Jeff VanderMeer - Dead Astronauts

Who, stunned, stumbled now as if through a dream or nightmare. Grappled with this nothing dissipating through the air and made despairing sounds. Subsided, rendered frozen by the pinpricks of Moss’s transference of her defensive blood. Moss recoiling at the feel of Chen’s blood in contact with her particles.

Grayson found rope in Chen’s pack and bound Chen’s hands and feet.

“I have you, Chen.”

“I have you, Moss.”

“Another time, Chen. Another time. But not now.”

Chen outside was Chen again. Could not describe the feeling of being so distributed: to have so many bodies at once and so many eyes, and so many beating hearts and breathing lungs. A legion of tiny lives that could not be reduced to equations, that existed in every moment, each unique, nothing about math or structure. He needed music. He needed a huge meal. He would get neither, just the relief of his own labored breathing. Singular.

Charlie X had altered Chen to fail because he was disposable. Moss had made him fail in a way that allowed him to live, that gave some comfort, that was not really failure. That allowed Chen to atone, that manifested in his flesh.

Grayson and Moss looked down at Chen. They could see the imprint of salamander bodies like a fading tattoo. They could see it, so Chen could too. Feel also their concern.

“Should you do it or should I do it?” Grayson asked Chen.

Kill the other Chen.

Chen said, “No! Keep him alive. He might have value.”

Chen had never had value because Chen never knew as much as Grayson’s Chen. Chen had never suggested saving Chen. It was too dangerous.

Moss put a hand on Chen’s shoulder.

“You said the duck is on our side,” Chen wheezed out through the retreat of salamanders in his throat. “We can afford to.” Just to say something. Just to be normal. Which was impossible.

“The duck was at our side,” Moss observed.

True: The duck had appeared next to the swimming pool, watching them. Had it been there the moment before?

Then it was gone again.

The duck had seen Chen explode into salamanders. It had seen Moss help reconstitute Chen.

What else had it seen?

a creator who no longer

remembered the creation

How to explain the weight of the duck with the broken wing? In truth of flesh and blood and light, though it could not fly. The wing deliberate, part of Charlie X’s plan, that the duck might always be cast out from the Company. That the duck might register as prey. As low and cast out and as prey.

To the three when they encountered the duck, it was as heavy as if made of brass or steel or gold. The duck’s gaze was impervious to the years, pinned them down with that weight. Always when they arrived: that urgent, nagging question. Is the duck with us or against us? Does the duck recognize us?

The duck represented a paradox. It roamed where it would, and wherever it patrolled for the Company it also negated anywhere within its shadow the Company’s surveillance. The duck could do that, to lesser and greater degrees, across all of the Cities.

“Schrödinger’s duck.”

“Heidegger’s duck.”

“Swedenborg’s duck.”

“Seneca’s duck.”

Charlie X’s duck.

The worst versions of the duck: Carnivorous, enflamed, the cruel lizardous eye. Oozing a thin crust of blood that dried on the mottled white. Oracular stigmata, appraising. Price of seeing too much of the future. Most often observed replicating the murders of birds of prey—bill sharp, serrated in microscopic detail. Buried in a limp rat-thing, tearing out the guts. Gulping them down like a ghoulish stork. Gnawing on what was left in an artistic way, the delicacy in how long the duck could leave the recipient of its attentions alive.

It would look up from feasting with a mechanical grace and hunger, as if lusting for meat in a way that festered. Fostered the impression screams were more important than hunger.

Once, twice, the three witnessed the duck eviscerating a fox it had pinned to the sand, from back legs to snout, with the spurs on its scaly feet. And then the duck did bring down its head like a hammer that became an ice pick that split the fox’s head in a crack and splatter of blood and brain matter. A sound that carried over the sands.

But the duck ate no part of either fox. Perhaps wary of a trap. That the foxes might come free from the inside out, might somehow conquer it postmortem. That the foxes still spoke to one another when dead, voices floating in the air, seemed a desecration by the duck, but Moss could not be sure. All that seemed sure is that Charlie X hated the foxes. Or had once hated one fox.

Of the broken wing, the best that could be said is that the wing left a smile upon many a neck and torso. But never on a face. For the creature could in a motion reminiscent of some awkward bat unfold and unfurl and extend.

The wing by will locked in place. The edge knife-sharp and serrated. It with willful industry and psychotic intent vivisected and hacked apart scavengers as large as men and larger. With a zigzagging approach once taught perhaps but now as automatic as a stitched pattern.

Then came the sliding in a wet and separated slump to the dust, the dirt, the scavenger forever caught in a bloodstained, anguished look of confusion at the method of its own ending. Until the sun and smaller scavengers still did their work and turned the anguish into a smile. Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

Sometimes, the duck would distract with the voice of your beloved dead, plucked from your mind, and then dig into your brain like a worm or grub, and try to live in there for a while, eating out your thoughts until you were a husk that twitched and slobbered and spasmed in the sand. At which point, reduced to harmlessness, the duck would stab you with its beak wherever best to place a spigot. Bleed you out while eating you alive.

There came then, Moss knew, in some victims, the heights of ecstatic experience. A lightness that carried the mind off into the clouds to look down on the twisting and shaking mess of carcass without worry or care. Despite the pain that had arrived before that moment.

Oh happy memory for Charlie X, who had no memories anymore. Oh, happy days of youth evoked by the duck. The one he’d nursed back to health. The one he’d been given as a gift. The one he’d rescued from a zoo. The one he’d kidnapped at a park. Depending on Charlie X’s mood, the story changed, on a sliding scale of the sentimental that Chen could map to the cruel.

The one he’d told Chen about even as he created the demonic version, no space between the molecules of air that shouted Lie! and those that flowed from his mouth to tell what he thought was the truth, in that moment.

Who knew what was truth and what was story?

The logical next question, more remote because the answer was usually the same: Where is Charlie X now? Nowhere. Nowhere. Dead. Forgotten. Rags buried in sand, buried in the past. Just the duck left behind.

But that was not the case in this City.

Charlie X, a ghost given flesh, rising up impossible to meet them across the years. Yet they could not meet him. Must not risk that in his disturbed mind might still exist a memory of Chen, of Moss and the wall of globes inside the Company. And, so, seeing Charlie X from afar as they had headed for the Balcony Cliffs, by the polluted river … the three let him pass unhindered. Did not call out. Did not admit to the past. Hardly discussed it after.

They’d never turned him to their cause, either too broken or not broken enough. But here, and most places now, he had already long past been abandoned or been kicked out by the Company. Unable to use the micro-tears created by the portals that allowed Moss a way to come through. Burdened by the bat-like hardening of features that the Company had imposed on him. That never truly fit. That proclaimed mask or helmet or cage. And how he breathed uneven through it, rasping, and how the mice living in his throat bulged there, clung to soft tissue with their sanitized toes. How long it had taken Charlie X not to claw at his throat, for all that lived inside it? Knew, somewhere deep inside, that he always went mad, went bad, could not be trusted, lived in a place where the landscape had been stripped bare.