When the others lost interest, or belief, or both, I kept on. Skids was my sib, closer than any blood. There was a huge cavern in my life where he had once been. And beyond that, I feared for him. How could he cope out there on his own, his head screwed up with the madness that had taken him over? That, and his anger at us for our stupid attempts to save him from himself. I felt so guilty about that.
One day I went to the skystation.
In our wanderings we’d occasionally come close, but it was a long trek across the city from Cragside, and I’d never come this far north.
I remembered Skids returning late, always from the north. I remembered him sitting on the terrace wall, always looking towards the station. He had been obsessed with the aliens. One of the last things I had done for him had been to needle a scattering of star tattoos across his face, a starsinger thing.
The station was in Constellation, a district of warehouses and bars, doss-houses, sex clubs and alien buildings whose purpose was never clear.
I set off early that morning, and spent the middle part of the day hiking from street to street in Constellation, mind blown away by the barrage of
alien
and
new
. Everywhere I turned, ads leapt out, haranguing me:
Dodge, you need to try my phreak... Dodge, come with me to a place where... Dodge, try... Dodge, buy... Dodge... Dodge...
Strange sounds swamped me: musics, speeches, shouting and squealing and screeching. Phreaks filled the air, leaving me dizzy and stupefied and horny and hyper. Armed grunts stood at every junction, and I desperately tried to remember my lessons about not misreading reactions, not sending out the wrong body signals. I was only a kid, and suddenly partway across my home city I was somewhere entirely alien to me.
“!¡
deferential
¡! Excuse me... my sib. I’m looking for my sib.”
I asked so many times, of so many different species and artificials and witches’-brew hybrid oddities. I asked animated posters on the walls. I asked the interactive ads hanging in the air all around me. I asked in shops and bars where aliens phreaked and imbibed all manner of substances. I asked in sex clubs where humans and aliens sat and lay and pressed together in combinations that boggled my young and still relatively innocent mind.
I asked mostly humans and nearly-men, figuring that at least I would not offend with my body language and intonation.
Then: “You asked Wraith Pedre, have you?” said a woman wearing only body paint and feathers and ritual scars, standing outside a bar and trying to draw custom inside.
She nodded down the street and I saw a man I had previously avoided. He was skinny, wearing only a pair of frayed trousers, torn off just above the knee. His ribs looked like the rungs of a ladder, and his skin was a sickly grey. On his head there was a strange, jellied growth.
He was preaching, and that was why I had avoided him. I hadn’t thought a mad preacher could help, and I didn’t want to get snared into his routine. The gods meant nothing to me, other than they were sometimes a way to get what you wanted if you were dealing with someone who believed.
I thanked the woman and approached Wraith Pedre. I had heard the term
wraith
a few times, but at that stage I had little idea what it meant.
As I drew closer, I saw that the growth on the man’s head was some kind of alien, wrapped around him, attached by suckers. A caul, I realised; a mental parasite.
“!¡
deferential
¡! I’m looking for my sib,” I said to the man. “His name is Skids. I think he knows this district well.”
The man looked at me curiously, and I wondered what was in his head, whether it was even his head that shaped his actions and words, or if he had been completely taken over by the caul.
“Have you asked the Lord of the Stars?” Pedre asked, accompanied by a torrent of clicks I could not decipher.
I started to edge away. Madness. I did not want madness just then.
Then he added, “The Singer. Have you asked the Singer?”
He rambled a little longer, and I eventually gathered there was a starsinger living in the sheer-fronted building where Pedre preached.
A starsinger.
I had never seen a starsinger, didn’t even know what they looked like. They were ethereal, shrouded in mystery, one of the most ancient races.
I hadn’t known we had one living in our city.
With a wave of an emaciated hand, Wraith Pedre guided me towards the entrance. It looked like no more than a slit in a mirrored metal wall, but there was some weird perspective shit going on with it and when I drew near I realised it was open and I could pass within...
