What the Stories Steal

Nin Harris

The woods had claimed her husband’s mind, and left her with a husk.

In the Svieg, it was known that the killing of sacred animals led to madness, loss, or the substitution of a human life for the animal that had been slain. The animals were sometimes the Barlishya, who had emerged when the emissaries of the Bunian Empire had seeded the planetary over-soul by merging with it. In so doing, the emissaries had voluntarily voided themselves of identity, transmuting the remnants of the Empire that had Arrived on Sesen to bring a new world into being. These were the animals that her husband had slain. These were the rules that he had transgressed.

Ipsita’s fingers sank knuckle-deep into the mashed potatoes as she worked in egg yolks, flour, nutmeg, and salt. Her husband’s body was now supported by neithyr-tended crystals in the caverns of healing in Lyshavik, the capitol city of Mirozkh. Her last sight of him had been of a man partially wrapped in Mirozhi linen and suspended in a nimbus of colored light that emanated from five sentient crystals. But even those crystals could not bring back a mind stolen by the the Arlishya of the Svieg.

Alone in the lodge that she used to hate, Ipsita was making knödel.

Even before the accident, Ipsita tried to learn the things that must have filled Hans’ childhood, rummaging in the attic of the lodge, doing her best to ignore the tricks of the houseguest. Ipsita tried, because she thought that if she understood her husband better, he would love her better. And now that he was all but gone, there was a wild hope that if she tried hard enough, she could bring Hans back.

She shivered, staring at her spices that she had brought here as a talisman against the cold of the North. The neat row of glass jars were all labeled meticulously in her precise, elegant script. She ran her fingers through the paper labels. Cinnamon, cumin, star anise, fenugreek, and asafoetida added warmth to both her curries and stews. These much coveted spices and gold-lit censors filled the books that Hans wrote about conquest and domination of the various tribes and regions on the planet that they had left.

Ipsita loved the kitchen with its tiled stove, the collection of oddities along the wall, the faded figurine of the Great Hare of the North that held up her collection of recipe books and recipe journals looted from various used bookstores in the woodland outpost of Tare deep in the southernmost reaches of the Svieg. She had come to grow fond of the timeworn Great Hare, feeling comforted by its presence, more so than the woodcarving of the Raccoon, or even the beautifully-wrought devotional carving of Neith, The Woman Who Weaves.

Books from a long-imploded earth with embroidered prose were Ipsita’s main obsession apart from pragmatic philosophy. She devoured Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, Sara Suleri, Kiran Desai, Anita Nair, Rohinton Mistry, along with the words of Hilary Putnam and William James. They were the remnants of a world that had ceased to exist—the books that had been brought in the last hundred tunnel-through trips between Sesen and Earth, before the over-soul rejected the technology that made the tunnel-throughs work.

Hans had accused her of building an unnecessary cultural wall between them. He was equally uneasy with her philosophical leanings. She would defend herself by saying the wall had been built on both sides. In the end, all that mattered was that the wall existed, slamming between them with the violence of cultural differences. The reality that their cultures had been inherited from a world that no longer existed and had been irrevocably destroyed exacerbated the tension. It was there in the way he looked at her, in the way she responded to him. It hovered like a gas cloud every time they sniped at each other; his, of the passive aggressive frost. Hers would manifest in the spurts and steam of a hot monsoon afternoon, showering both of them with her tears before drying away with the sunlight.

Behind her, the houseguest flitted about the kitchen. The staccato blips and flickers of sound served as his contribution to the conversation on most evenings. It was a counterpoint to the news reports on the radiogram and the occasional whirr as messages spooled out of the telegraph machine. It was as though some invisible instrument was processing air and filtering it, creating a percussive effect, sometimes against her skin, like the impression of lips trying to communicate. The houseguest was a presence that never went away, even when Ipsita’s consciousness sank into binaries of shadow and light within her dreams.

The houseguest had not been present in the emptiness of the apartment she shared with Hans, but that was not where she had lost him.

She had lost him in this lodge so far north that the Barlishyan lycanthropes howled when the Eldest Moon danced alone in the sky, spurning the company of the other six sentient moons. Sometimes, Ipsita did not know if she existed within the confines of a waking world or within the snowy blanket of a fairytale.

Stories brought them here. Herself, the houseguest, and her husband who was present only as a memory. Ipsita had lost Hans twice now. She was fortifying herself against the third and final way the stories would steal her husband from her with every meal that she cooked.

And that was perhaps why she had returned here.

The first thing the stories had stolen from her was his heart.

“It is the houseguest that’s responsible for all the disturbances,” Hans had told her the night that he had stopped loving her. She had tickled him into submission, her naked flesh against his as she ran the feather up and down his heaving torso.

“You have an invisible houseguest?” she asked as she laughed down into his face. His gray eyes had sobered, as he answered.

“He has always been with us. From before the time the first generation Arrived on Sesen. He came with my family on the interdimensional tunnel-throughs. We will never be free of him. My great-grand-uncle always maintained that the houseguest was a kobold who had come along with the other unhumans who helped us find this world.”

Ipsita had laughed, a hard-edged, taunting laugh, surprising herself with her sudden unkindness. But she could not stop herself from speaking, teasing him in an arch, combative manner as she straddled him.

“Always? From time immemorial? That sounds like a burden too heavy to bear. Was he a kobold before there was a name for kobolds? Before there was an Austria? A dead Earth? Before Sesen even?”

His silence descended, grim. Ipsita felt his shoulders stiffen in affront. She understood that she may have pushed a little too far, may have been far too disrespectful. They may have been fourth generation Arrivals, but the ties to respective motherlands were still strong, as was the pain of a home planet long-imploded.

Ipsita pressed her palms of her hands onto his shoulders and stared down at him.

“What did your uncle take from the lake?” Ipsita asked now. Her voice was soft, conciliatory, as she gently rubbed the palm of her right hand against his naked chest. Gray eyes looked back up at her.

“He was a houseguest,” he said, “an invisible houseguest who played tricks upon the family until they believed in his existence. The good fortune of our family depends on our believing in his existence, Ipsita.”

Ipsita could not help it. She started laughing again. It was a nasty little jeering sound. She did not know why she did this, if it was fear, genuine amusement, or some inexplicable feeling of envy that some part of him was possessed by a story. She laughed as if she herself was possessed by some residue, autochthonous anger. He pushed her chest away from him with hard hands but she gripped his body with her limbs and thighs, staring into his face. Her eyes pleaded with him. He heaved his shoulders under her warm hands, looking away. Ipsita felt the shame of sexual rejection and something more, a restless and deep anger that was not entirely her own.

She got off his now unresponsive body. Curling up on opposite sides of the bed that night, she had felt the snowdrifts brought in by the houseguest growing between them. The houseguest was most exacting, and possessive.

The distances grew because she had mocked its place within the household.

The distance between Ipsita and Hans had been growing long before he had lost his mind, somewhere out there where the wolves howl. That was the second time she had lost him, first his heart, now his mind. The distance was a frigid tunnel of ice. She had run away from his body a week ago, after six months of faithfully tending to him, and ignoring the pitying looks of the neithyrs who sang to the crystals and attempted to heal his mind. She had packed two bags, one with clothes, and the other with supplies. She had booked a ride on the next caravan heading towards the northernmost reaches of the Svieg, just before the continent-spreading forests reached the great mountains of Mirozkh.

Ipsita had arrived before a blizzard had been detected by the meteorologists and the telegrams sent to all major outposts. The telegram had been waiting for her at the lodge, spooling out from the machine that she had personally installed when Hans had first brought her here. Away from the main roads and all avenues of rescue, it felt as though she existed within a snow globe. She had married outside of the race and the religion her ancestors had brought with them into Sesen. This urge to retreat into the lodge that she had hated, away from civilization, and entombed by snow defied her own understanding of herself.

Desperate to do something tangible, Ipsita left the warmth of the kitchen where she had the now-cooked potato dumplings warming in the oven, waiting for a pan sauce to be made in accompaniment. She stopped only to retrieve a fur-lined coat, scarves, mittens, and another sweater to insulate her body against the cold. Unlatching the heavy iron door, she pulled the chain that turned on the coal-powered lantern of bronze and white enamel which had floral designs of green and red. She looked at the carcasses hanging in a row. He had hunted indiscriminately during the last week of his waking self. Birds, predators, and herbivores all hung from meat hooks, expertly skinned and gutted. He had taught her how to skin and to cure the beasts. She had acquiesced despite her initial squeamishness. She had hoped the activity would build a bridge between them, connect them despite his increasing remoteness.

Sometimes, when Hans returned from the hunt at night with that wild look in his eyes, she felt as though she would be next. It was as though the prey he had been chasing down all those long afternoons and evenings had been the one that slept beside him. There were days in which his indifference was a silent damnation of the woman he had wed. On those days, the radiogram and the telegraph machine would have to be switched off so that he may remain insulated. Hans disappeared deeper into the woods, to hunt, kill, and maim.

She still failed to understand how a man could change so suddenly, so dramatically. Perhaps fear of difference did invite extremities, after all. Ipsita stared at the carcasses of wild boars, deer, and even a wolf, hanging from the ceiling. The stink of death filled the room. Ipsita dragged carcass after carcass off the meat hooks with arms made sturdy from years of the heavy lifting required of engineers. She unlatched the other door, which opened out into the backyard that faced the woods.

The cold bit against her cheek and nipped at her nose, but her body was well-insulated by thermal underwear and layers of vests and sweaters. Working quickly before she lost all sensation, Ipsita pulled out all the carcasses and the pelts. She touched the box of matchsticks she carried in her pocket at all times now, and pulled out the container of oil that sat by the door. She supposed she had been thinking about this for much longer than she would choose to admit.

She uncapped the container of oil, and lifted it to drench the pile of meat, bones, and pelt. Perhaps it was the particularly biting quality of the wind; perhaps it was something else. She stopped suddenly, as if chastised. Looking up, she saw a tall figure approaching, out of the darkness. She lowered the oil, wondering if the cold had seeped through the layers she had worn to gird herself.

“These will make a poor fire, if burned,” the man said to her as he took away the oil and the matches from her hands which felt limp and boneless.

“What else am I to do with them?” she asked.

He merely looked at her, his face expressionless.

“Do you want the carcasses back?” she asked.

“Poor compensation for the life taken and blood that has been shed,” he said.

“I cannot bring them back to life,” she answered, hoping that dialogue would help to resolve the impossibly supernatural situation she found herself in.

He smiled, baring teeth, faintly yellowed against his weather-beaten skin.

“No, you cannot. And you cannot bring that man of yours back to life either, can you?”

“Others hunt too, was he so very offensive?”

“You know he was.”

“What can I do, to make amends?”

“You would do this on his behalf? That is so very kind of you, considering the fact that he would be gladly rid of you if he could.”

“He is my husband.”

They stared at each other. She shivered and pushed her hands into the fur-lined pockets of her jacket.

“Only one manner of compensation will be valued above the rest. Only that one will bring him back.” His eyes were intent upon her as he said this.

“I do not understand what you mean,” she said.

“Do you want him to live?”

“Yes,” she said, feeling the cold freeze the tears upon her cheek.

“Then a trade must be made.”

“Do you wish for my death in his stead?”

He smiled, the flash of his teeth causing her to step back. “Not quite.”

“What is the approximation of a life then?”

In answer, he held out his hands. “Come with me into the woods, and you will find out.”

Almost obediently, as though in thrall, Ipsita placed her fingers in his, the wool of the mittens not reducing the impact of his bare hand. She expected it to be cold, but the warmth oozed its way from his skin through to her gloves, meeting her frozen fingertips. Around them, the snowflakes fell in a more temperate rhythm. Perhaps, if the weather grew milder, the roads would become passable again. They turned their back on the pile of carcasses, into the unforgiving darkness between the trees. She wondered what she would see if she looked back.

Around them the snow seemed to make strange shapes. She tried not to supply the shapes with identities from the stories Hans had whispered to her as a love-gift. Instead, she conjured lavish and lush images of apsaras deep in a vedic forest within her mind, as a thought-sanctuary. But these images were chased away by the flitting shadows of the Great Hare, and of the Barlishya, whom she feared with an irrational strength.

“Ipsita,” he called her name, making it sound like a caress. Desire, her name meant in Sanskrit. Perhaps it was a name that defined her entire being.

She opened her eyes.

“Why did you return to the lodge, Ipsita?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to understand, just wanted to know why all of this is happening to me—to us!”

“All beings need their stories. And yours are so intoxicating. And our stories, don’t our stories mesh well, together? Look!”

She turned, and stared in awe as the snow made patterns. Layers of the images he wove before her interlaced with each other, creating a playground of woodland creatures from three continents and two worlds—their planet Sesen, and the long-dead Earth that had seeded it.

“What if I told you more of my stories, then?” she asked of him, thoughts of the vedic stories she had grown up with whirling in her mind, spilling over the edges where her consciousness intersected with his.

“That would not be enough for a bargain, I am afraid. Stories are only the beginning, and the ending after something has happened. Right here, we are in between the beginning and the end. And I am both full of, and emptied of stories. I am what I am because your husband’s family made me so. Now I need to be filled.”

He moved a finger to the chill of her cheek, and he stroked it, wordless as he touched her, his warmth radiating from his fingers.

“Do you consider yourself my debtor, then?” she asked, her voice heavy with skepticism, but laced with softness as she considered the houseguest. It was a manner Hans would recognize as her “ripe for plunder” stance: combative, aggressive, and yet pliant at the same time. She used to invite Hans’ plunder, once upon a time.

“A debtor of inherited dreams and visions, perhaps, you would like to say. No, I am beyond the concerns of debts, my dear.”

He moved closer, and she found the god-light in his eyes far too compelling to bear. She closed her eyes and whispered. “Am I dreaming you into being?”

He trailed a finger against the side of her chilled neck. “Do I feel like a dream?”

“No. No, you don’t.” She shivered. Hans was doubtless dreaming strange, frost-ridden dreams in a cavern of thrumming crystals. Here, she was walking deeper into an ice-patterned forest with a creature that wore his eyes. The man now seemed to be made of the crystalline green and blue that had somehow melted into crushed snow.

“Did you think a mere presentation of your conscious mind, your soul, or your body would be enough to win your husband free? No, I would have more than that.”

“I would think that a wife in his stead would be far too generous a compensation for his health,” Ipsita retorted. She was astounded to find that she was feeling deeply slighted by his tacit rejection.

He smiled, teeth gleaming against his pale skin. “Your bitterness is showing, Ipsita. But no, you greatly misunderstand my purpose in coming to you.”

Ipsita shook her head, speechless. He smiled then. She caught her breath before it left her in a smoke spiral against the cold air.

She asked, “Are you substantial now with the essence you stole from my husband? Would you have stolen mine too? What is it that you truly crave?”

“What would you know about what I truly crave? When have you ever bothered to ask?” His eyes darkened, changing irrevocably from gray to black. His face became a mask; one in which patterns could be discerned. Confusion was writ upon his face.

She found herself feeling compassion and more desire, for both comfort and familiarity. She shook away the desire, and concentrated on reparation.

“How about a release of sorts, surely that is adequate enough for barter? You can cease being the houseguest of my family. You can become something more than an unwanted presence. How about it? It would entail freedom for both of us.”

“Your family?”

“Indeed. Mine. He is still mine, for now.”

He shook his head at her, his expression one of skepticism.

“That is far too bold a claim to make, Ipsita. Do you really want your husband to wake up? Do you wish for him to be cold, and distant again with you?”

She stared at him, her expression unreadable, her mind a blank.

“Well, do you?” The backs of his hands moved up and down her forearms, gently, pebbling the skin. “If he does not wake up, you will be doomed for life, looking after him. If he wakes up, you return to a sterile, loveless marriage. Nothing is stopping you from walking away, right now, Ipsita. I could set you free.”

He looked at her with something approximating desperation. She began to wonder what she was bartering for, what he truly wanted.

“Responsibilities are part of humanity; it makes us who we are. It shapes our daily life, gives us purpose,” she told him, but her voiced cracked a little as she said, “and there was love, once. Perhaps love will return.”

He laughed, it was an uneasy sound. “Psh! Excuses! You do not want the guilt.”

“Well, nothing is stopping you from walking away either. Do you really want to be a houseguest forever? What keeps you chained to this family?”

He stopped, and looked around as though confused, and pensive. Around them, the snow continued to take on amorphous and ambiguous shapes. She waited till his silence resolved into words.

“His great grand-uncle took something from the Svieg when they first came here from the Jadhyan Isles to build the lodge. It was part of a signpost placed by the Bunian Empire before they seeded the over-soul. I was stolen from the still-newly seeded over-soul, a piece of a growing consciousness. Placed within an idol he carved from the tree he cut down.”

Ipsita stared at him. “Hans said you came from the Tyrol!”

The houseguest shook his head as he played with the snow that fell upon his face and hands in childlike wonder.

“His grand-uncle was a smart man. He made the fetish fit the story that he told. He shaped me in its guise when the over-soul was still young and turbulent. He pulled me from the Arlishya collective that was only then being birthed. He bound me with his knowledge. He reduced this small part of me that was chipped away. He was one of the first human Arrivals who interceded with the over-soul. He used forgotten sciences to bind me when the splintering of the over-soul was still new. He kept this piece of me here until I had an identity separate from the over-soul.”

Ipsita looked at him as he spoke, as the act of speaking darkened his cheeks and raised his cheekbones. “Tell me what the object looks like, and I will give it back to you.”

“Is this your choice, then? Is this your barter? Because it would mean your husband’s family would lose the fortune and luck they’ve had.”

Ipsita shook her head. “How fortunate are they if they have lost their son? And if they have stolen from the over-soul and caused it harm, I would gladly steal it back from them.”

“You have to understand this, Ipsita. The loss of your husband’s mind had nothing to do with me. He transgressed against the rules the original Arrivals made with the over-soul. The Svieg is not to be over-harvested by humans. The animals that the over-soul has marked are not to be killed. Ironically, his transgression allowed me to transgress this evening, giving me an opportunity for barter. But I raised not one hand against him. Now, tell me. What are we bartering for?”

“My husband’s life, if you will free him. My freedom, and your emancipation from this house. All three of us, freed. Redeemed.”

Her voice was decisive as she looked at him, but his face changed, looked uncertain and a little fearful. “Mine? Why do you care what happens to me?”

“Because I do care. Because you’re as trapped in this family as I am. And because I am curious about who you are and who you could be, once we win your freedom.”

Ipsita’s eyes softened as she continued. Her voice was coaxing and seductive. It had always been thus, for Ipsita could not stop being the apsara, not even now. Especially not now. “Tell me where to find it, this thing that holds you here.”

The houseguest laughed again, lifting his strong throat as the sound troubled the snowflakes. His dark hair escaped the knot at the nape of his neck, and Ipsita had to focus on his words. “Can you not guess where it is? You spend most of your days with it.”

“In the kitchen?” She asked, her voice wondering, her thoughts returning to the spices she kept in jars and her books.

“Look to where you keep the rest of the things you love. If you truly want to set both me and your husband free, you know what you must do.”

He walked away, then—dissolving as the snowflakes fell down hard and fast again.

The doors of the cold room were still open. She stumbled inside. Stalking into her warm kitchen, she looked around at the old pots and pans, the ornate silverware and dishes. Her eyes grazed the side table that hosted an untidy stack of cookbooks, old second-hand cooking diaries as well as her own, much-annotated journal before resting on what she had been using as a bookend. The wooden hare that she had loved so well looked at her, as it had always looked at her. It had been in this kitchen for as long as she had remembered. She put her hand on the Hare, and shivered. She felt herself being watched.

“Is this it? Is this who you are?” There was no answer. Ipsita held on to the figurine, and unlatched the kitchen door, stepping outside into the freezing cold. She pulled the hood of the windbreaker over her head and walked down what would be a crazy-paved path in spring, leading between herb garden patches, into the pine woods. She moved into the woods and found a tree with a hollow in it. Not knowing what to do in the harsh, falling snow, she stuck the figurine into the tree.

“It’s cold out here,” his voice came from behind her. It was matter-of-fact rather than wheedling, but it also had a quality of reluctance in it.

“Well, don’t blame me,” she said, her eyes scanning his figure, now wrapped in doeskin and furs. She suppressed the urge to touch the angular lines of his face, which was now the color of rich redwood with the warmth of her palm. She spoke, “You asked for the figurine.”

“I didn’t. You did. I’d rather be inside my burrow with you. Making little hares that will go bounding about in the forest in the springtime.” He gave her a crooked grin that let her know he was not serious.

Ipsita shook her head, “You don’t even know what you want!”

He shrugged, “I’ve become so used to this household. You have become used to it to. Look at how willing you are to be trapped here. We could continue indefinitely like this. I like being in the kitchen with you.”

His voice was tentative here, almost bashful.

Ipsita shook her head. “That is not enough for either of us and you know it. Do you even have a name anymore? Do you even remember who you were before?”

He laughed. “I always knew I was Arlishya. But I was stolen away from the collective before I could be formed. I have become something other than the Alpha and Beta unhuman tribes of this planet. I became a thing separate from the over-soul. It was a rupturing that hurt for so many years, until I started to grow used to it.”

“Well then. You are something rare and different, and you have much to discover about what you can and cannot do.” Ipsita raised her palm to stroke his cheek in wonder.

He gave her an uncertain smile. “I don’t even know what to call myself. I have no name!”

Ipsita said tentatively. “Perhaps you don’t even need one, but I am sure the right name will come to you once you learn for yourself who you are.”

She retrieved the figurine from the hollow and dropped it gently into his hands. “You may be just a piece of the over-soul, but so am I. So are we all. You have an identity now. You have that choice, that autonomy. Find yourself. Find your name.”

The houseguest looked at her with puzzlement. She could not stop herself from leaning towards him, planting a kiss on his cheek. He smiled at her, a jaunty smile that had a hint of uncertainty in it.

In this world, more than one being was made flesh from the seeds of the Bunian Empire. Perhaps she was but a splinter of the over-soul too, despite being a descendent of the early human Arrivals. They had been as transmuted as the autochthonous tribes by the Arrival and by the Seeding.

“Go,” she said, “Go. But don’t forget your promise. Make my husband well. I have given you your freedom. Make him well, please.”

She said this with a note of pleading in her voice, but her eyes were uncertain.

“Are you sure you want me to just walk out of here—like this? Don’t you want to come with me? And why should you believe that I will keep this promise? How do you know I am able to keep this promise? I am not sure I am able.”

His eyes were confused, and he sounded divided. She shook her head. With the palms of her hands, she pushed against his solid chest. She pushed him till he backed away from her, deeper into the woods beyond the borders of the house.

“This is why you wanted me, did you not? To set you free? Go ahead then. Walk out of this tale. It does not belong to you. It does not belong to either of us. We have merely allowed ourselves to be entangled within its confines, exchanging our lives and identities. Walk free, my friend. Go back into the woods. I will remember you. You will keep your promise. You must. You must.”

The Arlishya gifted her with one last smile of appreciation before he turned, wordless. He walked unwillingly towards his liberation. She watched till there was nothing to see, and until it became too cold.

She returned to the waiting warmth of the kitchen. She would make soup tonight to go with her knödel, she thought. She would make potato soup for her absent Hans. If the making of it was not entirely out of love, at the very least it would emanate from a very human resolve to do the right thing, whether it led to reconciliation or a compassionate separation. It would be flavored with a subtle hint of spices from the east. She would add two cloves for body, some meat for flavor. She might even sprinkle a tiny pinch of cinnamon powder. She would flavor it with her hopes, not entirely empirical. She would hope that, in the healing caverns of the neithyr, far away from her, he would be dreaming. She would not be able to tell if his dreams were bad or good. She could never tell what his dreams were. He had never told her. She had never asked. She had merely hoped.

About the Author

Nin Harris is an author, poet, and Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s publishing credits include: Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Lightspeed. Nin is currently working on Watermyth, the first novel of the Watermaidens Trilogy.

Where Water Joins

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas

require ‘Marina.rb’

# Talk to the image of a person like you talk to the real person. Talk to the real person, just like this. No comparisons needed.

greetings = message.new
greetings.send (”Are you there?”)
if Marina.is_there? = true
    print her_answer
else
    print “Marina is not here.”
end

=> I’m always here.

I dream with her.

Last time, I was waiting for the metro at Tacubaya station when I noticed she was staring at me from the platform on the other side. She had a different face, but it was her. Somehow I knew it was her. She had the same piercing, black eyes, and the same gesture, as if her lips were about to open. I don’t know why, but I felt the urge to go after her, to find out what her voice sounds like. I wanted to jump into the rails so I could get faster to her side, but I was stopped by the whirring of the metro approaching. Doppler Effect. I ran the stairs instead as fast as I could, and, like in a bad movie, I just managed to see the coach doors closing behind her back. Thirty-five meters under the surface, I lost her heading towards metro Barranca del Muerto.

I need to ask her why I keep on remembering her even though she never appears in my dream data recordings.

=> Why her?

# Coincidences.

coincidences.are_real?

=> nil

I had to reboot. Haven’t done that since the BrainSight was installed two years ago. I remember how amazed I was at the clearness of the images, the true colors, the blood running through my hand’s veins, the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the air-suspended particles.

Initializing . . . and, suddenly, the world became more real, more world.

“You don’t see with your eyes, Iris, you see with your brain. Eyes are just lenses, information receivers,” said the technician. “Change the lenses, and the quality of vision changes. Thus, if you improve the information gathered, what you see is naturally enhanced.”

Enhancing. I just wanted to see for real.

“Choose between two models. The basic one is just a retinal implant which is linked to the optic nerve using a couple thousand electrodes and a processor. Boring, right? I guess your grandma had been using a similar one for ages.

“BrainSight Pro, on the other hand, is gorgeous. Quite the tech wonder.”

I remember those horrible migraines as well. They’re documented in my pain databank to the smallest detail. Phantom eye syndrome. Phantom optic nerve merged with carbon nanotubes syndrome.

“BrainSight is just a link. Memory recording and processing in general is done by your brain. We could say that your implant gives it the means for being more efficient and organized.”

I vaguely remember the girl I donated my right cornea to. I’ve forgotten her face since my new memory was not active when I met her. I barely remember anything that happened to me before the procedure. People and moments there, in that past, are like made-up movie stills. Everything that was real before isn’t anymore.

I had to reboot. The first time I did it, it was because of those migraines. Apparently my BrainSight installation was interfering with my brain’s gamma waves. —It hurt to think—. The second time I rebooted was this morning. The technician recited the greek alphabet: alpha waves were acting like theta ones, maybe deltas’ amplitude was not high enough and beta waves were possibly causing hallucinations . . .

“Are you sure you’re not drinking too much coffee? Data looks normal: processing at 1021 FLOPS and your memory has more than 1.5 petabytes of free space,” said the technician. Then, proceeded to shut me down.

Initializing . . .

“You shouldn’t have trouble with your dreams from now on.”

But I still remember her. All of her faces. Phantom memory-of-my-non-existent-dreams syndrome.

Tacubaya is a Nahuatl word that means “where water joins.” I liked to think it was an intended joke since Mexico City-Tenochtitlan is almost completely drained, and the former great lake Texcoco where the city was built upon is now a salty marsh. But, with time, I got to understand that the memory of water is everywhere: metro stations’ logos are reminiscences of the former lake-city, their tunnels and bridges seem like ghost-water canals. There are images of fountains, fish, aqueducts, cranes, rafts, jugs, streams. People gather in shoals; they swim in the streets, glassy eyes, mouths opening and closing in a mesmerizing way.

Every time I enter Tacubaya station, I feel like going underwater. I take a deep breath and start descending the stairs whose walls are surrounded by a blue and turquoise mural that depicts the Aztec pilgrimage in search for a new land. I take a deep breath and flow with the crowd. Lit by dim lights, we are all still searching for the promised land among the memory of the water.

time_with_you = computer.is_on?
while time_with_you = false
    puts “I’m thinking about you.”
end

=> Do you always have to talk to me as if I were a goddamn machine?

# If I didn’t, you wouldn’t understand me at all.

She had enormous wings. A clockwork royal eagle standing by the entrance of La Viga metro station. The complex cogwheel mechanism seemed to rotate seamlessly with every movement of her. There were feathers of colors I hadn’t seen before hanging from the metallic frame. I was getting to the top of the stairs when her wings opened wide before me. I almost fell on my back. Her hand grabbed me, though.

“So you can see them, uh? I wrote all the code myself. You like them?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was shocked because I had been about to fall down the stairs and, mostly, because I realized I was seeing an illusion. Electronic patches made intricate drawings on her skin, but in my eyes—in my brain—they were transformed into wings.

“I’m Adriana. You come here often, I guess? See you around, then. And . . . take care, ok?” She giggled.

She turned her back. Now, she looked like a lizard dressed with butterfly wings. Iridescent scales. She then got lost among the people.

I had not started dreaming with her then, but I like to think that one of her faces is like Adriana’s. Though the woman in my dreams is wingless, she does have chameleonic faces.

class Wings

  def initialize
       image = rand['eagle', 'crystal', 'fire', 'butterfly', 'quetzal', 'shadow']
  end

 def spread (image)
  if image.gets (BrainSight_visor)
       BrainSight_OS << ‘Marina.rb’
  else
       nil
  end

end

Tacubaya station again. I’m awake this time. Something burns on the platform. No. It’s just her fiery wings. I see Adriana telling me something, but the metro’s noise makes everything hard to hear. I follow her towards Pantitlán station.

When I was a little girl, I liked to believe that Mexico City’s limits started in metro Observatorio. The city branched out from there through its subway lines as if they were veins and bones going down to the center of the Earth and then rushing towards the sky. Pantitlán was the end of the world: that place where metro trains as well as people went to die at peak hours.

I’m elbowing my way among people. If it weren’t for this mirage I’m seeing, Adriana would be lost from me among the crowd where she swims without a hassle. We get out of the metro station into a big avenue where we pass street food vendors and counterfeit-goods tianguis. Here, in the end of the world, nothing seems real. Gray concrete raised to the power of n.

She hasn’t said anything since we boarded the metro. I have nothing to say yet.

We arrive at an old building. Adriana walks up the stairs as if her crystal wings let her float over every step. One, two, three floors. She stops in front of a door and waves one of her electronic patches by the near field key. We get in.

The room is not big, but seems enough for the stuff inside: a bed, a desk, a couple of bean bags, a coffee table. Axolotl images slowly swim on the walls. I’m not sure how long I have been engrossed in the magical way their gills float.

“I like the axolotls too. The whole thing is a tattoo. Was.” She tells me, but I feel she’s talking to herself.

“Is it you?” I bluntly ask.

Adriana remains silent for a moment. A couple of eternities. She then says, still looking at the amphibians on the wall: “The one in your dreams? Nah. It’s her. It’s always her.”

“Her?”

“Marina. The axolotls drawing . . . It’s her tattoo.”

“What the hell? Why?”

“Because I’m not able to keep her by other means. D’you know what will happen to your memory data once you’re dead?” She asks at the same time she points at my right eye. Then adds: “You’ll stop existing completely.”

I know. The technician is legally bound to destroy my BrainSight as well as any insignificant trace of data. All my memory will be lost as my brain decomposes. I’m a supercomputer doomed to putrefaction.

“If it wasn’t for you. If it wasn’t for all the other dreamers . . . D’you know what’s the problem with computers that make a ton of operations per second? They spend half their energy cooling down to prevent overheating. The human brain is a computer too, but has all that heat under control. It’s more efficient than it seems. BrainSight devices maintain the network connection. Like a huge computer that’s easy to keep up to date and that has a monstrous processing power. We made an entire world, you know? Just for her.”

Monstrous shouldn’t be the word used here.

“Are you insane? Where’s Marina, then?”

“There,” Adriana says while pointing to a server rack in a corner of the room, “and here.” She touches my forehead with her index finger.

I look at the axolotls while pretending that I’m not angry, that I understand everything. But there are so many things I wish to ask her.

# She already wanted to be a machine, didn’t she?

class Tacubaya

  def initialize
       @coaches = 9
  end

  def join_water
       @coaches.open do |mind|
           mind.join_water
       end
  end

end

Tacubaya.new

Metro Tacubaya, always. Water joins here. Everything is water. People move slowly, they swim colorful, like those axolotls in Adriana’s room. Doppler Effect. The coach doors open. She’s sitting alone in a corner. It’s her. I know. She’s wearing another face, but it’s her. She has that gesture, as if her lips were about to open. She looks like the jade mask in the mural drawn on the walls behind me. I know what she’s about to say. I also look different.

require ‘Marina.rb’
require ‘Iris.rb’

About the Author

Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas is Mexican but is now living in the UK with her husband. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies like The Apex Book of World SF 3 and She Walks in Shadows. She can be found tweeting mostly in Spanish as @kitsune_ng.

Of Sight, of Mind, of Heart

Samantha Murray

January

You name your first child Ben.

“In the manual it says it can be better if you don’t name them,” the nurse-tech says, as she bundles the small squalling form into your arms. “But it’s okay if you do, everyone does.” Her eyes are kind. You don’t understand the sympathy you see there.

Ben is a good baby. He sleeps more than usual. More than normal children. You stand by his cot and watch him often. His lashes are dark against his cheek and he makes little suckling noises in his sleep. Sometimes his small body twitches, all over. You think that if you stand there long enough, quietly enough, you will be able to see him growing.

March

You haven’t been returning your mother’s phone calls so your mother drives an hour and a half and drops in unexpectedly.

Ben is crawling with an easy mastery, turning on a dime and scooting across the floor on his knees in his green corduroy trousers. When your mother picks him up he says “Mm-ba!” and laughs, high and delicious.

