Sunward, p.15
Sunward, page 15
“I’m so sorry that you needed to hide,” I told him. “Sorry you lost your home while trying to help.”
The Elevator shuddered all around us. Metal shrieked against metal as massive doors opened.
“We found a better one,” he said.
* * *
Cosmas unbuckled himself, took the statue of his twin, and marched through the Elevator doors. The rest of us followed. Torque and Halley carried Agatha between them. She was so heavy now that I might not have been able to hold her at all.
Diffused and cloud-filtered sunlight overwhelmed my eyeballs. I wanted to put my helmet back on and use the visor filters. Instead I reclaimed the hat, shoved it on my head, and forced my eyes to acclimate. Brightness retreated into the yellows, greens, and grays of a hurricane sky.
I unswaddled Crimson and set him on my shoulder. He made unhappy noises. Birds might have evolved down here, but this one had only ever lived in lighter places. He couldn’t fly. I sympathized. Every moment felt like an acceleration burn, and the ground below us refused to hold still.
“Careful,” Cosmas said over his shoulder. “Artificial island. Floating town at ground level. The whole place is a little wobbly. Cable passes straight through, anchored to the ocean floor. Big pieces of the town have crumbled and sunk.”
Gray-green clouds spiraled above us. This was Iris, the eye of a permanent hurricane, churning up all the air that we used to breathe. I found it difficult to breathe now. Too much moisture weighed heavy in my lungs.
The outlaw bots dispersed to go about their own business—whatever that might be.
“Most of us are down here already,” Cosmas said. “Lunar bots. Refugees. Sent them soon after we got to Zahir. I stayed in orbit. Waiting for you.”
“I’m here,” I said, practically gasping. This planet was too big, and I was too small to weigh so much. “I’m right here.”
But are you really here, Cosmas? I wondered. How many places have a piece of your attention? How many fragments have you split yourself into, visiting so many dreams?
He led our strange procession down an otherwise empty street, which ended abruptly at a park bench with no actual park. This was the edge of the floating city, eroded away. Waves lapped at support structures below us. Walls of water dominated the horizon.
Cosmas put down the statue, sat on the bench, and dangled his feet. “Rest for a bit,” he said. “Our captain is about to keel over.”
I collapsed beside him. “Shush. Am not.”
The rest of the crew gathered around us to watch the sea and storm.
“Why did you bring Damian?” Cosmas asked me again.
“Why did you make him?” I countered.
He took a moment to pull himself together, which clearly took effort. “I studied old funeral customs for twins. Tributes and memorials. Ways to say goodbye, and to refuse goodbyes. Eulogies are paradoxes. They confront loss while simultaneously striving for permanence, which resists that same loss. Memorials inscribe memory in stone. Surviving family sometimes carved statues of twins.”
“You didn’t carve Damian out of stone,” I pointed out.
“Because I knew better.”
His voice sounded stronger. He wasn’t a child. Not anymore. I took his hand and squeezed it anyway, because he was still mine.
“We never held a funeral,” I said. “They took his body away from us. Then I left you alone. I’m sorry. I thought it was what you needed.”
“Maybe it was,” Cosmas said, “and I did carve another body for him. This might be a good time and place for an overdue funeral.”
We stood, which took effort. I tried to think of something to say, gave up, and sang the saddest lullaby from Mama CJ’s book.
The long dark awaits, all heat dissipates, and entropy comes too soon.
Stars will shine clearer, skies will seem nearer, over the haven moon.
Entropy comes, so let us be glad, and match every voice in tune.
Hearts will be lighter, Sol will burn brighter, over the haven moon.
Halley joined me after the first line, singing in a round. Torque, Bodkin, and Filament followed. Cosmas joined last, and finished the song alone. Then he pushed the statue of his brother into the sea.
I put my arms around him. He started shaking. I held him close until the tremors passed.
“Thanks,” he said. “Now let’s keep the same thing from happening to baby sis.”
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You aren’t going anywhere,” he told me. “The weight of this world is squishing you flat. We’ll bring Agatha in there.” He pointed to an ornate building on the corner of the block. “It used to be the Lunar embassy. Important people gathered there to insist that the first moon qualified as a sovereign place. Seemed like an auspicious building to reclaim while establishing our own sovereignty. All the support and equipment we’ll need is in there.”
I tried and failed to use my best captain voice. “I’m coming with you.”
Cosmas took the Hat and put it on. Crimson hopped onto the brim. “Agatha needs everyone except for you. She needs diagnostic cartography from Petasus Station. She needs Torque’s understanding of Mercurial bots and their swarms. She needs Halley’s practical, theatrical knowledge of distributed cognition, backed up by the rest of her troupe.” He took my hands in both of his, and then slipped the ring-shaped data core from my finger. “She needs me to connect these disparate pieces together, dream alongside her, and guide her reassembly—hopefully before the vast things that move beneath our dreams take notice and try to swallow us.”
