What Lingers in the Trench Depths
by Gabrielle Bleu
Takes-Half-Glances-Through-Porous-Clouds corrected their course through Hoag’s Object. Soon the Serpent would be behind them, and in only the length of a sigh, they would reach that galaxy which was the source of so much sorrow. They were trailing Cold-Shoal-Among-Encompassing-Heat and the thin ribbons of light and color left in their wake across space.
Cold-Shoal was in mourning. The Milky Way was contaminated, the pollutants spreading throughout the cosmic food chain, and Cold-Shoal had yet found no solution.
Obsidian swallowers swam with derelict starships lodged in their bellies, rather than their normal diet of moons and comets. Unable to break down the synthetic materials, their bloated bellies burst, intestines and half-digested metals spewing out across the galaxy. Quasar amphipods, dwelling on the edges of black holes, had the remnants of decayed space probes deep in their guts. Pulsar eels with their massive jaws lodged open by nothing more than the smallest of satellites, killing the eel slowly.
Cold-Shoal worked ceaselessly, consumed with their grief, trying to find a solution to the poisonous refuse. Distraught over the detritus they found in something as simple as solar crustaceans clinging to the poles of moons. The feelings were most unbecoming, as both Cold-Shoal and Takes-Half-Glances were meant only to observe the universe, not to be complicit in its cycles.
And yet Takes-Half-Glances felt they understood Cold-Shoal’s anomalistic sympathies. They had their own unbecoming soft swirling feelings for Cold-Shoal. However, their eddies seemed different from Cold-Shoal’s keening over the deaths of the denizens in the deepest trenches of dark space. Their own tides had sorrow in them, yes, but were also tinged with something less saline. It was a new sensation for Takes-Half-Glances, and they had nothing to compare it to, save for Cold-Shoal’s wailing out among the Milky Way. When Takes-Half-Glances heard that mournful sound, they nearly stopped in their journey to wail themself, so deep were their feelings for Cold-Shoal. But Takes-Half-Glances did not stop, and continued deeper into the Milky Way, their own uncommon sentiments spurring them forward.
Space grew crowded, in the span of the breath that it took Takes-Half-Glances to enter the Milky Way. A million tiny bits of processed material drifted, like a great swarm of gamma krill, along the tides of space. Surely, no krill made their homes here now, among the contaminants. Takes-Half-Glances moved in a slow pirouette, casting about for Cold-Shoal. At last Takes-Half-Glances found them, coalesced around Mercury, gazing at the third planet, their anguish sputtering and giving way to anger in brief bursts like solar flares. Their attention turned to Takes-Half-Glances-Through-Porous-Clouds watching them, and the flares calmed.
“Did you travel far?” Cold-Shoal-Among-Encompassing-Heat molded the question.
“It was but a sigh,” Takes-Half-Glances forged in return.
“Was I hard to find?”
“It was an easy thing.”
Cold-Shoal warmed and cooled in sequence and Takes-Half-Glances synced with them. The cycle fluctuated after a time, Cold-Shoal growing erratic. Takes-Half-Glances at first tried to sync to Cold-Shoal’s irregularity, to match and anticipate the heated shifts, but they could not.
A distant, luminous cetacean hummed through the galaxy, following the migration path that thrummed in its evolutionary memory. The vibrations caused Cold-Shoal to cool even more, until Takes-Half-Glances could no longer see them. They waited for Cold-Shoal’s return, and wondered what hid in the singer’s belly, how many rover treads agitated their larynx.
“I must change my name,” Cold-Shoal-Among-Encompassing-Heat returned, blistering with force.
“Why?”
“I can no longer be a cool place. I am merely An-All-Encompassing-Heat.”
“But you are still like a shoal. And the waves of what pains you will break upon you.” Takes-Half-Glances attempted to soothe, but An-All-Encompassing-Heat would not hear it.
“I pull the contaminants from their bellies. But there is so much of it, too much of it. I lure the ones that have eaten of it into suns, voids, black holes. But it spreads still.”
An-All-Encompassing-Heat cooled again, receding until Takes-Half-Glances could barely see them. Takes-Half-Glances’ own heat flared, and they moved towards the third planet, pressing themself down through the coating of orbiting particulates and faintly transmitting satellites until they came to rest just inside the atmosphere. As they searched the planet’s surface for the source of the wreckage spilling out into space, they seared with anger, which was another new sensation for Takes-Half-Glances. It was uncomfortable, this pure heat, and it was acrid.
