The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (32 page)

What the hell did
that mean?

They walked through
the jungle. Chamberlain felt the ground shake under his feet. They passed
through the trees, and suddenly they were out of them and into open space.

Chamberlain stared.
He had thought this was all jungle, yet below him a vast open plane spread out
in all directions, and in the distance he saw the outline of mountains, their
peaks covered in snow, and a great, distant waterfall whose water rose again
into the sky as it hit the ground, creating a haze of mist. Below, on the
plane, were the Gorp.

“What is this
place?” he said.

“Source,” the Weirdy
said. “Fly inside Fly. You say—amber?”

“Amber?”

“Fly in amber. Fly
in Fly in amber.”

“I have no idea what
you just said.”

The Weirdy seemed to
shrug. “Matter no matter,” it said. Chamberlain sighed.

Below, the Gorp
thundered past them.

“Why are they—” he
said, and stopped, thinking back on the Weirdy’s words. “Like me not like me?”

“Not Fly. Come
from—not source. Like you. Now belong Fly. Like you. But different.”

“Not from Fly?” He
stared at the Gorp. He had never seen so many. They ran past, appearing not to
sense him, which suited Chamberlain fine. “Belong Fly, like me? How? I don’t
belong here!” Was that a wisp of panic in his voice? He stared at the Gorp and
prayed they would keep on not noticing him.

“Belong Fly long
time. No matter. Fix source first time. See after.”

“What’s the—where’s
the—what source? How do you fix it?”

“You come. Wait
first time. Gorp go. Gorp fight you, fight me. Like fight.”

They were
aliens
?
That is,
other
aliens? Where did they come from? When? He said, “And the
Bombies? Also from not here?”

“Bombies?” The
Weirdy sounded surprised. “Nice toy. Nice Bombie. Like play-play. All same
wind-toy.”

Wind-toy? He meant
his gun, Chamberlain realised. So the Weirdy thought the gun was a
toy
?
He said, “Gun no toy. Gun kill.”

“Kill, all same
play-play,” the Weirdy said. “You no die. Like Bombie.”

Chamberlain gave up.
They watched the Gorp in silence.

When the last Gorp
had passed, Chamberlain sighed with relief and the Weirdy, without speaking,
began to flow down the hill to the plane. Chamberlain followed him.

They walked in
silence. It was a strange place. It should not have been there, he thought.
There should be only jungle, living trees, darkness, mud, not—this.

There were tracks in
the dust, and as they walked Chamberlain’s perspective seemed to shift
uncontrollably, as if a great lens were pinpointed at him and he stared through
it at the plane and saw—

The tracks—made by
the Gorp? By others?—seemed magnified, lines and circles running and
criss-crossing each other, forming—

Somehow they began
to make sense. They were like a writing, if someone could write on an entire
world. Not random, but carrying a meaning, like an ancient magic spell, and he
could almost understand it...

“Source,” the Weirdy
said, and it sounded sad. “You understand?”

Understanding was
hovering on the edge of his mind. It was there in the lines in the dirt, in the
great rising mountains which shouldn’t have been there, in the plane itself.
The old song came back to him then.

Firefly is dead and
cold

Monkey burns, Jaguar
sleeps

Wolf and Dog circle

Elephant is home.

“No!”
the Weirdy said. It stopped and faced Chamberlain. Its cat’s eyes were wide and
unblinking. Its whirlwind body sent dust flying in the air. Chamberlain blinked
back tears. “One, you see? You understand!”

“One is missing?” he
found himself whispering the words.

“Must fix!”

Was there another
line to the song? There were six worlds, and he counted them, ranked based on
their distance from the sun: Monkey, Jaguar, Wolf, Elephant, Dog, Firefly. Six.

“No! Mistake!
Never-mind, no fault. Must fix all same.”

“I wish you’d stop
saying that.”

But the plane grew
around him and he could see the world emanating from it, from that single
point, growing outwards, and the script upon the world was like a curse, a
seal, a—

“What
did you do?” he whispered. And then he thought—
was it
us
?

“All same,” the
Weirdy said.

All same. And stop.
And the world shrank around him, the lens lifted.

“Source,” the Weirdy
said.

“Here?”

It was just another
patch of dust, nothing to distinguish it. Nothing around them for miles.
Something lying in the dirt, a metal cylinder half a meter across. He looked at
it. Ours? he thought. Theirs?

“Never mind,” the
Weirdy said. “You fix, now.”

“Me?”

The Weirdy released
the frozen Bombie sphere. “Wait,” Chamberlain said, “What are you—”

The Weirdy threw the
Bombie high in the air. The bubble rose, rose, rose and then—

“Shit!” Chamberlain
yelled. He looked up—

The transparent
bubble disappeared. The Bombie explosion, as if there had been no interruption,
expanded outwards from its nucleus.

“Shit!” Chamberlain
said again, and—

Four:
Elephant and Fly

He was Shambalin,
and then he was Chamberlain, and he was sent to Fly with all the others. He
said goodbye to his parents. His mother cried. His father shook his hand,
awkwardly. He wore his cadet uniform. There were many others like him. The
Deputy Chairman of the Party gave a speech.

(—What happened?

No
answer in words, but the scene disappeared, and was replaced—)

He was on the ship
coming to land. They were playing cards. Shen and Mastorakis were still alive.
Shen said, “I wonder what’s happening back home?” Mastorakis said, “Same old.”
A screen came alive then, a news-feed from home, the Chairman speaking. “Peace
must be achieved at all costs.”

“Hear, hear,”
someone said.

“Our boys on Fly are
sacrificing themselves daily to protect our rights, our livelihoods, our very
humanity
against the monsters.”

