing luminosity of the planet’s surface. Where the ship meets regolith, it is as if the very core is right there beneath, pulsing like a thing electrified. The planet outside presents some vestige of infernal creativity; perhaps God smashed panes of colored glass together and speared the earth with them.
…orange and purple and blue…
Except God is not here, because what the Officer does next is dress himself in sodden rags and hobble along the rows of seared cryopods, withdrawing a firearm from his belongings beneath his own pod, and euthanize the drowned and the drowning, the burned and the burning, and those maimed in countless other ways by the ship’s catastrophic landing.
No avenging angels descend at his act. No clarion sounds. No devils leap up to judge him. There is not even guilt; just an abstract sense of unease, like he has forgotten to tie his shoelaces and he is running and keeps running while the plastic nubs tap against his feet.
Something crackles by his side.
Two pods, bright with power, gel draining from them. A young man and a young woman. Even in unconsciousness, their vitals rise vibrant on the working display screens; they are young, both barely twenty-one, their bodies both lithe and soft with youth. Around the boy’s neck, a pendant glows with residual heat. It resembles a rounded hockey puck inscribed with arcane symbols. In a triangular aperture within it, the Officer sees a tiny scratched tower, hewn in two by a line that is supposed to represent lightning.
I can see a rainbow… see a rainbow… see a rainbow, too.
###
“You really love this boy? Enough to go with him?”
“I do. We’re engaged.”
She flourishes the ring like a weapon.
As he looks at this earnest young woman, doomed to have been his daughter, compassion almost makes him weep, because, despite her recklessness, despite her choosing that idiot recruit, he cannot begrudge her for seeking a better life. Behind her, on the far shoreline: bleak majesty of processor buildings and mountainous deposits of landfill.
“Now you remember when you go up there,” he says. Tears make his eyes glow. “That you can tough out anything, ok? You won’t forget where you come from. Anyone of anything gives you shit, remember where you come from.”
I look like him, she realizes, the choreography of his emotion somehow amplifying the likeness. The muscles of our faces pleat in the same way when we are sad.
###
Of the pioneering thousand souls on the Mercury only ten remain alive, including the Officer. Together, they put out the fires and gather resources from the hull of the ship. Each of them takes a cabin near the ground.
Every crackle and rumble of earth starts a panic attack in her. Will the ship tip over? Will the ground break? Will the whole fucking thing collapse on us and finally end it, because we should not be alive?
“I got you,” her young husband tells her one night, after they have eaten some dehydrated meat and retired to a cabin looking out over the glassy planet. “We’ll be alright as long as we’re together.”
“I know,” she says, fingering the chain around his neck. Cupping the pendant in her palm. It is a cooling salve against the warmth of his body, which radiated so much heat, always, like he was sick. It was just his being alive. She holds onto him, tracing the shapes of his shoulder blades. He put on weight after they left the poverty of the city and started soldier’s rations. So many things provided after a childhood of denial and struggle. And now so many things taken away.
She falls asleep to his soft snores. Days and nights turn quickly on this planet, and some unquantifiable time later, when it is dark, she wakes up and sees a sharp-edged thing watching them in the starlight beyond the cabin’s porthole.
###
…the Mercury passes through a fourth and fifth wormhole, becoming plural. Some tiny unforeseen leaden vector of chaos shifts it in its path, and everything changes, again, and the ship shifts in the innards of reality and glops over the dream-substance of it, and the backdrop of the dimension is struck, torn, revealing painted-on stars, planets, cosmic fragments, and all the adorning lives as things illusory. An unspooling occurs, in gravity wells and across quantum tunnels. It is a pouring-out of matter and a pouring-in again. The Mercury skips six, seven, eight times, ten times. More.
###
The Officer’s heart breaks every moment in his chest as he looks at the handful of survivors huddled together—all new recruits—green, young, too young for this, yet cruelly strong enough to last for days in the alien environment. You joined the army to make a better life for yourselves, and now you’re back to this. Scrimping and struggling to survive—or, at least, slow dying. There is enough food from the Mercury for them, but he has implemented a strict rationing, anyway. In the daylight hours, they crouch around the ship, conserving energy, because even five minutes of motion sets their hearts on fire. The effective oxygen in the atmosphere is low, here. A siltiness in the air turns their throats to dust, and speaking is painful, so they do not converse much.
The planet itself offers only confusion, and seems lifeless; it is hard to tell what is animal or vegetable, what is sentient and moving with agency, and what is merely wind-blown mineral. The flowers spotting the terrain are not flowers at all but delicately arranged pieces that move as one on brittle stems that can be picked off, just like petals, whereupon they lose their jewel tone and become clear as polished glass. One of the youths tries to nibble a tip of one and, to their shock, his teeth pass straight through it. “It doesn’t taste of anything,” he says gummily, incisors bright with a kind of gloss. “But I like it. S’like fudge.”
