SPIZO
2016 Q3 Silver Honorable Mention
L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest
To his back, a monstrous cloud loomed, jabbing the ground with lightning as it crawled closer. Thunder shouted across the landscape, announcing the arrival of the tempest, the darkness, the destruction carrying a dark cape of rain.
The dark planet did not accept them, and every long night, another furious tempest shook the small shelter. Wind whistled against it, sending an unnatural wail inside where Ebe tried to sleep, pressed against the side of his wife, Mala. Mala slept soundly. As a young girl, Mala had grown up in a surface city, now long gone, where storms constantly tore against the landscape. She could sleep through anything.
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This lonely planet would never be like their former homeworld of Spizo, but this was a low standard. Spizo had been no paradise. Ebe only knew it as the hot, dry hell it became. He remembered best the machines that burrowed into the ground, creating underground cities for a desperate populace.
On the few times he'd been to the surface, his skin practically melted with sweat. He witnessed the machines toil, their brass backs rising and heaving off great clumps of soil, sending out loud, calamitous noises before submerging again beneath waves of dirt.
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Presently, a little hand pulled at the covers. By the soft glow emanating from the nightlight, Ebe saw his son's face gazing back at him, his black eyes wide and fearful.
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His son, Idrin, had inherited many traits from his parents. The large eyes of his mother, or snub nose of his father. Even Idrin's skin was a perfect blend of Mala's sallow appearance and Ebe's dark mahogany complexion.
Ebe used to be a thick, fleshy man in contrast to Mala's petite frame. But the family appeared ever more alike as hunger sapped the fat and muscle from their bones.
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Mala was an attractive woman with a sharp nose and full lips. Sometimes Ebe would glimpse her face and remember why he fell in love in the first place. But this joy occurred less and less. When he saw his family, he only saw his own failure reflected back at him. He barely recognized Idrin as his son.
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Idrin mouthed, “It's back, Daddy.” His son crawled into the bed without disturbing his mother.
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Idrin was either seven or eight. He could even be ten. Ebe struggled to keep track of time, even though the shelter came with a timekeeper. It was a cat-shaped clock that ticked away time relevant to a planet no longer existent.
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Ebe glanced at the date on the timekeeper. A year. It had only been a year since they landed on this planet. A year that seemed to stretch into a decade, but they would never make it that long.
The shelter they lived in was supposed to create a self-contained, sustainable environment, but its systems were failing. The shelter had been designed for a more hospitable planet with an atmosphere similar to Spizo, but Ebe had failed to find such a planet for his family.
This was the truth Ebe dared not tell his son.
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As the nights wore on in fury, it became clearer that this new frontier wasn't home, would never be home, and would never be theirs. At every point, it denied them. At every point, it punished them, whether by freezing days or by the eternal and sleepless nights.
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Off the shelter was a pod where they maintained plants for food, supplemented by consuming nutrient pouches. Only three plants remained. Their wilted vines drooped with brownish tomatoes. Starvation was inevitable.
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Ebe counted the bolts in the ceiling as Idrin gripped his shirt and buried his face in his sleeve. “Let's go home,” the boy whispered, but his voice steadily rose. “I want to go. I'm bored! I hate it!”
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“This is home,” Ebe replied, stroking the boy's hair. The child cried to himself. Not knowing what else to do, Ebe weakly held him. The tears didn't stop until Idrin fell asleep, leaving Ebe to suffer the storm in fearful wakefulness.
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Rain pummeled the metal, resonating with a beating sound that drowned out his thoughts. Ebe crawled out of the bed—leaving Idrin to scoot closer to Mala—and shuffled over to the computer to boot it up. It had no connection, although it did have an expert system installed.
It was a delightful program. He could type whatever he wanted, and it would prompt the expert system to respond.
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Somewhere far away in the rain, he thought he heard something from long ago. It brought about the memory of a dim room where Ebe's mother hummed softly as she wiped the feet of his brother's twisted corpse. Ebe's brother had been crushed by a machine while going out to get supplies.
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The military had brought his cadaver back with their deepest condolences. “This is the price we pay to Spizo,” Ebe's mother said softly at hearing the news. She was experienced at losing children. She had lost many sons before to war and hunger and heat. In fact, Ebe turned out to be her only surviving child—a bitter twist of fate, considering how things eventually turned out for Ebe and his family.