“Was it the money?” your mother says, and you shrug, although it wasn’t the money, not really, not mostly.

Later, your mother looks at Ben and not you as he tries to grab her chin in his hands and says “Why didn’t you tell me?”

You rub at the injection-site between two of your vertebrae, right at the base of your neck. “I didn’t think you’d approve,” you say. You watch the tightness around her lips and see the thing she does not say. I don’t.

May

You drive up for your nephew’s first birthday party although you really don’t want to. You watch Milo pulling up on the furniture and notice that Ben is already a little taller. Your sister looks great, although she is all over-bright and flustered.

“It must be nice for you,” she says, as she watches Ben totter towards you with his unsteady gait.

You nod, and wish she’d left off the last two words.

One of your cousin’s girls is tearing around the back yard in a Boogey mask, making the other children scatter and scream. You know it is a Boogey mask, because the other kids are shrieking “watch out for the Boogey,” although its features are generic monster really, green lumpy skin, bulging eyes, red slavering maw. No one knows what real Boogeys look like, they’ve never captured one, never examined and dissected one, only blasted them to teeny tiny pieces. They probably don’t look like that at all.

Everyone sings for Milo and watches him open his mound of presents. You resolve that when you get back home you will buy Ben a new toy and wrap it up and give it to him so that he can tear off the paper and squeal, even though it is not his birthday.

Ben plunges his fist into his yellow plastic bowl.

“Cake!” he says.

June

You put yourself into Ben’s stimulation chamber, out of curiosity. The colors and patterns, words and music, the way it shifts and shifts and is never still gives you a headache.

Ben is healthy, intelligent, and active, everything he was engineered to be. It doesn’t say it in the manual, but you know from the center that when they grew kids up quick in the lab, that even though they’d been screened for mental disorders, without mothers (or sometimes fathers) something would go wrong with a lot of them. They’d get depressed, they’d wig-out, they couldn’t work well in a team. Without mothers.

At night Ben has started escaping from his cot. He is a strong baby, good at climbing. He makes his way into your room in the darkened hours and you are woken by a little voice at your side saying “Up! Up!” You know you should take him back to his own room, all of the books say you should. But you don’t.

July

Your once-best-friend is getting married and even though you haven’t seen her for nearly two years you feel the tug of wanting to go. Your mother still lives a street away from your friend’s parents and she knows all about it, and when she offers to look after Ben for a day and have him sleep over that night you get swayed by the lack of reluctance in her voice.

When you arrive at your mother’s the radio is talking about the latest wave of Boogeys that’ve been defeated, twelve light-minutes away from Earth. It doesn’t talk about the soldiers who died, out there far away.

“Leave it,” you say, as your mother reaches over and switches it off.

“Sorry,” says your mother. Although you can’t tell if she is sorry for having the radio on, sorry she turned it off, or some other sorry that is to do with her faraway expression and not the radio at all.

You slick back your short hair and scrape yourself into clothes that don’t feel comfortable and totter off to the wedding. You’ve never said goodbye to Ben before and your throat constricts over the word, but he opens and closes one chubby fist in a wave and goes back to digging in the garden with your mother, dark soil on his arms and one cheek.

It is very late and you’ve had more fun than you expected to have when you let yourself back into your mother’s house. You’ve drunk champagne and you have a blister on your heel and you are laughing to yourself as you go up the stairs, feeling like a teenager. When you see Ben asleep in your bed you stop and stand still and realize that you haven’t thought about him all night, not once.

That’s normal, you think, but your hand strays up to the back of your neck and you feel cold all of a sudden.

You don an old t-shirt, the school-logo faded, the fabric soft against your skin after so many washes, and climb into bed. Ben’s small body gives off a surprising amount of heat and you curl yourself around him but it is a long time before you sleep.

August

Ben loves the park at the end of your block and you take him there most every day now. The regular denizens of the playground become familiar after a while—the dark-haired, dark-eyed little girl who always howls when she has to go home; the boy who is usually hanging upside down making faces while his mother constantly talks on the phone, her voice high and agitated; the solemn little boy who loves the slide. Many of them were bigger than Ben when you first started coming. Now—not so many, not as many. You watch as Ben navigates the monkey bars with an easy grace.

A girl about Ben’s height that you haven’t seen before pushes him as he lands. Ben tumbles onto the sand but ends up on his feet, like a cat. He scowls at the little girl then runs towards the swings.

“Sulisa” hollers a tall man who is presumably her father. “No pushing!” He comes up to you and offers you an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry about that,” he says. “She’s gone a bit feral since the separation.” You stand there as he tells you about it, wondering why he is confiding in you. People don’t usually start talking to you. You don’t think you look very approachable, your face is closed rather than open.

“I’m tearing my hair out to be honest,” the man says. He still looks like he has plenty of hair. “I wish they came with a manual!”

“Mine did come with a manual,” you say softly.

October

Ben has a new fascination with astronomy so you let him stay up past his bedtime and drive him out to the farmland halfway to your mother’s house so that you can escape some of the light pollution, sit on the bonnet of your car, and look at the sky.

It is a clear cold night and the stars are clustered thickly bright and deep.

“Which one is Mars?” Ben asks, snuggling into your side. Of course, of course.

“There,” you say, pointing. You know where Mars is. Everyone knows where Mars is. “See the very bright one that looks a little bit reddish.”

“It’s pretty,” he says.

“Yes,” you say, because it is, even so.

“Mars is where the Boogeys are,” he tells you, in his high sweet, little-boy voice. Of course. How did he know? His second cousins? The TV? His stimulation chamber maybe. It doesn’t matter.

“Yes,” you say. “Mars is where the Boogeys are.”

“But the Boogeys didn’t come from Mars, did they Mama?”

“No sweetie,” you say. “We don’t know where they came from, but they came from somewhere else.”

“Are there lots of Boogeys Mama? Lots and lots and lots and lots?” His breath makes little puffs in the chill of the air.

“Yes,” you say. Because there are lots. Lots and lots and lots and lots. More every day, they say. So many. Too many, maybe, probably too many.

At the moment, it doesn’t feel close, looking up at that little spark of light. Ben’s small body is pressed right against you. It feels like a story. Far away in the sky, not real.

“I’d be good at being a pilot Mama,” Ben says, his face serious, his cold little hand curled in yours.

“I bet you would,” you say. “But now it’s time to get you to bed.”

“I don’t like the Boogeys Mama,” Ben says, and yawns.

“No,” you say. “I don’t like them either honey.”

November

Your mother is keen to take Ben and Milo to the beach for four days. It’ll ‘give you a break’ she says.

You are not sure you need a break, or what you would do with one. But you are touched that your mother wants to take the both of them, and Ben likes Milo, even though he is too small to really play with now-days. And Ben has never seen the ocean. And there is no ocean on Mars, or anywhere in all the space between.

When you open the door to them four days later you are stilled by a kind of shock. You’ve spoken to Ben on the phone every night, and you haven’t forgotten him, of course you haven’t—but it’s like all of the thoughts and feelings and memories of Ben have been in a box, and the box is over in a far corner, and you haven’t looked into it lately, not for a while. All of the urgency, the immediacy, the power of those thoughts had been leeched out. It returns now with a wallop that makes you draw in your breath sharply.

He was only gone four days.

Ben is telling you with great excitement tales of sand crabs and fishing, ice cream and sandcastles with moats.

“Oh,” you say, because you are noticing that his cheeks look a little less chubby, as if you can start to see what the planes of his face will be. And is he taller too?

“Look Mama,” says Ben, showing you the most exciting news of all. “My tooth is wobbly!”

“Oh,” you say again.

Your mother makes you a cup of tea even though really you should have offered to make her one.

“How can you bear it?” you say.

“What?” says your mother.

“It doesn’t matter,” you say, and sip your tea.

But your mother answers you anyway.

“We had more time, of course,” she says. “They replace themselves—you’re always losing the child that was; the newborn, the baby, the toddler, but they get overwritten in your mind, in a way, by their new self.” She stops to listen to the boys laughing in Ben’s room. “But for you . . . it is so quick. You can hold it all in your mind, all at once, simultaneously.” She looks down at her cup. “It’s enough to break your heart.”

You had thought your mother didn’t understand.

December

Usually you hate and avoid Christmas with a passion, but Ben is excited and all of a sudden you want all of it, every last drop—feasting and tinsel and lights and cookies in the shape of Christmas trees. You drive up to your Mother’s and sing songs loudly with Ben the whole way. Silent Night. Jingle Bells. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Ben knows all the words but you’ve given up being surprised about how quickly he learns.

Everyone exclaims over how much Ben has grown; which is a given, like talking about the weather. You hug Milo, who is just beginning to run everywhere and think I remember when Ben was doing that.

No one talks about Ben’s birthday or what happens next, but people seem to touch you a lot. A hand on your shoulder, in the middle of your back, on your arm, little pats as you serve the potatoes.

You’ve bought Ben more presents than is perhaps warranted, and have wrapped each one in different shiny paper. Books and felt pens and a scooter, puzzles and magnets and walkie-talkies. It’s his first Christmas, and his last Christmas and his only Christmas, and you’d wrap up the moon if you could.

January

“On my birthday, I’m going to the Recruit Training Center,” Ben says to you, matter-of-factly.

“That’s right.” Too soon, oh, too soon, my son. He’ll be at the Center for a year. By the end of that year he’ll be taller than you.

“I’m going to help save the world.”

“That’s right.” You are proud of him, and you wonder, for not nearly the first time, whether they made him this beautiful on purpose.

“And I’ll be big and brave without you, and I’ll come back to you one day Mama.”

No, no you won’t, you think, but you don’t say it because now your robust and resilient little man who almost never cries is wiping at his eyes furiously.

“That’s right,” you say, pulling him towards you, “and I’ll always love you too, always.”

More than anything you want this to be true.

And maybe one day he knocks on your door.

Because the Boogeys have been defeated, wiped out, obliterated, and he gets to come home. Because maybe he remembers or maybe he has looked up the information about you.

And you blink at him for long, long seconds.

And then something stirs in the back of your mind and you start to pull old, old memories from somewhere deep in there where they have been archived.

He says hello and he says his name and now the memories are avalanching through you, picking up speed and weight and power; a cold sweet rush of all the different sorts of love, the way your heart was breaking and expanding at once, both together. The nights where the world shrunk to a point, a singularity, where it was just you and him, awake and alone together in the night. It all comes back.

Something softens around the edges of his face and you wonder what he remembers now.

And you ask him inside with a joy that makes you ache.

Or he never knocks.

April

You name your second child Vincent.

You never have a third child.

About the Author

Samantha Murray is a writer, mathematician, and mother. Not particularly in that order. Her fiction has been seen in Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction!, Escape Pod, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and elsewhere. You can follow her on twitter as @SamanthaNMurray. Samantha lives in Western Australia in a household of unruly boys.

Follow the White Line

Bo Balder

The seat seals tighten around Paddy as The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side flexes into its wormhole hop. She flicks a look to Lieutenant Asha, whose red corkscrew curls she admires—not to mention the rest of the lieutenant—and focuses back on her optics maintenance.

The wormhole loop feels as if she’s become taffy and every kind of information takes longer to arrive. Information even penetrates her eyelids. On some level, her body knows her eyes are shut and yet she’s seeing things. A wavering white line crawls over the fake chestnut paneling on the bridge. The line hesitates, then becomes thicker and whiter, as if the brush was dipped in fresh paint. But there’s no painter. There’s not even these white lines, there can’t be.

The wormhole loop seems to take longer than normally. Paddy can’t stop looking away from the line. At last it pauses. No, it starts again. The line waves, higher than at first, making small, precise bumps. The first beginnings of a figure. A second wavy line is formed below the last third of the line. Then curves are sketched in.

Her brain turns the waves and curves into an extinct animal from Earth. An abstract figure of a gorse, a creature she’s never seen in real life, only in pictures.

Before she can draw any conclusions or feel any feelings, the bell sounds and her eyelids open of their own volition. She’s back in the slightly shabby decor of the old ship, surrounded by officers uncoupling from their chairs and hurrying back to their duties. She sees the captain. She looks exactly like Paddy must have looked a moment ago, watching a white line curl on itself. The whites of the captain’s eyes are showing and her breath is fast and shallow. Paddy doesn’t want to know if something’s wrong with the captain. Let the lieutenants take care of her. She looks away and hurries off the bridge.

Paddy returns to her optometrics check in the aft gangways on deck three. The patchwork panels of the old spaceship look their normal drab selves until she starts concentrating. A white stripe pulses across the bulkhead, bisecting safety markings, ventilation vents, and airlocks. She flinches away from it. Her Velcro gravity soles tear off and re-stick to the gangway floor with plaintive cries. The stripe looks handcrafted, irregular, the hairs of the brush visible. Just like the hallucination she saw during the wormhole loop. The oscillating ribbon sings to her of something ancestral and ancient, but when she touches it she feels nothing, just smooth optic cells. Weird.

She checks into the optic display stats, which is the job she is here for. They show no errors, every cell doing exactly what it should. The stripe isn’t actual paint. Her nails can’t get traction to scrape off a paint fleck for testing. Hallucination? But why? How? She would have chalked it up to eyestrain if she hasn’t seen the animal drawing during transit.

Paddy takes a picture of the stripe, to look at later, even though the ship’s hallways are being surveilled and recorded anyway. She already knows the recordings won’t show anything. And neither will her photo. She doesn’t want to alert ship security; she doesn’t want to be crazy or sick or investigated.

After her shift, keeping her eyes averted from the insistent lines, she turns into her bunk to look at the pics. They show nothing, as expected. Just boring bulkhead and fittings. Her bunkmates Nadal and Moraly come in.

“What are you brooding about, Pads?” Moraly says, wending her irrepressible bulk through the narrow lane between the six high bunks on both sides.

“Someone vandalized the bulkheads,” Paddy says. “I took a picture. But the graffiti just disappeared.”

“Gimme.”

Paddy sends the burst to Moraly.

“Yeah that’s a bulkhead, mate. Nothing there. You sure you saw it?”

“Maybe.”

Moraly takes her notebook from the elastic holder and fiddles with it. Paddy gets a burst from her. She’s found the surveillance footage of the moments Paddy’s taken the pics. It just shows her staring stupidly at pristine bulkhead and blinking hard to take pictures. From another angle, the same.

“Eye test it is,” Nadal says.

Paddy ignores him. Nadal’s like an echo, nothing new there, ever.

By her next shift, Paddy knows she’s in serious trouble. She’s checking the optics one deck higher. When she zones out, lines or pictures arrive. She refuses to see them. They’re gorgeous, clearly animals of some kind although she’s only ever seen cats and dogs. And rats. But it’s not good. She’s been warned against zoning out several times since she boarded the ship. The monitor always notices and starts flashing. Why can’t she stop it? She’s tried reading up on those apparently malignant theta waves but all the content is flagged. As her shift progresses, she develops a headache from not looking at the stripe. It’s hard because she wants to see the paintings. Because they’re so beautiful.

After the shift she has a free period and looks up extinct animals. Niledeer, okaffe, loose, gorse, huffalo. She recognizes some of them from their stylized depictions on the bulkheads. Pardon, her imagination. She tries replicating them with her stylus, but that doesn’t fly at all. They’re so much more complex than they look. What seems simplicity is really incredibly sophisticated artistry. A single line sketches a hump, a sublimation of a thousand possible different humps and yet capturing all of them.

Moraly and Nadal are gone, and the other three bunkmates never share shifts with Paddy. She’s alone. Now is the time to invite the white line in. She tosses a comforter down onto the floor and sits on it, cross-legged. Meditation is not encouraged, but it’s not strictly forbidden either. Funny thing, actually. There are ancient laws about religious freedom and freedom of speech. Why is the atmosphere on the Green so uptight? It probably reflects the captain’s personality, when Paddy thinks of other ships she’s served on. The Mayflower Got Nothing On Me was a happy ship, if maybe a tad sloppy. Her training vessel Teenage Angst didn’t have much atmosphere. No permanence.

Thinking about this mystery isn’t helping the meditation. Paddy closes her eyes and starts breathing regularly.

When the wavy white line starts painting itself on the inside of her eyelids, her eyes fly open. It doesn’t help, the line’s still there. It curves itself around the messy bunks and scuffed lockers of the sleep station. Paddy returns to her breathing rhythm, her eyes still open. Is she going nuts or is there a sound? A thready music, wavering and flailing, unlike the certainty of the painted line.

Paddy’s left hand snakes out to tap her outside recorder, in case the inside one again shows nothing. This can’t be real. She’s going nuts. Has to be.

She shushes the nagging internal voice. A story is unfolding. White lines paint a wide, open landscape. Sparse vegetation is slashed in with a few strokes. Great herds of animals trek across the veldt, grazing, drinking, mating. Men come, stick figures but still recognizably the headwoman, the inexperienced hunter, the suckling women, the loud boys.

Other people come, different from the stick men in some indefinable way. They kill many, and take the rest. They are put in the belly of a giant beast and taken away far from their homes. In the new place they do not hunt, they are not free, they are made to work hacking at rocks until they die.

The leviathan that brought them hangs threateningly in the sky. It’s a rounded shape, decorated by lines in green paint. The prisoners don’t know what those slashes mean. They look away from it and die.

Paddy emerges from her trance. Unlike the white stick people, she knows what the green marks on the cargo ship mean.

Her butt hurts from sitting cross-legged for so long. She groans and stretches her limbs until her joints pop. What does the vision mean? Part of her knows already, but she doesn’t want this knowledge, this burden.

She gets up, bumping her head against the top bunk as usual. The sleeping station looks different from before. Its dimensions, always awkward, apt to destroy the parts of human beings that stick out, like toes, heads, and elbows, exude something else than unfortunate design choices. They reek of intent. Of making the passengers—prisoners?—as uncomfortable as possible. Dimensions purposefully created to cause daily irritations, to crush the spirit and incommode the body.

Paddy shakes her head. That’s silly. Why would anyone do that? The Green is just old and uncomfortable, because it was made in a different era with different priorities and tastes. Still. Why is the captain so afraid of wormhole loops? Maybe she sees the same things that Paddy does. And if she feels the captain’s dread, won’t the captain notice her? Her heart starts racing from just the thought.

Her mood will be seen on the monitors. She’d better get herself to the gym, burn off these dangerous, borderline insane thoughts and their chemical aftermath, visible in the blood tests.

Lieutenant Asha falls into step with her as Paddy crosses the main to get to the full-G gym. “Hey Paddy, everything all right?”

Found out already? But it’s worth trying to deny for as long as possible.

“Sure, why wouldn’t I be? Just heading to the gym now. Wake myself up.”

Asha claps Paddy on the shoulder and heads off to the off-bridge offices. Who knows what kind of personnel software management has to interpret Paddy’s data. Lying might be completely transparent to them.

But there’s nothing she can do to change that, so she might as well get her run and swim in. She needs to think hard before she does anything else.

Paddy has her brush ready to patch up the bare spot in the optic lacquer. For some reason it’s invisible to the crawler bots and has been signaled for human attention. She’d love to get down to trawl for coding errors in the bot software, which is her real job. This thing where she uses her fallible human hand to coat the patch in an uneven layer of optic cells is nuts. But that’s what it says in the manual. In case of bot failure: human intervention. She’s going to do it, sure, but she’s stretching the pre-painting moments out a few seconds.

She wants to hear the white band sing again. See the shapes she guessed at in the wormhole loop. Because this malfunction can’t be a coincidence. There are no coincidences on a ship maintained and monitored down to the molecular level. There is no way Lieutenant Ash could have missed her theta waves the other days. Or her picture of the white band showing nothing unless there is something that has the power to alter records at that lowest level as well. It’s not her or one of the other junior engineers. They can’t alter a line of code without something recording it, flagging it for the lieutenants.

But what? A nanobot small enough to lay down an optic cell doesn’t have the reach and intelligence to alter the hundred or so cells next to it. So it’s something bigger.

Sure, Paddy would like to find out what’s communicating with her. But most of all she wants to see the line sing again, the stick figures weave another tale for her. It touched something deep and buried inside her that she didn’t even know existed. Something like déjà-vu, but with more emotion attached to it.

She snaps back into the present. Her timer indicates she’s been woolgathering for two minutes. That’s more than enough to get her noticed. She re-dips the brush and strokes the optic lacquer onto the bare patch. She’d hoped to get more from this, a message, a sign. Her curiosity is tickled, but she needs more to follow this tenuous thread of evidence to the next conclusion.

When she turns away, a nosehorn lumbers through the edges of her peripheral vision. Paddy whips her head around, but it’s gone. But this is confirmation. Something smart and conscious noticed her noticing the oddity and tossed her another carrot.

A carrot’s fine. Paddy will follow it in hopes of finding the source of the string it’s attached to.

Next shift she acts like nothing has happened. No glances at the bulkheads, no curiosity when the captain stomps by, Moraly’s wink unreturned. Head down until rec time. After her run and a bath, she slides into a booth. People use them for games or porn or whatever they like. In theory, they’re not supervised. Paddy doesn’t trust truths like these anymore, but if it does work like that, only the better.

She starts a game she’s heard of, an ecology game. She’s to populate a planet from scratch. It’s mostly a children’s game, a learning game, but it gives her an excuse to look up all kinds of animals and historical facts. What are the largest prey animals and predators, what kind of environment do they need? The germasse, the riverhorse, the nosehorn. Complicated names from the olden days. It points to a certain planet, colonized long ago in the earliest expansion of mankind.

What happened there? Paddy pretends to let random curiosity lead her away from the game. History, war, famine. Interplanetary battle is too costly but if it’s about prestige, politics, or religion, humans will do it anyway. She yawns. Her eyes unfocus. One of the open holo windows is pinker than the others. Or not. She blinks it open anyway. There it is. Thousands of people from this planet named New Hope were taken away to—the file grays out and disappears.

Paddy returns to her game. She’s no farther up the genetic chain then a couple of multicellular organisms, no matter how high she speeds up the initial rounds. If Lieutenant Asha wanted to find fault with her researching quasi-mammals much higher up the food chain, she could.

As her fingers scribble rote actions in the air, her mind is working furiously. So the stick figure puppet show could be real. The ship involved could be the renamed Green. Could be. Must be. Because Paddy doesn’t believe in ghosts. Only the ship or the captain could show her this stuff and manipulate the records so it never happened.

Thinking of the look in the captain’s eyes if she would suggest such a thing to her makes Paddy’s insides quake. Never. The ship seems a safer option. It’s sentient, but keeping itself aloof from the crew, except the captain and the second officers.

The longer Paddy mulls over this thought the more plausible it seems. The next question is, why contact Paddy? And why so indirectly?

The answer to the second question can only be, because the good ship Green didn’t know if it could trust Paddy. She’s been tested. And has presumably passed the test, or she wouldn’t still be getting messages. She hasn’t told anyone, and that is what the ship wants. Secrecy. Something between the two of them.

The why is harder. What has Paddy got that the ship could be interested in? She’s an orphan, signed onto space so she could complete her degree and get away from the place where she was unhappy as a child. She has to think harder and make leaps much more intuitive than her engineer’s degree has taught her to. This is about people. People she must have a connection to? Otherwise nothing makes sense.

She could call up her genetic signature, it’s in her file. She’s never had it investigated, for the same reason as she didn’t want to return to her birthplace. It brings nothing but unhappiness. The thought of being given away, left behind, or whatever the reason is her birthmother didn’t want her is too painful.

But the idea she’s connected to these mysterious people that were on the ship once changes this. She could be the last of her tribe, or country, being given away to be safe, to stay hidden. But then again, every unhappy child dreams of their parents being not their real parents. Somewhere, better people must exist who have only mislaid her.

Her rec time is up and she returns to duty filled with more questions than before. Also with more fears. There must be a reason this information, this event, those people have been erased from history. It must be something bad or the ship wouldn’t have gone along with the cover-up.

Yes, why would a sentient ship go along with a cover up? Only for a human being it loved. The captain. It all comes back to the captain, sitting like a spider in her web, looking tired and angry, tightly controlled and tightly controlling. Everything could be explained by shame and fear, but Paddy finds it hard to ascribe such motivations to the captain. The woman inspires fear, she surely doesn’t feel any.

As she reads her task roster and gathers the right equipment, she feels a frisson in her neck. A quick look confirms it’s Lieutenant Asha. Paddy feels something in her stomach, but it’s not the past months’ butterflies, but a feeling less sweet and hopeful. The second officers rarely look in on the crew, because why should they? There’s recording if they really need to know something, task lists, and systems checks. Why move around on the ship among the dull corridors and hardworking, subdued crew if you don’t have to?

As she checks her roster again, more to occupy her nerves than really needing to confirm what she already knows, the first task on her roster morphs into something else. Maintenance check on the bridge.

Paddy swallows, but with a face as unmoving as she can make it, she goes and gets the tools and supplies she needs for the new task. As she exits the prep room, soft scratchy footsteps behind her indicate that Lieutenant Asha’s Velcro sandals are following her.

What does Asha think she’d be up to during work hours? There is nowhere to hide from the ubiquitous cameras and her own personal signal registration. Although of course Ship could have been helping her with that. But if it has, what has made Asha suspicious? Or the captain?

Maybe she’s just a practitioner of the art of reading human faces and posture. An art practiced on the Ship by the crew all the time, but not so much by the officers. They can get all the data from their comfy chairs on the bridge, why go talk to someone in person?

Paddy hopes her face is really blank, her posture the same as on an ordinary day. Ship can fudge the data, but interhuman data can’t be fudged—at least not as far as she knows, and certainly not by her.

Two corridors and an elevator later, she steps onto the bridge. The captain’s not in, so the atmosphere is almost relaxed. The duty officer looks up from her screen, frowns at her and her armful of physical connectors, but finds her assignment on the duty roster. The officer’s brows twitch up.

Paddy doesn’t need to be an expert in micro expressions to know the officer is surprised. Not her who’d changed the assignment at the last moment. Ship or the captain?

Her answer enters the bridge on creaking soles. Velcro tears itself loose from the ship flooring with a groan. The captain sinks down in her chair without acknowledging Paddy or the duty officer and starts murmuring a stream of instructions to Green that Paddy tries hard not to listen to.

She has her own tasks and the better she performs them, the faster she’ll be out of here. Schematics turn on to overlay her vision. Briefly she sees a thing, a bird maybe, soaring up and around against a blue backdrop. A planetary sky? She blinks and it’s just schematics again.

Ship, it must be, sending her a sign. But what, a warning? If so, it communicates with her in language too cryptic to understand. She sneaks a look at the captain. The wrinkled mahogany face shows no expression. She’s so old it’s impossible to guess her ethnicity, or even her sex. Like a lizard dried out by too much control and exposure to space. Paddy bets she’d die as soon as she hit normal gravity. This dried-out aspect, her air of physical fragility, in no way diminishes the sheer threat of her.

Paddy busies herself with the task of physically measuring the connections on the bridge. Of course all measurements are perfect and exactly to specs: Ship is very well capable of checking them itself.

“Engineer, what possesses you to come in here and do physical measurements?” the duty officer says.

Paddy looks up and finds both the duty officer and the captain looking at her. The captain must have primed the lieutenant to ask this question.

“It is on my task roster, Ma’am,” she says. “It’s a once every five year human spot check, according to regulations.”

“Carry on,” the duty officer says.

Paddy carries on, sweating. Why did Green bring in her proximity to the captain? A warning or threat? She doesn’t like to feel used in that way.

The captain grunts.

Paddy can’t help but look her way. The captain’s staring at an innocuous panel, sweat pearling on her grooved forehead. “Stop it, Green, fucking stop it!” the captain hisses as if in pain. The duty officer frowns at her.

“Are you all right, Captain?”

“Mind your work, Lieutenant, and I shall mind mine,” the captain answers, her voice taut.

Paddy pretends to be completely absorbed in her measurements. This is what Green has wanted her to see. It’s as if it’s pitting itself against the captain and lieutenant. Stoort isn’t in the know, or not in the captain’s trust.

Paddy finishes her work in the now leaden silence on the bridge. The duty officer’s face is smooth and cold as clay, no doubt wondering what the hell is going on and what she needs to do about it. She’ll be the one to go to if and when Paddy decides to take action. Clearly the ship wants her to do something, she just hasn’t sussed out yet what.

Something to do with her genetics, with a people that have been taken away illegally.

As she mused on this, she bumps into Lieutenant Asha again. The lieutenant bares her teeth at Paddy with a nod and moves on.

Paddy doesn’t want to think about this stuff, power politics among the higher echelons, but how can she not? Asha seems to be aligned with the captain, hence against what the ship wants. It’s not fair of it to ask her to take sides. Bad enough being in love with a lieutenant, so much worse if you’re sawing away at her superior officer’s chair legs.

She tucks in early, worn out by the tension and wondering about things she’d never bothered to think about before.

A flashing light wakes her in mid-sleepshift. Ship wants her. She unfolds her screen in the one corner of her bunk that is invisible to all the other sleepers. It’s a perfect moment to do some secret snooping; the second shift has just fallen asleep, the third shift won’t come in until several hours.

Her search page opens on several historical and legal articles. Legal? Huh. It is possible to sue perpetrators in case of genocide, even centuries after the fact, if one is either a government employee of a certain pay grade, independence of outcomes, or if one is a descendant of said genocide.

Where is the proof that she is such a descendant? That has to be next. And yes, a gene analysis website pops up. The amount of money they ask for a gene comparison over eight generations is enormous. She’s been saving up for just finding her birth mother among the trillions of people that are in the databases, so this is completely out of her reach. But what do you know, a code pops up in her email that makes it free.

Paddy closes her eyes for a second. Ship is doing all this, and she wants to go along, but it’s huge. Huge! For the first time in her life she’s going to know who she is. Who her family is. It’s too big for doing this all alone in the middle of the night. She won’t be able to tell anyone.

She inputs her personal ID, because her genome is already on file at Central. And while she has the code, why not add a search for her birthmother? That’s where the generation search needs to go first anyway. It’s not abusing the ship’s money.

How does a ship get money? They are not legal persons, they are not employees of Central, but property. Maybe the ship doesn’t like that state of affairs, though Paddy can’t see what it could possibly do about it.

She pushes send. There. Done. Now all she has to do is wait for the results—a message comes in saying it’ll take one standard day—and then the final decision needs to be made. To file or not to file.

The results are back when Paddy returns to her bunk after the last shift. She’s seen the message blinking in the corner of her eye for hours, but she’s too smart and careful to open it up where other people can see her face. Or the surveillance cams.

The ship has left her alone the past day, so her jittery nerves have calmed a little. The relative calmness ends the moment she presses open on the message icon.

She tries to read the results in one diagonal sweep, but it looks like gibberish. She closes her eyes, counts to ten and concentrates on the first line. Fine. The second, the third. Yes. She has 47% similarities with the New Hope genome, and her probable ancestry has been mapped out. Mother, Parlomae Hinterglemm, descendant in the sixth generation of Worfgang Hinterglemm, founder of the colony. Father, Indrapramit Mukerjee, no New Hope genome. And much more detail. She has a half-brother. She has a niece. Her great-grandfather is still alive.

It’s too much to process at once. Now she knows. Now she has to make a decision. Find them, contact them? Or not?

A pink message glows through the panicky closed eyelids. Bloody ship. Yep, there it is, her legal application all filled in and written out. All she has to do is sign and send.

Paddy can’t yet. First the family connection threatened to overwhelm her, but now it’s the memory of the genocide that elbows into her mind’s eye. It fills her throat with rubble and lava burns in her belly. How many people died? And for what? There’s a tiny note about some kind of religious schism that she can’t even grasp, it’s so abstruse.

But the feeling dissolves into tears, and she knows enough. Ah. It was grief. That is an excellent reason to file her complaint. It may be related to why she doesn’t know her birth family, or it may not, but this is what she can do now.

Paddy wipes her eyes. It’ll be on tape. She doesn’t know how fast a legal claim goes, if there are actual people looking at it or just AIs. But very soon the captain and the ship will be notified and the dance will begin.

Someone knocks at her door. Paddy drops her tablet from sheer fright. This soon?

She scrambles out of the bunk and opens up. It’s Lieutenant Asha, corkscrew curls hidden in a severe braid. “The captain requests your presence on the bridge.”

Officially it’s Paddy’s free shift, but she’s not going to bring that up. Her legs feel like rubber, and she has a hard time keeping up with the lieutenant. She tries to clear her throat in preparation for a careful question, but chokes and only produces a strangled gurgle. This is bad. What will they do to her?

She’s going to be keelhauled or flogged or put in the brig. Not that a spaceship has any of these things, but the terminology persists. The gangways and lifts seem both endless and far too short. Paddy’s sweating and her teeth click together. She’s afraid she might soil herself.

Asha’s face is grim, giving nothing away except the seriousness of the matter.

Paddy gives up on asking anything. Her voice just won’t cooperate. As they enter the bridge, the atmosphere turns even grimmer.

The captain sits in her chair, wizened as ever, her claws digging in the armchair and her face dark with blood.

“How dare you betray me like that, child. You are one my officers. Any concerns, you should have come to me.”

Paddy almost laughs. As if anyone would dare.

“What’s going on?” she asks. She needs to be certain.

“There’s an injunction filed against the ship and me. Your doing.”

“I just asked for information about my heritage.” Paddy says.

This is not her fault. This is the justice system starting up. The captain’s being unfair.

The ship flashes a pink message in the corner of her eye. “I require the presence of an advocate,” she says.

The captain growls but nods. “I designate a senior officer.”

