Solaris Rising (13 page)

She’s the only rag on this beach without a single mote, let alone a cloud. I mean, in the world’s lowliest vocation she’s at absolute bottom.

Once, when she could still speak, she told me that clouds are a distraction. “No good rag needs followers,” she said. “I’ve never wanted them, and I think they sense that and leave me alone. I can’t work with someone looking over my shoulder.”

Whatever you want to believe, Gran,
I said to myself. The ways people console themselves for their failure. It’s so sad. Not that I should talk.

“Jacques is successful,” I tell her now. “He has over a hundred million followers and they don’t stop him finding core. He has some kind of… I don’t know, some kind of gift.”

She shows me the wrinkled-tree-bark face. Maybe Mom is right. Gran must be in denial. It must burn her so bad that she’s been here her whole life looking for core and has only found some tiny unauthorized gleams once or twice a decade. She has so little to offer any possible motes, while Jacques has only been on the beach a year and he’s already a celebrity. From even the weakest, most decayed, wretched has-been of a corpse, Jacques can extract core of exquisite brilliance and meaning.

I have this problem with my mouth. I say the wrong thing. It’s happening now.

“But Gran… you haven’t found anything in a long time.”

She shrugs.

“Do you hate him?”

She points to Jacques, and then to her throat. She makes a point of swallowing, then shakes her head.

“He doesn’t swallow? Gran, really – don’t tell me you
swallow
? You don’t swallow their… flesh?”

Dordogne, another old-school cleaner, staggers past us. He’s carrying two reeky buckets on a yoke around his neck like something out of the Dark Ages. He pauses, panting, and in his drainpipe voice asserts, “Some people don’t swallow like some people don’t inhale. You get what you pay for. Everybody got a right to search. Trachea got a right. Core be core. He find it, then bless him. He trying, then bless him anyway. He’s an asshole, then bless his holy ass.”

He wheezes away, shaking his head at his own humour.

Gran hikes up her skirt and wades out. She wears no gloves. Claims she’s immune to all the corpse bugs now, but I know that’s not true. They took her voice. Mom and Aunt Shara don’t come here because of that. Mom stopped me coming, too. Afraid for my fertility, sanity, mobility – you name it.

“I know you love Gran,” Mom told me when I was eleven. “You lived on that beach when you were little and I was working. But things are different now. She’s gone… too far. She’s chosen to leave us behind. Not the other way around.”

But the smell of dead gods is the smell of my childhood. The only waves I know are dirty and foul. When I go up to the garden district to visit my family, they talk about the beach and the shit and the death that Gran lives with. Like they own it. “Those were hard times,” they say, munching barbecue beside their private pools.

Mom says Gran has invested so much searching for core that she can’t stop. “It’s an addiction,” Mom says sadly.

“It’s not an addiction,” Gran told me when she could still talk. “It’s common sense. The bodies of dead gods must be honored.”

Gods take funny shapes. Octopi, whale sharks, clams, sea horses larger than land horses. Giant water spiders. Washed ashore below the glittering town, like tampons and cola bottles. From a distance, they are a tourist attraction. Artists come to be inspired (bringing nasal plugs).

Now Drake is talking about the failures of science. He waves his arms a lot, and his anti-microbial moustache makes his nose run. His followers will find him even more authentic for it. I stay away from the cams. Don’t want Karl to find me.

Trachea waits until everyone’s looking at Drake. He flips his hair, which smears a bit of blackish blood across his cheekbone, stylishly, just in time for the cams to swing back on him and show how real he is. The other rags scurry and hurry, eager to be spotlighted as Genji’s searchlight passes over them.

Daw is answering the same questions Rogers always asks. Talking about how he has spent his career designing Genji’s abilities. He didn’t design the dog itself, of course, but he makes it sound like one day he’ll probably whip one up in his spare time.

“Why are fewer gods appearing? Because they’ve rotted away to nothing, of course!” He pauses to chortle. “And that is because there is no more need for gods now that we have pinned down how to make life with such breathtaking specificity.”