The Officer hobbles into a nearby forest of jade spears, stepping around the bunches of dagger-shard flowers in case they offered any sudden threat. Tapping the jade with the muzzle of his rifle, he finds the substance unyielding, the impact making an unpleasant ringing in the air. What kinds of life could change its density at will? The sound is returned—from something not him. Notes peal out; sunlight from the dun star in the sky’s apex glitters along scratched textures in the spears, making a succession of colored lights, and the sound comes again, like singing.
The Officer drops his gun and flees.
###
Their wedding was invisible. A thing of subterfuge. Only him, and her father, and her. The pendant is cold against his breast under a suit she has tailored to perfection, and she is in a dress she has made for herself with offcuts salvaged from the lakeshore, looking seraphic in her beauty. The garment is diaphanous, her skin an almost luminous black under lacelike ochre.
They are old-fashioned. The father gives her away, at her request, and they walk in slow-motion through an abandoned warehouse on one of the landfill sites. Nature makes a pageant of it, a whole ceremonial. Spotlight of sunbeams, shimmering dust as confetti, elegant shadows of long-defunct machinery making silent witnesses. The groom is at the far end of the chamber. He does not even hide his crying. They meet, he shakes the father’s hand. The father says some words. They all weep. The married couple kisses. He takes her on his motorcycle, and as she steps up onto the saddle, hiking up her dress to reveal leather boots thick as a sow’s hide that her husband has cobbled for her, she turns one last time to wave at her father, the papers for their departure secure in a satchel around her new husband’s shoulders. The shoreline of the lake—so grim, so mundane to her in all of her growing years—becomes almost holy in its finality. This is the last I will see of it. Everything is precious when you are leaving.
Don’t forget me, her father mouths as the motorcycle roars in acceleration over lead-poisoned roads.
She never does.
###
Another Mercury appears in the sky while they are sleeping. This Mercury overshoots, skimming the gravitational pull of the planet, whickering out into deeper space and vanishing. The warp drives plot a new destination and attempt to jump it elsewhere. The warp drives miss, punching another hole into some new realm, and reality breaks again.
###
Later, when the news reached, the monitoring stations on Earth would broadcast messages from the space program officials. “There is always a risk of something going wrong with such new technology, there is always a margin for error,” and other lies. After a year, they will cut the resources allocated to locating the craft by half and sunset warp drives as an experimental propulsion technology entirely. In five years, a quarter. In ten years, they will employ one single person to send transmissions out and listen for a return signal, and when she eventually retires, no one replaces her, and the ship and all its souls are considered formally lost. Services and memorials are held all over the world: grieving human faces blown up to the size of stadium screens. Artificially generated texts convey the horror and the bravery of these lost souls. At the lake, bees still wobble along their golden flight paths, and it is as if nothing has ever changed, nor ever will.
###
After a week passes, they give up the desiccated rations from the hold and take to harvesting the ‘petals’ of the flowerlike things and cramming them into their maws, teeth crushing down into softening matter that is tasteless and odorless and yet utterly exquisite. She resists—she is the last to eat of them—but her husband persuades her, and she has nothing else to do, and if they all die from it, then she wants to go, too, so she eats. After another week, they stop feeling hungry. A few more days after that (twelve hours here, the planet is restless, spinning while the sun smolders from horizon to horizon) she realizes she can see the indescribably precious network of blood vessels under her husband’s skin. “Look,” she says. “Hold your hand up to the sky.” He does so, constellations glittering beyond the translucent flesh. Bones make darker shadows within it.
He turns apoplectic with fear and, before she can stop him, takes his gun, stomping out into the glassy ground, and fires upon the crystalline structures. Not aiming for any particular target: just the nearest cluster (“Look,” his wife shouts, seeing movement, “stop!”), and then there is the susurration of a million rolling things: a carpet of pearls unfolds, the structures break, the structures fall apart. Marble-like droppings race away from him in all directions. The ground is livid with light. Clouds of diamond dust explode under his gunfire. The plants, or animals, or whatever they are, release neon buckshot. One bursts apart as he advances on it—and the velocity of its fragments takes his face, and he screams red ruin as he falls.
###
“I want to die.”
“You can’t.”
“You need to leave, love. Look at me. I can’t breathe… I can’t…”
“We’re not doing that,” she cuts him off. “That’s the easy way out. Whatever this is, we’re seeing it through together.”
As she looks down at her husband’s panting, sweat-cooling body, a title materializes like bold light in her skull, signifiers for them both. Veteran. Veteran’s wife. The names are as good as any. The specifics don’t matter. They are they are they.