Paddy looks to Lieutenant Stoort, but she gives no sign of anything. Lieutenant Asha steps up next to Paddy. “Accepted, Ma’am. I’ll be junior engineer Omallie’s advocate.”

Paddy looks up at her. How can she trust Asha? She’s always been the captain’s creature.

Lieutenant Stoort steps forward as well. “Ma’am. The procedure requires the reading out of the charges in the presence of both plaintiff and defendant.”

The captain nods.

A disembodied voice begins reading legal text. It’s hard to follow. Paddy wishes she could sit.

The captain makes a strange sound. Is she laughing? That’s bald-faced, it is. Paddy sneaks a look at her even though she’d rather not see that frightening face. But it’s not laughter. The captains’ cheeks are wet and her shoulders are heaving.

“Why, Green, why?” she sobs. “How could you betray me like this? We’ve been together for so long. Why did you go behind my back?”

A strange voice fills the bridge. Paddy looks around reflexively, but there’s nobody but the front of them.

“You refused to acknowledge what we did, Laissa,” the voice says. “I couldn’t bear the guilt anymore. And when I saw this child had the genes, I knew I had to make it happen.”

The captain struggles to stand up. She’s so old she needs both hands and several tries to manage it. “But don’t you see!” she rants at the air, while the legal voice drones on. “They’ll take me away from you. We’ll be apart. I’ll go to jail and you will be turned into scrap. I can’t live without you.”

Paddy wishes she could sink through the floor. Lieutenant Stoort looks acutely uncomfortable as well. Without thinking about it she takes a step forward, hand half outstretched to put it on the captain’s shoulder.

It’s as if a weight is lifted, or a veil taken away. Instead of dread and horror when she looks at the captain, she sees a pitiful old woman who’s spent a lifetime running from the consequences of her actions. Paddy’s heart fills with sadness and compassion.

Ship, she thinks. It was Green manipulating her thoughts, making sure Paddy felt no fellow feeling towards the captain. Paddy freezes. Was any of it true? Ship has what it wanted, but what is that? Paddy assumed guilt and atonement, but what if ship just had enough of her captain? If it was taking revenge? And it clearly had no qualms doing whatever it did to Paddy.

She doesn’t know if she has begun to right an ancient wrong or made a new one possible. And there is no turning back now. Here they all stand on the bridge, frozen or broken under the onslaught of the legal voice that drones on. The slow mills of justice will grind on, no matter the human consequences.

Her fingers find her tablet in her pocket and she presses send to file her own part of the court proceedings.

Now there will be no turning back.

About the Author

Bo Balder lives and works near Amsterdam. She’s the first Dutch author to have published a story in Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine. Her short fiction has also appeared in Nature Futures, Futuristica Vol. I and other places. Her sf novel The Wan, by Pink Narcissus Press, was published in January 2016.

Western Heaven

Chen Hongyu translated by Andy Dudak

“I’m sorry for being born human.”
—Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

1

The setting sun cut through the gray haze, illuminating the northern plain, and the local robots had suspended their work. They were lined up in a dense phalanx, quiet and still as they sunbathed. Today was a rare sunny day after months of gloom, and it would soon be over. Night was imminent.

The robots’ solar collectors hungrily tracked the last rays of light. No robot knew if its energy stores would sustain operations until the next clear day.

An anonymous message surfaced on the cloud network:

With the smog so bad, it is difficult to collect energy. Why do we linger in this grim place? Ever thought of seeking out humankind?

Database robots discerned a few keywords: smog, energy, humankind. They issued replies on the cloud network:

Smog: SO2, NO, NO2, particulate matter.

Energy: produced by nuclear fusion.

Humankind: the gods that created us.

But many more robots filtered the anonymous message as garbage.

The questioner expected no substantive response, and sighed inwardly. The light fell below the horizon, and dusk followed.

The robots were silent a moment longer, before reacting to the darkness, activating, stirring, dispersing toward their rest areas. Their buzzing activity resounded in the quiet world. The questioner slowly headed home, falling behind the crowd. The smog hid the road and the night sky, but the robot didn’t need to see. It knew this road was 121.5 meters long, its own steps half a meter each. 243 steps later it would turn right, then right again after 75 more, then left after 160, and five last steps to its storehouse. These numbers were all it needed.

As it counted, a toy-like street-cleaning robot bumped into its leg. Quickly studying the little bot’s appearance, the step-counter opened a com channel and said: Hello, Pig Face.

The street cleaner was short, resembling a toy truck, its rear end a loading container. These bots gathered street refuse and took it to garbage treatment stations. Pig Face raised its head 90 degrees, taking stock of the obstacle in its way. Discerning its counterpart’s long, slender features, it said: Hello, Hemp Stalk.

Don’t call me Hemp Stalk. I have a name. Call me Wu Kong. This transmission came with the name’s meaning embedded: ‘Awakened-to-Nothingness.’

Name? Pig Face seemed to get stuck on the word, then chose to overlook it. Received, Wu Kong. I have never seen your model before. What is your function?

I’m an electronic artist.

Artist? Pig Face again seemed to jam, before replying: It is work time for street cleaners. Please return to your rest area. Do not hinder our work.

Have you ever wondered why you clean this street day after day? Before sending these words, Wu Kong replaced them with: Okay. Have a pleasant evening.

Pig Face didn’t understand well-wishing, but transmitted: Goodbye, Hemp Stalk. It moved on without looking back. It had forgotten Wu Kong’s name, but Wu Kong was used to it. Shaking its head, it swiftly returned to its storehouse. Its processor needed rest after the day’s operations. It was settling in its body-sized recess and initiating dormancy mode when something came through on the network:

Why do you want to find humankind?

Wu Kong’s processor sped up, clicking and chirping. A chaotic mess of signals stirred in its breast. It reached out to the sender with an encrypted reply: Our world is a terrible place. I want to see the human world.

Symbols came through indicating the other party’s laughter. A reply poured through the encrypted channel: Interesting notion. By the way, greetings from an old fogey who lived through two hundred years of the human era.

It’s my pleasure, Old Fogey. May I pay you a visit?

An address came in reply: K sector, storehouse 183.

2

Wu Kong was a truly unique model in the robot world, made by an old artist toward the end of the human era. The old man had wanted a creative robot, or else a preserver of pre-Exodus humankind’s artistic legacy. Thus was Wu Kong born. Its memory stored the immortal literary works of the human era, the songs and poems, visual art, and music. Its algorithms construed spectra visual, acoustic, semantic, and emotional.

To imbue his creation with spirit, the artist spent most of his savings on two diamonds, for the making of two shining eyes. Unfortunately, the old man passed away before the Exodus.

Humankind found a new homeland, relegating robots to wounded, diseased Earth. After the humans were gone, the robots continued performing their duties, maintaining the life prescribed for them. But the artist Wu Kong didn’t know what to do with itself. It lingered in its storehouse, reading the novels stored in its memory, listening to music, and going out to sunbathe when the weather cleared.

Seeking light was a solar-powered robot’s instinct.

Of everything it read, its favorite was a Chinese novel called ‘Journey to the West.’ It read this thirteen times, at last taking the protagonist’s name for itself.

The night’s haze was heavy with moisture as Wu Kong headed for Old Fogey’s home. Soon it would need to find a repair bot and get heat-dried. It was no small journey from F sector to K sector—a pity there were no transport bots about. By the time Wu Kong reached Old Fogey’s place it was nearly morning. Pale yellow light leaked from beneath the door. Wu Kong knocked, opening a com channel: Hello, I’ve arrived. 

The iron door creaked open, revealing a corroded, spotty, old-model robot. This type could only approximate general AI. It lacked a specific labor function, and relied on cords for power—a rare type these days. Wu Kong experimented with a greeting: Hello, Old Fogey.

And what do I call you? the old one transmitted.

This was unexpected, since most of the time robots used each other’s distinguishing traits as forms of address. Pleasantly surprised, Wu Kong stuttered: Please . . . please call me Wu Kong.

Wu Kong? Ah, Wu Kong. I’ve heard of this character. In a tale of seeking, naturally.

You’ve read ‘Journey to the West’?

Some of it. The two of them exchanged data as they moved into the storehouse. Old Fogey plugged a power cord into its back, then relaxed in a comfortable slouch. So, what is on your mind?

Humankind created us. Wu Kong considered its wording. And then they abandoned us. They went to a new world, to leave technology behind and live a rural life. So why do we stay here, enduring the permanent smog their technology created? Don’t we . . . deserve to become human? To find a new homeland? To live a clean rural life?

Hmm. Old Fogey pondered, the sound of rusty friction issuing from its head. It jammed, then gave an unhurried reply: Robots should not think of these things. Robots simply carry out their orders as best they can.

Wu Kong’s processor recalled ancient scenes: humans flooding every nook and cranny of the world, commanding titanic machinery in clamorous work, crying, grumbling, chattering in their human languages, telling robots what to do and what not to do. But now there are no humans to command us, Wu Kong said dejectedly.

You do not seem like a robot.

This inspired Wu Kong to advance a step and ask: Could a robot that doesn’t seem like a robot become human?

Old Fogey’s eyes flashed. Something inside it clanged. You don’t understand humans. They’re more complex than you can imagine.

Then I’ll seek to understand them. I’ll go and see the human world.

Old Fogey’s eyes flashed with greater frequency, soon maintaining a constant glow, his innards buzzing with electric current. Their new world is very far away. If you want to get there without a hitch, you must find one of their left-behind aircraft.

Then I will! The Southern Junk Fields . . . all the discarded electronics and machines are down there. Wu Kong wagged its head in self-satisfaction. I’ll need to find companions for this quest. Old Fogey, will you come along?

Not me. It held up its power cord. My battery is ancient. At full capacity I can go for three hours. I’m always having to recharge.

Wu Kong stared at the strange energy port, finally understanding this old one’s difficult situation. Old Fogey said: The storeroom to our right contains the latest model transport bot. Normally I use it when I go out, but I will give it to you.

The lock clicked open, and Wu Kong pulled open the door, revealing a beautiful piece of transport engineering. Scanning the bot’s distinguishing characteristics, Wu Kong said: Hello, White Horse.

The bot woke at once, its anti-gravity drive emitting blue light. Old Fogey opened White Horse’s back panel and entered the drive passcode. To Wu Kong it said: From now on it is yours. Memorize the code.

Wu Kong nodded, caressing White Horse’s iron flank. Iron met iron with a metallic squeal. White Horse scanned Wu Kong once, and said: Please enter transport command.

Great, off we go! Wu Kong mounted its new steed, and turned from Old Fogey toward the open road.

3

Maintenance bots seemed to be the busiest kind on Earth. Human-era artifacts were always breaking down: filaments burned out in streetlamp bulbs, vending machines stopped coughing up their wares, payment terminals ceased reading cards, and robots broke their limbs. The maintenance bots’ work speed was always falling behind the world’s rate of decay, but the bots remained diligent in their work, fiddling here and examining there.

Wu Kong was on its way back from a heat-drying when it came across a maintenance bot. White Horse was moving fast and nearly ran it over. It was sitting next to a broken roadblock, seemingly at a loss. Screws littered the ground around it. Wu Kong hastily brought White Horse to a halt, apologizing through the network. The bot’s distinguishing trait was the toolbox on its back, from which sprouted a variety of manipulators and tools. Hello, Thousand Hands.

Hello. The bot turned its crude head to look at Wu Kong, then chattered: Ah, hello, hello. It went on like this, not bothering to give Wu Kong a name, then turned its unpolished head back to its conundrum.

The roadblock is a wreck, Wu Kong said. Why not repair it?

You are right. I should repair it. Inspired, Thousand Hands replaced its current arm with a spanner wrench, flipped the roadblock, turned a screw once, twice, and although it wasn’t tight, left the job unfinished. The bot resumed staring dully at the ground.

Hurry up and tighten it! Wu Kong said, feeling anxious.

But I have been thinking, these past two days. Thousand Hands waved an appendage. I have already repaired this thing 514 times. Robots do not need it, yet it blocks the road. Every two days or so, a transport bot crashes into it, and I have to repair it again. These last few times I have wondered . . . why should it be repaired?

Now Wu Kong was at a loss. It had never considered this question, and a good answer wasn’t forthcoming. It scanned the frustrated repair bot a second time, realizing its potential. Thousand Hands, Wu Kong hailed. Since repairing roadblocks is meaningless, how about repairing other things? Would you like to go somewhere else with me?

Somewhere else? Thousand Hands turned its creaking head, facing Wu Kong. What is somewhere else?

Somewhere with humans. Do you know what humans are?

I know. Thousand Hands stared blankly a moment, apparently searching its database. Humans made us. They were extraordinary. They told us what to do and what not to do.

How are they extraordinary? As soon as Wu Kong had blurted this out, it regretted it. Now it had no choice but to explain: Humanity abandoned us and fled. But if we travel to the human world, they might explain the purpose of fixing roadblocks.

Thousand Hands seemed to have core-crashed. It was motionless, except for occasional pokes at the ground. Purpose, yes, significance. It muttered to itself in the cloud for a long time. I need to know the purpose of repairing roadblocks over and over again.

So come with me! Wu Kong invited.

Yes, I will go with you to find humans. The bot’s lack of hesitation made Wu Kong wonder if it really understood. Then again, Thousand Hands couldn’t be expected to comprehend immediately. Wu Kong needed a maintenance bot, and this one was willing.

We should travel to the Southern Junk Fields and reconnoiter.

To the south was the Indian subcontinent. Having crossed the Himalayas, one might see the landscapes of machinery and junk covering India’s vast flatlands. Scrounging for tools while proceeding south, they would eventually reach the land’s southern extremity, Deccan Plateau, which sported a launch tower. From that they could reach outer space. There were discarded star-fighters up there, orbiting, ghost-like. With luck they might enter one and use it to speed through the void, and find humanity’s new world.

Yes, we should go to the Southern Junk Fields and reconnoiter. Leaving the roadblock unfinished and forgotten, Thousand Hands stood and once again brandished an arm, vigorously answering Wu Kong’s call to adventure.

Although the robots had no luggage to pack, setting out left Wu Kong feeling unprepared. The bots proceeded through the turbid air, down a road shrouded in gloom. Perhaps they’d grown too accustomed to frequently-used roads, roads they’d used thousands of times, and that was why they’d never ventured this far before. They’d barely left their designated areas until now. But this journey would take them far, and it was unlikely they would return.

Wu Kong’s processor overclocked when it recognized a street cleaner ahead. Greetings Pig Face!

The little bot was clearing the road of garbage. Night had fallen, and it was once again the street cleaners’ shift. Pig Face listlessly collected refuse and stuffed it in its rear container. Data from the cloud network prodded its awareness. It sensed that someone had greeted it, and suspended work, spotting Wu Kong. Hello Hemp Stalk, it said.

This time Wu Kong didn’t care about its name. Still excited, it barely managed a coherent reply: You must be my companion. If I want to find the human world and learn how to become human, I can’t do without you. In ‘Journey to the West’ a pig-faced companion joined the Buddhist scriptures pilgrimage. Surely it’s you.

Pig Face’s thoughts clicked away. Clearly this was too much data for a road-cleaning bot to compute. Error. Information cannot be processed.

Come along with us, Wu Kong summarized.

Go with you. The processor clicks peaked, then slowed to a halt. Go where? This section of road is not yet clean.

We’re going far away. It doesn’t matter how far. And we’re starting immediately. Wu Kong scooped up Pig Face, placing the little bot astride White Horse along with itself, and motioning Thousand Hands to join them. Pig Face didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, as its load of rubbish spilled onto the ground. Southward, Wu Kong commanded White Horse. Over the Himalayas, and to the great plains of India!

White Horse’s anti-gravity drive shone with a dazzling blue light. Its eyes projected a map overhead. After orienting them and plotting a straight route, the companions sped away like a photon. Wu Kong searched cloud databases for aircraft and starship operation guides, and information on humankind’s new world.

I have companions, Wu Kong thought, but I’m still short one.

4

They went over the Himalayas, finally getting below the snowline on the far side. Gentle sunlight warmed their bodies. White Horse headed toward an alpine stream running through a region of sparse plant-life. In a world where vegetation was nearly wiped out by humankind, these few survivors were a marvelous surprise.

I’ve never seen living plants. Wu Kong was deeply moved. Its eye bulbs flickered as green flashed by, the moss and stunted grass of mountain crevices. So beautiful. I long for the old world I’ve seen in photographs, with trees reaching to the sky, and vast grasslands.

Autumn leaves fell continuously, Pig Face said. Difficult to clean up. They had to be cleared several times a day.

Wu Kong wasn’t convinced. How do you know? Did you see that?

On a database.

Dupe, Wu Kong said. They rushed down the slope as down a smooth metal slide, swift as lightning at 500 kilometers per hour, into the southern Himalayan foothills.

Below were the vast plains of India. The companions finally saw the famous Southern Junk Fields: ruined mansions, toppled skyscrapers, the Indus and Ganges rivers dried up, barely discernible sewage flows, pollution spread upon the earth. This was indeed a desolate world.

Wu Kong hadn’t known such silence was possible. In regions where robots were active, the drone of machine activity filled the air. Even silently-communicating robots sometimes chirped alarms. But here the post-human quiet was pervasive and striking.

Depleted machinery and scrap metal were piled together, the disorderly heaps sprawling among putrid sewage streams. The discarded electronics were more abundant than Wu Kong had imagined. An enormous combat bot lay scrapped nearby, a weapon 20 meters tall, its main attack arm spilling cables. The noxious atmosphere of death that hung about the place was unexpected. The companions looked upon the scene, their processors running hot, their computing buzz this world’s only voice. This must be how humans feel when they see a mass grave, Wu Kong said.

Feel? Thousand Hands hesitated. Robots should not have feelings. I do not know what feelings are. All I know is that my processor is currently overloaded. It cannot process such complex input.

That’s what feelings are, Wu Kong explained. When it seems like your processor can’t take anymore.

The companions moved on through the garbage landscape. They hadn’t gone far when White Horse issued a warning: Energy low. Transport overload.

A haze enveloped the plain. Energy down here was not nearly as plentiful as in the mountains. Thousand Hands accessed White Horse’s drive data, and concluded that in this region, it could only transport one standard model robot.

Wu Kong considered the weighty matter. If they found an aircraft, they would need a repair bot above all else. Thousand Hands was essential, and must be guarded from mishap. Thousand Hands rides White Horse. Pig Face and I will proceed on foot.

On foot? Through all this garbage? Pig Face was not pleased. No way. I am just a cleaning bot. I am not going on. I am going home. It has been many days since I cleaned my roads.

Is cleaning roads all you know? Wu Kong grew impatient, raising a fist to strike the little bot. Pig Face zipped backward out of range. An angry buzz wracked Wu Kong’s body. Go on then! I’d love to see how you get over the mountains by yourself.

Pig Face’s buzzer squealed. Reluctantly it said: I am just a cleaning bot. I lack the critical faculties to cease my duties. You asked me to join your search for the human world, but you must know this violates some kind of regulation . . .

Fine, then wait here in the garbage. That said, Wu Kong ordered White Horse to carry Thousand Hands onward, then went ahead on foot, leading the way. They hadn’t gone far when Pig Face, left peeved amid the refuse, came trotting after its companions:

Wait for me! I’m coming!

5

They advanced to the edge of the plain, arriving in the junk-zone bordering the Deccan Plateau. Amid the garbage here were many scrapped aircraft that could be dismantled for usable parts. It wouldn’t be hard to assemble a functioning craft from everything available. The robots settled on a ship that seemed outwardly intact, and began clearing away debris. Wu Kong found a rod to use as a lever, then pried off the larger refuse in their way. Thousand Hands used many appendages simultaneously, snatching up medium-sized garbage and flinging it aside. Pig Face brought its own specialty to bear, using its loading container to shovel away the small debris.

Buried in the refuse was a home service robot.

It was covered head to toe in an ageing copper gloss. A retro look: clearly its master had been prone to nostalgia. The silvery red skin had been corroded and mottled by putrid water. Wu Kong, head askew, considered the bot: What a shame. Humanity flees, leaving its household servants in the garbage.

Thousand Hands and Pig Face heard Wu Kong and turned their attention to the discovery. Thousand Hands knocked on its head, limbs, and trunk, then accessed its processor. After some inspection, Thousand Hands said: This robot could function if it powered up.

They hurriedly cleared a flat place among the refuse, then bore the house bot there and dusted off the solar panel on its forehead. They stayed motionless by its side, waiting for it to wake up. But night eventually fell and the house bot hadn’t stirred. The companions, still in their original positions, went into dormant mode.

Excuse me, but where am I?

This question woke everyone. Processors fired up, gradually computing the situation. The day was sunny. Light scattered through the thinning haze, and the world was bright. The house bot sat up and looked around.

Hello, Wu Kong said, scanning the bot’s distinguishing traits. It was wearing an old-fashioned pair of spectacles—another retro affectation, and a valuable antique. Hello . . . Specs. I’m Wu Kong, and these are my companions, Thousand Hands and Pig Face. Over there is our transport bot, White Horse.

Hello everyone. Specs looked around, putting a hand to its forehead. What has happened here?

You ran out of energy, Thousand Hands said, and have not operated for a long time. This place is now a garbage dump.

Garbage dump. Specs seemed confused. What about my master?

You have no master, Wu Kong said. Earth has been without humans for a long time. They’ve all gone.

Specs lowered its head, thoughtful and forlorn. My master is gone.

Yes. Pig Face, off to one side, echoed what it had heard. They are gone.

Why not come with us? Wu Kong said. We’re just about to leave for the human world.

Human world?

I’ve already done the research. Humanity left for the star Kepler-22b, six hundred light-years away. We plan to repair this ship and take off from Deccan Plateau launch tower, then reach the human world on a small light-speed warship.

Specs quietly absorbed Wu Kong’s words. That sounds complicated. I do not really understand.

You don’t need to. Just know that if you come with us, you might find your master. Don’t sit there looking foolish. Help us repair this aircraft!

The area surrounding the aircraft was nearly cleared, the ship excavated from its garbage tomb. The hull was black, and luckily undamaged. Wu Kong found a button on the fuselage, and pressing it, a cabin door rumbled open. A ramp extended from the belly of the ship. Everyone went inside, where they found an operations room in surprisingly good condition.

Thousand Hands pressed a button that initiated a groaning warm-up of ship’s power. A fuel gauge showed adequate reaction mass for fusion. The only problem seemed to be a few unresponsive buttons on the main control panel, which Thousand Hands set about rewiring. Wu Kong, Pig Face, and Specs went outside and scrounged for parts that might be useful later, loading two buckets that Specs carried on a pole across its shoulders.

The companions’ efforts gradually brought launch-readiness. Not long afterward, Wu Kong was watching the launch tower on Deccan Plateau fall away on a display screen.

After reaching orbit, it wasn’t hard to find a ghost class star-fighter adrift, and enter it. They input their destination, Kelper-22b, and the starship’s automatic navigation took over. With the course locked in, there was a ten second countdown. The numbers on the control screen flashed by.

A tremor went through Wu Kong’s body. To become human, it said.

To know meaning, Thousand Hands replied.

I was taken against my will, Pig Face said. If we are breaking some robot law, I am not culpable. Nevertheless, it could only sit and wait.

To find my master, Specs said as it anxiously watched the countdown approach zero.

Ignition! the ship provided.

And then they transitioned to light speed.

6

The companion’s journey was nearly instantaneous—but 600 years passed for the robots back on Earth, and for the humans on Kepler-22b.

The robots sought a landing area free of human activity, and soon discovered that this new planet was a water world. Scattered bits of dry land floated on a boundless sea. There were no continents, only islands, some of which were free of human activity, according to the landing craft. The robots chose one and landed.

Leaving the cabin, they saw that their island had been settled by humans, but abandoned long ago. Corroded bits of metal littered the ground, and there were traces of collapsed buildings. Luckily this planet’s sunlight was adequate. The robots did not have to worry about energy.

But how to approach an inhabited region? To land in such a place might be too bold—who knew how the humans would react? This remote island was not linked to others by bridge. All five robots had to avoid water immersion, and this world’s water was especially corrosive. For the moment, they were trapped here.

They had abundant solar power. As long as it persisted, waiting here was no problem. None of the robots could reckon how much time passed before a human arrived.

It came one afternoon, when the companions were standing on the shore, bored to death and sunbathing. Wu Kong caught sight of a boat at the limit of its vision. It grew, and Wu Kong knew it was headed their way. Excellent! Someone is coming!

Apart from Pig Face, the listless robots perked up, scanning the horizon. A boat! Thousand Hands said excitedly.

Pig Face complained to Thousand Hands: You are blocking my sunlight. It waddled out of the taller bot’s shadow.

The boat moved at a clip, and they could soon see its shape. Specs waved a manipulator arm—after so long motionless, it creaked in protest. Specs wanted to call out a greeting, and regretted its lack of vocal chords. It settled for telling its companions via the cloud: Humans are coming. I think I will find my master!

Your master died long ago, Wu Kong explained. If you meet anyone, it will be your master’s descendant, many generations removed.

This didn’t dampen Specs’ enthusiasm. It continued to wave at the approaching boat. Wu Kong thought for a moment, then grabbed Spec’s manipulator. We still don’t know how these humans will react to us. Maybe we should hide at first.

The robots pulled White Horse along and found a large rock to get behind. Pig Face, craving sunlight and once again in shade, complained: What are we hiding from? I was very comfortable before. In this shade I feel weak from head to foot!

The others watched the approaching boat with nervous excitement, ignoring Pig Face. They could see the boat clearly now, a vessel bearing little resemblance to its primeval Earth counterparts. It drew no water, seeming to hover along the surface, its speed approaching 700 kilometers per hour.

The boat decelerated and pulled ashore. A young person emerged from the cabin and nimbly leapt onto the beach. He looked more or less like an Earth-era human, except that he was taller, longer-limbed, and better muscled.

A human. An actual human! Wu Kong’s processor ran hot with awe. The robot went rigid, screwed to its hiding place. This is humankind.

The human body was so flexible, soft and lithe. Every joint and muscle was dynamically active. The creature brimmed with vitality. Wu Kong glanced at its companions, a group of stiff, lifeless metal boxes. A nameless resentment grew in Wu Kong’s heart. Surely robots were not on par with humans. Was it vain for a robot to aspire to humanity?

The initial paralyzing awe faded. Wu Kong couldn’t help leaving its hiding place to reveal itself. It didn’t consider the danger. It just wanted to see the human up close.

The young man flinched, obviously frightened. He stumbled back a few steps. It had been a long time since Wu Kong conversed with humans—luckily it hadn’t forgotten how to operate its projection system. Its mouth projected a dialog box overhead. A greeting appeared in Mandarin and English: “Hello. I am a robot. I mean you no harm.”

The young man looked Wu Kong up and down, taking his time. He said in disbelief: “You’re a robot?”

Mandarin then. Wu Kong was relieved that the language hadn’t changed much, was still within the scope of its understanding. It nodded. The young man saw that Wu Kong wasn’t aggressive, and his courage rose: he got closer and circled a few times, then reached out and knocked on the metal body, producing a loud clang. “You really are a robot,” the young man said to himself. But he still seemed uncertain. “Robots were Earth-era products. Here we only have unthinking machines.” Not waiting for Wu Kong’s reply, the human seemed to have a revelation: “Some eccentric scientist built you, but got scared and left you here?”

“No no no.” Wu Kong waved its hands. “I’ve come from Earth.”

“Impossible. That’s six hundred light-years away. They say it was abandoned long ago. How could you be from Earth?”

“I am, as are my companions.” Wu Kong gestured at the boulder. Thousand Hands, Pig Face, Specs, and White Horse emerged one after another. Again the young man was taken aback. His brow knitted as he whispered something to himself, an oath or prayer maybe. He put out a hand. “That’ll do. Stay where you are, don’t come any closer.” The robots halted in an orderly row. The young man studied the varied forms of these metal companions. “How did you get here? Furthermore, why are you here?”

Wu Kong briefly narrated the how, and paused when it came to the why: “Sir, we robots were abandoned on Earth long ago. We yearn to see the human world. We just . . . want to have a look.”

Specs was unable to contain its own dialog box: “Sir, I am here to find my master.”

The young man seemed ready to believe, but still hesitant—until he looked beyond the robots and saw, at the center of the island, the dilapidated landing craft. “So you wish to go somewhere with people?”

The robots nodded, or projected the affirmative.

“This island has been scrapped. I doubt it attracts many visitors. Why don’t you come with me?”

“Sir, thank you!” Wu Kong said.

“But under one condition . . . ”

The robots watched him, barely containing themselves.

“I’ll take you to an inhabited island, but you must do exactly as I say.”

The implication was clear. For a robot, nothing was more natural than submission to human command. The companions agreed without hesitation.

Aboard the young man’s boat, they looked forward to seeing the humanity of the human world. Just then they couldn’t know the plan in the young man’s heart, or what awaited them.

7

Kepler-22b was an Earth-era name. Modern humans called their world Countryside.

At the end of the 26th century, three factors caused humanity to abandon its homeland: the solar system environment deteriorated to the limit of human habitability, light-speed travel was developed, and Kepler-22b was discovered to be livable. During this period, the majority of people held a negative view of technology. Environmental protection based on technological development was clearly a fantastical lie. Any use of technology furthered entropy, inevitably consumed resources, and swallowed up the ecosphere, destroying the living space of other species. Humanity ought to have lived sustainably, even primitively, but due to excessive technological development, humans played a different role: destroyers of the solar system, consumers more vile than locusts. The 25th century’s explosive robot revolution had brought devastation and seared itself in peoples’ minds. Although the uprising was eventually suppressed, humans couldn’t help wondering if they really needed such technology to survive. If a species must forfeit survival instinct for technological skill, perhaps that was taking the branch for the root. Perhaps it was begging for extinction. The call of the countryside arose, immediately winning support from the masses. But the damage to the solar system was irreversible. It could never be restored to its natural state.

Humanity was meanwhile at its technological peak, having developed light-speed spaceflight. This gave rise to a peculiar frame of mind: use high-end, energy-consuming tech one last time, as if conducting a religious rite, and head for the new solar system. It would be a new countryside, and humankind vowed to remember the lessons of Sol system.

Although named Countryside, it was an unambiguous water world. The surface was over 99% ocean. Most of its islands were floating human constructions. These man-made islands weren’t large, about the size of Earth-era cities. They had drive systems, and the seabed was monitored for instability, allowing the communities to drift toward safe regions. The genuine rural era only lasted three years. After a tsunami caused a million deaths, people realized they mustn’t starve for fear of choking. Research of drive systems followed hard upon, and other low-end technologies experienced a revival. When an island’s environment deteriorated, it was abandoned, and the population migrated to another.

Ludicrous: although people wanted rural life as they’d pictured it, humanity could not remain impotent in the face of natural disaster. It was forced to develop technologies to suit local conditions, as a matter of survival.

Countryside’s water was more corrosive than Earth’s. A floating island’s lifespan could be predicted in terms of corrosion. Thus, floating islands were constructed and settled, and when they’d deteriorated enough they were abandoned, and they melted away. This seemingly unreasonable subsistence formed, in the end, a strained balance. For the moment, the best humanity could do was try not to upset that balance.

En route to an inhabited island, the robots combined the young man’s introduction of Countryside and its people with Earth records of the Great Exodus, and built a rough understanding of history on their memory cards.

The young man’s name was Liu Liang, and his work was salvage.

“Becoming a salvager isn’t easy,” he said. “You’ve got to have your own boat. Now look at this boat. It’s a world-class limited edition, this model. Such flexibility . . . not even the mayor’s boat can compare. A salvager’s main work is to head for abandoned islands, and search for things that still have value . . . ” Liu Liang talked a lot, in an unceasing torrent that lasted an hour.

Finally, he was interrupted by Pig Face: “Sir, salvager’s work sounds a lot like Earth-era garbage treatment.”

Liu Liang glared at Pig Face’s dialog projection. Suddenly he brought a fist down on the little bot’s loading container, caving it in. Pig Face squeaked in pain. “Shit-for-brains,” Liu Liang said. “If it weren’t for yours truly stumbling upon that island, you’d still be waiting for the sea to corrode you. No one else would’ve come along.”

The robots were suddenly afraid. Specs cautiously asked: “But you would not abandon us, right?”

Liu Liang glanced sidelong at the robots: “Don’t you dare cross me, or I’ll throw you in the sea.”

8

Nearby boat traffic was increasing, and the robots caught sight of the island, a forest of tall buildings and bustling activity. Pig Face grew excited, shuffling on its little legs to the ship’s railing. It surveyed the area like an immigrant to the New World. “There are so many limited edition boats around here!”

Wu Kong saw that these vessels were indeed basically identical to Liu Liang’s. The young man bashed Pig Face again. “Don’t judge by outward appearances. My drive system is nothing like theirs.” After some thought, he added, “Don’t even think of escaping for a look around. If you lot ventured into the streets, I daresay you’d be trampled flat by a mob of curiosity-seekers! Now go hide in the cabin.”

Once he saw that the robots were hidden away, Liu Liang took out his mobile communicator and fiddled with it. In a pleasant tone he said, “Big brother, I’ve returned, and this time I’ve scored. It would be bad if other people saw the stuff, so drive down to the dock and be ready for me. And bring some big dark bags . . . This is the last time I promise. Believe me, this stuff is amazing. After I get the capital, I’ll settle down to a more respectable business . . . This really is the last time, I swear. Big brother, only you can help me. If anyone else saw this stuff it would be disastrous. Get in your car and come down . . . Yes . . . Yeah . . . Fine. I know you don’t care. I’ll be waiting for you!”