The shelter could only support three people. Ebe hadn't been able to take his mother with them into space, but she insisted it was fine. Ebe had tried to offer his spot to his mother, but she balked at the idea. She wanted Idrin to have both of his parents. She had always been a good woman.
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Only after his brother died did Ebe truly understand what Spizo was. Ebe had never been a religious man, but the death of his siblings left him with many questions. He earnestly threw himself into reading religious texts about Spizo, spending hours in deep contemplation.
Spizo wasn't simply the namesake of their planet. Spizo was also a being that, according to the church, set everyone and everything in place and then left them alone and helpless to suffer.
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The church had been the only official way to worship Spizo. Everything else was blasphemy. Before the end, there had been talk that the impending doom was brought about by Spizo-worshipping cultists, sequestered in deep caverns, their faces turning paler as the sun grew hotter.
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Ebe typed into the program's prompt bar, “Spizo.” A page of information came up, explaining the planet's former place in a distant galaxy. He typed, “Where am I?”
The program couldn't tell him, but it offered a few incorrect suggestions. Fingers shaking, chest restricting, he typed again, “Please help me. Please help me. Please help me. Please help me.”
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If you are not well, the expert system replied, then you should seek the professional services of a psychiatrist or other mental health professional. Here is a list of things to remember if you are in emotional distress...
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It went on even after Ebe stopped reading.
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Am I depressed? The sounds of the storm swirled in his ears and beat against his brain.
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Am I depressed? He envisioned his last day on Spizo, the air thick with the sweat of the entire world. The sun loomed large on the horizon, threatening to cannibalize—hungry, starving, and lashing fire.
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Ebe had been smart. After all, he had been a financial consultant for one of the vast mining companies with operations on the surface of the planet of Spizo. While Ebe's brothers were being drafted into the military or scraping by as scavengers, Ebe attended college.
After Ebe graduated, he attained a prestigious job and ascended to the highest ranks of the Azteka Mining Company. That was when he met Mala. She was his boss's daughter, a prim woman with a wicked sense of humor she revealed only to him.
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Mala was as accomplished and educated as Ebe. She had worked for a company that built and maintained the geodesic agricultural domes housing artificial environments required to feed a populace that lived underground.
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Ebe fell in love with the impish quality that Mala concealed under layers of professionalism. It only took a glass of wine for Mala to lower her guard and flash a bright, mischievous smile at Ebe.
Back then, Ebe wore suits every day. He remembered Mala's fingers brushing his tie when he asked her to marry him. They became husband and wife with his boss's blessing. Idrin was born shortly after.
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Ebe had gradually saved up enough money to buy an escape and survival shuttle. On the last day of Spizo, Ebe shot his family into space and across the distance of void and stars to come to this unknowable spot in the universe. They had been there ever since, biding their time.
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He typed, “Depression,” and the expert system described the chemicals and neurons in his soft brain tissue that made him unhappy and made him want to die.
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As he scrolled down the page, the computer froze. It crashed habitually. Someday the computer would never boot up again, and with it would go all the pages on Spizo and depression. The expert system would be silent forever after.
Ebe briefly considered writing down as much information from the expert system as he could for the sake of preservation. Then, he remembered that Idrin had lost all their pencils.
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He drifted to sleep in the chair, the storm beating his dreams into an incomprehensible jumble of nightmares and shadows. A voice boomed in his consciousness and shook his skull. At first, he couldn't comprehend a word of it, but gradually, it became intelligible.
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“DO YOU STARVE?” The voice rattled his brain, dislodging his memories and thoughts, leaving him to fall to the ground, trembling and without self.
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“DO YOU STARVE?”
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Ebe found his mouth to speak. “I'm hungry!” He touched the skin of his lips. He was disembodied.
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“YOU COME FROM A HUNGRY PEOPLE. THEY CONSUMED AND CANNIBALIZED AND SUFFERED, NEVER SATED AND NOW DEAD. THE SUN ATE THEM. ITS BRIGHTNESS TORE THEM APART. THEY HAD THEIR TIME, THEIR SHORT TIME.”