...and I was on a hill, the ground falling away below me in grassy folds. The sky was a pale shade of lilac, and over to one side a fringe of strange dark trees pressed together, swaying in the breeze and talking to each other in clicks and sighs.
I looked back and saw the narrow black slit that must be the exit back to the street.
I started to panic and instantly my head was filled with song, an alien chorus without rhythm or tone but somehow intensely musical. I started to breathe more slowly again.
I heard giggling, chatter, coming from the trees, but I didn’t think it was the trees, and then a group of small beings emerged. They looked like human children, naked and fleshy, with ringlets, pale skin and pink cheeks. It was the high feathery wings that made it clear they weren’t human. Flapping, the six of them rose from the ground and came to swoop and circle around my head.
I’d been phreaked, I realised. None of this was real.
I closed my eyes and willed them gone, but when I looked they were still circling and swooping, chuckling as they flew.
I took a deep breath. “I’m looking for the Lord of the Stars.”
The flyers said nothing.
I looked around. Rolling green landscape stretched in every direction, fading into a misty blur at a distance.
“!¡
assertive
¡! I’m looking for the starsinger.”
The flyers stopped, and hung motionless in the air all around me. With one booming voice, they said, “You are
in
the ’singer. We are the ’singer. We are reality. We make it. We sing the reality. You like it? We make it
big
...”
Disappointed
. In my head, a voice.
Don’t like it. Not real enough
.
I shook my head, trying to shake the voice out.
Don’t like this real
.
I looked up, saw dark brown clouds swirling across a sky that had been the lilac of a child’s story, saw the tops of the trees whipping in a sudden wind.
“No...” I gasped. “It’s... it’s pretty.”
The trees calmed, the clouds thinned.
Sing good. Sing strong. Sing harmony with joined voices of star sibs.
Then, more gently, one of the winged beings hanging over me said, “You can be safe here. Do you want to be safe here?” And, giggling, they resumed their flight.
I turned, and although I stopped it was as if I kept on turning.
I was dizzy. I stumbled. I dropped to my knees.
I heard voices, my head full of voices, singing and laughing and crooning soothingly, eerily.
I opened my eyes and I was up high, looking down. I could see the snaking twists of the river as it meandered through the city; the line of craggy hills that cut the city in two.
I needed to get out of this building, I realised. The phreaks were messing with my head. Already, the real world seemed far away. Worlds away. The starsinger’s reality was so much more real.
I would be fine. I would not be harmed. I could relax.
A crooning, singing voice, filling my skull.
I could stay here for as long as I liked.
I could. Easily. (And a part of my mind, buried deep, reminded me that if I ever emerged I would be wasted, drained of life, drained of
me
.) So easy.
But I wanted something. What was it that I wanted? Something important...
I want to remember
.
No... I wanted Skids. I wanted to find my nest-sib.
I closed my eyes and he was in my head. Images, fragments from when we were growing up, as if they were being pulled from me.
I know that Wraith Skids is safe. I remember that he is living in Constellation. I see that he has taken the caul. I understand and accept that he has made this choice because it is a manifestation of that which is within. He has become a part of the greater real.
It was hard to imagine Skids with an alien caul wrapped around his head, attached to him by suckers and tendrils buried deep in his skull, feeding on his brainwaves as it fed him with phreaks. But it was what was within and I felt good about that.
I could stay here... I could join my nest-sib and become a part of the greater real too. My destiny lay in the greater real.
No... I would stay and I would be happy and I would starve until I was skin and bones. I would not do that. I did not have it within me to exist on phreaks and dreams alone.
I started to break free, started to see walls around me, an arched metal ceiling high above me.
I was lying on the floor. I must have collapsed.
I rolled over, rose to my hands and knees. I felt suddenly sick, and then my guts were heaving and I was staring down at a pool of vomit and in that pool of lumpy, mucousy green there was a...
thing
... It had a semi-transparent pink body, like a lump of jelly except there were organs within and a
sense
of something more about it.