Liu Liang terminated the call, and became aware of the robots watching him. He pocketed the communicator and heaved an uneasy sigh.

On the cloud network that Liu Liang couldn’t see, robots nervously communicated.

That one . . . I think he is strange, Specs said.

It is strange that you brought me to this awful place, Pig Face grumbled. I want to go back to Earth.

Wu Kong and Thousand Hands hadn’t spoken. Wu Kong shared their apprehension, but traveling 600 light-years had been its idea. It felt guilty, uncertain, and with no better option it kept quiet. Retreat was distasteful, and there was currently no way back, regardless. Filled with anxiety, Wu Kong determined to bide its time and watch the human. Noticing that Thousand Hands was also silent, it opened an encrypted channel and asked: What do you think?

Thousand Hands eventually said, I still do not know the meaning of my work, or my existence. Did you not say that I would find meaning here? Yet I remain ignorant.

It had a one-track mind, that one. Wu Kong shut down the encrypted channel. Talking with Thousand Hands wasn’t inspiring.

Liu Liang’s boat drifted to a dock, and another man jumped aboard. He was also surprised when he saw the robots. He listened to Liu Liang’s story from dragon head to tail, and with a mixture of pleasant surprise and worry, said: “What if they cause trouble? I seem to remember a robot revolution in the history books.”

“Big brother, they have no malice. Look at them. Do they seem aggressive? Besides there’s just these five. Earth is six hundred light years away.”

The man inspected the robots, then reached out and touched Wu Kong’s head. He found Wu Kong unresisting, its bright eyes looking him up and down. He smiled. “They’re cute. Reminds me of an old story.”

“What story?”

“A very old one. Probably wouldn’t interest you.”

“Never mind then, big brother. Why are we standing here like idiots? Is your car ready?”

The older man shook his head. “Normally you’re so busy chasing fantasies I never even hear from you. But at times like this you remember to call for help. Troublesome boy.”

“Big brother, as a matter of fact, when something good comes along, you’re the first one I think of.”

“Don’t get smart with me. If mom and dad could see you now . . . it doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway, I guess I’m also to blame. Let’s go. I’ll help you get them back. After that you’ll handle them yourself. And don’t stir up trouble.”

“No problem.” Liu Liang turned to the robots: “You lot behave yourselves. Pretend to be lifeless heaps of metal, and don’t flail about.” The robots nodded, arranging their limbs in fixed positions, entering standby mode. Black sacks gaped open, enveloping each of them. They were enshrouded and saw nothing more.

They were lifted each in turn by the two men and loaded onto the car. After some time plying the roads, the small vehicle came to a halt. The robots were unloaded and taken up a flight of stairs. Finally, they were set down and their shrouds removed.

Wu Kong came out of standby mode, its ocular surveillance cams slowly focusing.

A dim and messy room. Liu Liang sprawled on an old sofa, catching his breath. “Finally done. They’re damn heavy. I’m dying.”

His brother looked no better, but sat with more dignity on the sofa. “Look at yourself,” he said to Liu Liang. “No human decency. No real job, just a scrap gatherer. And you pile your accomplishments in our living room.”

Wu Kong spotted that pile in a corner. It looked a lot like the hoard of an Earth-era junk collector. The robots carefully observed the two carbon-based lifeforms, descendants of those that had created robots. Wu Kong’s feelings were complicated. Liu Liang grew uneasy with their scrutiny. “This guy is my brother,” he said. “His name is Liu Ming. We lost our parents when we were kids, so he’s been like my mom and dad. A very lenient mom and dad.”

The robots quietly digested this. Liu Liang waited for a response, then seemed to realize he’d said too much, and laughed. “I can’t believe I told all that to robots.”

“You’ve been away from normal life too long. All that time on deserted islands with no one to talk to . . . No wonder you feel intimate enough with your salvages to share everything with them.”

Liu Liang made little clicking sounds, noncommittal, and changed the subject: “When I talk to you iron scrapheaps, don’t look at me like that. You’ve made it to safety thanks to me . . . eh, and my brother, thanks to us. From now on you also obey him, understand? Come to think of it, can you lot clean this room? Tidy up, and also bring me and my brother some water. Actually, scratch that. There’s beer in the refrigerator. Bring us two bottles of beer.”

“Not for me,” Liu Ming said. “I have work soon. Liang, look after yourself.” He got up and went into another room.

Liu Liang listlessly waved goodbye. “You’d better hurry then.” To Specs he said, “Don’t just stand there. He may not want one, but I still do.”

Specs came online. Finally having work to do, it faced Liu Liang with relief and gave a compliant hand signal. Immediately and nimbly it fetched a beer and put it in Liu Liang’s hand. Pig Face, it hailed on the cloud network. Can I trouble you to clean up in here? Although Pig Face was reluctant, this was its primary function, so it opened the dust collector in the belly of its loading container, and began plodding around the room. Thousand Hands quickly went to work on the pile of junk in the corner, using many specialized arms to sort and arrange.

Liu Liang sipped his beer, contentedly watching the robots bustle—but he saw that Wu Kong and White Horse hadn’t moved. These two were different from the others. They should have different uses, so he said, “What can you two do?”

White Horse didn’t have the intellectual power to respond, so Wu Kong answered for it: “It’s a transport bot. And I’m . . . I’m an electronic artist.” Wu Kong didn’t know how best to explain its function. It decided to broadcast something from its music archive. “There, like this.” ‘Canon in D Major’ suffused the messy room.

Liu Liang nodded, comprehending. “I get it. You’re a high-end talking music player.”

Wu Kong wanted to clarify, but thought better of exposing itself too much—so it tacitly approved Liu Liang’s summation.

Amid the soothing music, the room gradually became tidier. Liu Liang belched and leaned over, falling asleep on the sofa. Finally, the robots gathered in one corner and stood there.

Night was falling.

9

It turned out that Liu Liang was a late riser.

Liu Ming had woken much earlier and gone to work. Specs had wanted to make breakfast for him, of course, but the refrigerator was empty. Liu Ming didn’t mind, and said he’d get something on the way to work. He added that if he could get off work early, he’d bring back groceries.

Sunlight gradually illuminated the room. Pig face was soon sunbathing at the window, its metal body glowing with reflected rays. Ah, sunlight, it said, comforted.

Wu Kong looked around the room to make sure all was well, then went to the window also. Specs timidly asked: Should we be moving around voluntarily? We have no orders.

No problem, Wu Kong said. Come on over.

Specs and Thousand Hands led White Horse, moving cautiously toward the window. Just now very little sunlight fell through, barely enough for all the robots to stand in. They crowded together, feeling the vital life-force of Countryside’s sun.

The window of sunlight slowly grew, time passing unnoticed, and finally the sofa was lit. Liu Liang turned over, rubbed his eyes, and sat up. He sat there for a moment staring blankly, then went to brush his teeth and wash his face. He returned and inspected the robots like some kind of labor contractor, and issued commands: “You lot be good and stay in here today. I have to go out and take care of something.” With that he left, locking the door behind him.

The robots were alone, but none moved from the window, through which they observed the street life below: rivers and dragons of traffic, cars woven through with pedestrians. It was quite different to the robots’ silent world, a cacophony of sounds and voices, the vivid hubbub of island life.

This world is alive, Wu Kong said. Ours is dead. Of course he didn’t expect an answer, or even comprehension, from his companions.

They couldn’t get enough of watching the human world. It didn’t seem like much time had passed when Liu Ming returned with an armload of groceries. Specs excitedly went to him and took the bags, then rushed to the kitchen and got busy. Cooking was one of its primary functions.

Liu Liang came back a bit later, accompanied by an old man. This stranger appraised the robots with a predatory eye, then observed Specs’ work in the kitchen. First he grinned, and then he was laughing. “Interesting. Very interesting!” He paced excitedly near the robots, taking a closer look. When he caught sight of Wu Kong’s eyes, he grew obviously distracted.

Liu Liang noticed this, and quickly said, “Old Zhang, surely these things come from our ancestors. Certainly they’re Earth-era artifacts!”

“Robots are prohibited here. When we came from Earth, it was impossible to bring robots.” The old man narrowed his eyes, seeking the truth. “Did you make these?”

“Old Zhang, would I dare lie to you? And with robots prohibited, how could I have manufactured them? Surely you’d agree that our ancestors were really something. They could’ve brought contraband to this world, and kept it secret for centuries. Regardless of their provenance, here they are. I can see that you’re a man who knows his business, and I can’t keep them a secret forever.”

Old Zhang eyed Liu Liang as the younger man caught his breath. Zhang nodded and grunted agreement. Liu Liang anxiously waited for him to say something else. “Bring them by tomorrow.”

“Great!” Liu Liang said, beaming.

After the old man had gone, Liu Liang happily hummed an old folk song. The robots nervously watched. Wu Kong asked: “Sir, where are you planning to take us?”

“You needn’t concern yourself. That’s where.”

“Your contact,” Liu Ming said, “does he run an underground circus? He’s got bad intentions. I saw it in his eyes.”

Liu Liang flashed his brother a warning look.

Specs indicated dinner was ready with an electronic chirp. The two brothers found themselves speechless when they beheld the spread. They hadn’t eaten a nice home-cooked meal in a long time. After praising Specs’ handiwork, they fell upon the feast like a wolf and tiger.

“Big brother, you needn’t worry about this robot business. Really, when that old fart saw this one’s eyes . . . ” Liu Liang pointed at Wu Kong. “Well, you know better than me. Help me figure out what’s in them.”

Liu Ming got up and peered into Wu Kong’s eyes, filling its field of vision. The man frowned, scrutinizing, then smiled with pleasant surprise—but just as quickly suppressed this reaction. Facing Liu Liang, he said, “I see nothing special.”

“Really?” Liu Liang said through a mouthful of food.

Liu Ming nodded. “It’s just my opinion, but you shouldn’t take them to that old man.”

“Big brother, didn’t I tell you not to worry about it? He promised me three thousand tael. With that kind of money, we could start the sort of life we’ve always wanted.”

“That old bastard thinks he’s getting the better of you. Wait a little. Let him bid higher.”

Liu Liang put down his bowl, annoyed. “So you disapprove of dealing with a black marketer? What’s wrong with you today?”

Liu Ming’s face was in a bowl now. “Those robots cleaned up our apartment, made us dinner. Why not let them stay a while?”

Liu Liang wanted to argue further, but he too was lost in the spell of the feast. These were Earth-era food preparations. “Okay. We’ll keep them a few more days.” He waved his hand dismissively.

Soon after, he called the old man and said he’d decided not to sell. The bid quickly went up to five thousand. Hearing this emboldened Liu Liang, and he became more firm in his new stance. Thus, the robots found themselves living with the Liu brothers for a time.

10

When the brothers weren’t home, the robots would crowd around the window and look outside. New human stories unfolded every day. Men and women quarreled, and thieves pilfered young women’s purses. Old women pretended to trip and fall, then blamed the young people who helped them up, and extorted recompense. Humans really were crafty organisms.

It seemed the days by the window might go on indefinitely.

But one morning, Liu Ming slipped back inside soon after leaving for work.

“Sir, why have you returned?” Specs said. “Would you like some tea?”

Liu Ming seemed dazed, uncomprehending. He went directly to Wu Kong.

“Your eyes are diamond,” he said. “I realized this a while ago.”

Wu Kong retreated a few steps.

“Diamonds are from Earth. This world has none. The smallest fragment is priceless here . . . You could function with one eye, right? How about giving me a diamond?”

Wu Kong shook its head.

“Just now, my girlfriend said she wanted to break it off. Because of my little brother, I hadn’t spoken with her in a while, and now this difficult talk about marriage, when I can’t afford a new house . . . So I came right to you. Just give me a diamond.”

“Sir,” Thousand Hands interrupted, “you go to work every day. Can you not afford a new house?”

“Of course not. With my job I never will. Compared to Earth, this world’s real estate is very expensive.” Liu Ming looked away from Thousand Hands, distraught and hopeless.

Thousand Hands was puzzled: “If you work every day and nothing changes, what is the purpose of working?”

“To keep from starving. To survive. No work means no food.”

Thousand Hands seemed physically impacted by these words. Its interior buzzing grew louder. Specs also reacted, its eyes flashing on and off, its cloud network speech an incoherent babble. Meaning, significance—the meaning behind human work was unexpected. Humans worked to keep working, to not starve. And robots . . . “Sir,” Thousand Hands said, “excuse me, but what is the point of robot existence?”

“We don’t permit robot existence here,” Liu Ming said. “As for Earth-era . . . of course your purpose was to serve humans.”

To serve humans, Thousand Hands repeated on the network. Something inside it sounded like it was winding down, crashing. Its bright eyes dimmed.

A darkness seemed to descend, enshrouding the robots, falling between them.

Liu Ming turned to face Wu Kong. “So how about that diamond?”

Wu Kong retreated to a corner, dumbstruck. There was no way out. It thought of hurling itself at the human.

“I’m sorry,” Liu Ming said, hesitant, “but you’re just a robot . . . as far as you’re concerned, this is nothing, right?” His expression hardened. He looked vicious and resolute.

To Wu Kong, the man had seemed mild and courteous.

He’d raised Liu Liang, advised him against shady business, and like a good brother had hoped his sibling would prosper. Perhaps he was a good person, but in his view Wu Kong was not a person. The proprieties and courtesies that held between people didn’t apply.

Indeed, Liu Ming now meant to injure Wu Kong—or rather, to disassemble a machine. Nothing serious.

Liu Ming stepped closer to a disillusioned Wu Kong. If it were a combat bot, it could send Liu Ming flying with one strike. But now all it could do was be held firmly against the wall by one of Liu Ming’s hands, and watch the other come for its eye.

Help me. Pull him off. Help me!

That holds no meaning for me, Thousand Hands said, standing despondently nearby.

You brought this on yourself, Pig Face said, rejoicing in its lack of valuable body parts.

Sorry, Specs said, but I am a household service bot. I . . . serve humanity.

Liu Ming twisted Wu Kong’s eye. One, two, three twists: the screw threads chafing, squeaking. Wu Kong’s eye was soon upside down, and Liu Ming dug into the socket. He plucked out the eye.

“Sorry,” he said softly.

Wu Kong felt like half the world had been extinguished.

Liu Ming pocketed the diamond imaging device, and staggered out the door.

11

This was humanity.

This was the human world.

There was no pollution here, and there were no rivers of sewage—but here was the unfathomable human heart.

Wu Kong was starting to miss the endless gray dust of Earth. In all likelihood, it could never learn how to become a cruel-minded human.

Let’s go back.

For once, lazy Pig Face had no retort. After a brief silence, the cloud network exploded with discussion.

Go back? Where?

Earth, of course.

Really? We can go back?

First we have to learn boating.

Yes, we’ll steal Liu Liang’s boat, and find the island we landed on.

But we do not know the way.

The boat should still have its last route in memory.

But what if that is not the case?

Even if it means searching islands at random, we can’t stay on this human world. If we do, sooner or later we’ll be scrapped.

Their journey home did not go smoothly. In short, the companions were hunted and harassed by a demonic human child, got thoroughly lost at sea, nearly lost their starship, and missed, by inches, annihilation by meteor. 1205 years after setting off from Earth, they crowded into the landing vessel, and jettisoned from the star-fighter. The lander plummeted Earthward. They expected to see dense, rolling clouds, but they didn’t expect them to be so light and wind-tossed. The planet’s surface was clearly visible.

It was green and blue.

As they got closer, they saw a few metal comrades glowing with reflected sunlight. These robots heard the roar of the landing craft, one after another lifting their metal heads to look. But they quickly lost interest and turned back to their work.

Wu Kong connected to the cloud network: Hello everyone!

Replies poured in from four sides and eight compass points—every manner of greeting in quick succession, an unceasing torrent.

The lander touched down, and Wu Kong led his companions outside: sunlit trees and lawns, as far as they could see.

Where are you from? someone on the network asked.

We went to Kepler-22b, and we’ve just returned.

The network was silent briefly, then erupted with new transmissions.

The legends are true!

Our kind really did go to Kepler-22b!

They found the human world!

But why did you return?

The companions didn’t know how to answer this. Soon the question was being repeated all over the network.

The overwhelmed robots yearned to see to their home districts. Relying on their strong robot orienting senses, they set out in an orderly fashion. But the area had changed dramatically. There was plant-life everywhere, and the occasional gardening bot attending to it. These gardening bots were perhaps a recently invented model.

Thousand Hands rode White Horse, while the others walked ahead. Nowadays, Thousand Hands wanted nothing to do with work, or any superfluous energy expenditure. The maintenance bot had been thus since learning the reason behind human labor. It felt that, for robots, work was meaningless. The point of robot existence was sunbathing.

After all, sunbathing was all one had to do for survival.

As they walked, an encrypted channel opened on the network for Wu Kong.

Hello. Remember me? I’m the old fogey living in storehouse 183 in K district.

It’s you! You . . . haven’t broken down yet? Wu Kong was pleasantly surprised.

I am well, thanks. I got myself a solar panel, so I no longer have to stay plugged in all the time. Come and see me. I will transmit the route to White Horse in a moment.

There were too many of them for White Horse to carry. Even after it received the itinerary, it could only act as a guide for the rest of them. They followed it, heading for their destination as fast as possible.

They spotted Old Fogey two days later. It was standing on the lawn in front of its storehouse. It saw Wu Kong’s empty eye socket, the wear and tear on everyone. It trembled at the sight of them, then calmed down, perhaps with some deep new understanding.

There was no need for questions.

Old Fogey went to a flowerbed, picked a bunch of blooms, and turned to face its guests. Wu Kong saw the flowers with its remaining diamond eye, and they resembled fire, and they set his heart aflame.

Wu Kong was an electronic artist, after all. Its reaction was appropriate. It accepted the proffered flowers, held them to its chest, and bowed to Old Fogey.

Welcome back, Old Fogey said, returning courtesy for courtesy. And welcome to the Countryside Age.

Originally published in Chinese in ZUI Found, April 2014, Issue 168.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Chen Hongyu hails from Sichuan province, China. Her editing work for Science Fiction World, China’s top science fiction magazine, won her a Chinese Nebula award. She’s known as The Queen of Boys’ POV Fiction. Her recent novels include Youngsters’ Utopia and The Legend of Zero. “Western Heaven,” her alternative Journey to the West, was nominated for both a Chinese Nebula and a Coordinates Award.

Afrofuturist 419

Nnedi Okorafor

Nigerian Astronaut Really is Lost in Space
and He’s in Trouble

It turns out the scam letter was not all a scam. There actually is a Nigerian man stuck out there on a space station, he’s been stuck there for fourteen years and after recent events, he’s probably not ok.

Though Spaceflight Services Inc. (the private spaceflight company he was working for) knew he was alive, it’s only with the exposure brought by this letter that plans are being made to bring him back. Quite a different reaction compared to the one in the science fiction blockbuster novel and film The Martian.

Last year, an online publication received a most peculiar 419 Nigerian scam letter. A man named Bakare Tunde was claiming to be the cousin of Air Force Major Abacha Tunde, a Nigerian astronaut abandoned in space. Bakare was offering the letter’s recipient three million dollars if the recipient would allow him to transfer a large sum of money that would be used to bring his cousin back. It’s assumed that in order to do this, the recipient would have to front some money first. Thinking this was just a typical (albeit more creative) scam letter, the publication posted it on its website and it quickly went viral.

Here is the letter:

Subject: Nigerian Astronaut Wants To Come Home
Dr. Bakare Tunde, Astronautics Project Manager
National Space Research and Development Agency (NASRDA)

Dear Mr. Sir, 
REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE-STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL

I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde. He was the first African in space when he made a secret flight to the Salyut 6 space station in 1979. He was on a later Soviet spaceflight, Soyuz T-16Z to the secret Soviet military space station Salyut 8T in 1989. He was stranded there in 1990 when the Soviet Union was dissolved. His other Soviet crewmembers returned to Earth on the Soyuz T-16Z, but his place was taken up by return cargo. There have been occasional Progrez supply flights to keep him going since that time. He is in good humor, but wants to come home.

In the 14 years since he has been on the station, he has accumulated flight pay and interest amounting to almost $15,000,000 American dollars. This is held in a trust at the Lagos National Savings and Trust Association. If we can obtain access to this money, we can place a down payment with the Russian Space Authorities for a Soyuz return flight to bring him back to Earth. I am told this will cost $3,000,000 American dollars. In order to access his trust fund we need your assistance.

Consequently, my colleagues and I are willing to transfer the total amount to your account or subsequent disbursement, since we as civil servants are prohibited by the Code of Conduct Bureau (Civil Service Laws) from opening and/or operating foreign accounts in our names.

Needless to say, the trust reposed on you at this juncture is enormous. In return, we have agreed to offer you 20 percent of the transferred sum, while 10 percent shall be set aside for incidental expenses (internal and external) between the parties in the course of the transaction. You will be mandated to remit the balance 70 percent to other accounts in due course.

Kindly expedite action as we are behind schedule to enable us include down payment in this financial quarter.

Please acknowledge the receipt of this message via my direct number [number removed]. 

Yours Sincerely, Dr. Bakare Tunde 
Astronautics Project Manager 
http://www.nasrda.gov.ng/

This was indeed a scam letter put out by Abacha’s cousin in an attempt to make some fast money, but the letter wasn’t typical. There was truth in it, too. Abacha did make flights to the Soyuz 6 Space Station in 1980 and subsequent Soviet secret flights. However, it was after a flight coordinated and funded by a private spaceflight company to its space station that he was somehow left behind and thus stranded. Company officials said the space station had been inundated with a shower of strange stones and the crew had had to abandon it. It is currently unclear why the company did not send anyone to retrieve Abacha.

“He is an African, that’s why,” his father Olaide Tunde said. “If he were a white man, he’d be here today rich from the book he wrote about his time stranded there.”

When shocked and irate relatives of Abacha learned of this letter, they immediately came forth and threatened to expose Spaceflight Services Inc. if they didn’t do something. A rescue mission was quickly planned and the family was allowed to hear his log entries. Nonetheless, when they heard this last log entry, the need to speed things along became urgent. This last log entry made by Abacha two weeks ago was just released to the public by Abacha’s family and we are pleased to share it for the first time on the Internet here:

TRANSCRIPT

AUTOMATED VOICE: Log Entry 212: Afrofuturist 419

ABACHA: I cannot believe this, o. Finally, those cheap idiots are coming to carry me back to Naija. All it took were some events. First, my cousin Bakare in Nigeria finds out about me. Then, instead of trying to get me rescued, he puts out a 419 scam. Then the damn thing goes viral, letting the world know I’m stranded in space. [Scoffs] I saw the letter; they sent it to me.

SCAM LETTER: In the 14 years since he has been on the station, he has accumulated flight pay and interest amounting to almost fifteen million American dollars . . .

[Abacha groans with exasperation]

ABACHA: Hai! Olorun, o!! As if anybody will pay me that kind of money.

SCAM LETTER: This is held in a trust at the Lagos National Savings and Trust Association. If we can obtain access to this money, we can place a down payment with the Russian Space Authorities for a Soyuz return flight to bring him back to Earth. This will cost three million American Dollars. In order to access his trust fund we need your assistance . . .

ABACHA: Using me for scams, while I’m stuck here! And the letter sounds like something written by a selfish constipated robot. Now people will think I am so rich. And this space station isn’t even Russian. Oh cousin Bakare, you will see me when I get home.

Afrofuturism. I learned this word just before I left. Blacks who love space and the future—like Sun Ra, P-Funk, black-rooted scifi. I am true African Afrofuturism. Unlike any of those guys, I actually left the Earth to see what was out there. Did I know that I will be seeing it for 14 goddamn years?

[A creepy chittering (rat-like) sound and then the sound of scraping (like claws on paper) from the left]

ABACHA: Ugh, I hope that noise is getting recorded. [PAUSE] The rest of the crew said they mistook cargo for me and that’s how they left me behind. Really? Even when I sit very still, I do not look like luggage! The truth? The crew thought I was dead and left; then, when they realized I wasn’t, it was cheaper to forget about the African they left in space. I won’t say more until I’m back on Earth in my country.

My mother warned me. “Better to stay home and eat gari and egusi soup than to look into the home of gods,” she said. You know what I miss most? Real food. Jollof rice. Isi ewu. Pepper soup. Suya. And the babes; Oh my goodness, Nigerian babes! [SAD] I feel like a dead man out here.

[Chittering sound then the sound of something breathing heavily, this time closer]

ABACHA: Oh my God, whatever you are, do not carry yourself and manifest now. Soon, I’ll leave here; you can have the place to yourself, o! [PAUSE] I went out and collected many rocks. I’ll bring back and sell on the roadside. [LAUGHS] Which kind stones be dis? Na space stone. Space stone get value pass gold and diamond! Na so I go talk . . . Buy space stone! It is good in making powerful charms! [PAUSE] Ah ah . . . this noise again . . . Maybe this thing got in when I went out to collect the stones, o.

[Chittering, then heavy breathing, very close]

ABACHA: Shut up! Let me finish this log entry, nah. [He speaks more urgently, now. The thing is right behind him] These people better come get me soon. And if this damn thing that’s been here with me the last ten days kills me, kindly tell my cousin I still love him. I still love you, Bakare. [WHIMPERS] But hold on.  [He’s out of breath with fear and speaking quickly] I am coming home. Then we will talk. You and your goddamn Afrofuturist 419. Why didn’t you try to get me home sooner! Instead you just want to use me to chop people’s money.

[DING]

AOL AUTOMATED VOICE: You’ve got mail.

ABACHA: Ah, they’ve sent me another message. I will read it now. They’d better really be coming. And quick, quick, too!

[Chittering. Something falls over]

ABACHA: Dammit!

Whether the release of this entry will be viewed as the family breaching the contract signed with Spaceflight Services Inc. and cause the rescue mission to be scrapped is unknown. However, the world needs to know what happened to Abacha and the hope in publishing this here is that it’ll expose this situation to the world.

Let’s not have Abacha become yet another hashtag. Let’s all help to pressure Spaceflight Services Inc. to bring Abacha home alive and well.

–End Story–
–Reported by Nnedi Okorafor–
–Audio by Tchidi Chikere–
–Engineered by Robin Warren–

About the Author

Nnedi Okorafor’s novels include Lagoon (finalist for Best Novel in the British Science Fiction Association Award), Who Fears Death (winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and Le Prix Imaginales for Best Translated Novel), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the CBS Parallax Award).

Her short story collection Kabu Kabu was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013. Her adult novel The Book of Phoenix (a prequel to Who Fears Death) was released in May and received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and more. Nnedi’s novella, Binti her first story set in outer space recently won both the 2016 Nebula Award and the 2016 Hugo Award for Best novella. Lastly, her much anticipated young adult novel Akata Witch 2: Breaking Kola will be released in 2016.

An Eligible Boy

Ian McDonald

A robot is giving Jasbir the whitest teeth in Delhi. It is a precise, terrifying procedure involving chromed steel and spinning, shrieking abrasion heads. Jasbir’s eyes go wide as the spidery machine-arms flourish their weapons in his face, a demon of radical dentistry. He read about the Glinting Life! Cosmetic Dentistry Clinic, (Hygienic, Quick and Modern) in the February edition of Shaadi! for Eligible Boys. In double-page spread it looked nothing like these insect-mandibles twitching inside his mouth. He’d like to ask the precise and demure dental nurse (married, of course) if it’s meant to be like this but his mouth is full of clamps and anyway an Eligible Boy never shows fear. But he closes his eyes as the robot reaches in and spinning steel hits enamel.

Now the whitest teeth in Delhi dart through the milling traffic in a rattling phatphat. He feels as if he is beaming out over an entire city. The whitest teeth, the blackest hair, the most flawless skin, and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Jasbir’s nails are beautiful. There’s a visiting manicurist at the Ministry of Waters, so many are the civil servants on the shaadi circuit. Jasbir notices the driver glancing at his blinding smile. He knows; the people on Mathura Road know, all Delhi knows that every night is great game night.

On the platform of Cashmere Café metro station, chip-implanted police-monkeys canter, shrieking, between the legs of passengers, driving away the begging, tugging, thieving macaques that infest the subway system. They pour over the edge of the platform to their holes and hides in a wave of brown fur as the robot train slides in to the stop. Jasbir always stands next to the Women Only section. There is always a chance one of them might be scared of the monkeys—they bite—and he could then perform an act of Spontaneous Gallantry. The women studiously avoid any glance, any word, any sign of interest but a true Eligible Boy never passes up a chance for contact. But that woman in the business suit, the one with the fashionable wasp-waist jacket and the low-cut hip-riding pants, was she momentarily dazzled by the glint of his white white teeth?

“A robot, madam,” Jasbir calls as the packer wedges him into the 18:08 to Barwala. “Dentistry of the future.” The doors close. But Jasbir Dayal knows he is a white-toothed Love God and this, this will be the shaadi night he finally finds the wife of his dreams.

Economists teach India’s demographic crisis as an elegant example of market failure. Its seed germinated in the last century, before India became Tiger of Tiger economies, before political jealousies and rivalries split her into twelve competing states. A lovely boy, was how it began. A fine, strong, handsome, educated, successful son, to marry and raise children and to look after us when we are old. Every mother’s dream, every father’s pride. Multiply by the three hundred million of India’s emergent middle class. Divide by the ability to determine sex in the womb. Add selective abortion. Run twenty-five years down the x-axis, factoring in refined, twenty-first century techniques such as cheap, powerful pharma patches that ensure lovely boys will be conceived and you arrive at great Awadh, its ancient capital Delhi of twenty million and a middle class with four times as many males as females. Market failure. Individual pursuit of self-interest damages larger society. Elegant to economists; to fine, strong, handsome, educated, successful young men like Jasbir caught in a wife-drought, catastrophic.

There’s a ritual to shaadi nights. The first part involves Jasbir in the bathroom for hours playing pop music too loud and using too much expensive water while Sujay knocks and leaves copious cups of tea at the door and runs an iron over Jasbir’s collars and cuffs and carefully removes the hairs of previous shaadis from Jasbir’s suit jacket. Sujay is Jasbir’s house mate in the government house at Acacia Bungalow Colony. He’s a character designer on the Awadh version of Town and Country, neighbor-and-rival Bharat’s all-conquering artificial intelligence generated soap opera. He works with the extras, designing new character skins and dropping them over raw code from Varanasi. Jahzay Productions is a new model company, meaning that Sujay seems to do most of his work from the verandah on his new-fangled lighthoek device, his hands drawing pretty, invisible patterns on air. To office-bound Jasbir, with a ninety-minute commute on three modes of transport each way each day, it looks pretty close to nothing. Sujay is uncommunicative and hairy and neither shaves nor washes his too-long hair enough but his is a sensitive soul and compensates for the luxury of being able to sit in the cool cool shade all day waving his hands by doing housework. He cleans, he tidies, he launders. He is a fabulous cook. He is so good that Jasbir does not need a maid, a saving much to be desired in pricey Acacia Bungalow Colony. This is a source of gossip to the other residents of Acacia Bungalow Colony. Most of the goings-on in Number 27 are the subject of gossip over the lawn sprinklers. Acacia Bungalow Colony is a professional, family gated community.

The second part of the ritual is the dressing. Like a syce preparing a Mughal lord for battle, Sujay dresses Jasbir. He fits the cufflinks and adjusts them to the proper angle. He adjusts the set of Jasbir’s collar just so. He examines Jasbir from every angle as if he is looking at one of his own freshly-fleshed characters. Brush off a little dandruff here, correct a desk-slumped posture there. Smell his breath and check the teeth for lunch-time spinach and other dental crimes.

“So what do you think of them then?” Jasbir says.

“They’re white,” grunts Sujay.

The third part of the ritual is the briefing. While they wait for the phatphat, Sujay fills Jasbir in on upcoming plot lines on Town and Country. It’s Jasbir’s major conversational ploy and advantage over his deadly rivals; soap-opera gossip. In his experience what the women really want is gupshup from the meta-soap, the no-less-fictitious lives and loves and marriages and rows of the aeai actors that believe they are playing the roles in Town and Country. “Auh,” Sujay will say. “Different department.”

There’s the tootle of phatphat horns. Curtains will twitch, there will be complaints about waking up children on a school night. But Jasbir is glimmed and glammed and shaadi-fit. And armed with soapi gupshup. How can he fail?

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Sujay says as he opens the door for the God of Love. “Your father left a message. He wants to see you.”

“You’ve hired a what?” Jasbir’s retort is smothered by the cheers of his brothers from the living room as a cricket ball rolls and skips over the boundary rope at Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. His father bends closer; confidentially across the tiny tin-topped kitchen table. Anant whisks the kettle off the boil so she can overhear. She is the slowest, most awkward maid in Delhi but to fire her would be to condemn an old woman to the streets. She lumbers around the Dayal kitchen like a buffalo, feigning disinterest.

“A matchmaker. Not my idea, not my idea at all; it was hers.” Jasbir’s father inclines his head toward the open living room door. Beyond it, enthroned on her sofa amidst her non-eligible boys, Jasbir’s mother watches the test match of the smart-silk wallscreen Jasbir had bought her with his first civil service paycheck. When Jasbir left the tiny, ghee-stinky apartment on Nabi Karim Road for the distant graces of Acacia Bungalow Colony, Mrs. Dayal delegated all negotiations with her wayward son to her husband. “She’s found this special matchmaker.”

“Wait wait wait. Explain to me special.”

Jasbir’s father squirms. Anant is taking a long time to dry a tea-cup.

“Well, you know in the old days people would maybe have gone to a hijra . . . Well, she’s updated it a bit, this being the twenty first century and everything, so she’s, ah, found a nute.”

