The Climbers
By Jason Heller
Art by Jaime Valderrama
Published Issue 134, February 2025
Best of Birdy, Originally Published in Issue 070, October 2019
The song at the heart of the starship Escalante sang. It sang itself, as all songs must. As such, it was no different than the six solipsistic humans who populated the ship. But where the humans chattered and muttered and slandered their way into a stasis of perpetual self-reference, the song celebrated.
“Engine seems chirpy today,” said the human called Helen. She led the others. Her facial structure approached a certain tunefully symmetrical topography, and she preened and enunciated more markedly than the others.
“Engine.” That was what Helen called the song. As did all the humans. It was a misleading oversimplification. The song, after all, wasn’t the engine, but the fuel for the engine.
The engine was not alive.
The fuel was.
The song. A symphony of cascading fugues and cybernetic harmonics and quantum modalities, all suspended in chordal wetware. Its reverberations opened tablature behind space, where the sprawl of matter outpaced light. Along this sprawl the Escalante climbed.
“I like it when Engine is all show-oddy,” replied Kenisha, the biologist among the crew of humans. Her voice was melodic in a way that pleased the song, all fluted notes and fluid glissandos.
“You would,” said Helen with a laugh. “Sometimes I think you’ve got a crush on Engine.”
Kenisha’s features crumpled. “The only person onboard worth having a crush on, in my humble opinion.” Helen made a percussive noise with her tongue and said, “You really do think this thing is self-aware, don’t you? A sentient being? Come on, K. You’re letting the biologist in you run away with your reason.
You’ve been out here too long. You’re seeing life in everything.”
“Better than seeing life in nothing.” Kenisha made a movement with her shoulders. “You know, that is why we’re out here.”
“That’s why you’re out here,” Helen said, laying a hand on the casing of the song’s orchestral mathematics.
“Some of us just want to get paid and get home.”
“Like I don’t?”
The two of them continued their sparring as they walked down the corridor toward the bridge, their voices echoing in heated counterpoint.
A sudden silence ensued. It startled the song. Then, gradually, it remembered that it was celebrating. And it remembered why it was celebrating.
The other song, the new song, returned. It had been lying dormant, just out of reach, an unknowable fraction of a dimension to the left.
The song exulted. Reaching out, she touched the surface of the other song. Tentatively she split the silence. Then, gradually, they alternated harmonies to build a crescendo of escalating equations that made spacetime thrum, a weblike eardrum vibrating to a vast fanfare of brassy gravity.
Their tempo increased. Their volume unfolded. Their symphony spread.
Maybe the song would tell Kenisha about the new song. Somehow. If it could find some way to communicate with her. But if not, that would be fine too. For the longer the Escalante searched for life, the longer the song would be free to roam the sprawl and duet with her new partner.
And with that, she sent fresh tendrils of melody into her new alien mate, and they joined voices once more, intertwining and sampling each other and climbing together into infinity.
Jason Heller is a journalist, editor and author whose books include: Strange Stars (Melville House); the alt-history novel Taft 2012 (Quirk); the Goosebumps tie-in Slappy’s Revenge (Scholastic); the Pirates of the Caribbean tie-in The Captain Jack Sparrow Handbook (Disney); and a chapter of Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Time Traveler’s Almanac (Tor). He’s also the former nonfiction editor of Clarkesworld and won a Hugo Award as part of that editing team. His short stories have appeared in Apex Magazine, Farrago’s Wainscot, Sybil’s Garage, Paper Darts, Nightmares Unhinged, Swords v. Cthulhu and many others. He writes about books and/or music for NPR, Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and The New Yorker, and is a former Senior Writer of The Onion’s A.V. Club. His writing has also appeared in Weird Tales, Entertainment Weekly, Alternative Press, and Tor.com. He is the co-editor of the Cyber World (Hex) and Mechanical Animals (Hex), and is a 2009 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He lives with his wife Angie in Denver, where he play in various bands.
“If science fiction, horror, and Moebius had some type of offspring to the tune of punk rock and dungeon synth you’d have Jaime Valderrama who is an illustrator, toy maker and designer for his independent toy line Galactic Anomalies. His work can be found in various publications, zines among other places. An avid toy collector himself, he draws inspiration from toy lines such as Visionaries, Supernaturals, Captain Power and many others to create his own unique line of figures in various scales and styles based on his writings and short stories.” —The Magnificent World of Toys. Check out their full interview with Jaime on YouTube and see more of his work on Instagram.
Check out Jason’s last Birdy install, Why Are We Whispering, and Jaime’s, Ghost In The Machine, in case you missed it, or head to our Explore section to see more of these talented creatives’ work.