Because They Could Not Stop
SHORT FICTION
by Dennis Mombauer
The seed plummets back toward the womb.
V. Clinzell watches the atmosphere grow, the endless ocean and the ruins rising from below. The position lights shine from under the waves, the signal arrays have drowned decades ago.
Because they could not stop, the world has stopped for them.
* * * * *
Piece No. 113, Dream.
A clipping from a newspaper that doesn’t exist. It is printed on leather made from human blood, scraped so thin it has become translucent.
The headline states “Collaborative Immortality Achieved,” and there is only one line of text below: “For decades in the simplest animals, twelve experiments with long telomeres held the key to parabiotic longevity.”
* * * * *
V. Clinzell keeps her/his hand perfectly steady as she/he puts the last piece into her/his magnum opus. It is finished.
One thousand seven hundred and twenty-six pieces, eight hundred and sixty-three trips. This is the last one, her/his final journey.
* * * * *
Piece No. 282, Memory.
An instar with microscopic lamps installed in its exoskeleton, hanging from the body by a thread. Light flows along the curvature of the carapace and makes the chitin shimmer in unearthly hues.
It is filled with hardened foam, or the gravity of the seed, albeit lesser than Earth’s, would crush it. Where it is from, continents float on planetary currents of gas and vast swarms blot out the atmosphere.
A trillion is a small number there, and beauty a weak word.
* * * * *
The thermal protection falters. Flames pearl off the windows and micro-fissures bloom along it. The quartz darkens and crackles, and V. Clinzell feels her/his body drenching in sweat.
Her/his artwork fills the entire inner coat of the seed, images and objects crawling over aluminum and titanium in dizzying lines. Two images for every journey: one when she/he left, and one when she/he came back. Desire and memory. Dream and reality.
* * * * *
Piece No. 291, Dream.
A conch shell with an inscription that traces its spiral, an unbroken sentence that recalls the waves and the salt. It mentions the sunken cities by name, all of them, as well as the islands no longer there.
The writing gets tinier the further inside it goes, and the breaking surf echoes from the cavernous interior walls. It talks of seasteading and aquatics, of floating agglomerations and storms inside tectonic plates.
The ozone in the air is tangible and mixes with the stench of fish rotting on oil slicks, of maelstroms of polythene and micro-plastics.
In the deepest recess of the conch shell, the writing runs dry with a single name.
* * * * *
Earth’s gravity well pulls V. Clinzell down toward the womb and burns her/him alive. She/he concentrates on slow, measured breaths within her/his frame.
Age has stripped Clinzell of her/his skin and fossilized her/his bones, has dimmed her/his eyesight and immobilized all muscles. It has taken away her/his need to sleep, her/his memories, and the names she/he has cherished.
There is only so much a human brain can hold: and over time, Clinzell has forgotten where she/he has come from, what she/he has desired, who she/he has been.
* * * * *
Piece No. 456, Memory.
A flacon of flawless crystal, a glittering star the size of a golden-aged algae.
The fluid inside has no color, no smell, and no taste. It is almost indistinguishable from water, but it has lost everything that gives it its identity.
Even the most advanced laboratory could not reveal its origin.
* * * * *
Plastic melts into V. Clinzell’s flesh as the heat increases.
Clinzell closes her/his eyes, surrounded by the beauty of the seed. Art was the price of admission into the outer dark, and she/he has paid it gladly.
A great artist might only provide a stanza per trip, a paragraph, a mere sentence. The most extraordinary artists traveled the stars so many times and brought back so little: a crystal-clear note, a well-chosen syllable, a stroke of the brush.
V. Clinzell has tried, and she/he has created. Whatever she/he had carried into the outer dark, it was transformed before it came back.
* * * * *
Piece No. 717, Dream.
A slip of paper, like the one you might find in ancient fortune cookies. It evokes a temple of random prophecies, a harvest of shadows reaped by candlelight. A trace of incense and sesame surrounds the paper, and the letters on it read:
“Sacred cities of free will. All animals are skeletons of melted glass; aspirants are the tubeworms of telluric force.”
* * * * *
The vibrations jingle through V. Clinzell’s prosthetic teeth and stretch her/his lungs, then vanish. Calm like a river flowing into the sea, the seed fails.
Eyes still closed, Clinzell senses the deceleration and knows this is her/his final journey. There is nothing to come back to, no more extension.
Relativity has gifted her/him millennia, but now she/he has spent them all.
* * * * *
Piece No. 840, Memory.
V. Clinzell’s third heart. It is shriveled and vacuum-wrapped, the cauterized surgery scars still visible. The whole muscle is decorated with tattoos that tell of extraordinary proportions.
A flight so long and black it seems to never end; a cartel of fingers, a cult of time, a mnemonic empire. Watch-dust settling on ink, atria and ventricles ticking with fainted clockworkers.
* * * * *
V. Clinzell’s eyelids disintegrate to ashes, and powder her/his cheeks. The landing spires and stupas of the womb pierce the ocean’s surface, but everything else is gone.
The pumps are no longer working, the pipes clogged. The proud docks of Earth’s spaceport have become home to algae and crustaceans alone.
* * * * *
Piece No. 1109, Dream.
The reproduction of an old-fashioned photograph.
It shows V. Clinzell as a young woman and as an older man, both images overlaid and merged into one faded shadow. Her/his soul has been isolated and enhanced, the most colorful part of the photo by far.
Its tendrils seem to caress her/his face, the trailing gossamers of a jellyfish; and there is a residual psychic energy brimming in the silver atoms pressed onto the paper.
* * * * *
Clinzell’s seed closes in fast, almost at disintegration speed. The re-entry has incinerated all navigation and welded the whole seed into a chimera of flesh, artwork, and machine.
The seed vanishes into the submerged womb with barely a splash, then sinks toward the bottom of the sea.
* * * * *
Piece No. 1726, Memory.
The spherical map of an imaginary country, about as big as a marble.
Desiccated roads and rivers flowing with gravel. Expanses of blankness and jumbled letters scattered across the landscape. The map has eyes on gluey triangle strips, and they ogle the spectator.
It blends into itself on all sides, but it is impossible to recognize landmasses or coastlines. Whatever the map shows, it does not translate into a stable memory. It could be any world or every world.
If you look close enough into the eyes, you can see the whole seed reflected in their pupils.
It is V. Clinzell’s seed, sometimes.
* * * * *
The fire has already dented the windows, and the pressure smashes them in.
The last thing V. Clinzell sees as water rushes into her/his charcoaled lungs is the seafloor below the immense crumbled pillars of the womb.
It is littered with returned and broken seeds, and they have spilled their art into the fertile darkness.
Dennis Mombauer currently lives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he works on climate change and as a writer of speculative fiction. He is co-publisher of a German magazine for experimental fiction, "Die Novelle – Magazine for Experimentalism," and has published fiction and non-fiction in various magazines and anthologies. His first English novel "The Fertile Clay" (Nightscape Press) and his novella "The House of Drought" (Stelliform Press) will be published in 2022.