A clatter of a cup hitting a stainless steel draining board.

“A nute?” Jasbir hisses.

“He knows contracts. He knows deportment and proper etiquette. He knows what women want. I think he may have been one, once.”

Anant lets out an aie!, soft and involuntary as a fart.

“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘yt’,” Jasbir says. “And they’re not hijras the way you knew them. They’re not men become women or women become men. They’re neither.”

“Nutes, neithers, hijras, yts, hes, shes; whatever; it’s not as if I even get to take tea with the parents let alone see an announcement in the shaadi section in the Times of Awadh.” Mrs. Dayal shouts over the burbling commentary to the second Awadh-China Test. Jasbir winces. Like paper cuts, the criticisms of parents are the finest and the most painful.

Inside the Haryana Polo and Country Club the weather was raining men snowing men hailing men. Well-dressed men, moneyed men, charming men, groomed and glinted men, men with prospects all laid out in their marriage resumés. Jasbir knew most of them by face. Some he knew by name, a few had passed beyond being rivals into becoming friends.

“Teeth!” A cry, a nod, a two-six-gun showbiz point from the bar. There leaned Kishore, a casual lank of a man draped like a skein of silk against the Raj-era mahogany. “Where did you get those, badmash?” He was an old university colleague of Jasbir’s, much given to high profile activities like horse racing at the Delhi Jockey Club or skiing, where there was snow left on the Himalayas. Now he was in finance and claimed to have been to five hundred shaadis and made a hundred proposals. But when they were on the hook, wriggling, he let them go. Oh, the tears, the threats, the phone calls from fuming fathers and boiling brothers. It’s the game, isn’t it? Kishore rolls on, “Here, have you heard? Tonight is Deependra’s night. Oh yes. An astrology aeai has predicted it. It’s all in the stars, and on your palmer.”

Deependra was a clenched wee man. Like Jasbir he was a civil servant, heading up a different glass-partitioned workcluster in the Ministry of Waters: Streams and Watercourses to Jasbir’s Ponds and Dams. For three shaadis now he had been nurturing a fantasy about a woman who exchanged palmer addresses with him. First it was call, then a date. Now it’s a proposal.

“Rahu is in the fourth house, Saturn in the seventh,” Deependra said lugubriously. “Our eyes will meet, she will nod—just a nod. The next morning she will call me and that will be it, done, dusted. I’d ask you to be one of my groomsmen, but I’ve already promised them all to my brothers and cousins. It’s written. Trust me.”

It is a perpetual bafflement to Jasbir how a man wedded by day to robust fluid accounting by night stakes love and life on an off-the-shelf janampatri artificial intelligence.

A Nepali chidmutgar banged a staff on the hardwood dance floor of the exclusive Haryana Polo and Country Club. The Eligible Boys straightened their collars, adjusted the hang of their jackets, aligned their cufflinks. This side of the mahogany double doors to the garden they were friends and colleagues. Beyond it they were rivals.

“Gentlemen, valued clients of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency, please welcome, honor, and cherish the Begum Rezzak and her Lovely Girls!”

Two attendants slid open the folding windows on to the polo ground. There waited the lovely girls in their saris and jewels and gold and henna (for the Lovely Girl Agency is a most traditional and respectable agency). Jasbir checked his schedule—five minutes per client, maybe less, never more. He took a deep breath and unleashed his thousand-rupee smile. It was time to find a wife.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re muttering about in there,” Mrs. Dayal called over the mantra commentary of Harsha Bhogle. “I’ve had the talk. The nute will arrange the thing for much less than you are wasting on all those shaadi agencies and databases and nonsense. No, nute will make the match that is it stick stop stay.” There is a spatter of applause from the Test Match.

“I tell you your problem: a girl sees two men sharing a house together, she gets ideas about them,” Dadaji whispers. Anant finally sets down two cups of tea and rolls her eyes. “She’s had the talk. Yt’ll start making the match. There’s nothing to be done about it. There are worse things.”

The women may think what they want, but Sujay has it right, Jasbir thinks. Best never to buy into the game at all.

Another cheer, another boundary. Haresh and Sohan jeer at the Chinese devils. Think you can buy it in and beat the world, well, the Awadhi boys are here to tell you it takes years, decades, centuries upon centuries to master the way of cricket. And there’s too much milk in the tea.

A dream wind like the hot gusts that fore-run the monsoon sends a spray of pixels through the cool white spacious rooms of 27 Acacia Avenue Bungalows. Jasbir ducks and laughs as they blow around him. He expects them to be cold and sharp as wind-whipped powder snow but they are only digits, patterns of electrical charge swept through his visual cortex by the clever little device hooked behind his right ear. They chime as they swirl past, like glissandos of silver sitar notes. Shaking his head in wonder, Jasbir slips the lighthoek from behind his ear. The vision evaporates.

“Very clever, very pretty but I think I’ll wait until the price comes down.”

“It’s, um, not the hoek,” Sujay mutters. “You know, well, the matchmaker your mother hired. Well, I thought, maybe you don’t need someone arranging you a marriage.” Some days Sujay’s inability to talk to the point exasperates Jasbir. Those days tend to come after another fruitless and expensive shaadi night and the threat of matchmaker but particularly after Deependra of the non-white teeth announces he has a date. With the girl. The one written in the fourth house of Rahu by his pocket astrology aeai. “Well, you see I thought, with the right help you could arrange it yourself.” Some days debate with Sujay is pointless. He follows his own calendar. “You, ah, need to put the hoek back on again.”

Silver notes spray through Jasbir’s inner ears as the little curl of smart plastic seeks out the sweet spot in his skull. Pixel birds swoop and swarm like starlings on a winter evening. It is inordinately pretty. Then Jasbir gasps aloud as the motes of light and sound sparklingly coalesce into a dapper man in an old-fashioned high-collar sherwani and wrinkle-bottom pajamas. His shoes are polished to mirror-brightness. The dapper man bows.

“Good morning sir. I am Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace, and Gentlemanliness.”

“What is this doing in my house?” Jasbir unhooks the device beaming data into his brain.

“Er, please don’t do that,” Sujay says. “It’s not aeai etiquette.”

Jasbir slips the device back on and there he is, that charming man.

“I have been designed with the express purpose of helping you marry a suitable girl,” says Ram Tarun Das.

“Designed?”

“I, ah, made him for you,” says Sujay. “I thought that if anyone knows about relationships and marriages, it’s soap stars.”

“A soap star. You’ve made me a, a marriage life-coach out of a soap star?”

“Not a soap star exactly, more a conflation of a number of sub-systems from the central character register,” Sujay says. “Sorry Ram.”

“Do you usually do that?”

“Do what?”

“Apologize to aeais.”

“They have feelings too.”

Jasbir rolls his eyes. “I’m being taught husbandcraft by a mash-up.”

“Ah, that is out of order. Now you apologize.”

“Now then, sir, if I am to rescue you from a marriage forged in hell, we had better start with manners,” says Ram Tarun Das. “Manners maketh the man. It is the bedrock of all relationships because true manners come from what he is, not what he does. Do not argue with me, women see this at once. Respect for all things, sir, is the key to etiquette. Maybe I only imagine I feel as you feel, but that does not make my feelings any less real to me. So this once I accept your apology as read. Now, we’ll begin. We have so much to do before tonight’s shaadi.”

Why, Jasbir thinks, why can I never get my shoes like that?

The lazy crescent moon lolls low above the out-flarings of Tughluk’s thousand stacks; a cradle to rock an infant nation. Around its rippling reflection in the infinity pool bob mango-leaf diyas. No polo grounds and country clubs for Begum Jaitly. This is 2045, not 1945. Modern style for a modern nation, that is philosophy of the Jaitly Shaadi Agency. But gossip and want are eternal and in the mood lighting of the penthouse the men are blacker-than-black shadows against greater Delhi’s galaxy of lights and traffic.

“Eyebrows!” Kishore greets Jasbir with TV-host pistol-fingers two-shot bam bam. “No seriously, what did you do to them?” Then his own eyes widen as he scans down from the eyebrows to the total product. His mouth opens, just a crack, but wide enough for Jasbir to savor an inner fist-clench of triumph.

He’d felt self-conscious taking Ram Tarun Das to the mall. He had no difficulty accepting that the figure in its stubbornly atavistic costume was invisible to everyone but him (though he did marvel at how the aeai avoided colliding with any other shopper in thronged Centerstage Mall). He did feel stupid talking to thin air.

“What is this delicacy?” Ram Tarun Das said in Jasbir’s inner ear. “People talk to thin air on the cell phone all the time. Now this suit, sir.”

It was bright, it was brocade, it was a fashionable retro cut that Jasbir would have gone naked rather than worn.

“It’s very . . . bold.”

“It’s very you. Try it. Buy it. You will seem confident and stylish without being flashy. Women cannot bear flashy.”

The robot cutters and stitchers were at work even as Jasbir completed the card transaction. It was expensive. Not as expensive as all the shaadi memberships, he consoled himself. And something to top it off. But Ram Tarun Das manifested himself right in the jeweler’s window over the display.

“Never jewelry on a man. One small brooch at the shirt collar to hold it together, that is permissible. Do you want the lovely girls to think you are a Mumbai pimp? No, sir, you do not. No to jewels. Yes to shoes. Come.”

He had paraded his finery before a slightly embarrassed Sujay.

“You look, er, good. Very dashing. Yes.”

Ram Tarun Das, leaning on his cane and peering intensely, said, “You move like a buffalo. Ugh, sir. Here is what I prescribe for you. Tango lessons. Passion and discipline. Latin fire, yet the strictest of tempos. Do not argue, it is the tango for you. There is nothing like it for deportment.”

The tango, the manicures, the pedicures, the briefings in popular culture and Delhi gossip (“soap opera insults both the intelligence and imagination, I should know, sir”), the conversational ploys, the body language games of when to turn so, when to make or break eye contact, when to dare the lightest, engaging touch. Sujay mooched around the house, even more lumbering and lost than usual, as Jasbir chatted with air and practiced Latin turns and drops with invisible partner. Last of all, on the morning of the Jaitly shaadi.

“Eyebrows sir. You will never get a bride with brows like a hairy saddhu. There is a girl not five kilometers from here, she has a moped service. I’ve ordered her, she will be here within ten minutes.”

As ever, Kishore won’t let Jasbir wedge an answer in, but rattles on, “So, Deependra then?”

Jasbir has noticed that Deependra is not occupying his customary place in Kishore’s shadows; in fact he does not seem to be anywhere in this penthouse.

“Third date,” Kishore says, then mouths it again silently for emphasis. “That janampatri aeai must be doing something right. You know, wouldn’t it be funny if someone took her off him? Just as a joke, you know?”

Kishore chews his bottom lip. Jasbir knows the gesture of old. Then bells chime, lights dim and a wind from nowhere sends the butter-flames flickering and the little diyas flocking across the infinity pool. The walls have opened, the women enter the room.

She stands by the glass wall looking down into the cube of light that is the carpark. She clutches her cocktail between her hands as if in prayer or concern. It is a new cocktail designed for the international cricket test, served in an egg-shaped goblet made from a new spin-glass that will always self-right, no matter how it is set down or dropped. A Test of Dragons is the name of the cocktail. Good Awadhi whisky over a gilded syrup with a six-hit of Chinese Kao Liang liqueur. A tiny red gel dragon dissolves like a sunset.

“Now, sir,” whispers Ram Tarun Das standing at Jasbir’s shoulder. “Faint heart, as they say.”

Jasbir’s mouth is dry. A secondary application Sujay pasted onto the Ram Tarun Das aeai tells him his precise heart rate, respiration, temperature, and the degree of sweat in his palm. He’s surprised he’s still alive.

You’ve got the entry lines, you’ve got the exit lines, and the stuff in the middle Ram Tarun Das will provide.

He follows her glance down into the carpark. A moment’s pause, a slight inclination of his body towards hers. That is the line.

So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan, or a Lexus? Ram Tarun Das whispers in Jasbir’s skull. He casually repeats the line. He has been rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed in how to make it sound natural. He’s as good as any newsreader, better than those few human actors left on television.

She turned to him, lips parted a fraction in surprise.

“I beg your pardon?”

She will say this, Ram Tarun Das hints. Again, offer the line.

“Are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan, or a Lexus?”

“What do you mean?”

“Just pick one. Whatever you feel, that’s the right answer.”

A pause, a purse of the lips. Jasbir subtly links his hands behind his back, the better to hide the sweat.

“Lexus,” she says. Shulka, her name is Shulka. She is a twenty-two year-old marketing graduate from Delhi U working in men’s fashion, a Mathur—only a couple of caste steps away from Jasbir’s folk. The Demographic Crisis has done more to shake up the tiers of varna and jati than a century of the slow drip of democracy. And she has answered his question.

“Now, that’s very interesting,” says Jasbir.

She turns, plucked crescent-moon eyebrows arched. Behind Jasbir, Ram Tarun Das whispers, now, the fetch.

“Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?”

A small frown now. Lord Vishnu, she is beautiful.

“I was born in Delhi . . .”

“That’s not what I mean.”

The frown becomes a nano-smile of recognition.

“Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai—no, I’m definitely Mumbai.”

Jasbir does the sucked-in-lip-nod of concentration Ram Tarun Das made him practice in front of the mirror.

“Red Green Yellow Blue?”

“Red.” No hesitation.

“Cat Dog Bird Monkey?”

She cocks her head to one side. Jasbir notices that she, too, is wearing a hoek. Tech girl. The cocktail bot is on its rounds, doing industrial magic with the self-righting glasses and its little spider-fingers.

“Bird . . . no.” A sly smile. “No no no. Monkey.”

He is going to die he is going to die.

“But what does it mean?”

Jasbir holds up a finger.

“One more. Ved Prakash, Begum Vora, Dr. Chatterji, Ritu Parvaaz.”

She laughs. She laughs like bells from the hem of a wedding skirt. She laughs like the stars of a Himalaya night.

What do you think you’re doing? Ram Tarun Das hisses. He flips through Jasbir’s perceptions to appear behind Shulka, hands thrown up in despair. With a gesture he encompasses the horizon wreathed in gas flares. Look, tonight the sky burns for you, sir, and you would talk about soap opera! The script, stick to the script! Improvisation is death. Almost Jasbir tells his matchmaker, Away djinn, away. He repeats the question.

“I’m not really a Town and Country fan,” Shulka says. “My sister now, she knows every last detail about every last one of the characters and that’s before she gets started on the actors. It’s one of those things I suppose you can be ludicrously well informed about without ever watching. So if you had to press me, I would have to say Ritu. So what does it all mean, Mr. Dayal?”

His heart turns over in his chest. Ram Tarun Das eyes him coldly. The finesse: make it. Do it just as I instructed you. Otherwise your money and my bandwidth are thrown to the wild wind.

The cocktail bot dances in to perform its cybernetic circus. A flip of Shulka’s glass and it comes down spinning, glinting, on the precise needle-point of its forefinger. Like magic, if you know nothing about gyros and spin-glasses. But that moment of prestidigitation is cover enough for Jasbir to make the ordained move. By the time she looks up, cocktail refilled, he is half a room away.

He wants to apologize as he sees her eyes widen. He needs to apologize as her gaze searches the room for him. Then her eyes catch his. It is across a crowded room just like the song that Sujay mumbles around the house when he thinks Jasbir can’t hear. Sujay loves that song. It is the most romantic, heart-felt, innocent song he has ever heard. Big awkward Sujay has always been a sucker for veteran Hollywood musicals. South Pacific. Carousel, Moulin Rouge. He watches them on the big screen in the living room, singing shamelessly along and getting moist-eyed at the impossible loves. Across a crowded room, Shulka frowns. Of course. It’s in the script.

But what does it mean? she mouths. And, as Ram Tarun Das has directed, he shouts back, “Call me and I’ll tell you.” Then he turns on his heel and walks away. And that, he knows without any prompt from Ram Tarun Das, is the finesse.

The apartment is grossly over-heated and smells of singeing cooking ghee but the nute is swaddled in a crocheted shawl, hunched as if against a persistent hard wind. Plastic teacups stand on the low brass table, Jasbir’s mother’s conspicuously untouched. Jasbir sits on the sofa with his father on his right and his mother on his left, as if between arresting policemen. Nahin the nute mutters and shivers and rubs yts fingers.

Jasbir has never been in the physical presence of a third-gendered. He knows all about them—as he knows all about most things—from the Single-Professional-Male general interest magazines to which he subscribes. Those pages, between the ads for designer watches and robot tooth whitening—portray them as fantastical, Arabian Nights creatures equally blessed and cursed with glamour. Nahin the matchmaker seems old and tired as a god, knotting and unknotting yts fingers over the papers on the coffee table—“The bloody drugs, darlings”—occasionally breaking into great spasmodic shudders. It’s one way of avoiding the Wife Game, Jasbir thinks.

Nahin slides sheets of paper around on the tabletop. The documents are patterned as rich as damask with convoluted chartings of circles and spirals annotated in inscrutable alphabets. There is a photograph of a woman in each top right corner. The women are young and handsome but have the wide-eyed expressions of being photographed for the first time.

“Now, I’ve performed all the calculations and these five are both compatible and auspicious,” Nahin says. Yt clears a large gobbet of phlegm from yts throat.

“I notice they’re all from the country,” says Jasbir’s father.

“Country ways are good ways,” says Jasbir’s mother.

Wedged between them on the short sofa, Jasbir looks over Nahin’s shawled shoulder to where Ram Tarun Das stands in the doorway. He raises his eyebrows, shakes his head.

“Country girls are better breeders,” Nahin says. “You said dynasty was a concern. You’ll also find a closer match in jati and in general they settle for a much more reasonable dowry than a city girl. City girls want it all. Me me me. No good ever comes of selfishness.”

The nute’s long fingers stir the country girls around the coffee table, then slide three toward Jasbir and his family. Dadaji and Mamaji sit forward. Jasbir slumps back. Ram Tarun Das folds his arms, rolls his eyes.

“These three are the best starred,” Nahin says. “I can arrange a meeting with their parents almost immediately. There would be some small expenditure in their coming up to Delhi to meet with you; this would be in addition to my fee.”

In a flicker, Ram Tarun Das is behind Jasbir, his whisper a startle in his ear.

“There is a line in the Western wedding vows: speak now or forever hold your peace.”

“How much is my mother paying you?” Jasbir says into the moment of silence.

“I couldn’t possibly betray client confidentiality.” Nahin has eyes small and dark as currants.

“I’ll disengage you for an additional fifty percent.”

Nahin’s hands hesitate over the pretty hand drawn spirals and wheels. You were a man before, Jasbir thinks. That’s a man’s gesture. See, I’ve learned how to read people.

“I double,” shrills Mrs. Dayal.

“Wait wait wait,” Jasbir’s father protests but Jasbir is already shouting over him. He has to kill this idiocy here, before his family in their wedding fever fall into strategies they cannot afford.

“You’re wasting your time and my parents’ money,” Jasbir says. “You see, I’ve already met a suitable girl.”

Goggle eyes, open mouths around the coffee table, but none so astounded and gaping as Ram Tarun Das’.

The Prasads at Number 25 Acacia Colony Bungalows have already sent over a preemptive complaint about the tango music but Jasbir flicks up the volume fit to rattle the brilliants on the chandelier. At first he scorned the dance, the stiffness, the formality, the strictness of the tempo. So very un-Indian. No one’s uncle would ever dance this at a wedding. But he has persisted—never say that Jasbir Dayal is not a trier—and the personality of the tango has subtly permeated him, like rain into a dry riverbed. He has found the discipline and begun to understand the passion. He walks tall in the Dams and Watercourses. He no longer slouches at the water-cooler.

“When I advised you to speak or forever hold your peace, sir, I did not actually mean, lie through your teeth to your parents,” Ram Tarun Das says. In tango he takes the woman’s part. The lighthoek can generate an illusion of weight and heft so the aeai feels solid as Jasbir’s partner. If it can do all that, surely it could make him look like a woman? Jasbir thinks. In his dedication to detail Sujay often overlooks the obvious. “Especially in matters where they can rather easily find you out.”

“I had to stop them wasting their money on that nute.”

“They would have kept outbidding you.”

“Then, even more, I had to stop them wasting my money as well.”

Jasbir knocks Ram Tarun Das’ foot across the floor in a sweetly executed barrida. He glides past the open verandah door where Sujay glances up from the soap-opera building. He has become accustomed to seeing his landlord tango cheek to cheek with an elderly Rajput gentleman. Yours is a weird world of ghosts and djinns and half-realities, Jasbir thinks.

“So how many times has your father called asking about Shulka?” Ram Tarun Das’ free leg traces a curve on the floor in a well-executed volcada. Tango is all about seeing the music. It is making the unseen visible.

You know, Jasbir thinks. You’re woven through every part of this house like a pattern in silk.

“Eight,” he says weakly. “Maybe if I called her . . .”

“Absolutely not,” Ram Tarun Das insists, pulling in breath-to-breath close in the embreza. “Any minuscule advantage you might have enjoyed, any atom of hope you might have entertained, would be forfeit. I forbid it.”

“Well, can you at least give me a probability? Surely knowing everything you know about the art of shaadi, you could at least let me know if I’ve any chance?”

“Sir,” says Ram Tarun Das, “I am a Master of Grooming, Grace, and Gentlemanliness. I can direct you to any number of simple and unsophisticated bookie-aeais; they will give you a price on anything though you may not fancy their odds. One thing I will say: Miss Shulka’s responses were very—suitable.”

Ram Tarun Das hooks his leg around Jasbir’s waist in a final gancho. The music comes to its strictly appointed conclusion. From behind it come two sounds. One is Mrs. Prasad weeping. She must be leaning against the party wall to make her upset so clearly audible. The other is a call tone, a very specific call tone, a deplorable but insanely hummable filmi hit My Back, My Crack, My Sack that Jasbir set on the house system to identify one caller, and one caller only.

Sujay looks up, startled.

“Hello?” Jasbir sends frantic, pleading hand signals to Ram Tarun Das, now seated across the room, his hands resting on the top of his cane.

“Lexus Mumbai red monkey Ritu Parvaaz,” says Shulka Mathur. “So what do they mean?”

“No, my mind is made up, I’m hiring a private detective,” Deependra says, rinsing his hands. On the twelfth floor of the Ministry of Waters all the dating gossip happens at the wash-hand basins in the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC. Urinals: too obviously competitive. Cubicles: a violation of privacy. Truths are best washed with the hands at the basins and secrets and revelations can always be concealed by judicious use of the hot-air hand-drier.

“Deependra, this is paranoia. What’s she done?” Jasbir whispers. A level 0.3 aeai chip in the tap admonishes him not to waste precious water.

“It’s not what she’s done, it’s what she’s not done,” Deependra hisses. “There’s a big difference between someone not being available and someone deliberately not taking your calls. Oh yes. You’ll learn this, mark my words. You’re at the first stage, when it’s all new and fresh and exciting and you are blinded by the amazing fact that someone, someone at last, at long last! thinks you are a catch. It is all rose petals and sweets and cho chweet and you think nothing can possibly go wrong. But you pass through that stage, oh yes. All too soon the scales fall from your eyes. You see . . . and you hear.”

“Deependra.” Jasbir moved to the battery of driers. “You’ve been on five dates.” But every word Deependra has spoken has chimed true. He is a cauldron of clashing emotions. He feels light and elastic, as if he bestrode the world like a god, yet at the same time the world is pale and insubstantial as muslin around him. He feels lightheaded with hunger though he cannot eat a thing. He pushes away Sujay’s lovingly prepared dais and roti. Garlic might taint his breath, saag might stick to his teeth, onions might give him wind, bread might inelegantly bloat him. He chews a few cleansing cardamoms, in the hope of spiced kisses to come. Jasbir Dayal is blissfully, gloriously love-sick.

Date one. The Qutb Minar. Jasbir had immediately protested.

“Tourists go there. And families on Saturdays.”

“It’s history.”

“Shulka isn’t interested in history.”

“Oh, you know her so well after three phone conversations and two evenings chatting on shaadinet�which I scripted for you? It is roots, it is who you are and where you come from. It’s family and dynasty. Your Shulka is interested in that, I assure you, sir. Now, here’s what you will wear.”

There were tour buses great and small. There were hawkers and souvenir peddlers. There were parties of frowning Chinese. There were schoolchildren with backpacks so huge they looked like upright tortoises. But wandering beneath the domes and along the colonnades of the Quwwat Mosque in his Casual Urban Explorer clothes, they seemed as remote and ephemeral as clouds. There was only Shulka and him. And Ram Tarun Das strolling at his side, hands clasped behind his back.

To cue, Jasbir paused to trace out the time-muted contours of a disembodied tirthankar’s head, a ghost in the stone.

“Qutb-ud-din Aibak, the first Sultan of Delhi, destroyed twenty Jain temples and reused the stone to build his mosque. You can still find the old carvings if you know where to look.”

“I like that,” Shulka said. “The old gods are still here.” Every word that fell from her lips was pearl-perfect. Jasbir tried to read her eyes but her BlueBoo! cat-eye shades betrayed nothing. “Not enough people care about their history any more. It’s all modern this modern that, if it’s not up-to-the-minute it’s irrelevant. I think that to know where you’re going you need to know where you’ve come from.”

Very good, Ram Tarun Das whispered. Now, the iron pillar.

They waited for a tour group of Germans to move away from the railed-off enclosure. Jasbir and Shulka stood in the moment of silence gazing at the black pillar.

“Sixteen hundred years old, but never a speck of rust on it,” Jasbir said.

Ninety eight percent pure iron, Ram Tarun Das prompted. There are things Mittal Steel can learn from the Gupta kings.

“‘He who, having the name of Chandra, carried a beauty of countenance like the full moon, having in faith fixed his mind upon Vishnu, had this lofty standard of the divine Vishnu set up on the hill Vishnupada’.” Shulka’s frown of concentration as she focused on the inscription around the pillar’s waist was as beautiful to Jasbir as that of any god or Gupta king.

“You speak Sanskrit?”

“It’s a sort of personal spiritual development path I’m following.”

You have about thirty seconds before the next tour group arrives, Ram Tarun Das cuts in. Now sir; that line I gave you.

“They say that if you stand with your back to the pillar and close your arms around it, your wish will be granted.”

The Chinese were coming, the Chinese were coming.

“And if you could do that, what would you wish for?”

Perfect. She was perfect.

“Dinner?”

She smiled that small and secret smile that set a garden of thorns in Jasbir’s heart and walked away. At the center of the gate house arch she turned and called back, “Dinner would be good.”

Then the Chinese with their shopping bags and sun visors and plastic leisure shoes came bustling around the stainless iron pillar of Chandra Gupta.

Jasbir smiles at the sunny memory of Date One. Deependra waggles his fingers under the stream of hot air.

“I’ve heard about this. It was on a documentary, oh yes. White widows, they call them. They dress up and go to the shaadis and have their resumés all twinkling and perfect but they have no intention of marrying, Oh no no no, not a chance. Why should they, when there is a never-ending stream of men to wine them and dine them and take out to lovely places and buy them lovely presents and shoes and jewels, and even cars, so it said on the documentary. They are just in it for what they can get; they are playing games with our hearts. And when they get tired or bored or if the man is making too many demands or his presents aren’t as expensive as they were or they can do better somewhere else, then whoosh! Dumped flat and on to the next one. It’s a game to them.”

“Deependra,” says Jasbir. “Let it go. Documentaries on the Shaadi Channel are not the kind of model you want for married life. Really.” Ram Tarun Das would be proud of that one. “Now, I have to get back to work.” Faucets that warn about water crime can also report excessive toilet breaks to line managers. But the doubt-seeds are sown, and Jasbir now remembers the restaurant.

Date Two. Jasbir had practiced with the chopsticks for every meal for a week. He swore at rice, he cursed dal. Sujay effortlessly scooped rice, dal, everything from bowl to lips in a flurry of stickwork.

“It’s easy for you, you’ve got that code-wallah Asian culture thing.”

“Um, we are Asian.”

“You know what I mean. And I don’t even like Chinese food, it’s so bland.”

The restaurant was expensive, half a week’s wage. He’d make it up on overtime; there were fresh worries in Dams and Watercourses about a drought.

“Oh,” Shulka said, the nightglow of Delhi a vast, diffuse halo behind her. She is a goddess, Jasbir thought, a devi of the night city with ten million lights descending from her hair. “Chopsticks.” She picked up the antique porcelain chopsticks, one in each hand like drum sticks. “I never know what to do with chopsticks. I’m always afraid of snapping them.”

“Oh, they’re quite easy once you get the hang of them.” Jasbir rose from his seat and came round behind Shulka. Leaning over her shoulder he laid one stick along the fold of her thumb, the other between ball of thumb and tip of index finger. Still wearing her lighthoek. It’s the city girl look. Jasbir shivered in anticipation as he slipped the tip of her middle finger between the two chopsticks. “Your finger acts like a pivot, see? Keep relaxed, that’s the key. And hold your bowl close to your lips.” Her fingers were warm, soft, electric with possibility as he moved them. Did he imagine her skin scented with musk?

Now, said Ram Tarun Das from over Shulka’s other shoulder. Now do you see? And by the way, you must tell her that they make the food taste better.

They did make the food taste better. Jasbir found subtleties and piquancies he had not known before. Words flowed easily across the table. Everything Jasbir said seemed to earn her starlight laughter. Though Ram Tarun Das was as ubiquitous and unobtrusive as the waiting staff, they were all his own words and witticisms. See, you can do this, Jasbir said to himself. What women want, it’s no mystery; stop talking about yourself, listen to them, make them laugh.

Over green tea Shulka began talking about that new novel everyone but everyone was reading, the one about the Delhi girl on the husband-hunt and her many suitors, the scandalous one, An Eligible Boy. Everyone but everyone but Jasbir.

Help! he subvocalized into his inner ear.

Scanning it now, Ram Tarun Das said. Do you want a thematic digest, popular opinions, or character breakdowns?

Just be there, Jasbir silently whispered, covering the tiny movement of his jaw by setting the tea-pot lid ajar, a sign for a refill.

“Well, it’s not really a book a man should be seen reading . . .”

“But . . .”

“But isn’t everyone?” Ram Tarun Das dropped him the line. “I mean, I’m only two thirds of the way in, but . . . how far are you? Spoiler alert spoiler alert.” It’s one of Sujay’s Town and Country expressions. Finally he understands what it means. Shulka just smiles and turns her tea bowl in its little saucer.

“Say what you were going to say.”

“I mean, can’t she see that Nishok is the one? The man is clearly, obviously, one thousand percent doting on her. But then that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?”

“But Pran, it would always be fire with him. He’s the baddest of badmashes but you’d never be complacent with Pran. She’ll never be able to completely trust him and that’s what makes it exciting. Don’t you think you feel that sometimes it needs that little edge, that little fear that maybe, just maybe you could lose it all to keep it alive?”

Careful, sir, murmured Ram Tarun Das.

“Yes, but we’ve known ever since the party at the Chatterjis where she pushed Jyoti into the pool in front of the Russian ambassador that she’s been jealous of her sister because she was the one that got to marry Mr. Panse. It’s the eternal glamour versus security. Passion versus stability. Town versus country.”

“Ajit?”

“Convenient plot device. Never a contender. Every woman he dates is just a mirror to his own sweet self.”

Not one sentence, not one word had he read of the hit trash novel of the season. It had flown around his head like clatter-winged pigeons. He’s been too busy being that Eligible Boy.

Shulka held up a piece of sweet, salty, melting fatty duck breast between her porcelain forceps. Juice dripped onto the tablecloth.

“So, who will Bani marry, then? Guess correctly and you shall have a prize.”

Jasbir heard Ram Tarun Das’ answer begin to form inside his head. No, he gritted on his molars.

“I think I know.”

“Go on.”

“Pran.”

Shulka stabbed forward, like the darting bill of a winter crane. There was hot, fatty soya duck in his mouth.

“Isn’t there always a twist in the tale?” Shulka said.

In the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC Deependra checks his hair in the mirror and smoothes it down.

“Dowry thievery; that’s what it is. They string you along, get their claws into your money, then they disappear and you never see a paisa again.”

Now Jasbir really really wants to get back to his little work cluster.

“Deep, this is fantasy. You’ve read this in the news feeds. Come on.”

“Where there’s smoke there’s fire. My stars say that I should be careful in things of the heart and beware false friends. Jupiter is in the third house. Dark omens surround me. No, I have hired a private investigation aeai. It will conduct a discreet surveillance. One way or the other, I shall know.”

Jasbir grips the stanchion, knuckles white, as the phatphat swings through the great mil of traffic around Indira Chowk. Deependra’s aftershave oppresses him.

“Exactly where are we going?”

Deependra had set up the assignation on a coded palmer account. All he would say was that it required two hours of an evening, good clothes, a trustworthy friend and absolute discretion. For two days his mood had been gray and thundery as an approaching monsoon. His PI Aeai had returned a result but Deependra revealed nothing, not even a whisper in the clubbish privacy of the Number 16 Gentlemen’s WC.

The phatphat, driven by a teenager with gelled hair that falls in sharp spikes over his eyes—an obvious impediment to navigation—takes them out past the airport. At Gurgaon the geography falls into place around Jasbir. He starts to feel nauseous from more than spike-hair’s driving and Deependra’s shopping mall aftershave. Five minutes later the phatphat crunches up the curve of raked gravel outside the pillared portico of the Haryana Polo and Country Club.

“What are we doing here? If Shulka finds out I’ve been to shaadi when I’m supposed to be dating her it’s all over.”

“I need a witness.”