Breathtaking specificity? Really? I am stacking Gran’s buckets and checking her nets for holes. I mean, holes apart from the ones that are supposed to be there. That’s the funny thing about nets.

“Gods,” says Daw, “were only ever thoughts in the minds of humans, not the other way round. So even as we use their core energies to light up our world” – and he sweeps an arm toward the Meta – “we can let the gods go.”

Gran’s toenails have been black ever since I can remember. I don’t think she’s left the beach in twenty years. My mother told me that every moment of her childhood, every hurt and triumph, was accompanied by the smell of death because Gran couldn’t afford to live anywhere but here. Rags depended on handouts – like monks, only smellier. As Mom got older, she just couldn’t stand it anymore. She went to live with her aunt, who soft-soaped the smell out of Mom until not a whiff of dead god could be detected on her skin. Both of them want to forget the beach exists, and they mostly succeed. Now Mom pays a contractor to clean her house and shield her from the brilliance of entropy.

Gran and I are up to our waists, near the rotting bones now. These usually collapse by the time a god comes to shore. Bioluminescence replaces structure as gods are broken down by tiny creatures that shit light. The smell is overpowering. I have vomited twice by the time Genji stops running up and down the beach.

Why is he stopping here? Squinting, I see his neck bristle. His tail goes stiff. He begins to bark. Then he points. While the flies swarm on Trachea, the telling beam of Genji’s light has landed on Gran’s ass where she bends down to drag a torn intestine from the lapping water. The end of the intestine coughs out globs of crap fitfully, like a dribbly hose. Behind her towers the half-melted rib cage of a foetid fish-god. The bones are becoming holey and translucent as they liquefy.

“Well, that’s a surprise, Bettina! Dr Daw, is this the official prediction?”

Daw has a deeply unhappy expression on his face. Flies are abandoning Trachea and his fluffed-out hair for my grandmother and her stained mouth. She squints into the light but doesn’t smile. I duck away.

“Madame?”

Gran tries to ignore the flies but they’ve got her surrounded. Trachea’s halo abandons him and gathers around Gran’s head. She swats at it in thinly-disguised annoyance. Her new followers won’t go, though. They make a bright nimbus of suffering: young people on chemo, old people on respirators, newborns plugged in by overeager parents, etiolated women on a bad connection that blurs their empty, begging hands and pixelates the hollowness beneath their eyes. Children with no hands and their elders, all expectant, half-weeping with anticipation of the sight of core.

Drake looks pleased, starts rubbing his hands.
That prediction machine’s a piece of shit
, you can hear him thinking. He’s already tasting the sweet, sweet Mountain Dew.

Rogers intones, “And we’re told Madame here has a track record of… zero for 40,104. Can this really be right, Bettina? Has this person really never found anything in all her years as a Cleaner?”

“Never,” says Bettina. “The dedication of these Cleaners is truly remarkable. Madame lost her voice seven years ago in the infectious wave following the dismemberment of the Giant Goddess, but she continues to work here every day in all weathers. Despite the unconscionable smell.”

“Probably she can’t smell anything,” quips Rogers. “Maybe that’s why she stays.”

“Of course she can smell.” I snarl. “I can smell. We all can smell it. We’re here anyway.”

Bettina starts to ask Gran questions.

“She can’t speak,” I say. “Don’t frighten her. She’s old. Her voice is gone.”

Flies begin aligning themselves to me, buzzing.

What’s your name?
Bucky.

Is that your real name?
My name’s Baksheesh. It means ‘little gift’. My mother thought it was cute. Obviously it isn’t.

How old is the Madame?
109.

Has she ever found core?
Not to my knowledge.

Why doesn’t she leave?
God calls her.

But the gods are dead, or dying.
She must honor them, I say. I say it out of duty to her, not because I believe it. Once they were alive, I say. Do they become less divine, in death?