I remembered Skids’ night terror, his insistence later that something had happened, that watchers had slithered inside him.
I could feel them sliding down my throat. Into me. Everywhere. Some of them came out, but not all.
The thing died before me. The watcher, if that was indeed what it was.
And that was when I started to remember.
I
T CAME BACK
in snatches. Dream images you cling onto as you wake. Memory flashes prompted by some vague connection. Fragments that you struggle to piece together.
And then you wish you hadn’t.
That afternoon. We’d been roaming Cheapside and Satinbower all morning, but later... at the docks in Cheapside, smoking our own phreaks in a huddle on a piece of wasteland behind a sprawling warehouse. Jemerie and Jacandra were arguing, pushing each other about, squaring up chest to chest. It had started off as flirting and bravado, but the phreaks and bull spirits had shifted it into something else. Things were getting quite serious between the two of them.
Then a squad of grunts, rounding us up. Jemerie getting antsy with them until he was taken out with a spray of something that just turned him off like an electric light.
Me, objecting and at the same time wondering why I was always the first to open my mouth.
And then nothing.
Waking that evening in the sleep cell I shared with my sibs.
Nothing in between.
Another fragment: a silky mesh mask smothering my face. Bright lights. So bright they hurt. Senses muddled, heavy, phreaked. Voices babbling in my head, but no words I could understand.
Another: lying, still, calm. Surrounded by jelly. No air, but I did not need to breathe. And then the jelly moved and I realised it was not a mass of jelly but a mass of
jellies
, of jelly-like polyps... of watchers. Slithering over me, around me, probing every orifice, entering me, exploring, penetrating. I was impaled by them, immersed in them and them in me.
I
WANTED TO
find Skids still, but also I didn’t. I wanted to tell him that I remembered now. I wanted to tell him I had been wrong, so badly wrong, but the starsinger’s words still rang in my skull.
Wraith Skids is safe.
I headed back to Cragside, exhausted, still trying to absorb what I had learned. I made it back just before seventh and curfew.
Back at Villa Mart Three I headed straight for the junior hall. I needed to tell the others. They had been there on that missing afternoon. We all had. Had the grunts taken us all? Did the others still have watchers in them? For that matter, did I? I’d vomited up one, but could there be more?
I bumped into Sol in the main lobby.
She took one look at me and steered me off onto a second floor balcony cut into the crag face.
“!¡
agitated
¡! The watchers took us,” I said. “Skids was right. They took us and... and did things...”
Sol looked serious, and took a long time to answer. Finally, standing with her back to the panorama of the city beyond the balcony, she said, “I know. !¡
earnest | sincere
¡! They do it to all of us, particularly the young.”
“!¡
rising panic
¡! But why? They get inside us!”
“!¡
patient | calm
¡! Measuring, monitoring, testing... they’re always testing us. They don’t want us to stray. They want to keep us in line.”
“What if they’re still inside?”
“!¡
reassuring
¡! They always come out,” said Sol. “We make sure of that.”
“But why?”
“Why, eh? You want me to tell you what’s in an alien’s mind? It’s hard enough to tell you what’s in another person’s mind. I don’t know. We live with it, is what we do. Sometimes it goes wrong, as it did with Skids. Maybe he didn’t pass one of their tests. Maybe he just happened to remember what he should have forgotten. Who knows, eh?”
Suddenly it was all I could do not to cry. I felt my lips trembling and a great knot of tension in my chest and throat.
Sol gathered me up, hugged me against her broad cushion of a chest, and somehow I managed to fight back the tears.
“!¡
comforting
¡! You’re a good kid,” said Sol. “You could lead this nest one day. There’s a lot of me in the way you are. That’s got to be good, eh?” She chuckled. “Come on. Time to eat.”
As we walked up through the nest my head was full of questions, like had this happened to us before, and would it happen again, and what could the watchers possibly be looking for?