###
Back on Earth, the father who showed his daughter how to skip stones talks to her every evening when the shadows wear the edges of his apartment and all the screens have gone dark. Weed drops him into it. It helps him focus on her: her image, the ghost of her motions around the place, the way she rolled her eyes, the tone of her laughter that was so infectious. She loved omelets. He always made the best omelets for her, or so she said. And you could believe it; his daughter was never one to bullshit.
Eight years after her disappearance, he takes something stronger than weed and doesn’t wake up.
###
One of the recruits wakes one morning and looks in the mirror of his cabin, and walks out to the other, almost entirely swaddled in a blanket, only his eyes showing. The color of his irises is vibrant, iridescent, as if a dragonfly flew into each one and crystallized.
“I can’t see my outside,” he tells them. Their hearing has changed on this planet. Every sound is tinny—every sound except the rush and whisper of silica fragments, the wind-chime tinkling of things.
“Remove the covering,” the Officer grunts. He, too, is pale, drawn in tense shapes.
The recruit does so.
The veteran and the veteran’s wife and the Officer and one other woman don’t say a word to him.
“I can’t see my outside,” he says again, suspended circuitry of a human being.
###
The Officer locks himself in what is left of the bridge, which is, by some happenstance, running bare functions on power reserves in its forward fuselage. He consults his screens and star charts and overlays maps onto the view of the terrain outside, now empty of anything that could resemble life. There is only the ink-stained terrain, mindless chromatics that drive needles of rage into him at his new colorlessness. Breathing in fills his mouth with the taste of blood.
“This is the Mercury,” he says into the console, but he is so sick he is unsure if the words actually manifest from his sidewinding thoughts. The sounds of his body distract him: the rushing of fluids, the gurgle of acids. He had not realized before that each human being emits a low-level hum of bioelectricity; you just need to listen out for it.
“…Mercury? This is the Mercury, transmit location? We—”
Interference snarls the incoming transmission. The Officer turns quite still. Then he starts to shake. Someone answered. The console screen is a green and black enigma. Renderings of the ship (torn into two pieces) revolve to the left of a data screen that transmits power reserves, temperatures, memorials to the deaths of almost all of the Mercury’s functions. A comms screen overlays this at the incoming transmission. He tries to respond but doesn’t know what to say.
“This is the Mercury…”
“We are the Mercury… We…”
What are the odds of another ship flying in this part of space, with the same name?
Sudden light catches the Officer’s attention, and he looks out of the porthole to see the inflorescent blue of warp drives burst through clouds. It is their Mercury. Their own ship.
“Am I—”
The ship flares in acceleration and disappears past the atmosphere.
###
They take to chipping at the ground and gnawing on the fragments. Most of the organic structures are wild shades of fuchsia. Some patches are a blank that makes their eyes hurt: a color illegible to the rods and cones of human vision. Sunburst-yellow expanses of terrain chip easily and soften quickly, yielding a satisfying, savory flavor profile when ingested. These are their favorites.
The veteran’s wife feeds him shards, places them like communion wafers into the hole of his mouth.
“I miss home,” she says. Tears fall softly.
He groans in confirmation.
All he does is spin the pendant around his neck these days, waiting for a new symbol to show at every moment. He spins it now with one stub of a finger. His eyes are huge, lidless in his face, and he is blind in one of them. He watches the mechanism like a terrible cyclops until the spinning stops, and a winged woman holding two cups appears in tiny metal scratchings. The markings are almost too tiny to be legible, but she looks to be pouring liquid from one into the other.
“She’s making a cocktail,” his wife whispers. “She’s trying to get all the angels fucked up.”
The two look at one another. He huffs in what is now laughter for him.
“I… can’t see you,” he wheezes, realizing. “I can only see stars where your body is.”
“Then know me by my voice,” she whispers. “Know me by this.” She takes his hands, drawing them together. Their human skin clinks where it touches. They are pellucid, both. Touch and sound are their intimacies now. Light passes through them, entirely.
One week later, there is nothing left to see except two entangled glassy beings, beautiful in their polychromy, a ship, and fractured ground.
###
…everything changes, again, and the ship shifts in the innards of reality and glops over the dream-substance of it, and the backdrop of the dimension is raked with talons, revealing in the gaps between painted-on stars, planets, cosmic fragments, and all the adorning lives as things illusory. The end of the thread is picked and unravels by the technology of the Mercury’s warp drives. A little glitch. A little rip becoming bigger, becoming rips, boring like proliferating parasites in spacetime. The ship flies. The ships fly. The energy isn’t duplicated; it is bisected, over and over, the iterations weakening. The iterations, though weak, persist.