“They can hardly qualify as gods if they die,” Daw drawls. I can feel his blue, intelligent eyes picking a trail over my face. I can feel him dismissing me, too. “But Genji predicts that core will be found here, tonight, by your grandmother. So perhaps she will get her wish after all.”

Yeah, and perhaps you’ll give out lollipops after?
I don’t say it, but I think it.

Drake does nothing to take Daw down. Instead he launches into a description of his latest research proving that fairies and rainbows really are the same thing (or something) and I slip away from Bettina and Daw and the millions of tiny, distant eyes. Of course, just then Jacques Trachea would have to give a shout.

“Aha!” Drake cries, waving long arms. “It would appear that even Genji is not infallible!”

“The results aren’t all in yet,” Daw replies in a crabby voice, and the clouds swarm and re-form as followers change camps. Daw holds position behind Gran’s bony butt. “We are close to pinpointing something quite extraordinary here. Please don’t be distracted by the shiny things you may see in Mr. Trachea’s camp.”

Gran reaches her hand into the decaying body and licks her fingers, sucks them with her thin lips. I wince.

“Look at this!” It’s Drake again. He’s very excited. Trachea works his trapezoids attractively as he pulls out cogs, wires, lights. From the sump he removes a long-flute-like thing that nobody quite recognizes. Then he pulls out an intact brass ship’s bell. I’m not sure what it means, but there is a collective gasp of wonder.

“Eureka!” Jacques’ teeth flash in the glow of his own halo. The bell rings wildly. Trachea’s halo is so full of rapt souls it flickers like static, a field of insect-sparkles and dim suggested outlines, entities not well-received but trying hard to be here. Share in the glory. Everyone loves him, the core-finder, the salvager, our salvation. I find myself caught up in it.

Gran’s mouth works. She vomits a little. She’s up to her hips in fish guts. She gives a jerk and I see her hands fumbling, like she’s trying to catch something that’s falling out of a cupboard. She bends over furtively, hissing, desperate-eyed.

Gagging, I reach her side. So do a cloud of flies. She’s juggling something shimmery.

“Is that a fish?” Bettina squeaks, turning her attention back to Gran. “What fish could survive inside the body of a dead god? Or was it loose in the harbour? We need to see that better…”

“A fish isn’t core!” Drake warns. “Core is inanimate and the product of abstract thought.”

Daw frowns. The smell must be getting through to him, because he turns his head and spits.

Gran makes a throwing motion with her right hand, but her left side leans into me and she secretly passes something small and slippery and moving. Holding it in my fist, I find the cloud all around me. Tiny lights, glimmering. My lips peel back from my teeth.

“It was just a fish,” I report, backing away. “She threw it back.”

I point to the lapping waves, and some of the cams go that way. Others follow me. They know what they saw. Most people do. But the thing is, in my line of work you quickly learn that people train themselves not to see what they see. They train themselves to be victims to people like me. I know how to play their expectations. It’s how I work.

So I weave among the clouds to bend over the disorderly pile of nets and rags. I slide the fish into a wet rag, unseen. I don’t know why Gran wants to keep it secret, but she does.

Drake is laughing and pontificating. “Stand down, everyone, it was just a fish!” he says. “Genji didn’t predict fish, he predicted core. So, let’s see where the core is tonight.”

While they’re distracted I slip away and put the fish into a cafeteria-sized baked bean tin that Gran uses to store her bits. It swims on its side in the dirty water. I leave it in the tent.

I can’t find Gran. I search everywhere, and I’m beginning to worry that she’s slipped and fallen in the murky shallows when I spot her.

Gran is walking up the beach without her rags. Bettina is walking alongside her. I run up there. Bettina is saying, “Your family will be so happy to have you home. Here, chew this gum. Your breath…”

Daw huffs up alongside Gran. He’s trying to convince her to continue searching. She shakes her head. No moving Gran when she doesn’t want to go.

I smile, and chewing Bettina’s gum Gran turns and looks at me. I don’t know what to say.

It seems a betrayal, but how can I argue when I know it’s best for her?