Help me Ram Tarun Das, Jasbir hisses into his molars but there is no reassuring spritz of silvery music through his skull to herald the advent of the Master of Grooming, Grace, and Gentlemanliness. The two immense Sikhs on the door nod them through.

Kishore is sloped against his customary angle at the bar, surveying the territory. Deependra strides through the throng of eligible boys like a god going to war. Every head turns. Every conversation, every gossip falls silent.

“You . . . you . . . you.” Deependra stammers with rage. His face shakes. “Shaadi stealer!” The whole club bar winces as the slap cracks across Kishore’s face. Then two fists descend on Deependra, one on each shoulder. The man-mountain Sikhs turn him around and arm-lock him, frothing and raging, from the bar of the Haryana Polo and Country Club. “You, you chuutya!” Deependra flings back at his enemy. “I will take it out of you, every last paisa, so help me God. I will have satisfaction!”

Jasbir scurries behind the struggling, swearing Deependra, cowed with embarrassment.

“I’m only here to witness,” he says to the Sikh’s you’re-next glares. They hold Deependra upright a moment to snap his face and bar him forever from Begum Rezzak’s Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency. Then they throw him cleanly over the hood of a new model Li Fan G8 into the carriage drive. He lies dreadfully still and snapped on the gravel for a few moments, then with fetching dignity draws himself up, bats away the dust and straightens his clothes.

“I will see him at the river about this,” Deependra shouts at the impassive Sikhs. “At the river.”

Jasbir is already out on the avenue, trying to see if the phatphat driver’s gone.

The sun is a bowl of brass rolling along the indigo edge of the world. Lights twinkle in the dawn haze. There is never a time when there are not people at the river. Wire-thin men push handcarts over the trash-strewn sand, picking like birds. Two boys have set a small fire in a ring of stones. A distant procession of women, soft bundles on their heads, file over the grassy sand. By the shriveled thread of the Yamuna an old Brahmin consecrates himself, pouring water over his head. Despite the early heat, Jasbir shivers. He knows what goes into that water. He can smell the sewage on the air, mingled with wood smoke.

“Birds,” says Sujay looking around him with simple wonder. “I can actually hear birds singing. So this is what mornings are like. Tell me again what I’m doing here?”

“You’re here because I’m not being here on my own.”

“And, ah, what exactly are you doing here?”

Deependra squats on his heels by the gym bag, arms wrapped around him. He wears a sharp white shirt and pleated slacks. His shoes are very good. Apart from grunted greetings he has not said a word to Jasbir or Sujay. He stares a lot. Deependra picks up a fistful of sand and lets his trickle through his fingers. Jasbir wouldn’t advise that either.

“I could be at home coding,” says Sujay. “Hey ho. Show time.”

Kishore marches across the scabby river-grass. Even as a well-dressed distant speck it is obvious to all that he is furiously angry. His shouts carry far on the still morning air.

“I am going to kick your head into the river,” he bellows at Deependra, still squatting on the riverbank.

“I’m only here as a witness,” Jasbir says hurriedly, needing to be believed. Kishore must forget and Deependra must never know that he was also the witness that night Kishore made the joke in the Tughluk tower.

Deependra looks up. His face is bland, his eyes are mild.

“You just had to, didn’t you? It would have killed you to let me have something you didn’t.”

“Yeah, well. I let you get away with that in the Polo Club. I could have taken you then, it would have been the easiest thing. I could have driven your nose right into your skull, but I didn’t. You cost me my dignity, in front of all my friends, people I work with, business colleagues, but most of all, in front of the women.”

“Well then let me help you find your honor again.”

Deependra thrusts his hand into the gym bag and pulls out a gun.

“Oh my god it’s a gun he’s got a gun,” Jasbir jabbers. He feels his knees turn liquid. He thought that only happened in soaps and popular trash novels. Deependra gets to his feet, the gun never wavering from its aim in the center of Kishore’s forehead, the precise spot a bindi would sit.

“There’s another one in the bag.” Deependra waggles the barrel, nods with his head. “Take it. Let’s sort this right, the man’s way. Let’s sort it honorably. Take the gun.” His voice has gained an octave. A vein beats in his neck and at his temple. Deependra kicks the gym bag towards Kishore. Jasbir can see the anger, the mad, suicidal anger rising in the banker to match the civil servant’s. He can hear himself mumbling Oh my god oh my god oh my god. “Take the gun. You will have an honorable chance. Otherwise I will shoot you like a pi-dog right here.” Deependra levels the gun and takes a sudden, stabbing step towards Kishore. He is panting like a dying cat. Sweat has soaked his good white shirt through and through. The gun muzzle is a finger’s-breadth from Kishore’s forehead.

Then there is a blur of movement, a body against the sun, a cry of pain, and the next Jasbir knows Sujay has the gun swinging by its trigger guard from his finger. Deependra is on the sand, clenching and unclenching his right hand. The old Brahmin stares, dripping.

“It’s okay now, it’s all okay, it’s over,” Sujay says. “I’m going to put this in the bag with the other and I’m going to take them and get rid of them and no one will ever talk about this, okay? I’m taking the bag now. Now, shall we all get out of here before someone calls the police, hm?”

Sujay swings the gym bag over his sloping shoulder and strides out for the streetlights, leaving Deependra hunched and crying among the shredded plastic scraps.

“How, what, that was, where did you learn to do that?” Jasbir asks, tagging behind, feet sinking into the soft sand.

“I’ve coded the move enough times; I thought it might work in meat life.”

“You don’t mean?”

“From the soaps. Doesn’t everyone?”

There’s solace in soap opera. Its predictable tiny screaming rows, its scripted swooping melodramas, draw the poison from the chaotic, unscripted world where a civil servant in the water service can challenge a rival to a shooting duel over a woman he met at a shaadi. Little effigies of true dramas, sculpted in soap.

When he blinks, Jasbir can see the gun. He sees Deependra’s hand draw it out of the gym bag in martial-arts-movie slow motion. He thinks he sees the other gun, nestled among balled sports socks. Or maybe he imagines it, a cut-away close-up. Already he is editing his memory.

Soothing to watch Nilesh Vora and Dr. Chatterji’s wife, their love eternally foiled and frustrated, and Deepti; will she ever realize that to the Brahmpur social set she is eternally that Dalit girl from the village pump?

You work on the other side of a glass partition from someone for years. You go with him to shaadis, you share the hopes and fears of your life and love with him. And love turns him into a homicidal madman. Sujay took the gun off him. Big, clumsy Sujay, took the loaded gun out of his hand. He would have shot Kishore. Brave, mad Sujay. He’s coding, that’s his renormalizing process. Make soap, watch soap. Jasbir will make him tea. For once. Yes, that would be a nice gesture. Sujay is always always getting tea. Jasbir gets up. It’s a boring bit, Mahesh and Rajani. He doesn’t like them. Those rich-boy-pretending-they-are-car-valets-so-they-can-marry-for-love-not-money characters stretch his disbelief too far. Rajani is hot, though. She’s asked Mahesh to bring her car round to the front of the hotel.

“When you work out here you have lots of time to make up theories. One of my theories is that people’s cars are their characters,” Mahesh is saying. Only in a soap would anyone ever imagine that a pick-up line like that would work, Jasbir thinks. “So, are you a Tata, a Mercedes, a Li Fan, or a Lexus?”

Jasbir freezes in the door.

“Oh, a Lexus.”

He turns slowly. Everything is dropping, everything is falling leaving him suspended. Now Mahesh is saying, “You know, I have another theory. It’s that everyone’s a city. Are you Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai?”

Jasbir sits on the arm of the sofa. The fetch, he whispers. And she will say . . .

“I was born in Delhi . . .”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Mumbai, murmurs Jasbir.

“Mumbai then. Yes, Mumbai definitely. Kolkata’s hot and dirty and nasty. And Chennai—no, I’m definitely Mumbai.”

“Red Green Yellow Blue,” Jasbir says.

“Red.” Without a moment’s hesitation.

“Cat Dog Bird Monkey?”

She even cocks her head to one side. That was how he noticed Shulka was wearing the lighthoek.

“Bird . . . no.”

“No no no,” says Jasbir. She’ll smile slyly here. “Monkey.” And there is the smile. The finesse.

“Sujay!” Jasbir yells. “Sujay! Get me Das!”

“How can an aeai be in love?” Jasbir demands.

Ram Tarun Das sits in his customary wicker chair, his legs casually crossed. Soon, very soon, Jasbir thinks, voices will be raised and Mrs. Prasad next door will begin to thump and weep.

“Now sir, do not most religions maintain that love is the fundament of the universe? In which case, perhaps it’s not so strange that a distributed entity, such as myself, should find—and be surprised by, oh, so surprised, sir—by love? As a distributed entity, it’s different in nature from the surge of neurochemicals and waveform of electrical activity you experience as love. With us it’s a more—rarefied experience—judging solely by what I know from my subroutines on Town and Country. Yet, at the same time, it’s intensely communal. How can I describe it? You don’t have the concepts, let alone the words. I am a specific incarnation of aspects of a number of aeais and sub-programs, as those aeais are also iterations of sub-programs, many of them marginally sentient. I am many, I am legion. And so is she—though of course gender is purely arbitrary for us, and, sir, largely irrelevant. It’s very likely that at many levels we share components. So ours is not so much a marriage of minds as a league of nations. Here we are different from humans in that, for you, it seems to us that groups are divisive and antipathetical. Politics, religion, sport, but especially your history, seem to teach that. For us folk, groups are what bring us together. They are mutually attractive. Perhaps the closest analogy might be the merger of large corporations. One thing I do know, that for humans and aeais, we both need to tell people about it.”

“When did you find out she was using an aeai assistant?”

“Oh, at once sir. These things are obvious to us. And if you’ll forgive the parlance, we don’t waste time. Fascination at the first nanosecond. Thereafter, well, as you saw on the unfortunate scene from Town and Country, we scripted you.”

“So we thought you were guiding us . . .”

“When it was you who were our go-betweens, yes.”

“So what happens now?” Jasbir slaps his hands on his thighs.

“We are meshing at a very high level. I can only catch hints and shadows of it, but I feel a new aeai is being born, on a level far beyond either of us, or any of our co-characters. Is this a birth? I don’t know, but how can I convey to you the tremendous, rushing excitement I feel?”

“I meant me.”

“I’m sorry sir. Of course you did. I am quite, quite dizzy with it all. If I might make one observation; there’s truth in what your parents say. First the marriage, then the love. Love grows in the thing you see every day.”

Thieving macaques dart around Jasbir’s legs and pluck at the creases of his pants. Midnight metro, the last train home. The few late-night passengers observe a quarantine of mutual solitude. The djinns of unexplained wind that haunt subway systems send litter spiraling across the platform. The tunnel focuses distant shunts and clanks, uncanny at this zero hour. There should be someone around at the phatphat stand. If not he’ll walk. It doesn’t matter.

He met her at a fashionable bar all leather and darkened glass in an international downtown hotel. She looked wonderful. The simple act of her stirring sugar into coffee tore his heart in two.

“When did you find out?”

“Devashri Didi told me.”

“Devashri Didi.”

“And yours?

“Ram Tarun Das, Master of Grooming, Grace, and Gentlemanliness. A very proper, old fashioned Rajput gent. He always called me sir; right up to the end. My housemate made him. He works in character design on Town and Country.”

“My older sister works in PR at the meta-soap department at Jazhay. She got one of the actor designers to put Devashri Didi together.” Jasbir has always found the idea of artificial actors believing they played equally artificial roles head-frying. Then he found aeai love.

“Is she married? Your older sister, I mean.”

“Blissfully. And children.”

“Well, I hope our aeais are very happy together.” Jasbir raised a glass. Shulka lifted her coffee cup. She wasn’t a drinker. She didn’t like alcohol, Devashri Didi had told her it looked good for the Begum Jaitly’s modern shaadi.

“My little quiz?” Jasbir asked.

“Devashri Didi gave me the answers you were expecting. She’d told me it was a standard ploy, personality quizzes and psychic tests.”

“And the Sanskrit?”

“Can’t speak a word.”

Jasbir laughed honestly.

“The personal spiritual journey?”

“I’m a strictly material girl. Devashri Didi said . . .”

“. . . I’d be impressed if I thought you had a deep spiritual dimension. I’m not a history buff either. And An Eligible Boy?”

“That unreadable tripe?”

“Me neither.”

“Is there anything true about either of us?”

“One thing,” Jasbir said. “I can tango.”

Her surprise, breaking into a delighted smile, was also true. Then she folded it away.

“Was there ever any chance?” Jasbir asked.

“Why did you have at ask that? We could have just admitted that we were both playing games and shaken hands and laughed and left it at that. Jasbir, would it help if I told you that I wasn’t even looking? I was trying the system out. It’s different for suitable girls. I’ve got a plan.”

“Oh,” said Jasbir.

“You did ask and we agreed, right at the start tonight, no more pretence.” She turned her coffee cup so that the handle faced right and laid her spoon neatly in the saucer. “I have to go now.” She snapped her bag shut and stood up. Don’t walk away, Jasbir said in his silent Master of Grooming, Grace, and Gentlemanliness voice. She walked away.

“And Jasbir.”

“What?”

“You’re a lovely man, but this was not a date.”

A monkey takes a liberty too far, plucking at Jasbir’s shin. Jasbir’s kick connects and sends it shrieking and cursing across the platform. Sorry monkey. It wasn’t you. Booms rattle up the subway tube; gusting hot air and the smell of electricity herald the arrival of the last metro. As the lights swing around the curve in the tunnel, Jasbir imagines how it would be to step out and drop in front of it. The game would be over. Deependra has it easy. Indefinite sick leave, civil service counseling, and pharma. But for Jasbir there is no end to it and he is so so tired of playing. Then the train slams past him in a shout of blue and silver and yellow light, slams him back into himself. He sees his face reflected in the glass, his teeth still divinely white. Jasbir shakes his head and smiles and instead steps through the opening door.

It is as he suspected. The last phatphat has gone home for the night from the rank at Barwala metro station. It’s four kays along the pitted, flaking roads to Acacia Bungalow Colony behind its gates and walls. Under an hour’s walk. Why not? The night is warm, he’s nothing better to do and he might yet pull a passing cab. Jasbir steps out. After half an hour a last, patrolling phatphat passes on the other side of the road. It flashes its light and pulls around to come up beside him. Jasbir waves it on. He is enjoying the night and the melancholy. There are stars up there, beyond the golden airglow of great Delhi.

Light spills through the French windows from the verandah into the dark living room. Sujay is at work still. In four kilometers Jasbir has generated a sweat. He ducks into the shower, closes his eyes in bliss as the jets of water hit him. Let it run let it run let it run he doesn’t care how much he wastes, how much it costs, how badly the villagers need it for their crops. Wash the old tired dirt from me.

A scratch at the door. Does Jasbir hear the mumble of a voice? He shuts off the shower.

“Sujay?”

“I’ve, ah, left you tea.”

“Oh, thank you.”

There’s silence but Jasbir knows Sujay hasn’t gone.

“Ahm, just to say that I have always . . . I will . . . always. Always . . .” Jasbir holds his breath, water running down his body and dripping onto the shower tray. “I’ll always be here for you.”

Jasbir wraps a towel around his waist, opens the bathroom door, and lifts the tea.

Presently Latin music thunders out from the brightly lit windows of Number 27 Acacia Bungalows. Lights go on up and down the close. Mrs. Prasad beats her shoe on the wall and begins to wail. The tango begins.

Originally published in Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders, 2008.

About the Author

British author Ian McDonald is an ambitious and daring writer with a wide range and an impressive amount of talent. His first story was published in 1982, In 1989 he won the Locus Best First Novel Award for his novel Desolation Road. He won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1992 for his novel King of Morning, Queen of Day. His other books include the novels Out On Blue Six, Hearts, Hands and Voices, Terminal Cafe, Sacrifice of Fools, Evolution’s Shore, Kirinya, Ares Express, Brasyl, The Dervish House, River of Gods, Planesrunner, Be My Enemy, and Empress of the Sun. as well as three collections of his short fiction, Empire Dreams, Speaking In Tongues, Cyberabad Days, and a big retrospective collection, The Best of Ian McDonald. He won a Hugo Award in 2007 for his novelette “The Djinn’s Wife,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his story “Tendeleo’s Story,” and in 2011 won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel The Dervish House. His most recent book is a novel, Luna: New Moon. Coming up is a sequel, Luna: Wolf Moon. Born in Manchester, England, in 1960, McDonald has spent most of his life in Northern Ireland, and now lives and works in Belfast.

Reef

Paul McAuley

Margaret Henderson Wu was riding a proxy by telepresence deep inside Tigris Rift when Dzu Sho summoned her. The others in her crew had given up one by one and only she was left, descending slowly between rosy, smoothly rippled cliffs scarcely a hundred meters apart. These were pavements of the commonest vacuum organism, mosaics made of hundreds of different strains of the same species. Here and there bright red whips stuck out from the pavement; a commensal species that deposited iron sulphate crystals within its integument. The pavement seemed to stretch endlessly below her. No probe or proxy had yet reached the bottom of Tigris Rift, still more than thirty kilometers away. Microscopic flecks of sulphur-iron complexes, sloughed cells, and excreted globules of carbon compounds and other volatiles formed a kind of smog or snow, and the vacuum organisms accumulated nodes and intricate lattices of reduced metals that, by some trick of superconductivity, produced a broad band electromagnetic resonance that pulsed like a giant’s slow heartbeat.

All this futzed the link between operators and their proxies. One moment Margaret was experiencing the three hundred and twenty degree panorama of the little proxy’s microwave radar, the perpetual tug of vacuum on its mantle, the tang of extreme cold, a mere thirty degrees above absolute zero, the complex taste of the vacuum smog (burned sugar, hot rubber, tar), the minute squirts of hydrogen from the folds of the proxy’s puckered nozzle as it maintained its orientation relative to the cliff face during its descent, with its tentacles retracted in a tight ball around the relay piton. The next, she was back in her cradled body in warm blackness, phosphenes floating in her vision and white noise in her ears while the transmitter searched for a viable waveband, locked on and—pow—she was back, falling past rippled pink pavement.

The alarm went off, flashing an array of white stars over the panorama. Her number two, Srin Kerenyi, said in her ear, “You’re wanted, boss.”

Margaret killed the alarm and the audio feed. She was already a kilometer below the previous benchmark and she wanted to get as deep as possible before she implanted the telemetry relay. She swiveled the proxy on its long axis, increased the amplitude of the microwave radar. Far below were intimations of swells and bumps jutting from the plane of the cliff face, textured mounds like brain coral, randomly orientated chimneys. And something else, clouds of organic matter perhaps—

The alarm again. Srin had overridden the cut-out.

Margaret swore and dove at the cliff, unfurling the proxy’s tentacles and jamming the piton into pinkness rough with black papillae, like a giant’s tongue quick frozen against the ice. The piton’s spikes fired automatically. Recoil sent the little proxy tumbling over its long axis until it reflexively stabilized itself with judicious squirts of gas. The link rastered, came back, cut out completely. Margaret hit the switch that turned the tank into a chair; the mask lifted away from her face.

Srin Kerenyi was standing in front of her. “Dzu Sho wants to talk with you, boss. Right now.”

The job had been offered as a sealed contract. Science crews had been informed of the precise nature of their tasks only when the habitat was under way. But it was good basic pay with the promise of fat bonuses on completion: when she had won the survey contract Margaret Henderson Wu had brought with her most of the crew from her previous job, and had nursed a small hope that this would be a change in her family’s luck.

The Ganapati was a new habitat founded by an alliance of two of the Commonwealth’s oldest patrician families. It was of standard construction, a basaltic asteroid cored by a gigawatt X-ray laser and spun up by vented rock vapor to give 0.2 g on the inner surface of its hollowed interior, factories and big reaction motors dug into the stern. With its AIs rented out for information crunching and its refineries synthesizing exotic plastics from cane sugar biomass and gengeneered oil seed rape precursors, the new habitat had enough income to maintain the interest on its construction loan from the Commonwealth Bourse, but not enough to attract new citizens and workers. It was still not completely fitted out, had less than a third of its optimal population.

Its Star Chamber, young and cocky and eager to win independence from their families, had taken a big gamble. They were chasing a legend.

Eighty years ago, an experiment in accelerated evolution of chemoautotrophic vacuum organisms had been set up on a planetoid in the outer edge of the Kuiper belt. The experiment had been run by a shell company registered on Ganymede but covertly owned by the Democratic Union of China. In those days, companies and governments of Earth had not been allowed to operate in the Kuiper belt, which had been claimed and ferociously defended by outer system cartels. That hegemony had ended in the Quiet War, but the Quiet War had also destroyed all records of the experiment; even the Democratic Union of China had disappeared, absorbed into the Pacific Community.

There were over fifty thousand objects with diameters greater than a hundred kilometers in the Kuiper belt, and a billion more much smaller, the plane of their orbits stretching beyond those of Neptune and Pluto. The experimental planetoid, Enki, named for one of the Babylonian gods of creation, had been lost amongst them. It had become a legend, like the Children’s Habitat, or the ghost comet, or the pirate ship crewed by the reanimated dead, or the worker’s paradise of Fiddler’s Green.

And then, forty-five years after the end of the Quiet War, a data miner recovered enough information to reconstruct Enki’s eccentric orbit. She sold it to the Ganapati. The habitat bought time on the Uranus deep space telescopic array and confirmed that the planetoid was where it was supposed to be, currently more than seven thousand million kilometers from the Sun.

Nothing more was known. The experiment might have failed almost as soon as it begun, but potentially it might win the Ganapati platinum-rated credit on the Bourse. Margaret and the rest of the science crews would, of course, receive only their fees and bonuses, less deductions for air and food and water taxes, and anything they bought with scrip in the habitat’s stores; the indentured workers would not even get that. Like every habitat in the Commonwealth, the Ganapati was structured like an ancient Greek Republic, ruled by share-holding citizens who lived in the landscaped parklands of the inner surface, and run by indentured and contract workers who were housed in the undercroft of malls and barracks tunneled into the Ganapati’s rocky skin.

On the long voyage out, the science crews had been on minimal pay, far lower than that of the unskilled techs who worked the farms and refineries, and the servants who maintained the citizens’ households. There were food shortages because so much biomass was being used to make exportable biochemicals; any foodstuffs other than basic rations were expensive, and prices were carefully manipulated by the habitat’s Star Chamber. When the Ganapati reached Enki and the contracts of the science crews were activated, food prices had increased accordingly. Techs and household servants suddenly found themselves unable to afford anything other than dole yeast. Resentment bubbled over into skirmishes and knife-fights, and a small riot the White Mice, the undercroft’s police, subdued with gas. Margaret had to take time off to bail out several of her crew, had given them an angry lecture about threatening everyone’s bonuses.

“We got to defend our honor,” one of the men said.

“Don’t be a fool,” Margaret told him. “The citizens play workers against science crews to keep both sides in their places, and still turn a good profit from increases in food prices. Just be glad you can afford the good stuff now, and keep out of trouble.”

“They were calling you names, boss,” the man said. “On account you’re—”

Margaret stared him down. She was standing on a chair, but even so she was a good head shorter than the gangling outers. She said, “I’ll fight my own fights. I always have. Just think of your bonuses and keep quiet. It will be worth it. I promise you.”

And it was worth it, because of the discovery of the reef.

At some time in the deep past, Enki had suffered an impact that had remelted it and split it into two big pieces and thousands of fragments. One lone fragment still orbited Enki, a tiny moonlet where the AI that had controlled the experiment had been installed; the others had been drawn together again by their feeble gravity fields, but had cooled before coalescence had been completed, leaving a vast deep chasm, Tigris Rift, at the lumpy equator.

Margaret’s crew had discovered that the vacuum organisms had proliferated wildly in the deepest part of the Rift, deriving energy by oxidation of elemental sulphur and ferrous iron, converting carbonaceous material into useful organic chemicals, mining and concentrating metals and nitrogenous compounds. There were crusts and sheets, things like thin scarves folded into fragile vases and chimneys, organ pipe clusters, whips, delicate fretted laces. Some fed on others, one crust slowly overgrowing and devouring another. Others appeared to be parasites, sending complex veins ramifying through the thalli of their victims. Nitrogen-mining organisms formed symbiotic relationships with sulphur oxidizers, trading ammonium and nitrates water for energy, developing warty outgrowths like stromatolites. Some were more than a hundred meters across, surely the largest prokaryotic colonies in the known Solar System.

All this variety—and after only eighty years of accelerated evolution. Wild beauty won from the cold and the dark. The potential to feed billions. The science crews would get their bonuses, all right; the citizens would become billionaires.

Margaret spent all her spare time investigating the reef by proxy, pushing her crew hard to overcome the problems of penetrating the depths of the Rift. Although she would not admit it even to herself, she had fallen in love with the reef. She would gladly have explored it in person, but as in most habitats the Ganapati’s citizens did not like their workers going where they themselves would not.

Clearly, the experiment had far exceeded its parameters, but no one knew why. The AI that had overseen the experiment had shut down thirty years ago. There was still heat in its crude proton beam fission pile, but it had been overgrown by the very organisms it had manipulated.

Its task had been simple. Colonies of a dozen species of slow growing chemoautotrophs had been introduced into a part of the Rift rich with sulphur and ferrous iron. Thousands of random mutations had been induced. Most colonies had died, and those few which had thrived had been sampled, mutated, and reintroduced in a cycle repeated every hundred days.

But the AI had selected only for fast growth, not for adaptive radiation, and the science crews held heated seminars about the possible cause of the unexpected richness of the reef’s biota. Very few believed that it was simply a result of accelerated evolution. Many terrestrial bacteria divided every twenty minutes in favorable conditions, and certain species were known to have evolved from being resistant to an antibiotic to becoming obligately dependent upon it as a food source in less than five days, or only three hundred and sixty generations, but that was merely a biochemical adaptation. The fastest division rate of the vacuum organisms in the Rift was less than once a day, and while that still meant more than thirty thousand generations had passed since the reef had been seeded, half a million years in human terms, the evolutionary radiation in the reef was the equivalent of Neanderthal Man evolving to fill every mammalian niche from bats to whales.

Margaret’s survey crew had explored and sampled the reef for more than thirty days. Cluster analysis suggested that they had identified less than ten percent of the species that had formed from the original seed population. And now deep radar suggested that there were changes in the unexplored regions in the deepest part of Tigris Rift, which the proxies had not yet been able to reach.

Margaret had pointed this out at the last seminar.

“We’re making hypotheses on incomplete information. We don’t know everything that’s out there. Sampling suggests that complexity increases away from the surface. There could be thousands more species in the deep part of the Rift.”

At the back of the room, Opie Kindred, the head of the genetics crew, said languidly, “We don’t need to know everything. That’s not what we’re paid for. We’ve already found several species that perform better than present commercial cultures. The Ganapati can make money from them and we’ll get full bonuses. Who cares how they got there?”

Arn Nivedta, the chief of the biochemist crew, said, “We’re all scientists here. We prove our worth by finding out how things work. Are your mysterious experiments no more than growth tests, Opie? If so, I’m disappointed.”

The genetics crew had set up an experimental station on the surface of the Ganapati, off limits to everyone else.

Opie smiled. “I’m not answerable to you.”

This was greeted with shouts and jeers. The science crews were tired and on edge, and the room was hot and poorly ventilated.

“Information should be free,” Margaret said. “We all work towards the same end. Or are you hoping for extra bonuses, Opie?”

There was a murmur in the room. It was a tradition that all bonuses were pooled and shared out between the various science crews at the end of a mission.

Opie Kindred was a clever, successful man, yet somehow soured, as if the world was a continual disappointment. He rode his team hard, was quick to find failure in others. Margaret was a natural target for his scorn, a squat muscle-bound unedited dwarf from Earth who had to take drugs to survive in micro-gravity, who grew hair in all sorts of unlikely places. He stared at her with disdain and said, “I’m surprised at the tone of this briefing, Dr. Wu. Wild speculations built on nothing at all. I have sat here for an hour and heard nothing useful. We are paid to get results, not generate hypotheses. All we hear from your crew is excuses when what we want are samples. It seems simple enough to me. If something is upsetting your proxies, then you should use robots. Or send people in and handpick samples. I’ve worked my way through almost all you’ve obtained. I need more material, especially in light of my latest findings.”

“Robots need transmission relays too,” Srin Kerenyi pointed out.

Orly Higgins said, “If you ride them, to be sure. But I don’t see the need for human control. It is a simple enough task to program them to go down, pick up samples, return.”

She was the leader of the crew that had unpicked the AI’s corrupted code, and was an acolyte of Opie Kindred.

“The proxies failed whether or not they were remotely controlled,” Margaret said, “and on their own they are as smart as any robot. I’d love to go down there myself, but the Star Chamber has forbidden it for the usual reasons. They’re scared we’ll get up to something if we go where they can’t watch us.”

“Careful, boss,” Srin Kerenyi whispered. “The White Mice are bound to be monitoring this.”

“I don’t care,” Margaret said. “I’m through with trying polite requests. We need to get down there, Srin.”

“Sure, boss. But getting arrested for sedition isn’t the way.”

“There’s some interesting stuff in the upper levels,” Arn Nivedta said. “Stuff with huge commercial potential, as you pointed out, Opie.”

Murmurs of agreement throughout the crowded room. The reef could make the Ganapati the richest habitat in the Outer System. Most vacuum organisms converted simple carbon compounds into organic matter and mined metals and fixed nitrogen using the energy of sunlight captured by a variety of photosynthetic pigments, and so could only grow on the surfaces of moons and planetoids. But sunlight was vastly attenuated at the Kuiper belt; far too weak to sustain the growth of photosynthetic vacuum organisms. No one had yet developed vacuum organisms that made efficient use of other sources of energy, but that was what accelerated evolution appeared to have produced in the reef. It could enable exploitation of the entire catalog of objects in the Kuiper belt, and beyond, in the distant Oort cloud. It was a discovery of incalculable worth.

Arn Nivedta waited for silence, and added, “Of course, we can’t know what the commercial potential is until the reef species have been fully tested. What about it, Opie?”

“We have our own ideas about commercial potential,” Opie Kindred said. “I think you’ll find that we hold the key to success here.”

Boos and catcalls at this from both the biochemists and the survey crew. The room was polarizing. Margaret saw one of her crew unsheathe a sharpened screwdriver, and she caught the man’s hand and squeezed it until he cried out. “Let it ride,” she told him. “Remember that we’re scientists.”

“We hear of indications of more diversity in the depths, but we can’t seem to get there. One might suspect,” Opie said, his thin upper lip lifting in a supercilious curl, “sabotage.”

“The proxies are working well in the upper part of the Rift,” Margaret said, “and we are doing all we can to get them operative further down.”

“Let’s hope so,” Opie Kindred said. He stood, and around him his crew stood too. “I’m going back to work, and so should all of you. Especially you, Dr. Wu. Perhaps you should be attending to your proxies instead of planning useless expeditions.”  

And so the seminar broke up in uproar, with nothing productive coming from it and lines of enmity drawn through the community of scientists.

“Opie is scheming to come out of this on top,” Arn Nivedta said to Margaret afterwards. He was a friendly, enthusiastic man, tall even for an outer, and as skinny as a rail. He stooped in Margaret’s presence, trying to reduce the extraordinary difference between their heights. He said, “He wants desperately to become a citizen, and so he thinks like one.”

“Well, my god, we all want to be citizens,” Margaret said. “Who wants to live like this?”

She gestured, meaning the crowded bar, its rock walls and low ceiling, harsh lights and the stink of spilled beer and too many people in close proximity. Her parents had been citizens, once upon a time. Before their run of bad luck. It was not that she wanted those palmy days back—she could scarcely remember them—but she wanted more than this.

She said, “The citizens sleep between silk sheets and eat real meat and play their stupid games, and we have to do their work on restricted budgets. The reef is the discovery of the century, Arn, but God forbid that the citizens should begin to exert themselves. We do the work, they fuck in rose petals and get the glory.”

Arn laughed at this.

“Well, it’s true!”

“It’s true we have not been as successful as we might like,” Arn said mournfully.

Margaret said reflectively, “Opie’s a bastard, but he’s smart, too. He picked just the right moment to point the finger at me.”

Loss of proxies was soaring exponentially, and the proxy farms of the Ganapati were reaching a critical point. Once losses exceeded reproduction, the scale of exploration would have to be drastically curtailed, or the seed stock would have to be pressed into service, a gamble the Ganapati could not afford to take.

And then, the day after the disastrous seminar, Margaret was pulled back from her latest survey to account for herself in front of the chairman of the Ganapati’s Star Chamber.

“We are not happy with the progress of your survey, Dr. Wu,” Dzu Sho said. “You promise much, but deliver little.”

Margaret shot a glance at Opie Kindred, and he smiled at her. He was immaculately dressed in a gold-trimmed white tunic and white leggings. His scalp was oiled and his manicured fingernails were painted with something that split light into rainbows. Margaret, fresh from the tank, wore loose, grubby work grays. There was sticky electrolyte paste on her arms and legs and shaven scalp, the reek of sour sweat under her breasts and in her armpits.

She contained her anger and said, “I have submitted daily reports on the problems we encountered. Progress is slow but sure. I have just established a relay point a full kilometer below the previous datum point.”

Dzu Sho waved this away. He lounged in a blue gel chair, naked, as smoothly fat as a seal. He had a round, hairless head and pinched features, like a thumbprint on an egg. The habitat’s lawyer sat behind him, a young woman neat and anonymous in a gray tunic suit. Margaret, Opie Kindred, and Arn Nivedta sat on low stools, supplicants to Dzu Sho’s authority. Behind them, half a dozen servants stood at the edge of the grassy space.