I glared at him. “Tell me that you’re joking.”
Cosmas winked. “I’m joking. And you’re staying. She doesn’t need you. Not for this. You can’t help any more than you already have.”
He turned and walked away, the piratical hat on his head. Bodkin and Filament followed him. Torque squeezed my shoulder. “It might be distracting to have you there while we try to figure this out.” Halley pressed her forehead to mine and said nothing. Then the two of them hoisted Agatha and carried her into the embassy, leaving me alone on a bench at the edge of the world.
* * *
My hands shook as though they had absorbed every tremor from Cosmas. I clenched them both. It didn’t help. When the shakes finally passed, I felt like an empty vac suit, discarded and cold.
Something huge moved beneath the waves.
No, I thought, arguing against the evidence of my eyes. This world is empty. Everyone knows that. Nothing lives down here. Nothing survived.
The shape breached, indifferent to what everyone knew. I didn’t recognize any part of it, or the whole of it, or the way that it moved through water and air. The looming thing broke my entire sense of pattern recognition.
Something vaguely shaped like a clawed finger unfurled above me. Something dropped from that claw and dangled in front of me. It looked like the corpse of someone executed in a time and place where your own weight could kill you.
Here, I thought. This is that place. This is that weight.
The dangling thing twitched. Limbs unfolded. Now it looked more like a marionette encrusted with shellfish. A skull-like head turned to look at me, eyes bright with an amber glow.
A bot, I realized. Very old. Ancient. I don’t recognize the make, but it’s definitely robotic—or at least it used to be. Might have spent centuries absorbing wrecked pieces of this city, becoming ever more rich and strange.
The marionette spoke in a politely rasping voice. “We are astonished to find a Maker in this place. Our cabled cousin has forsworn the company of Makers and will no longer bear them.”
I cleared my throat. “I’m astonished to see you as well. Do you have a name?”
“Yes, we do.” The dangling bot did not elaborate further.
“My name is Tova Lir.”
“Tell us how you came to this place, Tova Lir. Many years have elapsed since last we interacted with Makers. One fell through the sky and sank into the water. We learned much when we dismantled them and their craft.”
I wondered how fast I could run, and missed my cane. “Do you intend to dismantle me?”
“We have not yet decided.” Brine and ooze dripped from the marionette and pooled at my feet. “Explain yourself. How and why did you make planetfall?”
When a robotic leviathan from the depths of the ocean asks you a question, you tell them the truth. “I came here for my children.” That word held weight. “My daughter Agatha, and my son Cosmas. He’s trying to save her.”
“We have observed Cosmas,” said the marionette. “He has intriguing dreams. We observe him now, in this moment, engaged in daring and dangerous salvage.”
I took a step closer. My foot slipped in ooze. “Dangerous? How?”
“Strange things move in the depths.”
“Clearly,” I said. “So he wasn’t joking. Can you help him? Keep predators away while he finds his sister and guides her home?”
The claw moved. The puppet lurched. The two of us stood nose to nose. “How have you enjoyed your experience of this world so far, Tova Lir?”
“I’m not interested in small talk right now. The world is fine. Will you help us?”
“How have you enjoyed your experience of this world so far, Tova Lir?” the marionette repeated with identical intonation.
I wanted to burst into flame. “The sky is wrong.”
“In what way is the sky wrong?”
“In every way!” I said through clenched teeth. “To me the word ‘sky’ means stars visible in every direction and every imaginable color. It doesn’t mean a tangled blanket of sickly clouds the color of pus. This sky is poking me right in the ancestral memory, insisting that all the gods are angry, demanding that I hide away from hurricanes in the deepest cave I can find. This sky is wrong. The air is wrong. Too humid. Too heavy. Everything is so heavy here. This place is not my home.”
The dangling puppet tilted its head twenty degrees to the side. “We are relieved to hear it, Tova Lir. Makers should remain on the other side of the sky. They are not welcome to return. You, however, are provisionally welcome. We appreciate this conversation. All consciousness is dialogic, and therefore requires someone to talk to. We will now offer your children our assistance.”
The claw collected the marionette, and both submerged.
I tried to run, wrenched my ankle, and limped my way to the embassy.
* * *
Inside it smelled like brine and rot. Scraps of carpet littered the floor. A mural of Luna covered one wall. Several bots stood on makeshift scaffolds, repairing windows and repainting the mural.