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Tears fell without interruption down Ebe's face. He choked on the bile of his grief and dared to gaze into the darkness, searching for the source of the voice, but found nothing. “I-I-I'm scared.”
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From out of nowhere stepped an array of swirling colors that filled his vision completely. The colors parted slightly in the pantomime of a mouth, a lash of gold lolling out like a tongue. “I am being, existence, life, and death.”
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“Are you Spizo?”
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The golden tongue wiggled around. The being let out a sound that was almost a laugh, sounding as if an entire chain of mountains collapsing and being consumed by the ground. “Is that what you call me? Call me no one. Call me Spizo. I do not care.”
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Ebe crouched on all fours, his palms sweaty, eyes burning, and face feverish as he witnessed what he had not been made to witness. Encountering something beyond his feeble human experiences, Ebe fell to the ground as a servant.
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“Slowly you will starve, Ebe. Your body will consume itself in the absence of life. Absence is death for your hungry people. Your corpse will rot in your shelter until the oxygen systems break. Then, your body will freeze, and thousands of years from then it will remain, a last testament to a people completely obliterated. The universe will eat you in time.”
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The way the voice spoke adjusted to Ebe's mortal capabilities, becoming less painful to hear with every word.
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An invisible hand squeezed Ebe’s brain, making spots of his brain matter hot and cold, pulsing along his neurons, inciting his electrons. Something in his head was being modified, but he didn't understand what or how that could be. The swirling colors resembled more closely a face, its eyes gleaming red, its tongue still bright gold. “Do you starve?”
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“Yes. Yes. I'm hungry.”
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“Stand.”
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Ebe shakily stood. Contained within the eyes of the being were shots of purple that mimicked the veins of a man's eyeballs. “What is truth, Ebe?”
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“There is none.”
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The tongue rapidly lashed out, licking through Ebe's body. It was as if Ebe had momentarily turned incorporeal.
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“Truth is eating. Truth is food. Truth is consumption. Truth is starvation. Truth is hunger. This is a ravenous universe, a yearning universe, and all the little parts of it are morsels.” The gap in the colors appeared to be a caricatured mouth, with thick lips and teeth twice the size of Ebe's head. He saw down the being's throat, into a white and distant place. “Do you know the son of Ebe?”
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“Idrin? Do you mean Idrin? That's my son.”
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“I will be the savior. I will make the landscape green and fertile, and I will calm the storms. I will thicken the air and atmosphere and make it breathable. I will cut water across the ground. I will put twin children, one female and one male, into your wife's womb. You will live for now, and your legacy will live on for generations.”
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Ebe's eyes widened. “Mala can't have any more kids. She—”
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“She will bear your children.”
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“Thank you! Thank you, great lord!”
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“Do not call me lord. Do not call me lord! Do not call me lord!” With each iteration of the command, its voice became less and less comprehensible and more and more out of human bounds. Each intonation shot pain through the small veins of his eyes, as if the veins burrowed into the mushy whites.
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“I'm sorry! Forgive me! Forgive me!”
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“I am no one. I am nothing. I am beyond you. For this brief flicker, I am the savior. Later, I will consume myself. I will digest my parts. I am a famished creature. I will revitalize myself, and I will come to your hungry kind again. To be saved, you must consume the son of Ebe. Take the son of Ebe to the top of the mountain. There, cannibalize him. Ingest and digest his flesh and soul; let the son of Ebe become a part of you once again. There will only Ebe and no son.”
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“No! No!” Ebe collapsed to his knees and shook his clasped hands in supplication. “Don't ask this of me! Please, don't ask this of me!”
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“Then ask nothing of me. Then want nothing. Then let the universe consume you. I have bargained before with your hungry kind, and each time the planet has been revitalized. And now, I have come to you again to offer the choice I offer them all. You are heir to hunger and from a lineage of cannibals. Accept it.”
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Ebe woke up. Sweat pooled in every crevice of his body, as if to cleanse him of something unclean and tainted. He wiped his brow and swiveled his chair to see his son sound asleep next to Mala. The boy's expression was peaceful and without wrinkle, his kinky hair pressed against the thin pillow. Ebe got up and touched the boy's face to rouse him.
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“School today?” Idrin asked.
