Blue Hands
When you carpool, you don’t pick colleagues. They’re local or they’re not. Now Beal wasn’t only local, he was local color: white-bearded, green and black leaves, more Zeus in a Hawaiian shirt than a Social Studies teacher.
You’d have liked him—all dirty jokes and slang from teen years in the seventies, and then a coming together of preacher and professor—the auto-didactic man, the reader of a thousand books.
We had good talks those mornings.
“Makes you wonder—” I said. “—what they used before Aristotle invented Logic.”
“Logic isn’t the only source of knowledge,” Beal replied, nodding to Black Dog on the radio. “Like revelation. God telling men what’s up.”
I wanted to say science explained all that as hallucinations, sleep paralysis, and drugs but Beal added: “You see that?” He was looking up at the sky, at light and mist. “You see that? What is that?”
Beal cussed like one of his students and said, “There’s a blue hand coming down. Speed up. Speed up the damn car!”
“Is it a cloud?” I said.
“I can see its skin. Pores like… like honeycomb. It’s above us! Jesus, it’s going to grab us!”
I imagined a hand picking up the car like a beetle. But hey, didn’t Carl Sagan say one in twenty-five people hallucinate in their lifetime? Sometimes Carl heard his mother call his name.
Well, what if Sagan was wrong? What if the world is blue hands and dead mothers?
I drove the speedway, trying to retain the speed limit, trying to stay between dotted lines painted by men. Trying to ignore my companion, the mystic in the leaves, writhing like an animal looking for exits, screaming at light and mist.
Missed Connection(s)
TARGET 15TH ST AND BELL
To the beautiful tan-faced woman who was passing out pamphlets in front of Target. You were lovely and well-informed about the Israeli-Palestinain conflict. I lost your flyer, but you have my credit card information. Charge me!
LOOKING AT YOU LOOKING AT ME
To the lovely girl watching me from the pecan tree in my yard. I was getting out of the shower and toweling off when I noticed you. Your binoculars magnified your eyes which were a simmering blue sea. I know you ran the moment I saw you, but I’d like to think you remembered you had a doctor’s appointment, or Mom called and she locked herself out again. I left my number in the woodpecker’s den. I don’t care if you want to talk or stalk. I’d like you in my life — even if I don’t know about it.
When Men Came
When men came, they scratched against my brothers, kicking up a dust of innards, until I was surrounded by stumps. Then men removed the stumps.
I waited for the cutters to strike my knees but men must have feared the look of me. My gray shoulders, my nine arms, my armaments of acorn.
They burned the land.
I smelled the screams of grass—that fragrant wetness—before smoke. The fires ran up the bowl of the valley, and behind it men with long poles turned over char and removed the stones. If it reached me, the fire would burn across my flank, mutilate my face, but not kill me.
The fires stopped before the crest, and I was spared.
They were hard to spot—men. Blurs, fast as sparrows. Not that I wanted to look. I spent the days in sleep or enjoying the coats of sunlight tossed over my shoulders, ignoring the men, the snakes, the rats, ignoring new snow and new leaf.
Vegetables grew in the valley. If I wanted, I could see their human keepers, for they bent among the stalks, or crept. My children grew, too.
One day, herds of men approached. A band of colors. They killed the keepers and lit the vegetation. This time the fire was not a slinking thing through the bracken but a storm, and there was no one to stop its hot blow. The saplings, grown from my seed, their roots and my roots wound—those saplings disintegrated. The flames charred my leaves, left behind smoke stink and pain.
If I had ignored my hatred, it was revived in an instant. I was tempted to crack my joints and spear the next human who traveled across the hill. But there would be justice. Not in the way that I wanted, but there was justice.
The band returned. Green had sprayed across the black earth, but there were no new trees. Now the men were colors themselves—reds and yellows, blue-grays, their cloths bearing spots and squares and the shapes of things—eagles, badgers, trees. At first I took them to be birds. When I knew them to be men, I despaired.
The men waited. Then another band approached, and the two faced each other across the valley. A volley of branches flit the air. These were bones of wood, sharpened, foliage mocked by feathers. The bones stuck everywhere. Later I would fantasize about being stripped to splinters, to be tossed into man, to pin him to the earth, to grow, to set my roots to ribs, to wire around bone, to crush them beneath my weight.
Now bands met. The clash vibrated the rocks, and I watched men use cutters to fell other men. This was the limit of their minds. Soon the leafage of the bands was lost behind dark dusts and blood—that stain that seeps like sap.
Then I felt hot breath against my back. This man was swinging his cutter against another. A hand pressed my flank. I pushed back, and he fell. The man lost the foliage of his face, then heaved forward, screeches mulling the air. His cutter did not miss.
The man stood a while, solitary as an owl. He touched his enemy carefully—not cloth or rock but flesh. For a moment I understood. Perhaps behind this wildness, there is a want for solace.
The man crawled to a view of the valley, and leaned against me, and was quiet. The bands broke to fragments—some turned and fled, slips of sparrows. The cutters were cleaned, exercise over. Some crept among the dead, fingers nimble, searching for small fruits. The man against me was not bothered.
The dead were buried like squirrel stores. Wilds returned. My children wove their roots around coins and cloths and cutters, and a few tasted the summation of soldiers.
The man returned. I did not know it was him until he sat at my knees, hand to the earth, where slept the skull of his enemy. I will never know if that enemy was kin, or if the man felt some affinity for his species—that same sympathy I have for oaks, for all trees, bracken and brambles.