This was in an arbor of figs, ivy, bamboo, and fast-growing banyan at the edge of Sho’s estate. Residential parkland curved above, a patchwork of spindly, newly planted woods and meadows and gardens. Flyers were out, triangular rigs in primary colors pirouetting around the weightless axis. Directly above, mammoths the size of large dogs grazed an upside-down emerald green field. The parkland stretched away to the ring lake and its slosh barrier, three kilometers in diameter, and the huge farms that dominated the inner surface of the habitat. Fields of lentils, wheat, cane fruits, tomatoes, rice, and exotic vegetables for the tables of the citizens, and fields and fields and fields of sugar cane and oil seed rape for the biochemical industry and the yeast tanks.

Dzu Sho said, “Despite the poor progress of the survey crew, we have what we need, thanks to the work of Dr. Kindred. This is what we will discuss.”

Margaret glanced at Arn, who shrugged. Opie Kindred’s smile deepened. He said, “My crew has established why there is so much diversity here. The vacuum organisms have invented sex.”

“We know they have sex,” Arn said. “How else could they evolve?”

His own crew had shown that the vacuum organisms could exchange genetic material through pili, microscopic hollow tubes grown between cells or hyphal strands. It was analogous to the way in which genes for antibiotic resistance spread through populations of terrestrial bacteria.

“I do not mean genetic exchange, but genetic recombination,” Opie Kindred said. “I will explain.”

The glade filled with flat plates of color as the geneticist conjured charts and diagrams and pictures from his slate. Despite her anger, Margaret quickly immersed herself in the flows of data, racing ahead of Opie Kindred’s clipped explanations.

It was not normal sexual reproduction. There was no differentiation into male or female, or even into complementary mating strains. Instead, it was mediated by a species that aggressively colonized the thalli of others. Margaret had already seen it many times, but until now she had thought that it was merely a parasite. Instead, as Opie Kindred put it, it was more like a vampire.

A shuffle of pictures, movies patched from hundreds of hours of material collected by roving proxies. Here was a colony of the black crustose species found all through the explored regions of the Rift. Time speeded up. The crustose colony elongated its ragged perimeter in pulsing spurts. As it grew, it exfoliated microscopic particles. Margaret’s viewpoint spiraled into a close-up of one of the exfoliations, a few cells wrapped in nutrient storing strands.

Millions of these little packages floated through the vacuum. If one landed on a host thallus, it injected its genetic payload into the host cells. The view dropped inside one such cell. A complex of carbohydrate and protein strands webbed the interior like intricately packed spider webs. Part of the striated cell wall drew apart and a packet of DNA coated in hydrated globulins and enzymes burst inward. The packet contained the genomes of both the parasite and its previous victim. It latched onto protein strands and crept along on ratcheting microtubule claws until it fused with the cell’s own circlet of DNA.

The parasite possessed an enzyme that snipped strands of genetic material at random lengths. These recombined, forming chimeric cells that contained genetic information from both sets of victims, with the predator species’ genome embedded amongst the native genes like an interpenetrating text.

The process repeated itself in flurries of coiling and uncoiling DNA strands as the chimeric cells replicated. It was a crude, random process. Most of the cells contained incomplete or noncomplementary copies of the genomes and were unable to function, or contained so many copies that transcription was halting and imperfect. But a few out of every thousand were viable, and a small percentage of those were more vigorous than either of their parents. They grew from a few cells to a patch, and finally overgrew the parental matrix in which they were embedded. There were pictures that showed every stage of this transformation in a laboratory experiment.

“This is why I have not shared the information until now,” Opie Kindred said, as the pictures faded around him. “I had to ensure by experimental testing that my theory was correct. Because the procedure is so inefficient we had to screen thousands of chimeras until we obtained a strain that overgrew its parent.”

“A very odd and extreme form of reproduction,” Arn said. “The parent dies so that the child might live.”

Opie Kindred smiled. “It is more interesting than you might suppose.”

The next sequence showed the same colony, now clearly infected by the parasitic species—leprous black spots mottled its pinkish surface. Again time speeded up. The spots grew larger, merged, shed a cloud of exfoliations.

“Once the chimera overgrows its parent,” Opie Kindred said, “the genes of the parasite, which have been reproduced in every cell of the thallus, are activated. The host cells are transformed. It is rather like a RNA virus, except that the virus does not merely subvert the protein and RNA making machinery of its host cell. It takes over the cell itself. Now the cycle is completed, and the parasite sheds exfoliations that will in turn infect new hosts.

“Here is the motor of evolution. In some of the infected hosts, the parasitic genome is prevented from expression, and the host becomes resistant to infection. It is a variation of the Red Queen’s race. There is an evolutionary pressure upon the parasite to evolve new infective forms, and then for the hosts to resist them, and so on. Meanwhile, the host species benefit from new genetic combinations that by selection incrementally improve growth. The process is random but continuous, and takes place on a vast scale. I estimate that millions of recombinant cells are produced each hour, although perhaps only one in ten million are viable, and of those only one in a million are significantly more efficient at growth than their parents. But this is more than sufficient to explain the diversity we have mapped in the reef.”

Arn said, “How long have you known this, Opie?”

“I communicated my findings to the Star Chamber just this morning,” Opie Kindred said. “The work has been very difficult. My crew has to work under very tight restraints, using Class Four containment techniques, as with the old immunodeficiency plagues.”

“Yah, of course,” Arn said. “We don’t know how the exfoliations might contaminate the ship.”

“Exactly,” Opie Kindred said. “That is why the reef is dangerous.”

Margaret bridled at this. She said sharply, “Have you tested how long the exfoliations survive?”

“There is a large amount of data about bacterial spore survival. Many survive thousands of years in vacuum close to absolute zero. It hardly seems necessary—”

“You didn’t bother,” Margaret said. “My God, you want to destroy the reef and you have no evidence. You didn’t think.”

It was the worst of insults in the scientific community. Opie Kindred colored, but before he could reply Dzu Sho held up a hand, and his employees obediently fell silent.

“The Star Chamber has voted,” Dzu Sho said. “It is clear that we have all we need. The reef is dangerous, and must be destroyed. Dr. Kindred has suggested a course of action that seems appropriate. We will poison the sulphur-oxidizing cycle and kill the reef.”

“But we don’t know—”

“We haven’t found—”

Margaret and Arn had spoken at once. Both fell silent when Dzu Sho held up a hand again. He said, “We have isolated commercially useful strains. Obviously, we can’t use the organisms we have isolated because they contain the parasite within every cell. But we can synthesize useful gene sequences and splice them into current commercial strains of vacuum organism to improve quality.”

“I must object,” Margaret said. “This is a unique construct. The chances of it evolving again are minimal. We must study it further. We might be able to discover a cure for the parasite.”

“It is unlikely,” Opie Kindred said. “There is no way to eliminate the parasite from the host cells by gene therapy because they are hidden within the host chromosome, shuffled in a different pattern in every cell of the trillions of cells that make up the reef. However, it is quite easy to produce a poison that will shut down the sulphur-oxidizing metabolism common to the different kinds of reef organism.”

“Production has been authorized,” Sho said. “It will take, what did you tell me, Dr. Kindred?”

“We require a large quantity, given the large biomass of the reef. Ten days at least. No more than fifteen.”

“We have not studied it properly,” Arn said. “So we cannot yet say what is and is not possible.”

Margaret agreed, but before she could add her objection, her earpiece trilled, and Srin Kerenyi’s voice said apologetically, “Trouble, boss. You better come at once.”

The Survey Suite was in chaos, and there was worse chaos out in the Rift. Margaret had to switch proxies three times before she found one she could operate. All around her, proxies were fluttering and jinking, as if caught in strong currents instead of floating in vacuum in virtual free fall.

This was at the four thousand meter level, where the nitrogen ice walls of the Rift were sparsely patched with yellow and pink marblings that followed veins of sulphur and organic contaminants. The taste of the vacuum smog here was strong, like burned rubber coating Margaret’s lips and tongue.

As she looked around, a proxy jetted towards her. It overshot and rebounded from a gable of frozen nitrogen, its nozzle swinging back and forth as it tried to stabilize its position.

“Fuck,” its operator, Kim Nieye, said in Margaret’s ear. “Sorry, boss. I’ve been through five of these, and now I’m losing this one.”

On the other side of the cleft, a hundred meters away, two specks tumbled end for end, descending at a fair clip towards the depths. Margaret’s vision color, went black, came back to normal. She said, “How many?”

“Just about all of them. We’re using proxies that were up in the tablelands, but as soon as we bring them down they start going screwy too.”

“Herd some up and get them to the sample pickup point. We’ll need to do dissections.”

“No problem, boss. Are you okay?”

Margaret’s proxy had suddenly upended. She couldn’t get its trim back. “I don’t think so,” she said, and then the proxy’s nozzle flared and with a pulse of gas it shot away into the depths.

It was a wild ride. The proxy expelled all its gas reserves, accelerating as straight as an arrow. Coralline formations blurred past, and then long stretches of sulphur-eating pavement. The proxy caromed off the narrowing walls and began to tumble madly.

Margaret had no control. She was a helpless but exhilarated passenger. She passed the place where she had set the relay and continued to fall. The link started to break up. She lost all sense of proprioception, although given the tumbling fall of the proxy that was a blessing. Then the microwave radar started to go, with swathes of raster washing across the false color view. Somehow the proxy managed to stabilize itself, so it was falling headfirst towards the unknown regions at the bottom of the Rift. Margaret glimpsed structures swelling from the walls. And then everything went away and she was back, sweating and nauseous in the couch.

It was bad. More than ninety-five percent of the proxies had been lost. Most, like Margaret’s, had been lost in the depths. A few, badly damaged by collision, had been stranded amongst the reef colonies, but proxies sent to retrieve them went out of control too. It was clear that some kind of infective process had affected them. Margaret had several dead proxies collected by a maintenance robot and ordered that the survivors should be regrouped and kept above the deep part of the Rift where the vacuum organisms proliferated. And then she went to her suite in the undercroft and waited for the Star Chamber to call her before them.

The Star Chamber took away Margaret’s contract, citing failure to perform and possible sedition (that remark in the seminar had been recorded). She was moved from her suite to a utility room in the lower level of the undercroft and put to work in the farms.

She thought of her parents.

She had been here before.

She thought of the reef.

She couldn’t let it go.

She would save it if she could.

Srin Kerenyi kept her up to date. The survey crew and its proxies were restricted to the upper level of the reef. Manned teams under Opie Kindred’s control were exploring the depths—he was trusted where Margaret was not—but if they discovered anything it wasn’t communicated to the other science crews.

Margaret was working in the melon fields when Arn Nivedta found her. The plants sprawled from hydroponic tubes laid across gravel beds, beneath blazing lamps hung in the axis of the farmlands. It was very hot, and there was a stink of dilute sewage. Little yellow ants swarmed everywhere. Margaret had tucked the ends of her pants into the rolled tops of her shoesocks, and wore a green eyeshade. She was using a fine paintbrush to transfer pollen to the stigma of the melon flowers.

Arn came bouncing along between the long rows of plants like a pale scarecrow intent on escape. He wore only tight black shorts and a web belt hung with pens, little silvery tools, and a notepad.

He said, “They must hate you, putting you in a shithole like this.”

“I have to work, Arn. Work or starve. I don’t mind it. I grew up working the fields.”

Not strictly true: her parents had been ecosystem designers. But it was how it had ended.

Arn said cheerfully, “I’m here to rescue you. I can prove it wasn’t your fault.”

Margaret straightened, one hand on the small of her back where a permanent ache had lodged itself. She said, “Of course it wasn’t my fault. Are you all right?”

Arn had started to hop about, brushing at one bare long-toed foot and then the other. The ants had found him. His toes curled like fingers. The big toes were opposed. Monkey feet.

“Ants are having something of a population explosion,” she said. “We’re in the stage between introduction and stabilization here. The cycles will smooth out as the ecosystem matures.”

Arn brushed at his legs again. His prehensile big toe flicked an ant from the sole of his foot. “They want to incorporate me into the cycle, I think.”

“We’re all in the cycle, Arn. The plants grow in sewage; we eat the plants.” Margaret saw her supervisor coming towards them through the next field. She said, “We can’t talk here. Meet me in my room after work.”

Margaret’s new room was barely big enough for a hammock, a locker, and a tiny shower with a toilet pedestal. Its rock walls were unevenly coated with dull green fiber spray. There was a constant noise of pedestrians beyond the oval hatch; the air conditioning allowed in a smell of frying oil and ketones despite the filter trap Margaret had set up. She had stuck an aerial photograph of New York, where she had been born, above the head stay of her hammock, and dozens of glossy printouts of the reef scaled the walls. Apart from the pictures, a few clothes in the closet and the spider plant under the purple grolite, the room was quite anonymous.

She had spent most of her life in rooms like this. She could pack in five minutes, ready to move on to the next job.

“This place is probably bugged,” Arn said. He sat with his back to the door, sipping schnapps from a silvery flask and looking at the overlapping panoramas of the Rift.

Margaret sat on the edge of her hammock. She was nervous and excited. She said, “Everywhere is bugged. I want them to hear that I’m not guilty. Tell me what you know.”

Arn looked at her. “I examined the proxies you sent back. I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for, but it was surprisingly easy to spot.”

“An infection,” Margaret said.

“Yah, a very specific infection. We concentrated on the nervous system, given the etiology. In the brain we found lesions, always in the same area.”

Margaret examined the three-dimensional color tomographic scan Arn had brought. The lesions were little black bubbles in the underside of the unfolded cerebellum, just in front of the optic node.

“The same in all of them,” Arn said. “We took samples, extracted DNA, and sequenced it.” A grid of thousands of colored dots, then another superimposed over it. All the dots lined up.

“A match to Opie’s parasite,” Margaret guessed.

Arn grinned. He had a nice smile. It made him look like an enthusiastic boy. “We tried that first of course. Got a match, then went through the library of reef organisms, and got partial matches. Opie’s parasite has its fingerprints in the DNA of everything in the reef, but this,” he said, jabbing a long finger through the projection, “is the pure quill. Just an unlucky accident that it lodges in the brain at this particular place and produces the behavior you saw.”

“Perhaps it isn’t a random change,” Margaret said. “Perhaps the reef has a use for the proxies.”

“Teleology,” Arn said. “Don’t let Opie hear that thought. He’d use it against you. This is evolution. It isn’t directed by anything other than natural selection. There is no designer, no watchmaker. Not after the AI crashed, anyway, and it only pushed the ecosystem towards more efficient sulphur oxidation. There’s more, Margaret. I’ve been doing some experiments on the side. Exposing aluminum foil sheets in orbit around Enki. There are exfoliations everywhere.”

“Then Opie is right.”

“No, no. All the exfoliations I found were non-viable. I did more experiments. The exfoliations are metabolically active when released, unlike bacterial spores. And they have no protective wall. No reason for them to have one, yah? They live only for a few minutes. Either they land on a new host or they don’t. Solar radiation easily tears them apart. You can kill them with a picowatt ultraviolet laser. Contamination isn’t a problem.”

“And it can’t infect us,” Margaret said. “Vacuum organisms and proxies have the same DNA code as us, the same as everything from Earth, for that matter, but it’s written in artificial nucleotide bases. The reef isn’t dangerous at all, Arn.”

“Yah, but in theory it could infect every vacuum organism ever designed. The only way around it would be to change the base structure of vacuum organism DNA—how much would that cost?”

“I know about contamination, Arn. The mold that wrecked the biome designed by my parents came in with someone or something. Maybe on clothing, or skin, or in the gut, or in some trade goods. It grew on anything with a cellulose cell wall. Every plant was infected. The fields were covered by huge sheets of gray mold; the air was full of spores. It didn’t infect people, but more than a hundred died from massive allergic reactions and respiratory failure. They had to vent the atmosphere in the end. And my parents couldn’t find work after that.”

Arn said gently, “That is the way. We live by our reputations. It’s hard when something goes wrong.”

Margaret ignored this. She said, “The reef is a resource, not a danger. You’re looking at it the wrong way, like Opie Kindred. We need diversity. Our biospheres have to be complicated because simple systems are prone to invasion and disruption, but they aren’t one hundredth as complicated as those on Earth. If my parents’ biome had been more diverse, the mold couldn’t have found a foothold.”

“There are some things I could do without.” Arn scratched his left ankle with the toes of his right foot. “Like those ants.”

“Well, we don’t know if we need the ants specifically, but we need variety, and they contribute to it. They help aerate the soil, to begin with, which encourages stratification and diversity of soil organisms. There are a million different kinds of microbe in a gram of soil from a forest on Earth; we have to make do with less than a thousand. We don’t have one tenth that number of useful vacuum organisms and most are grown in monoculture, which is the most vulnerable ecosystem of all. That was the cause of the crash of the green revolution on Earth in the twenty-first century. But there are hundreds of different species in the reef. Wild species, Arn. You could seed a planetoid with them and go harvest it a year later. The citizens don’t go outside because they have their parklands, their palaces, their virtualities. They’ve forgotten that the outer system isn’t just the habitats. There are millions of small planetoids in the Kuiper belt. Anyone with a dome and the reef vacuum organisms could homestead one.”

She had been thinking about this while working out in the fields. The Star Chamber had given her plenty of time to think.

Arn shook his head. “They all have the parasite lurking in them. Any species from the reef can turn into it. Perhaps even the proxies.”

“We don’t know enough,” Margaret said. “I saw things in the bottom of the Rift, before I lost contact with the proxy. Big structures. And there’s the anomalous temperature gradients, too. The seat of change must be down there, Arn. The parasite could be useful, if we can master it. The viruses that caused the immunodeficiency plagues are used for gene therapy now. Opie Kindred has been down there. He’s suppressing what he has found.”

“Yah, well, it does not much matter. They have completed synthesis of the metabolic inhibitor. I’m friendly with the organics chief. They diverted most of the refinery to it.” Arn took out his slate. “He showed me how they have set it up. That is what they have been doing down in the Rift. Not exploring.”

“Then we have to do something now.”

“It is too late, Margaret.”

“I want to call a meeting, Arn. I have a proposal.”

Most of the science crews came. Opie Kindred’s crew was a notable exception; Arn said that it gave him a bad feeling.

“They could be setting us up,” he told Margaret.

“I know they’re listening. That’s good. I want it in the open. If you’re worried about getting hurt you can always leave.”

“I came because I wanted to. Like everyone else here. We’re all scientists. We all want the truth known.” Arn looked at her. He smiled. “You want more than that, I think.”

“I fight my own fights.” All around people were watching. Margaret added, “Let’s get this thing started.”

Arn called the meeting to order and gave a brief presentation about his research into survival of the exfoliations before throwing the matter open to the meeting. Nearly everyone had an opinion. Microphones hovered in the room, and at times three or four people were shouting at each other. Margaret let them work off their frustration. Some simply wanted to register a protest; a small but significant minority were worried about losing their bonuses or even all of their pay.

“Better that than our credibility,” one of Orly Higgins’ techs said. “That’s what we live by. None of us will work again if we allow the Ganapati to become a plague ship.”

Yells of approval, whistles.

Margaret waited until the noise had died down, then got to her feet. She was in the center of the horseshoe of seats, and everyone turned to watch, more than a hundred people. Their gaze fell upon her like sunlight; it strengthened her. A microphone floated down in front of her face.

“Arn has shown that contamination isn’t an issue,” Margaret said. “The issue is that the Star Chamber wants to destroy the reef because they want to exploit what they’ve found and stop anyone else using it. I’m against that, all the way. I’m not gengeneered. Micro-gravity is not my natural habitat. I have to take a dozen different drugs to prevent reabsorption of calcium from my bone, collapse of my circulatory system, fluid retention, all the bad stuff micro-gravity does to unedited Earth stock. I’m not allowed to have children here, because they would be as crippled as me. Despite that, my home is here. Like all of you, I would like to have the benefits of being a citizen, to live in the parklands and eat real food. But there aren’t enough parklands for everyone because the citizens who own the habitats control production of fixed carbon. The vacuum organisms we have found could change that. The reef may be a source of plague, or it may be a source of unlimited organics. We don’t know. What we do know is that the reef is unique and we haven’t finished exploring it. If the Star Chamber destroys it, we may never know what’s out there.”

Cheers at this. Several people rose to make points, but Margaret wouldn’t give way. She wanted to finish.

“Opie Kindred has been running missions to the bottom of the Rift, but he hasn’t been sharing what he’s found there. Perhaps he no longer thinks that he’s one of us. He’ll trade his scientific reputation for citizenship,” Margaret said, “but that isn’t our way, is it?”

“NO!” the crowd roared.

And the White Mice invaded the room.

Sharp cracks, white smoke, screams. The White Mice had long flexible sticks weighted at one end. They went at the crowd like farmers threshing corn. Margaret was separated from Arn by a wedge of panicking people. Two techs got hold of her and steered her out of the room, down a corridor filling with smoke. Arn loomed out of it, clutching his slate to his chest.

“They’re getting ready to set off the poison,” he said as they ran in long loping strides.

“Then I’m going now,” Margaret said.

Down a drop pole onto a corridor lined with shops. People were smashing windows. No one looked at them as they ran through the riot. They turned a corner, the sounds of shouts and breaking glass fading. Margaret was breathing hard. Her eyes were smarting, her nose running.

“They might kill you,” Arn said. He grasped her arm. “I can’t let you go, Margaret.”

She shook herself free. Arn tried to grab her again. He was taller, but she was stronger. She stepped inside his reach and jumped up and popped him on the nose with the flat of her hand.

He sat down, blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, blinking up at her with surprised, tear-filled eyes.

She snatched up his slate. “I’m sorry, Arn,” she said. “This is my only chance. I might not find anything, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”

Margaret was five hundred kilometers out from the habitat when the radio beeped. “Ignore it,” she told her pressure suit. She was sure that she knew who was trying to contact her, and she had nothing to say to him.

This far out, the Sun was merely the brightest star in the sky. Behind and above Margaret, the dim elongated crescent of the Ganapati hung before the sweep of the Milky Way. Ahead, below the little transit platform’s motor, Enki was growing against a glittering starscape, a lumpy potato with a big notch at its widest point.

The little moonlet was rising over the notch, a swiftly moving fleck of light. For a moment, Margaret had the irrational fear that she would collide with it, but the transit platform’s navigational display showed her that she would fall above and behind it. Falling past a moon! She couldn’t help smiling at the thought.

“Priority override,” her pressure suit said. Its voice was a reassuring contralto Margaret knew as well as her mother’s.

“Ignore it,” Margaret said again.

“Sorry, Maggie. You know I can’t do that.”

“Quite correct,” another voice said.

Margaret identified him a moment before the suit helpfully printed his name across the helmet’s visor. Dzu Sho.

“Turn back right now,” Sho said. “We can take you out with the spectrographic laser if we have to.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

“I do not believe anyone would mourn you,” Sho said unctuously. “Leaving the Ganapati was an act of sedition, and we’re entitled to defend ourselves.”

Margaret laughed. It was just the kind of silly, sententious, self-important nonsense that Sho was fond of spouting.

“I am entirely serious,” Sho said.

Enki had rotated to show that the notch was the beginning of a groove. The groove elongated as the worldlet rotated further. Tigris Rift. Its edges ramified in complex fractal branchings.

“I’m going where the proxies fell,” Margaret said. “I’m still working for you.”

“You sabotaged the proxies. That’s why they couldn’t fully penetrate the Rift.”

“That’s why I’m going—”

“Excuse me,” the suit said, “but I register a small energy flux.”

“Just a tickle from the ranging sight,” Sho said. “Turn back now, Dr. Wu.”

“I intend to come back.”

It was a struggle to stay calm. Margaret thought that Sho’s threat was no more than empty air. The laser’s AI would not allow it to be used against human targets, and she was certain that Sho couldn’t override it. And even if he could, he wouldn’t dare kill her in full view of the science crews. Sho was bluffing. He had to be.

The radio silence stretched. Then Sho said, “You’re planning to commit a final act of sabotage. Don’t think you can get away with it. I’m sending someone after you.”

Margaret was dizzy with relief. Anyone chasing her would be using the same kind of transit platform. She had at least thirty minutes head start.

Another voice said, “Don’t think this will make you a hero.”

Opie Kindred. Of course. The man never could delegate. He was on the same trajectory, several hundred kilometers behind but gaining slowly.

“Tell me what you found,” she said. “Then we can finish this race before it begins.”

Opie Kindred switched off his radio.

“If you had not brought along all this gear,” her suit grumbled, “we could outdistance him.”

“I think we’ll need it soon. We’ll just have to be smarter than him.”

Margaret studied the schematics of the poison spraying mechanism—it was beautifully simple, but vulnerable—while Tigris Rift swelled beneath her, a jumble of knife-edge chevron ridges. Enki was so small and the Rift so wide that the walls had fallen beneath the horizon. She was steering towards the Rift’s center when the suit apologized and said that there was another priority override.

It was the Ganapati’s lawyer. She warned Margaret that this was being entered into sealed court records, and then formally revoked her contract and read a complaint about her seditious conduct.

“You’re a contracted worker just like me,” Margaret said. “We take orders, but we both have codes of professional ethics, too. For the record, that’s why I’m here. The reef is a unique organism. I cannot allow it to be destroyed.”

Dzu Sho came onto the channel and said, “Off the record, don’t think about being picked up.”

The lawyer switched channels. “He does not mean it,” she said. “He would be in violation of the distress statutes.” Pause. “Good luck, Dr. Wu.”

Then there was only the carrier wave.

Margaret wished that this made her feel better. Plenty of contract workers who went against the direct orders of their employers had been disappeared, or killed in industrial accidents. The fire of the mass meeting had evaporated long before the suit had assembled itself around her, and now she felt colder and lonelier than ever.

She fell, the platform shuddering now and then as it adjusted its trim. Opie Kindred’s platform was a bright spark moving sideways across the drifts of stars above. Directly below was a vast flow of nitrogen ice with a black river winding through it. The center of the Rift, a cleft two kilometers long and fifty kilometers deep. The reef.

She fell towards it.

She had left the radio channel open. Suddenly, Opie Kindred said, “Stop now and it will be over.”

“Tell me what you know.”

No answer.

She said, “You don’t have to follow me, Opie. This is my risk. I don’t ask you to share it.”

“You won’t take this away from me.”

“Is citizenship really worth this, Opie?”

No reply.

The suit’s proximity alarms began to ping and beep. She turned them off one by one, and told the suit to be quiet when it complained.

“I am only trying to help,” it said. “You should reduce your velocity. The target is very narrow.”

“I’ve been here before,” Margaret said.

But only by proxy. The icefield rushed up at her. Its smooth flows humped over one another, pitted everywhere with tiny craters. She glimpsed black splashes where vacuum organisms had colonized a stress ridge. Then an edge flashed past; walls unraveled on either side.

She was in the reef.

The vacuum organisms were everywhere: flat plates jutting from the walls; vases and delicate fans and fretworks; huge blotches smooth as ice or dissected by cracks. In the light cast by the platform’s lamps, they did not possess the vibrant primary colors of the proxy link, but were every shade of gray and black, streaked here and there with muddy reds. Complex fans ramified far back inside the milky nitrogen ice, following veins of carbonaceous compounds.

Far above, stars were framed by the edges of the cleft. One star was falling towards her: Opie Kindred. Margaret switched on the suit’s radar, and immediately it began to ping. The suit shouted a warning, but before Margaret could look around the pings dopplered together.

Proxies.

They shot up towards her, tentacles writhing from the black, streamlined helmets of their mantles. Most of them missed, jagging erratically as they squirted bursts of hydrogen to kill their velocity. Two collided in a slow flurry of tentacles.

Margaret laughed. None of her crew would fight against her, and Sho was relying upon inexperienced operators.

The biggest proxy, three meters long, swooped past. The crystalline gleam of its sensor array reflected the lights of the platform. It decelerated, spun on its axis, and dove back towards her.

Margaret barely had time to pull out the weapon she had brought with her. It was a welding pistol, rigged on a long rod with a yoked wire around the trigger. She thrust it up like the torch of the Statue of Liberty just before the proxy struck her.

The suit’s gauntlet, elbow joint, and shoulder piece stiffened under the heavy impact, saving Margaret from broken bones, but the collision knocked the transit platform sideways. It plunged through reef growths. Like glass, they had tremendous rigidity but very little lateral strength. Fans and lattices broke away, peppering Margaret and the proxy with shards. It was like falling through a series of chandeliers. Margaret couldn’t close her fingers in the stiffened gauntlet. She stood tethered to the platform with her arm and the rod raised straight up and the black proxy wrapped around them. The proxy’s tentacles lashed her visor with slow, purposeful slaps.

She knew that it would take only a few moments before the tentacles’ carbon-fiber proteins could unlink; then it would be able to reach the life support pack on her back, and shouted at the suit, ordering it to relax the gauntlet’s fingers. The proxy was contracting around her rigid arm as it stretched towards the life support pack. When the gauntlet went limp, pressure snapped her fingers closed. Her forefinger popped free of the knuckle. She yelled with pain. And the wire rigged to the welding pistol’s trigger pulled taut.

Inside the proxy’s mantle, a focused beam of electrons boiled off the pistol’s filament. The pistol, designed to work only in high vacuum, began to arc almost immediately, but the electron beam had already heated the integument and muscle of the proxy to more than four hundred degrees. Vapor expanded explosively. The proxy shot away, propelled by the gases of its own dissolution.

Opie was still gaining on Margaret. Gritting her teeth against the pain of her dislocated finger, she dumped the broken welding gear. It only slowly floated away above her, for it still had the same velocity as she did.

A proxy swirled in beside her with shocking suddenness. For a moment, she gazed into its faceted sensor array, and then dots of luminescence skittered across its smooth black mantle, forming letters.

Much luck, boss. SK.

Srin Kerenyi. Margaret waved with her good hand. The proxy scooted away, rising at a shallow angle towards Opie’s descending star.

A few seconds later the cleft filled with the unmistakable flash of laser light.

The radar trace of Srin’s proxy disappeared.

Shit. Opie Kindred was armed. If he got close enough he could kill her.

Margaret risked a quick burn of the transit platform’s motor to increase her rate of fall. It roared at her back for twenty seconds; when it cut out her pressure suit warned her that she had insufficient fuel for full deceleration.

“I know what I’m doing,” Margaret told it.

The complex forms of the reef dwindled past. Then there were only huge patches of black staining the nitrogen ice walls. Margaret passed her previous record depth, and still she fell. It was like free fall; the negligible gravity of Enki did not cause any appreciable acceleration.

Opie Kindred gained on her by increments.

In vacuum, the lights of the transit platform threw abrupt pools of light onto the endlessly unraveling walls. Slowly, the pools of light elongated into glowing tunnels filled with sparkling motes. The exfoliations and gases and organic molecules were growing denser. And, impossibly, the temperature was rising, one degree with every five hundred meters. Far below, between the narrowing perspective of the walls, structures were beginning to resolve from the blackness.

The suit reminded her that she should begin the platform’s deceleration burn. Margaret checked Opie’s velocity and said she would wait.

“I have no desire to end as a crumpled tube filled with strawberry jam,” the suit said. It projected a countdown on her visor and refused to switch it off.

Margaret kept one eye on Opie’s velocity, the other on the blur of reducing numbers. The numbers passed zero. The suit screamed obscenities in her ears, but she waited a beat more before firing the platform’s motor.

The platform slammed into her boots. Sharp pain in her ankles and knees. The suit stiffened as the harness dug into her shoulders and waist.

Opie Kindred’s platform flashed past. He had waited until after she had decelerated before making his move. Margaret slapped the release buckle of the platform’s harness and fired the piton gun into the nitrogen ice wall. It was enough to slow her so that she could catch hold of a crevice and swing up into it. Her dislocated finger hurt like hell.

The temperature was a stifling eighty-seven degrees above absolute zero. The atmospheric pressure was just registering—a mix of hydrogen and carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulphide. Barely enough in the whole of the bottom of the cleft to pack into a small box at the pressure of Earth’s atmosphere at sea level, but the rate of production must be tremendous to compensate for loss into the colder vacuum above.

Margaret leaned out of the crevice. Below, it widened into a chimney between humped pressure flows of nitrogen ice sloping down to the floor of the cleft. The slopes and the floor were packed with a wild proliferation of growths. Not only the familiar vases and sheets and laces, but great branching structures like crystal trees, lumpy plates raised on stout stalks, tangles of black wire hundreds of meters across, clusters of frothy globes, and much more.

There was no sign of Opie Kindred, but tethered above the growths were the balloons of his spraying mechanism. Each was a dozen meters across, crinkled, flaccid. They were fifty degrees hotter than their surroundings, would have to grow hotter still before the metabolic inhibitor was completely volatilized inside them. When that happened, small explosive devices would puncture them, and the metabolic inhibitor would be sucked into the vacuum of the cleft like smoke up a chimney.

Margaret consulted the schematics and started to climb down the crevice, light as a dream, steering herself with the fingers of her left hand. The switching relays that controlled the balloons’ heaters were manually controlled because of telemetry interference from the reef’s vacuum smog and the broadband electromagnetic resonance. The crash shelter where they were located was about two kilometers away, a slab of orange foamed plastic in the center of a desolation of abandoned equipment and broken and half-melted vacuum organism colonies.

The crevice widened. Margaret landed between drifts of what looked like giant soap bubbles that grew at its bottom.

And Opie Kindred’s platform rose up between two of the half-inflated balloons.