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Ebe patted the boy's back. They had been over this a thousand times already, but Idrin never let go of the hope that he'd wake up for another school day. “Why don't you go back to sleep, huh? I'm sorry to wake you, buddy.”
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“I saw something weird, Daddy. It was in my head. It wasn't human.”
“It's only a dream,” Ebe assured.
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“It called me sacrifice.”
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“We need to watch what you eat before bed, huh?” Ebe laughed uneasily.
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The boy watched him warily. Idrin wasn’t fooled. Ebe knew he was a useless parent. While his son dreamed of Spizo, Ebe fretted with the computer, filling the air with the nervous chatter of keys.
Ebe never offered his son hope. He never encouraged the boy's dreams. Parents brought children into the world to fill their little heads with deferred dreams they had lost. Ebe didn't have a single dream for Idrin to inherit. Not one.
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Ebe heard the crinkling of the thin plastic sheet that was their blanket as Mala got out of bed. Her red hair stuck out in all directions. She slipped past Ebe without saying a word to him. Ebe yearned to reach out.
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“Aren't you hungry?” Ebe said to Mala.
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“Don't remind me!” Mala snapped as she sipped from a nutrient pouch.
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Ebe stared at her in cowed silence before slipping back to the computer.
He typed out all his memories of the dead world. It was the refuse clogging his brain, the junk littering his neurons, the trash that piled up in the corners of his mind and decayed foully. He let the computer feed him, and it was almost like talking to someone far away.
Even the little icon indicating that there was “no connection” gave him hope that one day, maybe, he'd wake up from this dream, and it would be connected again.
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Mala helped Idrin get dressed for the day. She poured water into a nutrient pouch and handed it to him. Ebe's eyes remained fixed on the screen. He couldn’t stand to see the boy. Guilt swallowed Ebe whole at the sight of his son.
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Ebe's shoulders tensed as Idrin's voice piped up with questions about going home. Mala responded with lies and more lies. Ebe typed into the computer, “What's the point?”
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Ebe didn't bother to read the expert system's response before typing yet another furious prompt. The more the boy prodded about home and school and grandma and the goddamn dog, the more furiously he typed. He tried to mask his son's voice with the sound of keys.
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It was in vain. Idrin's words still broke through. With irritation, Ebe stood up and announced, “Everyone is dead. The sun got them. Cooked them alive. Painfully. There is nothing to go back to. This planet will kill us. We will die.”
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The child's watering eyes widened. He looked to his mother for comfort, but Mala offered only an empty expression. Idrin pushed into her arms and sobbed.
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“We're going out.” Ebe's voice boomed with strength he didn't even know he had. He gripped Idrin's shoulder. “We're going out. I'm going to show you the world. The new world. Come on. It's an adventure. Come on, boy.”
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Mala did nothing. She moved to the bed and buried her face in her knees. Ebe found it a relief that she didn't try to stop him as he got out the environmental suits and oxygen masks for himself and the boy.
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“Please don't leave,” Mala murmured.
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“We'll be back soon. Who knows what we'll find? It's an adventure for me and my boy.” He surprised himself at how genuine his cheerfulness sounded.
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Just as Mala's keening heightened, the two stepped outside, letting the door to the shelter click behind them. The dark planet threatened to blow them away with violent gusts of wind. Ebe picked up Idrin and trudged against the planet's fury. He shivered.
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What was he doing? Where was the multicolored being from his dream to guide him? He was an idiot to trust what was probably a hallucination brought about by stress and cortisone and a deficit of serotonin. Maybe he saw something similar to that thing before in a movie, and now it was popping up in his dreams.
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But it was real. Somehow, he knew that.
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He journeyed across the obsidian ground, holding his son to his chest. Ebe was sick, a monster. No amount of serotonin could save him after he cracked his child's ribs and had the feast of his life on his young and tender heart.
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All for Spizo. All for the renewal of this world. This was the sacrifice demanded.
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There were some things beyond the electrochemistry of his being, some things that struck his primal soul, some things that were wrong and sinful but delicious. Some things were simply consumption, and these things had to do with the son of Ebe, fated to die.