“Hello? I’m looking for Cosmas!”
A familiar bot climbed down from the scaffolding. “I know you,” she said. “Tova. Double espresso. No sugar.”
“Beans?”
“That’s me.” She tapped the coffee maker embedded in her torso. “I’ve still got some grounds if you want your usual. No one else around here has the digestive system for it.”
“Yes. Absolutely. Later, though. First, can you tell me which way Cosmas went?”
She pointed. “Banquet hall on the left.”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
I limped into the banquet hall. A single table made of unbroken wood took up most of the space inside. I couldn’t imagine a tree big enough to provide so much material.
Agatha lay on the table. The rest of the crew sat around her, heads bowed. It looked more like a seance or a sacrifice than a medical intervention.
“Hello?”
Crimson sneezed from somewhere nearby. I found him on the floor, picked him up, and set him on my shoulder. He hid his face under one wing.
No one else moved.
Parents of human children get to peek into a crib and watch the rise and fall of tiny lungs. My kids offered me no such reassurance. Their bodies were absolutely still. None of them showed any sign that they would ever come back from wherever they had gone. I wished that I could watch them breathe. Crimson and I were the only ones breathing.
I put my hand to Agatha’s forehead as though checking for a fever. There was no fever. She felt cold.
“It’s okay, kiddo,” I said. “An ancient bot from the depths of the sea is coming to help you. It’s going to be okay.”
You don’t know that, Sparkles said. You might lose three more of your children while trying to save this one.
Go away, I told her. We’re done. You’ve been a terrible imaginary friend, and this world is too heavy to keep carrying you around in it.
Ouch, Sparkles said, and left.
I pulled up a chair and sat beside Agatha, immensely grateful for the invention of chairs.
Her favorite bedtime stories were all about talking animals, so I told her the one about the fox who tried to drink Luna’s reflection. Then I told her the one about a chorus of frogs who sang at Sol’s wedding. Nothing changed. She didn’t wake, or move, or laugh—not even when I sang the frog song.
Sometimes, when Agatha couldn’t sleep because she had too many questions, the two of us would recite Newtonian laws. Maybe she found it comforting to insist that the universe made sense. Maybe I did.
“Corpus omne perseverare in statu suo quiescendi vel movendi uniformiter in directum, nisi quatenus a viribus impressis cogitur statum illum mutare. All things persevere in their state of rest, or in the motion of their proper path, except insofar as they may be compelled to change state by forces impressed thereupon.”
Halley, Torque, and Cosmas all began to stir.
Agatha blinked her big glass eyes.
“Hi, Captain Mom.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel started out as a short story. Thanks to Fran Wilde and Julian Yap for publishing “A Body in Motion” in The Sunday Morning Transport on Mother’s Day 2022.
That short story expanded when an old friend asked me to write a book for grown-ups. Thanks to Joe Monti, Marietta Zacker, and everyone at Saga Press and Gallt & Zacker Literary Agency for their unwavering enthusiasm and support.
Sunward benefited from a shared commonwealth of knowledge, wisdom, irreverence, and sense of play. Thanks to Ivan Bialostosky, Kekla Magoon, Linda Urban, Karen Meisner, Pär Winzell, Katie Rasmussen, Ashley Pagnotta, Carlos Hernandez, Claire Cooney, Nora Sinclair, and the Nemesis Theatre Company for their creative midwifery.
Thanks most of all to Alice, architect and set designer of the room—and the life—that surrounds me while I write.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The two songs from The Lunar Saloon Visitor’s Companion are based on “The Man in the Moon” and “Under a Harvest Moon”—both traditional English folk songs. Their lyrics have changed, but the notes remain the same.
More from the Author
A Festival of Ghosts
A Properly Unhaunted Place
Nomad
Ambassador
Ghoulish Song
Goblin Secrets
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM ALEXANDER won the National Book Award for his debut novel, Goblin Secrets,and won the AudioFile Earphones Award for his narration of the audiobook. His other novels include A Festival of Ghosts, A Properly Unhaunted Place, Ghoulish Song, Nomad, and Ambassador. Alexander studied theater and folklore at Oberlin College, English at the University of Vermont, and creative writing at the Clarion Workshop. He teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in writing for children and young adults. Like the protagonist of Nomad and Ambassador, Alexander is the son of a Latino immigrant to the United States. Visit him online at WillAlex.net and on @willalex.bsky.social.
SagaPress.com
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/William-Alexander
@SagaPressBooks
ALSO BY WILLIAM ALEXANDER
Goblin Secrets
Ghoulish Song
Ambassador
Nomad
A Properly Unhaunted Place
A Festival of Ghosts
The Legend of Memo Castillo
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