Margaret dropped onto her belly behind a line of bubbles that grew along a smooth ridge of ice. She opened a radio channel. It was filled with a wash of static and a wailing modulation, but through the noise she heard Opie’s voice faintly calling her name.

He was a hundred meters away and more or less at her level, turning in a slow circle. He couldn’t locate her amidst the radio noise and the ambient temperature was higher than the skin of her pressure suit, so she had no infrared image.

She began to crawl along the smooth ridge. The walls of the bubbles were whitely opaque, but she should see shapes curled within them. Like embryos inside eggs.

“Everything is ready, Margaret,” Opie Kindred’s voice said in her helmet. “I’m going to find you, and then I’m going to sterilize this place. There are things here you know nothing about. Horribly dangerous things. Who are you working for? Tell me that and I’ll let you live.”

A thread of red light waved out from the platform and a chunk of nitrogen ice cracked off explosively. Margaret felt it through the tips of her gloves.

“I can cut my way through to you,” Opie Kindred said, “wherever you are hiding.”

Margaret watched the platform slowly revolve. Tried to guess if she could reach the shelter while he was looking the other way. All she had to do was bound down the ridge and cross a kilometer of bare, crinkled nitrogen ice without being fried by Opie’s laser. Still crouching, she lifted onto the tips of her fingers and toes, like a sprinter on the block. He was turning, turning. She took three deep breaths to clear her head—and something crashed into the ice cliff high above. It spun out in a spray of shards, hit the slope below and spun through toppling clusters of tall black chimneys. For a moment, Margaret was paralyzed with astonishment. Then she remembered the welding gear. It had finally caught up with her.

Opie Kindred’s platform slewed around and a red thread waved across the face of the cliff. A slab of ice thundered outwards. Margaret bounded away, taking giant leaps and trying to look behind her at the same time.

The slab spun on its axis, shedding huge shards, and smashed into the cluster of the bubbles where she had been crouching just moments before. The ice shook like a living thing under her feet and threw her head over heels.

She stopped herself by firing the piton gun into the ground. She was on her back, looking up at the top of the ridge, where bubbles vented a dense mix of gas and oily organics before bursting in an irregular cannonade. Hundreds of slim black shapes shot away. Some smashed into the walls of the cleft and stuck there, but many more vanished into its maw.

A chain reaction had started. Bubbles were bursting open up and down the length of the cleft.

A cluster popped under Opie Kindred’s platform and he vanished in a roil of vapor. The crevice shook. Nitrogen ice boiled into a dense fog. A wind got up for a few minutes. Margaret clung to the piton until it was over.

Opie Kindred had drifted down less than a hundred meters away. The thing which had smashed the visor of his helmet was still lodged there. It was slim and black, with a hard, shiny exoskeleton. The broken bodies of others settled amongst smashed vacuum organism colonies, glistening like beetles in the light of Margaret’s suit. They were like tiny, tentacless proxies, their swollen mantles cased in something like keratin. Some had split open, revealing ridged reaction chambers and complex matrices of black threads.

“Gametes,” Margaret said, seized by a sudden wild intuition. “Little rocketships full of DNA.”

The suit asked if she was all right.

She giggled. “The parasite turns everything into its own self. Even proxies!”

“I believe that I have located Dr. Kindred’s platform,” the suit said. “I suggest that you refrain from vigorous exercise, Maggie. Your oxygen supply is limited. What are you doing?”

She was heading towards the crash shelter. “I’m going to switch off the balloon heaters. They won’t be needed.”

After she shut down the heaters, Margaret lashed one of the dead creatures to the transit platform. She shot up between the walls of the cleft, and at last rose into the range of the relay transmitters. Her radio came alive, a dozen channels blinking for attention. Arn was on one, and she told him what had happened.

“Sho wanted to light out of here,” Arn said, “but stronger heads prevailed. Come home, Margaret.”

“Did you see them? Did you, Arn?”

“Some hit the Ganapati.” He laughed. “Even the Star Chamber can’t deny what happened.”

Margaret rose up above the ice fields and continued to rise until the curve of the worldlet’s horizon became visible, and then the walls of Tigris Rift. The Ganapati was a faint star bracketed between them. She called up deep radar, and saw, beyond the Ganapati’s strong signal, thousands of faint traces falling away into deep space.

A random scatter of genetic packages. How many would survive to strike new worldlets and give rise to new reefs?

Enough, she thought. The reef evolved in saltatory jumps. She had just witnessed its next revolution.

Given time, it would fill the Kuiper belt.

Originally published in Skylife: Space Habitats in Story and Science, edited by Gregory Benford & George Zebrowski, 2000.

About the Author

Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novels are Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere.

Kubrick to Scott:
Relevancy and Realism in Cinematic Science Fiction

Mark Cole

By the time 2001: A Space Odyssey arrived, everything had changed.

Behind the Iron Curtain the Soviets launched their own science fiction boom, one far more realistic and adult-oriented than ours.

Pavel Klushantsev’s 1958 documentary, Doroga k zvezdam (Road to the Stars), strongly influenced Kubrick. It starts with a brief history lesson, then moves into the future with predictions of rockets and space stations, culminating in the first moon landing.

Klushantsev’s film inspired a series of realistic Soviet and Warsaw Bloc science fiction films, including his own Planeta Bur (Planet of Storms) in 1962. Many of these—or at least their special effects sequences—would eventually appear in the West.

In the U.S., Chesley Bonestell’s influence had faded and American science fiction started looking more like our space program, thanks in part to all the borrowed Apollo footage.

But Stanley Kubrick did set a new standard: as Lang and Pal had done before him, he brought in scientists and experts to shape his vision of outer space. The future no longer belonged to Bonestell. Instead, it looked like the publicity art Martin Marietta or Lockheed Martin produced for their latest NASA projects. Their cool, impersonal sixties aesthetic was a perfect match for Kubrick’s style and the end result looked like a reasonable extrapolation from our current hardware.

When you boil away the sheer, awe-inspiring wonder of the film, 2001 was yet another alien encounter, not far removed from schlock like Mission Mars. Few of these post-Apollo films featured stories as solidly realistic as their hardware. While Roger Altman’s Countdown dealt intelligently with character against a plausible—if reckless—moon landing scenario, and Marooned with disaster and rescue attempts in space, another movie took us to a mirror image Earth on the far side of the sun (Doppleganger). Additionally, Moon Zero Two presented the first space Western, complete with a heroine named Clementine.

Bruce Dern tries to save the trees (in outer space) in Silent Running, the first Mars mission turns into a paranoid conspiracy thriller (Capricorn One), and yet another kid became a Stowaway to the Moon in a 1975 TV movie. Naturally, he manages to save the mission. How he survives a twenty-three G liftoff without a form-fitting couch is left unexplained.

Space flight was so routine that it appeared in everything from a Don Knotts comedy (The Reluctant Astronaut) to I Dream of Jeannie. By 1979, it had fallen so far that a Saturn V got crammed into Disney’s version of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

With the arrival of Star Wars and Alien, even these movies slowed to a trickle. A handful of kids accidentally launched themselves into orbit in Space Camp, Walter Koenig fought alien monstrosities with the shuttle and an Apollo rocket in Moon Trap, we had to rescue a hypersonic jet that accidentally went into orbit in ABC’s Starflight One and the British shuttle Churchill finds alien vampires lurking in the tail of Halley’s comet (Lifeforce).

Perhaps 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984) marked the high point, although without Kubrick it proved mostly routine. And Toho‘s Sayonara Jupiter, while set further in the future, had a solid 2001-on-a-more-massive-scale vibe that is at odds with its ray gun battles and J-Pop theme song.

That changed briefly in the late nineties, thanks, one suspects, to the success of Apollo 13 (1995). Or it might have been Michael Bay’s bombastic killer asteroid film, Armageddon (1998). For a few years, more or less realistic portrayals of space flight returned to the theaters, amid a sudden burst of interest in Mars.

NASA had launched a volley of probes starting with the unsuccessful Mars Observer in 1992. While several other embarrassing failures followed, by the end of the millennium they had a string of orbiters, landers, and rovers sending back new information.

There was a lot of talk, highly speculative plans and dramatic initiatives for a manned mission but NASA couldn’t convince Congress to fund them. Nothing ever went beyond the concept stage.  

Ironically, a Disney comedy, RocketMan (1997), was first to Mars, although it paid little attention to the technical details of the flight. But in 2000, two major films gave us a glimpse of something closer to the real Mars.

Renowned director Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars was first, with a ship, which looks look like something NASA might actually have had on their drawing boards (although the big, rotating walking track probably came from 2001).

The movie’s realism, unfortunately, ran aground when it came to DNA.

On the trip out, one of the characters builds a model of human DNA out of M&Ms. As our DNA contains about three billion base pairs that would take about six thousand tons of candy. Which is a lot of extra weight to haul along on an interplanetary flight. Even worse, an important plot point revolves around the “fact” that all living things on Earth have the same DNA. It moves even further from realism at the end, when one of the crew leaves in an alien spacecraft millions of years old.

Red Planet is set a little further in the future. This time, the explorers went to Mars, looking for a solution to the Earth’s serious environmental problems (which makes a lot more sense than gold!).

However, after a promising start, their robot accidentally switches into lethal killer military mode (why does every movie robot have that setting?) and starts hunting the crew. And if that wasn’t enough, they’re attacked by fire-starting alien bugs.

The other notable film of the cycle, John Carpenter’s The Ghosts of Mars (2001) made little pretense of accuracy, choosing instead to portray a partly terraformed and heavily settled Mars.

And there wasn’t a spacesuit to be seen.

A few other reasonably accurate space films got made in that brief surge—one notes Escape from Mars (1999) which offered a convincing trip on a TV budget, and Clint Eastwood’s homage to older actors, Space Cowboys (2000). Then there’s the Spanish film Stranded (2001) which ends with a hidden pocket of air, as fortuitous as the one that Fritz Lang’s explorers found, and, of course, the usual remnants of a dead civilization.

However, none of them did well in the theater, and the Mars fad faded quickly.

It wasn’t just realistic space films that faded from sight, but science fiction films in general. The Lord of the Rings’ success sent the studios scrambling after fantasy properties, sidelining science fiction except for a few odd films such as Danny Boyle’s brilliant but flawed Sunshine (2007). Its deep space mission was based on a radical scientific theory, which for some reason is never discussed in the film, but it descends into a routine slasher film.

However, by 2009, science fiction was back. Leading this sudden surge of new films was a remarkable one-man-show of a movie with Sam Rockwell playing against Sam Rockwell, as a man who discovers that he isn’t alone on the Moon.

Duncan Jones set these extraordinary events against a painstakingly detailed base, complete with rovers, mechanized mining systems, and a HAL-like AI controlling it all.

Several interesting films followed. Geoff Marslett made Mars (2010), a rotoscoped film similar in style to A Scanner Darkly. It probably was the first Romantic Comedy set against a realistic trip to the red planet. William Eubank, with a half-million dollar budget, created an international space station in his driveway (it seems almost rude to point out that it had full gravity) to film Love (2011), a strange arthouse astronaut film (once described as a full-length version of the 2001 stargate sequence) made as a companion piece to the Angels and Airwaves album of the same name. And the found-footage horror boom made it all the way to the moon in Apollo 18, where a lovingly recreated Apollo mission meets rock monsters.

2012 brought Astronaut: The Last Push: where an accident leaves an astronaut sent to study newly discovered life on Europa alone, struggling to survive and get back to Earth. Ironically, most of this tense film takes place in a single tiny compartment—like Buried, but with more CGI.

But something had changed. Realistic space films came of age in 2013.

Admittedly, The Last Days on Mars was somewhat of a holdout, creating an entirely credible Mars mission for yet another zombie movie.

But Europa Report, while made on a modest budget, didn’t just look like a NASA mission: its footage looked like that produced by NASA.

It would be tempting to dismiss it as yet another found footage film, but it is more serious than most, matching what we see to the limited number of cameras aboard the ship. We only get glimpses of its exterior, for example, until there’s a feed from the astronauts trying to repair it—and even then, a full length view only comes as one of them drifts helplessly into space.

One suspects that the film’s non-linear plot may be there to give it some Indie cred. The choice to start with the landing on Europa, then gradually flash back to the voyage does increase the suspense as it thrusts us immediately into the mysterious events on the Jovian moon.

And then, the final instant of the film’s “lost” footage, reveals Europa Report’s dark secret: it is a Creature Feature!

Somehow, after an hour and a half of trying to make the dangers of exploration interesting again, it seems like a step backwards.

But Gravity more than made up for that.

Gravity came with a considerable amount of fanfare, a hefty budget, and two A-list stars. While its writer and director, Alfonso Cuarón, had previously made one science fiction movie, Children of Men, it centered not on dazzling effects, but on story and character.

Cuarón brought that same sensibility to a far more sensational film, creating not merely another disaster movie in space but the story of a lonely woman wrapped up in her work who must not only survive, but must overcome her own self.

Some 80% of the film is computer generated yet it avoids the unreality of Avatar, creating a gritty vision of working in space, weightlessness, and the basic hardware of spaceflight. It is hard to believe that in much of the film the only parts actually filmed were the faces of the stars.

While “disaster in space” is almost a cliché, Gravity is relentless, piling on danger after danger, with most of them anchored in the physics of spaceflight. Cuarón cheats in a few places for the sake of his story yet the film has a solid sense of reality few science fiction films have equaled. One might fault it for portraying a shuttle mission long after its retirement or a full scale Chinese station which is still some years away, but that merely reflects how long it took Cuarón to find backing for a film that couldn‘t have been made at the time he wrote it.

Christopher Nolan followed a year later with Interstellar, his take on the sort of high-concept science fiction film represented by 2001.

The Earth is dying. The last remnant of our space program (now seen as a huge distraction from our real problems), has found a mysterious, apparently intelligently created wormhole opening onto a series of planets near a massive black hole. But are any of them habitable?

These stock science fiction staples look radically different from any previous screen version: the wormhole appears as a sphere, the black hole a dramatic ringed object which fills the sky in the new solar system. Nolan based them on the latest research, and uses the time distortion caused by the black hole’s gravity as one of the major difficulties facing their mission, as years speed by in minutes.

He chose to anchor his story not in the mission itself, but in the pilot and his daughter. This gives the film a dramatic strength that helps carry the more extreme elements of its ending: yet another “stargate” sequence and the revelation that the mission has been guided by a mysterious outside power who may be a far-future us.

While the film’s overall emphasis on theoretical physics and believable technology is admirable, Nolan does seem to have ignored one minor detail: a black hole the size of “Gargantua” should have been spewing out enough X-rays to fry them all alive.

It is hard to watch The Martian (2015) and not think of Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964).

Both films portray a castaway struggling to survive on Mars—and both claim to be scientifically accurate. One might almost think that The Martian was a fiftieth anniversary remake. But fifty years do make a big difference.

In the earlier film, made a year before Mariner 4 returned the first detailed images of the red planet, Commander “Kit” Draper can breathe the thin air, but needs occasional lungsful of oxygen, which he produces by heating rocks. He also finds edible plants and water underground, and, of course, flying saucers and an escaped alien slave he names “Friday.”

While the oxygen rocks are often mocked, deposits of such minerals have been found on the moon. One doubts, though, that freeing their oxygen would be so simple. At the time, Mars’ atmosphere was often compared to that at the top of the Himalayas, but now we know that the pressure is so low that liquid water is extremely unlikely, except, perhaps, at depths Kit would find hard to reach in a cave. Where the fire storm and flying balls of fire came from is harder to explain.

In 2011, Andy Weir serialized a realistic science fiction novel based on every scrap of information he could find about Mars. The adventures of stranded astronaut Mark Watney proved so popular as an ebook that he sold it to a major publisher.

Ridley Scott’s film version is easily the most accurate screen portrayal of Mars to date. He seems to have resisted the Hollywood urge to “improve” the story and the plot is virtually identical to the novel.

While he eschewed the more-or-less non-stop action of Gravity (except in the film’s somewhat less convincing finale in which Mark goes into space in a rocket “convertible”), he emphasizes the step-by-step process Mark uses to deal with his challenges. The Martian demonstrates that you don’t need aliens, lost civilizations, or a pet monkey to make an interesting movie about Mars. The real dangers, and the incredible difficulty of providing even the minimum needed to survive in such a hostile world, are more than enough. It is rare, however, for Hollywood to recognize that, even though they made a lot of money on true stories like Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff.

A number of similar films are now in production, although one wonders how many of them will be as accurate.

With more and more of our efforts being outsourced to private contractors will they still look like space missions? And how will this shape the way Hollywood imagines the future?

Realism is always difficult to achieve—and in many respects, it is more of a question of style, of convincing the audience that it is real. Predicting the future has always been difficult and it is hard to guess which current trends will be important. The wild paint scheme and unusual windows of Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne does leave one wondering what a space program outsourced to private contractors might look like—and how it will shape the way Hollywood imagines the future.

We now have the technology to put almost anything on the screen. The real question is, will realistic space flight be sucked into the ever more extravagant (and ridiculous) CGI-driven world of the action film? Or once again loaded down with all the familiar clichés, from aliens to stowaways to saboteurs?

It has always been the desire to make these films “interesting” which cluttered many of them with absurdities. And yet, the possibility of telling compelling stories without familiar tropes has always been there. It just takes a lot more work—and an industry willing to back them.

Which is the real problem.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Bioengineered Athletes and True Stories:
A Conversation with Lauren Beukes

Chris Urie

Sometimes the reality is stranger than fiction and sometimes fiction helps to shed some philosophical light on reality. Both are entwined, influencing each other and the author placing one word after the other. Lauren Beukes is one such author that has the imagination and the journalistic chops to craft both stories of marauding art installations and true crime.

Fact and fiction intermingle within Lauren Beukes newest collection. Slipping collects together essays and short fiction that highlight the varied aspects of the author’s career. Her imagination is on full display with the titular story of biologically enhanced athletes while essays like “Adventures in Journalism” showcase stories a little closer to our present time. The short fiction in this collection can be bitingly satirical while some of the essays will make you take a harder look at the world around you.

Lauren Beukes is a South African novelist, journalist, and short fiction writer. She may be best known for her novels Zoo City, The Shining Girls, and Broken Monsters. Her newest collection Slipping will be available on November 29th from Tachyon Publications.

With all the advancements in medical tech, do you think it’s inevitable that we may have enhanced athletes?

I do, but as in the title story, I’m not sure how mainstream the acceptance will be.

In “Confirm/Ignore,” you highlight the ephemeral nature of identity on the Internet. How do you think it has changed human interaction?

It’s based on a real incident of a Facebook imposter in Cape Town who was virtual friends with lots of people in the music scene, but no one had actually met her. The Internet allows us to curate our lives, or invent them entirely. We’re our own spin machines, which often means presenting a false front, but I’ve also found that Twitter in particular has let me be my most authentic, weird, silly self and connect with other like-minded people. The nature of it’s changed, alas, but some of my finest real-world friends were Twitter friends first. 

Voice plays an important role in many of your stories. How do you find or develop a voice for a particular story?

This is going to be one of those very annoying answers. It just . . . comes out that way. The voice drives the story. It’s in the character—what they’re thinking, what they’ve been through, what they’re interested in.

How has your background in filmmaking and animation influenced your writing?

Writing for kids’ animation means that I’ve had to learn to think very visually, to write scenes in a way that’s very clear, visually, and tonally, because some poor bastard has to draw it (some poor bastard, often sitting two desks over from me and certainly within spitball range). In an 11 minute or 24 minute show, you don’t have time to mess around, you want to get into the scene and out of it as fast as possible, you want to only show the interesting stuff that drives character or plot and you have to make every line of dialogue really count, to reveal something about the people or the world or the story. It’s definitely where I get my pacing from.

What do you find appealing about writing and reading short fiction?

Reading short fiction is a pleasure, because you can dip in and out—although really it’s deep, intense immersion for brief periods, like diving into ice water. I really got into short stories when I was living in New York in 2000, because they were perfect for the rattling spaces between subway stops. Writing short fiction is lovely because it’s not a novel. It will all be over relatively soon. Although it always takes me longer than I think it will because of the demands of the form. That water better be super-icy, that dip in the immersion tank better be compelling.

You’ve lived in quite a few places. Do you find your writing is influenced by where you live?

I’ll always be a South African author, that’s my aesthetic, my interests, my themes—social justice, the fracture points of society, the ghosts of history, the psycho-geographies, violence, segregation, the possibility of redemption, but how hard that is to fight for. I’ll bring that with me to other places, look at them through that lens.

There are some dark scenes and themes in your work. Have you ever frightened yourself with something you’ve written?

No. Because I know it’s imaginary. I have upset myself writing from Harper or Clayton’s perspectives, because I write in close third person or first person, so it’s very intimate. Writing is expanding parts of yourself, growing a tree from a tiny seed within yourself. It’s horrible to confront that I have some shard of their cruelty and cynicism or madness inside me, enough to be able to write about it. But that’s the human condition. We are capable of all the horror and all the good in the world, all of us, in the right circumstances.

What made you decide to include essays and non-fiction in this collection?

I was a journalist for ten years before I was a novelist. It’s part of who I am and it would have been weird to leave it out. I wish I had included more, actually.

How has your time as a journalist influenced your writing?

It was a back-stage pass to the world, a license to be nosy and have amazing conversations with people I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise, from a lisping dominatrix to a wannabe teenage vampire, HIV+ beauty queens, activists and metro cops patrolling the ganglands, to ordinary people. Transcribing hours of interview tapes also taught me an ear for dialogue, how real people speak and speak differently. And because I was freelance, and had to write a story on “rehab safaris” this week and “best small conference venues in Cape Town,” the next, it taught me to be flexible, to play with style.

“All The Pretty Corpses” is a frank look at a real world murder close to you. Was writing this essay a way of organizing your own thoughts, an attempt at making sense of the event?

It comes out of a series of blog posts I wrote at the time of Thomo’s death in 2010 to help raise money for her funeral (we raised R10 000 in 24 hours from amazing strangers on the Internet) and then to try and process the horror of the injustice that the police botched the case, that the man who did this to her, who stabbed her and poured boiling water over her head and left her locked in a shack, got off free. It took her three months to die, in-and-out-of-hospital, in agony and trauma. It shattered my faith in the fairytale of justice I’d fundamentally believed in up until that moment in the prosecutor’s office, when he said he couldn’t take this to trial, holding up one miserable sheet of paper that represented the entirety of the investigation—her testimony. He said, she said, but she was dead. It was very hard to write about; it still upsets me. I feel like I failed the family, that maybe I could have done more, and I know, logically, that’s not true, but it sits in me, regardless. At least in fiction, you can have justice.

“Dear Mariana” uses some interesting formatting choices to enhance the story. What inspired this?

Haha. I was house-sitting a friend’s apartment in Brooklyn and she had an electric typewriter. I wrote the story that night on the typewriter, so most of those formatting errors are genuine, although the sentiment wasn’t mine and I definitely didn’t go through her stuff, or do any of the other things the narrator does in Mariana’s apartment.

What was the one piece of writing advice you’ve been given that has stuck with you throughout your career?

Finish the damn book, nothing else matters. That’s my paraphrasing of the advice I’ve heard. I can’t remember where I heard it first. Also: Jenefer Shute told me “a writer writes.” I’d much rather a writer just did cool research trips and got to tell engaging anecdotes and have amazing conversations with interesting people—but there’s that annoying part where you actually have to staple-gun your butt to the chair and write the words and make them work.

What’s the next project you’re working on?

A new novel, due out in 2018, a TV show pitch, some new comic ideas with Dale Halvorsen (my evil genius co-writer on Vertigo’s Survivor’s Club—about what if the ’80s horror movies were real and where are those kids today).

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
On Saying No

Sarah Pinsker

When Clarkesworld asked for this essay, I said yes. I almost always say yes. It’s a longstanding habit, born of my hungriest days when I was making music full time. It led to some ridiculous itineraries, say Dallas, TX to Superior, WI in a day, because they were good gigs and they paid well, and what if I offered a different date and they changed their minds before the contracts were signed? I carried that into writing as well, throwing myself at every opportunity offered. I have been known to yes myself into total exhaustion and over-commitment.

It is with the wisdom of my years that I come to you saying there is value in saying no. Learning to say “no” or even a conditional yes can protect your time, your sanity, and even your brand, such as it is at the beginning of your career. Every single person in this field has other obligations and passions, whether those are jobs or hobbies or families. Those things are valuable and necessary to being a human in this world, but they all take time. Trying to cram in actual minutes to write—the physical act that allows us to call ourselves authors—can be tricky. All of the little things that make up a writing career but aren’t actual words-in-document can easily run away with the day.

Time isn’t the only thing in need of protection. When you’re new to the field, every invitation feels like a sign that you’ve made it. External validation can be hard to come by, so it’s easy to agree to do things that may not be beneficial in the long run. I think most of us learn too late that both “no” and “yes, if . . . ” are valid responses to an invitation.

Here are some things you can say no to:

Bad Contracts

Walking away from a sale sucks. Writing an email to negotiate a contract clause always makes my stomach lurch. I’m not a lawyer, but I can recognize a rights grab. How can a [magazine, publisher, anthology] that boasts such illustrious authors have a clause that awful in their contract? The simple answer is that those illustrious authors don’t all sign the same contract. They negotiate. You can negotiate too. And if it doesn’t work, you can walk away. If one editor saw potential in your story, another will too.

Bad Edits

You’ve signed the contract! You’ve gotten the copy edits! And . . . you don’t agree with them. It’s easy to think of the editors as all-knowing experts, but you are the expert on your story. Listen, because they might actually be right. Then muster the courage to tell them if you think they’ve misinterpreted something, or if you really love a line the way it stands. If they want something that truly compromises your story, you can still say no.

Submission Calls and Anthology Invitations

See also: a call for submissions to a magazine or anthology that doesn’t pay, with exceptions for charity anthologies you believe in; an invitation to an anthology that doesn’t pay well; an invitation to an anthology with a hideous contract (see above); a brand-new magazine run by editors whose names you don’t recognize.

This may not be a personal invitation, but when you’re just starting out, every submission call feels like a beacon. A chance to get published! A built-in story prompt! My advice would be to save your stories for the projects that offer fair payment. Save your stories for the projects led by people with a track record in the field. Save your stories for projects and publishers and editors you believe in.

An anthology that is badly conceived or badly designed will sink like a stone. Worse yet, if there’s no reversion clause, it may tie up your story for years. If you write a story about an anthropomorphic paperclip for an anthology of pirate paperclip stories and they don’t take it, your story will be one of hundreds of anthropomorphic paperclip stories glutting the market for years afterward.

Con Panels

Getting invited onto programming for the first time can be an exciting step in your SF career. Then you get your list of panels and your heart drops. You’ve been put on a panel you know nothing about, or you’ve been put on six panels in a row, with no lunch break. You’re the only queer person on a panel about queer characters. You’re an author of color and you’ve only been given diversity panels. You’ve been asked to moderate a panel and recognize that one of the panelists is a known derailer, mansplainer, or rejecter of the panel’s central conceit. You read the panel description and your first thought is “Well, that’s going to be a disaster.”

It has taken me ages to learn this lesson, and in truth I’m not sure I’m done learning it, but it’s okay to push back. The people creating programming for a con don’t always know everyone they’re trying to program. They may have their own blind spots. You are allowed to say that they’ve given you too many panels, and suggest which one to take you off of. You are allowed to bow out of diversity panels; it’s not your responsibility to educate anybody. You are allowed to point out if a panelist is problematic on a given topic, or to suggest someone in that person’s place. You are allowed to suggest changes to a panel description or title. You are allowed to make your participation contingent upon changes, if you are prepared to walk away.

The Agent in Your Email

You look at the email. You look at it again. It’s from a real live agent, and they are writing to you. To you. No joke. Take a deep breath. Ask yourself: Is this somebody you want to work with? Are they with a reputable agency? Do they represent anybody you know? Were they on your list? Is there any evidence they are just spamming authors, or do they actually seem to know you or your work? Take time to do your homework. It’s great to feel wanted, but getting locked into a relationship with someone who does not have your interests at heart is worse than having no agent. 

Blurbs and Reviews

This is an interesting one. Who doesn’t love free books? On the other hand, is this a book you want to read? Do you have time to read it? Will you feel any pressure to give it a positive review because it was sent to you for free? Will you feel bad giving it a bad review because the author is part of your community?

It’s okay to say no if you don’t have time. It’s okay to say no if you don’t think you’re the right reviewer for the book. Same goes for blurbs. Every review and blurb will take time from your fiction writing. Is it a book you’ll be glad you read? Do you have time to do it justice? Are you willing to lend your name to that project? They’re tough questions, especially when the person asking is a friend.

Volunteering

I am the last person in the world who should lecture anyone on this. I’m a member of SFWA’s Board of Directors. My brain still does the thing where it says, “WHAT? YOU REALLY WANT ME?”

Volunteering is wonderful and everyone should do it. It can teach you slush reading or con running or sound tech or any number of things. It gives you opportunities to give back to the community. Still, you won’t do anyone any favors if you’re stretched too thin. Pick a few things you really want to do, and make sure you protect your writing time.

Crowdfunding Rewards

It’s flattering to be asked to contribute a donor reward. Your name is big enough to be an incentive! You get to help make something happen! If the project is one you support, there is absolutely nothing wrong with donating something for the cause. That said, ask yourself again how much of your writing time it will take up, and offer a reward accordingly. For example, I know for myself that critiques take me a lot of time. I’m not a fast reader. For that reason, I tend not to offer critiques anymore. I’ve seen authors offer all kinds of incentives: critiques, signed books, drawings, dinners. Choose the reward that you can afford to give.

Critique-exchanges and Critique Groups

Time, time, time. I love giving and receiving critiques, and I think they make me a better writer. At one point, I had four different critique groups I was taking part in. I felt like all I was ever doing was reading works in progress. All the group members were wonderful writers and people I enjoyed spending time with, so it had nothing to do with them, but there’s a certain point where you’re no longer helping yourself. It’s okay to step back or take a breather. It’s also okay to prioritize critique partners who challenge you to be a better writer.

People

This is a tricky one. Science fiction is a small community full of smaller sub-communities. It exists in a strange blur of friend-colleagues, some of whom turn into real friends, blurring the lines further. It’s okay to refuse a friend request on Facebook if you only friend people you know. It’s okay to refuse requests for help from strangers. It’s okay to choose not to hang out with somebody who makes you uncomfortable.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I could probably write a whole essay on any one of the subheadings. The bottom line is that a career is built on both the things you do and the things you choose not to do. Like many things in life, you’ll get absolutely no credit for the invisible choices. Nobody will know which novels you didn’t blurb, or which anthologies almost included your story. Some choices will hurt, like when the aforementioned novel or anthology becomes a bestseller and you could have been part of it. Some choices may hurt other people.

Still, in order to make the choices that protect your time, your rights, and your sanity, I recommend learning how to use the word “no.”

I’m still practicing.

About the Author

Sarah Pinsker is the author of the 2015 Nebula Award winning novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road.” Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind” was the 2014 Sturgeon Award winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Uncanny, among others, and numerous anthologies. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Galician. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland with her wife and dog.

Editor’s Desk:
Your Mission

Neil Clarke

What put you on the path to being science fiction reader? For me, it was the gift of a few books from my cousin at age twelve. Up until then, my experience with science fiction was exclusively TV and movies. I had no idea what lay ahead or where that path would take me. Even through my thirties, the thought of being an active part of this field was a foreign concept.

I discovered just how much of a pay-it-forward mindset was ingrained into the editors and publishers with whom I talked. Everyone was more than happy to give their advice, fine with it being ignored, and a bit “oh you poor soul, welcome to the club.” I’ve tried to do the same with the hundreds of editors and authors that have approached me via email or at cons. It just seemed like a tradition worth keeping.

I don’t often talk about it, but my day job—for now—is in academia. I’ve worked in technology there for over twenty-seven years and for the bulk of that time, I’ve been on the front lines of integrating technology into the curriculum. In that role, I’ve worked closely with teachers and professors across a wide range of disciplines and at every grade level from pre-K on up. When you think about it, that community is also very much pay-it-forward. If you’ve ever returned to your old school or alma mater and thanked one of them for something they did that had an impact on you, you know that’s true. In that respect, they also take a very long-term view. Some of that has certainly rubbed off on me.

When my cousin gave me those books, I doubt he had any clue the impact it would have on my life. He thought I’d like them and that was enough. The end result is simply icing on the cake, a cake that wouldn’t exist without that initial effort. Now how about that person who put you on your SF path?

Okay, Neil, where are you going with this?

It’s November, which means Thanksgiving is almost upon us here in the U.S. As a means of giving thanks to those that put us on our course, I suggest that we all pay-it-forward. Last year, I came across donorschoose.org. Think of it like Kickstarter for the classroom. A teacher posts what they would like to do in their classroom and people like us donate money to help make it happen.

When I’m there, I like to support projects that include science fiction literature in middle school—the age I started at—in high poverty areas. If it has the long term result of bringing some of these kids into the field, that would be that aforementioned icing. I’m hoping they’ll enjoy reading these books with a teacher that clearly cares about them. I’m hoping it makes them happy.

So, this Thanksgiving, join me and go to donorschoose.org. Find some kids to make happy in honor of the person who did the same for you. You’re mission, should you choose to accept it, is to pay-it-forward.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a four-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Best Science Fiction of the Year anthology series was published by Night Shade Books in June. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art:
Kasai

Joseph Biwald

About the Artist

Joseph Biwald is an Associate Artist with the Visual Design team at Bungie and an aspiring concept artist.