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Ebe was hungry. More than depressed, or stressed, or anything else, he starved and yearned to fill his belly. He searched the jagged black horizon for a sign of where to take the boy. He found none.
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The wind whipped him until he lost all track of the shelter. A powerful gust halted his steps. The alien scenery assaulted him with the strangeness of its structure, the darkness of its colors. Most of all, it was alive with vast emptiness, overfull with deadness. The wind hummed across its surface, sweeping the whole planet in one brilliant blast.
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The boy trembled in his arms, silently weeping, and Ebe sensed the child's dread. The sun was far away, the coldness very near.
Fire burst across his vision and sent heat through his senses.
He grasped Idrin tightly as he stumbled forward. “It's okay, son,” he said. “It's okay. Stop. Shhh. Stop. Stop. It's okay. It's almost over. We're close.” A repetitive track of words meant for nobody at all.
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In the distance, a mountain burned, immersed in roaring flames. Ebe stopped comforting Idrin, his voice inconsequential. To his back, a monstrous cloud loomed, jabbing the ground with lightning as it crawled closer. Thunder shouted across the landscape, announcing the arrival of the tempest, the darkness, the destruction carrying a dark cape of rain.
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He raced toward the fire, knowing that this was the place to go. As he approached, the flame slowly died. The fire was completely extinguished by the time Ebe arrived at the foot of the mountain. The mountain reached far above his vision. He climbed with Idrin clinging to his back.
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Ebe's muscles ached as he reached the summit. He never thought he could climb with such ease, as if his limbs had been imbued with unnatural strength. He set the child down and rested.
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Ebe's stomach growled. The hunger signaled itself. The storm crested above them. Ebe watched Idrin's face, knowing it could be the last time he would see him alive. The boy gazed at him with watery eyes.
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Ebe gripped the boy's enviro mask. It was the only thing that kept them alive in that atmosphere. Ebe knew what would happen to his son when he removed it. Hopefully, the boy wouldn't fight too hard.
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In his other hand, Ebe gripped the knife that he would use to carve the body. In preparation, Ebe had asked the expert system about carving the bodies of animals after it refused to provide instructions for humans. He hoped the instructions would still apply.
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Ebe's muscles tensed as he steeled himself to rip off his son's mask, but he stopped. The wind whistled by or, no, it was something else. Not the wind. It was something speaking to him, but not in a human voice.
It spoke with such a small voice that it sounded comparable to a swarm of insects perched in his ears, all speaking in discordance, their wings buzzing. “Spare the son of Ebe.”
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Ebe froze in confusion.
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“Spare the son of Ebe,” they continued. “You have proven your desire to revitalize the world. You understand your place as a cannibal. You have proven your resolve to bargain with Spizo. The terms of the agreement have changed. A different price has been extracted.”
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It was as if the entire world popped. In the blink of an eye, Ebe saw twinkling light, and then he basked in rain. Unlike the tempest, this shower was benevolent, gleaming, and luminescent. Ebe ripped off his own mask and cried without end, the rain washing him, staining him in glory.
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Ebe could breathe. Already flora—small shrubs and blades of grass—sprouted from the dirt that had before been barren. The rain filled the crevices of the planet, the beginning of what would one day be rivers. Spizo fulfilled his end of the bargain. But at what cost?
His son, his empty child, the son of Ebe, was uneaten and alone and afraid. Idrin crawled backward, little legs scurrying. He smacked his knee on a rock.
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Ebe moved toward him, walking with steady speed in the rain. “Don't be scared. Don't fear me. Don't fear anything. Shhh. We're all safe.”
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Idrin could only perceive the up-and-down chomping of his father's mouth. The boy parted his lips, revealing a cavernous space. He had no tongue. The world was quiet for the boy, fearfully quiet. Something else had been taken from him.
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Idrin was deaf. He would never be able to hear his father's voice again, but it was for the best. Idrin didn't even want to be near Ebe, much less hear anything he had to say. He only wanted to run from the man whom he no longer recognized as his father.
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This was Spizo's price.
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There was darkness in the new world, the renewed one, the one becoming born. A far away darkness of rumbling hunger, of a desire to devour it all into a stomach—a vacuum—where there was no light. There was a colorful being, a bargainer, a money man, exchanging one thing for another, one child for the world.