###
This time, the ship lands on the glassy planet, which they name Hollina after the astral navigator on board. All thousand recruits exit, bright and smart. They are among them: the young man with the pendant, and his wife. They have landed near the hull of the other Mercury and marvel at the surreal explosions of life around it, substance sculpted almost deliberately. “Look at that,” she says, gesturing in her spacesuit. “Don’t you think they’re kind of people-shaped?”
###
The Officer is electrified with terror: at the other ship, at the humans that swarm the surroundings, suited, armed, equipped with everything they should have been. Once he thinks he sees someone who looks like him. Who is him, or another version of. He has been reading about entanglement, running simulations, pushing the shattered ship’s power to its thinning apex. How many times can a wave function branch? How exactly had their warp drives operated? Had they broken some cosmic law? He wishes all the scientists hadn’t died. “I’m just a soldier,” he says thickly, to no one. He wonders: if I see myself, will I decohere?
###
The ships fly.
###
In one reality, they are gendered and sexed in a manner that has no human analog—yet they are together, again. Long-bodied in this one, segmented and proliferate-limbed, they sit in the grubbing yard and pull small pink-and-brown creatures they called mealies from clear containers, clinking them together and pushing them into their mandibles. You have good taste, one says, wiggling antennae at the other. Of course I do, comes the reply. I’m with you. Their segments color in pleasure. Their pleasure is sounded out, too, in an extended purr like the spinning of wheels in their throats:
br-r-r-r….
###
A father throws a stone for his daughter across the lake, trying to skim it. It falls straight through the water without skipping once.
###
In another reality, his mother doesn’t steal and buys the talisman with her own money, and there is no moral difference in it, because the object is still the object. “Whenever you feel uncertain in life, just give it a spin and it’ll show you what to do.” He spins it.
“What does this mean?” he says, showing her the tiny symbol.
###
On another planet, in another reality, composite hangman beings of wood-and-flesh spend their suspended lives ankle-first and lollop in topsy-turvy buildings with piscine elegance. Fibers in their beamlike crowns detect light as it falls on them: sudden and flaring. Something big is in the sky. A ship makes cobalt streaks in clouds, ripping them open. Scientists in monitoring stations across the globe hear the dull insistence of the AI through floor-set speakers—trajectory error, trajectory error—but before they can respond, the ship is gone, zipping out of their atmosphere, skimming out of their reality.
There but for the grace of God… the hanged men say, clacking their beam-heads together in mourning.
###
“I’ve figured it out!” The Officer cries, translucent yet somehow still alive. “There is only one wave function, and it’s the universe! It’s the entire universe!”
“We’ll give you to three before we cut open the doors…”
His own voice outside the bulkhead, him from another reality. A different him.
“I understand!” he screeches. “I understand it all now! I’m coming!”
He opens the cabin door. His mind wipes, clean as glass.
###
“Look at those things,” she says, training her rifle on the scurrying life forms on the ground. “Are those… marbles?”
“I think you’re right,” her husband says. Their group is widening the perimeter around the Mercury; they do not talk about the other shattered ship with the same name. The Officer sealed the door to the bridge and forbade any of the soldiers with him from speaking about what was inside.
She raises the rifle, aiming at the rumbling little beads, cat’s-eyes-winking in all the colors of the rainbow. Larger structures susurrate in watchfulness as the wind plays over them, as the human soldiers crunch around them.
Her husband’s hand rests on the muzzle of the weapon as she raises it to fire.
Whole-faced this time, unmutilated this time, he tells her: “That’s a bad idea.”
###
Chrome sky of spinning circles. Cosmic machinery at work. Revolutions upon revolutions within revolutions. An aperture as huge as a world rends the firmament, and two figures are revealed, genderless, all-gendered, winged, draped upon one another in the aspect of lovers.
###
The colony Hellina is a success. The glass-like planet yields substance and sustenance and life. The architecture they build! The art they see! They live a long, happy life together there, and he is with her on her deathbed, as he is with her on countless other deathbeds across realities.
“I’m so grateful, and so happy,” she says between lucidity and death.
“I am too. I’ll follow you soon, my love.”
When they go, a ship sails above the clouds, unseen by anyone, undetected, splitting. Inexorable. Inevitable.
###
A lake. The pendant. A motorcycle. Poverty. A stone. Their love. The specificities didn’t matter. No—rather, both of these things are true: the specificities didn’t matter and the specificities are the most important thing, in every universe. The particularities of them. Lives as particles, fixed in flux. Someone/s were alive here. Someone/s were alive elsewhere. The two appear in synchronicity, always. In some lives, it takes longer to find one another; some realities are crueler. But, one way or another, fleetingly or for a lifetime—they always do.
###
A mineral mote of a planet skips over water. A recognition occurs.
There you are, the stone says.
The lake says, There you are.