Another sunless sky, and the man returned, this time with his cutter. He looked up at my tall branches, my nine arms, and put his cutter in the air. He hesitated long enough for me to see his foliage gray, eyes quiet as fox holes. Then he went away, and struck younger trees, and from their remains built a home. There he lived, and produced keepers like himself.
Seasons blue, and green, honeyed, ablaze, lusty, pale.
In idle mists, they buried him by my feet.
I have left him—undisturbed.
Published in Writ in Water (April 2018)
#tree #medieval #man #nature #war
Battle Roh ZN-10-4, Annex Class, 004
I apologize for my poetics.
Once I spoke in staccato, without emotion, through the Vox—that telepathy of machines, a channel for instantaneous communication. Most of my speech was reserved for tactics, for relaying my position, my next position, for observations, insights, a language for war. The battle schools taught us that expression is another tool of the soldier.
But I have had little to do for the last century lying here in the rubble of dead anneks, disregarded by the squids, who have no use for technology except the stolen plasma rifles they used to retaliate against invasion. Those too have been tossed; I often find myself looking at a las slinger not three throws away. When I see the squids fly overhead like crows, I never see them with tech; just those tentacles, those glibbering sacs of air, those long pinnacles that mark their heads. Theirs is the freedom of old-world dolphins.
No, my sentiment comes from reading files in my boredom—leftovers from school. Poems written millennia ago, writ before the human race was perverted and destroyed. Odysseys, monomyths, epic poems, extracts. Folk tales. Plays. Some have been adapted into propaganda. An annek is marooned on a planet and must circumnavigate ice floes and dagger rains and pinkskinned worms. An annek must reject the love-offering of a thermalwave engine to complete his mission objective.
We, the Roh of Annex Class, are identical, from the rings between our joint-bulbs to the glass of our retinal runes. We store these stories to find inspiration in dismal times. These heroes are the closest thing we have to individuality and the concept of moral courage.
I am marooned, too, like VC-11-9. But unlike this hero, who forded white rivers on a patch of his spaceship's wing, my legs are missing. My arms are missing. I am battle clutter.
Actually, I could move if I chose to. My weapon arm is cut after the elbow, and I can crawl in a jagged way. But to where? There is no destination worth my interest. Nowhere for a lone Roh to go. A century ago, I was disconnected from the Vox. The event told me that my people had left completely. Otherwise, I'd be a data point among others to map the ground, recording information for a counterattack. Disconnected means the Roh have the left the planet—left orbit—left the system.
I am alone.
No harbor. No haven. No purpose. No thoughts of revenge. No anger or pain. Just the stillness. The spectacle of the squids. The soothing steam-spouts and white towers. The hot rain that peels away my blue paint.
Do you see why I've turned to poetry?
#sciencefiction #robots #colonize #theroh #spaceandstuff
Battle Roh ZN-10-4, Annex Class, 003
Among the blue bones of my brothers, I listen to vapors.
And if I strain my receptors, I can hear the undersea.
Far, far below, boiling waves seek to escape the core's cauldron, scratching at a ceiling of pumicite and froth — screeching, foaming, breaking. From the backs of these waves shoot spears of steam, screaming things which hurtle through a lattice of low-caves, resting in vesicles, rising, finding those natural vents in the land and forming great white towers in the distance, sometimes geysers.
Millennia ago, bags of organic sentiment flew up these pipes and pores and licked the black scum that grew like rust. These bags were ancestor to the squids, who build their civilizations in the skies, who etch their secrets in the earth.
Why did we want this world?
The Roh must have predicted this planet's necessity on a larger scale, as a port between this system and the next, or the destination of a new battle school.
Certainly not for the locals, or the minerals, or the undersea.
Or the moans of earth, those kettle-screeches, that deluge of heresy.
#sciencefiction #robots #colonize #theroh #spaceandstuff
Battle Roh ZN-10-4, Annex Class, 002
I lie on porous gray rocks, blue paint scratched. My vision is crowded by ghostly green readouts—the closest, perhaps, that I come to organic pain. Stats confirm what I can physically see—my legs are glowing stumps. Actually, the legs themselves are fifteen meters away, the joints that once connected them burped into gas-rich froth. My arm is back there too. My other arm is firing a blast rifle. It will be destroyed, too, by precision fire, according to the probabilities running through my processor. Not that I care. A downed droid is a dead droid. The Roh don't bother repairing anneks who've sustained this percentage of damage (56%—now 87% as a green bolt eviscerates my weapon-arm). Cheaper to recycle the soldier for scrap. But I wasn't built for emotional complexity. My only concern is how many I can skyfall before a burst takes my processing unit.
Weaponless, armless, legless, I must no longer register as a threat, and I find myself staring at the enemy—those flying black squids—with the patience of stones.
#sciencefiction #robots #colonize #theroh #spaceandstuff
The Roh
Some days I will tell stories about Battle Roh ZN-10-4, Annex Class.
Ten Four is a warbot, a sophisticated technology with a simple intelligence.
He’s blue.
An unliving weapon, Ten Four has been programmed to kill as quickly as a half-starved owl. His people are the Roh.
The Roh are a synthetic species. Their philosophy is simple.
Become.
#sciencefiction #robots #colonize #theroh #spaceandstuff
Nonfiction—Each Dark Round
My philosophy is a lone night, with the wife far-flung on the couch watching videos about tape worms. I’ve gone to bed early, and the rain is caught by the tree canopy, except for a black fall from the roof that taps the cement. In the dark it could be the crackle of fire. My philosophy is my beating heart compared to her’s. I can only imagine she still lives, eyes fixed on the doctor’s spool, trapped by elemental darkness.