Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 206 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Science Fiction And Fantasy, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2023-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Case Report, The Pursuit of Neverage

Section Four of Agent Marino’s Direct Thought Recording. Extracted by Agent Cyce.

Cyce’s note: I warned you. I begged for help. Now Agent Uncertain is dead.

“Have you ever performed in the theatre?” Uncertain asks me.

It’s after dark.

She and Cyce have rewired their brains, too, so that we’re all speaking Eligaran, now. We’ve practiced the words of the deep, guttural language long enough that I can think of Cyce as Cyce, instead of Eats-Ice.

He refused to call me Of-The-Sea. He said that name was offensive to him, and that I’d need to choose another name. I suggested Of-The-Andes, but then Uncertain jumped in and defended me.

She said I didn’t need to change my name. She said that the reason Cyce hadn’t picked up on the true meaning of my name was that every time I thought it, I pictured myself, instead of picturing the sea. She said that, eventually, Of-The-Sea would sound just like Marino in my mind. It would just mean me.

So I’m still Marino.

“No performing,” I say. “Why?”

“Because of the role you’ll have to play on Eligar,” Uncertain says. “You’ll be a woman with no family, forced to labor in the mine. Even your daughter, the Child of your family, has died. A woman with no family is to be outwardly pitied, secretly despised.”

We’re sitting in a round, dark room in the depths of the alien ship. There are black cushions fixed along the circumference of the room, identical to the black cushions fixed to the ceiling and floor. White light sources are also speckled everywhere, as if we’re inside a child’s bauble.

Uncertain has a pile of printed photographs to show me.

The top one depicts black-haired, thin, brown-skinned people. They’re standing on a mud flat at dusk, gazing out to sea. Three gray dogs are with them, like the dogs I saw in my dream.

Each person has a head, two hands with enormous, curving claws, and two feet. Each person has two eyes located in the head, and a pointed, pigmented nose. They wear gray cloth wrapped around their flat, bony bodies. Their ears stand up at attention on opposite sides of their heads. Their knee joints bend backwards, like birds.

Or foodbeasts.

“You’re doing it again,” Cyce remarks. “Comparing them to animals.”

Cyce is dripping wet. He’s making his cushion dripping wet.

“Why do I have to be a woman?” I ask Uncertain. In the photo, some of the tallest people are almost twice the height of the smallest people. There aren’t any familiar objects in the photograph for scale. The Eligarans could be Uncertain’s size.

But I guess they aren’t.

That’s why the Agents need me.

I guess the women are the small ones.

“They’re all women,” Uncertain says. “They reproduce parthenogenetically. That’s mothers having daughters, without any men. Children are precious.”

“Children are precious to every people,” I say. “Anyone who tells you otherwise is a rich person trying to keep poor people at war with one another.”

“Children are precious,” Uncertain repeats, “because these people give birth once only. After that, they become infertile.

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