“I don’t want to be
a sacrifice,” Chamberlain said.

(—Sacrifice, a voice
said. Yes. Sacrifice.

—No!

—Doesn’t matter.

—It does to me!

Fade again, and—)

He was on Fly,
walking through the jungle with his platoon, and the Weirdies where coming out
of nowhere, and he fired at them, but always there were more Weirdies, more
bloody trees, more exploding insects. Only when you found Gorp did you get a
real fight; the Gorp were the worst, blood-thirsty and cunning and huge—

He was at the base,
relaxing after the fight. They’d lost three people that day, including Shen.

He was in the jungle
when the Gorp attacked. He remembered dying, now.

(—what?

—Play-play. You, me,
Gorp, play. Now tired—)

He was at the base
when Colonel Piet ordered him and Mastorakis on a scouting mission.

He was in the jungle
when Mastorakis was killed by a living tree and a Weirdy, coming out of
nowhere, stole over Chamberlain and the wind ripped him apart—

He was at the base when
they brought Colonel Piet’s body back from the jungle and he thought, so they
got you at last, you bastard.

He was at the base
when Mastorakis came in carrying Shen’s body, Colonel Piet watching
dispassionately from the side.

He was at the base
when the Gorp attacked, screams, Shen dying beside him, Mastorakis, Piet and he
was—

He was in the
jungle—

(—Please. Stop!—)

He was in the base—

Mastorakis—

He was in the base
and the voice of the Chairman of the Party on the news-feed said, “We have
peace.”

He was in the jungle
and a Bombie was resting on his arm and he tried not to move and counted the
planets based on distance from the sun. Monkey, Jaguar, Wolf, Fly, Elephant,
Dog, Firefly. Monkey, Jaguar, Wolf—

(—Fly!

—Fly. Fly
and...Elephant.)

Fly. Fly. Fly. Fly.
It was there. It had always been there.

And so had he.

(—How long? he said.

—Don’t know. Don’t
count time. Long time?

—How long?

—Many solar circles.
Many many. Full up.

—And all this time—

—Play-play. Tired
now.

But—)

He was on a plane
and above his head a Bombie exploded, shards raining down, and he knew there
was no escape. “Have I been here before?” he said.

“No. First time.
Last time. Fly now.”

The Bombie shards
hit him, and he died.

Five:
Shambalin

He was lying on the
grass under the stars with Rashmi and they both had their shirts off and her
skin was soft and dark and his heart was beating loudly in his chest.

Rashmi said, “One
day I’m going to go to the stars.”

“Can I come with
you?” he said, and his fingers traced a line under her arm and she giggled. “If
you like. Where shall we go?”

“We could go
anywhere. See what it’s really like out there, on Firefly and Monkey, Jaguar
and Wolf and Dog, maybe even further, back where people come from, I forget
what it’s called.”

“Mars,” Rashmi said.
He shrugged. “Whatever.”

“We can go to Fly,”
she said, and Shambalin said, “They say the forests of the living trees are
beautiful.”

“I want to see a
Weirdy!”

“They’re strange.
Hard to talk to.”

“How do
you
know?” she said, and punched him on the arm and he rolled over her and smiled
into her face. “I saw this programme.”

“I never want to see
a Gorp though!”

“No,” he said. “No
Gorp.”

He rolled on his
back. Rashmi put her arms around him and nestled her head in the crook of his
neck. He stared up at the stars, and said, softly, “Sometimes, when true night
falls, and the living trees are quiet, if you stand still, you can hear the
music of the Skaar-et-lam.”

“What does it sound
like?”

He thought about it,
looking up at the stars. “Like dying,” he said. “And then being reborn.”

“Where did you hear
that?” she said, and he said, “I don’t know. It just came to me.”

 
He turned his head
and looked into her face and she smiled. He kissed her.

The Puma

Theodora Goss

Mr. Prendick, there’s a lady
here to see you.”

I must have jumped, because I
remember my knee banging into the desk. In the years since I had moved to this
obscure corner of England, where even the trains did not come and I could walk
over the hills for hours without seeing a human face, I had received only one
visitor, the local vicar. There must have been something in my speech, perhaps
even in my face, that agitated him, because he would not stay for dinner, and
he left without urging me to attend services in the small stone church where he
preached, in the valley below. I was sorry to see him leave. He had seemed like
a reasonable man, although his inquisitive brown eyes and pinched face, a
probable indication of early poverty, reminded me of a lemur. In all that time,
I had never been threatened with a visit by anything that could remotely be
described as a lady.

“A what?” I wondered what Mrs.
Pertwee meant by a lady, exactly. Perhaps one of the female parishioners who
lived in the village that surrounded the stone church, with its post office,
pub, and collection of six or seven houses, coming to solicit for some
missionary society to help our savage brethren.

“A lady, Mr. Prendick. She—”
Mrs. Pertwee hesitated. “She calls herself Mrs. Prendick.”

I tripped over the chair. The
next day, Mrs. Pertwee had to wash the spot where my fountain pen had sputtered
on the carpet with strong soap.

She was waiting for me in the
parlor, a sanctuary that Mrs. Pertwee only entered to do whatever housekeepers
customarily do to horsehair sofas and china ornaments. I had not used the room
since renting the cottage, and had seen no need to alter it.

She was heavily veiled.

“Edward,” she said. “How nice
to see you again.”

We are divided beings. One half
of me had known that it could not logically be she. The other half had known
that no one else in the wide world could claim to be my wife. That other half
had been right. I could not mistake her voice, almost too deep for a woman,
with a resonance to it, as though she were speaking from the depth of her
throat. Like a viol.