Forever Magazine Issue 99 by Robert Reed & Lavie Tidhar & Chen Quifan

Author:Robert Reed & Lavie Tidhar & Chen Quifan [Reed, Robert & Tidhar, Lavie & Quifan, Chen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2023-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

12

The darkness of water brought pressure and a miserable chill, and then a separate darkness took hold, and no sense of temperature. Aeons were crossed. In an instant, without effort. Then the war’s final survivor was awake again, finding himself broken. Surus was mostly blind and entirely deaf. Even the idea of motion was beyond him. But he felt caring hands slicing him open, electric sweets forced into chambers crushed by thousands of meters of water and sediment and salt. Then his mind returned to a point where he was happily convinced that he remembered nothing, that he was a newborn, and what he was hearing had to be his mother’s voice, because who else would bother speaking to tiny, useless him?

Surus tried to respond, but his capacity for speech must have been forgotten on the seafloor.

Sleep came, and dreams.

And eventually the sweets did their wondrous work.

Another day, and the baby found his voice hiding in one corner of that shattered, badly weakened body. And waiting beside his voice were his name and shards of his past, and finally, some muddled sense about where he was now.

No mother was speaking to him. Just strangers. Every one of his clumsy responses convinced them to talk on, but they offered nothing besides noise and emotion and more sustenance.

An entire year passed before Surus had the balance and desire to stand on his own legs.

Another year of intense work was necessary before he mastered this peculiar language well enough to understand what was being said.

They wanted him to know that he was fortunate.

Like nothing else ever born, he was blessed. That long fall was what saved him. The seafloor was three kilometers below the ship’s keel, and being so much denser than water, Surus had gained a terrific momentum. Also, his feet must have been pointed down with the impact. Like a spearhead, he struck the abyssal plain, cutting deep. A thin layer of black sludge gave way to fossil salts, and because salt was greedy when it came to stealing water, his body was severely, perfectly dehydrated, leaving him in a state of profound hibernation.

That abyssal plain was gradually covered with river silts and volcanic ash and the skeletons of every creature that lived in the cloaking sea.

Then everything changed.

A woman told him that, and still uncertain about so much, Surus lifted a hand, begging her to quit speaking. Which she did, eventually. Yet she never stopped staring at the apparition before her. Surus wasn’t the same species that she was, or that anyone was. A giant among lesser giants, he was a relic from days that no one recalled, besides him.

Looking at their surroundings, he guessed, “This is my seafloor.”

“Yes,” she said. “It once was, yes.”

They were bathed in a fierce, delicious heat and surrounded by a jungle of vast black slabs and mirror-leaved foliage and black fans that followed the sun and countless thin towers that bent when the thick, thick air blew, that physical twisting generating currents that allowed them to grow half a kilometer tall.

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