Yet there was nothing that Takes-Half-Glances could discern as the source, in the illegible sizes of things between small and large, between microbe and mountain. Only that the metals and plastics had been made many sighs ago, scores of revolutions back.
Takes-Half-Glances pulled away from the surface of the planet, out past the atmosphere, tangling themself in the processed ring orbiting the planet.
An-All-Encompassing-Heat settled next to them, still below temperature, just a voice amidst star-bright space. “Takes-Half-Glances-Through-Porous-Clouds? Do you take half glances at me?”
Takes-Half-Glances-Through-Porous-Clouds thought on their name. They thought on Cold-Shoal-Among-Encompassing-Heat. And they thought on the strange eddying they had carried for them, and how the strange eddying remained for An-All-Encompassing-Heat.
“No, I look at you in full.” The eddies were a whirlpool now. Takes-Half-Glances tried to still their own waters. “You are neither clouds nor porous. It does not hurt to look in full.”
“I am becoming porous now. Or perhaps–it is hard to tell–it is–” Their voice receded, leaving Takes-Half-Glances alone for many sighs. “Heavy,” An-All-Encompassing-Heat finished at last, voice distant.
Takes-Half-Glances felt themself cool. Heavy was not a thing for them to know. Heavy was for the pull of black holes, for planets and their gravity. They did not understand.
“Show me.”
And An-All-Encompassing-Heat did, warming to visibility before they pulled the nearest of the plastics and the metals and the scraps of a great death into themself. They grew denser, slower. The change lasted for less than a breath before they recovered, but there was still a time when they were other than what they had been. Takes-Half-Glances fought to not grow cold and disappear at the sight.
“It stays, eating and eaten up, passing from one stomach to another. Do you understand, Takes-Half-Glances-Through-Porous-Clouds? I hold it inside of myself, so that it cannot spread further.”
“But it will poison you. And one day, you will die. It will be out again.”
“Yes. But it will take many sighs before then. A hurricane of breaths, until it is released again. Someone will have found a better way by then. I will have found a better way.” An-All-Encompassing-Heat paused, quiet for a time. Space was empty between the two of them. “I do not know what else to do, until that better way comes.”
Takes-Half-Glances felt their spiraling feelings for Cold-Shoal mix in a chemocline with their brackish fear for An-All-Encompassing-Heat, and the processed particles they now carried as dead things in themself. Takes-Half-Glances paused, and the alluvium of their emotions for Cold-Shoal that was and An-All-Encompassing-Heat that is, and whatever the poison would make them rose up in a delta. It was not enough to gaze upon these things in half-looks. In the witnessing of An-All-Encompassing-Heat’s actions, Takes-Half-Glances-Through-Porous-Clouds found themself fundamentally altered. They were moved to action, no longer Takes-Half-Glances-Through-Porous-Clouds but Witnesses-in-Full, themself still, but changed.
Witnesses-in-Full pressed the nearest satellite into themself just as they had seen An-All-Encompassing-Heat do. A warmth engulfed them and at first they feared it was the effects of taking such poison into themself. But it was merely An-All-Encompassing-Heat settling next to them. But they did not radiate an angry heat as they had before. It was a gentler glow, radiating forth at Witnesses-in-Full’s aid.
The two of them worked in tandem to pull objects in and up from the orbit around the planet, trapping the pollutants within themselves. Space opened around them.
One day they would spread wide and thin, the two of them, until they died and dissipated across the whole cosmos. The contaminants they carried in their forms would seep and then flood out. It was a temporary solution, only one small clearing in a vast expanse, jetsam already carried to the ever-expanding edges by all sorts of hungry life. But there was a clearing, and they two were in it. Witnesses-in-Full and their billowing feelings for An-All-Encompassing-Heat, and the memory of what they had both once been, together in that clear, wide space.
Gabrielle Bleu writes science fiction and fantasy. When not writing, she watches birds and admires lichens. Their work has appeared in Archive of the Odd, Mythaxis, and Hexagon magazine. Find more of Bleu's work at gabriellebleu.com.
