Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction

by Nalo Hopkinson

  Enough intelligence for what came next.

  The room had been designed to minimize the chance of injury. There was the bed, though, one of its edges built into the east wall.

  That was enough.

  The speed with which she moved was breathtaking. Kim and Andrew never saw it coming. Their child darted beneath the foot of the bed like a cockroach escaping the light, scrambled along the floor, re-emerged with her cable wrapped around the bed’s leg. Hardly any slack in that line at all, now. Her mother moved then, finally, arms outstretched, confused and still unsuspecting—

  “Jeannie—”

  —while Jean braced her feet against the edge of the bed and pushed.

  Three times she did it. Three tries, head whipped back against the leash, scalp splitting, the cable ripping from her head in spastic, bloody, bone-cracking increments, blood gushing to the floor, hair and flesh and bone and machinery following close behind. Three times, despite obvious and increasing agony. Each time more determined than before.

  And Stavros could only sit and watch, simultaneously stunned and unsurprised by that sheer ferocity. Not bad for a bleeding little lump. Barely even an animal…

  It had taken almost twenty seconds overall. Odd that neither parent had tried to stop it. Maybe it was the absolute unexpected shock of it. Maybe Kim and Andrew Goravec, taken so utterly aback, hadn’t had time to think.

  Then again, maybe they’d had all the time they’d needed.

  Now Andrew Goravec stood dumbly near the centre of the room, blinking bloody runnels from his eyes. An obscene rainshadow persisted on the wall behind him, white and spotless; the rest of the surface was crimson. Kim Goravec screamed at the ceiling, a bloody marionette collapsed in her arms. Its strings — string, rather, for a single strand of fiberop carries much more than the required bandwidth — lay on the floor like a gory boomslang, gobbets of flesh and hair quivering at one end.

  Jean was back off the leash, according to the panel. Literally now as well as metaphorically. She wasn’t talking to Stavros, though. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was catatonic. He didn’t know which to hope for.

  But either way, Jean didn’t live over there anymore. All she’d left behind were the echoes and aftermath of a bloody, imperfect death. Contamination, really; the scene of some domestic crime. Stavros cut the links to the room, neatly excising the Goravecs and their slaughterhouse from his life.

  He’d send a memo. Some local Terracon lackey could handle the cleanup.

  The word peace floated through his mind, but he had no place to put it. He focused on a portrait of Jean, taken when she’d been eight months old. She’d been smiling; a happy and toothless baby smile, still all innocence and wonder.

  There’s a way, that infant puppet seemed to say. We can do anything, and nobody has to know—

  The Goravecs had just lost their child. Even if they’d wanted the body repaired, the mind reconnected, they wouldn’t get their way. Terracon had made good on all legal obligations, and hell — even normal children commit suicide now and then.

  Just as well, really. The Goravecs weren’t fit to raise a hamster, let alone a beautiful girl with a four-digit IQ. But Jean — the real Jean, not that bloody broken pile of flesh and bone — she wasn’t easy or cheap to keep alive, and there would be pressure to free up the processor space once the word got out.

  Jean had never got the hang of that particular part of the real world. Contract law. Economics. It was all too arcane and absurd even for her flexible definition of reality. But that was what was going to kill her now, assuming that the mind had survived the trauma of the body. The monster wouldn’t keep a program running if it didn’t have to.

  Of course, once Jean was off the leash she lived considerably faster than the real world. And bureaucracies … well, glacial applied sometimes, when they were in a hurry.

  Jean’s mind reflected precise simulations of real-world chromosomes, codes none-the-less real for having been built from electrons instead of carbon. She had her own kind of telomeres, which frayed. She had her own kind of synapses, which would wear out. Jean had been built to replace a human child, after all. And human children, eventually, age. They become adults, and then comes a day when they die.

  Jean would do all these things, faster than any.

  Stavros filed an incident report. He made quite sure to include a pair of facts that contradicted each other, and to leave three mandatory fields unfilled. The report would come back in a week or two, accompanied by demands for clarification. Then he would do it all again.

  Freed from her body, and with a healthy increase in her clock-cycle priority, Jean could live a hundred-fifty subjective years in a month or two of real time. And in that whole century and a half, she’d never have to experience another nightmare.

  Stavros smiled. It was time to see just what this baby could do, with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.

  He just hoped he’d be able to keep her tail-lights in view.

  From Fugue Phantasmagorical

  by Anthony MacDonald and Jason Mehmel

  Epilogue: Disembarkings.

  Hermes Trismegistus. Artist. Mystic. Priest. God.

  Though Hermes may have been granted his power by humanity, he is now a force of his own. The current of his idea, of the existence of one such as he, swept me into this calm river, and I can’t take full credit for the idea, for the tour. I tried taking the work one way, but it pushed itself into this path, this exploration, and who was I to argue with a god? We, your lowly tour guides, to argue with the captain of our ship?

  Hermes is all of these things, and none. He does not exist, and exists for our believing in him.

  The boat slows. The bow cuts into the bank, kicking up sediment. Hermes steps out of the boat with us, and we all begin to disperse. Our collective cruise is at an end.

  Go on, get your feet wet. And hang on to your boarding ticket. It’s good for countless returns, an infinity of remembered travels.

  He was all of these things.

  Mirrors

  by René Beaulieu

  translated by Sheryl Curtis

  Thomas lets the last shovelful of dirt fall to the ground and sits down, exhausted. He looks at the twenty-two perfectly aligned graves, black earth standing out in sharp contrast against the yellowish, desiccated ground of the small hill. In actual fact, there are only sixteen real graves. The others are purely symbolic. Too little had remained of the rest of the crew to make digging holes worth the effort. And as for Evans … he still hasn’t been able to screw up the courage to go and get him. They’re not even sure they’ll be able to find the capsule again. Thomas looks up at the enormous red sun, high in the sky, crushing them, casting its dull, disgusting blue-green light over everything. His eyelids blink and tears run down his cheeks. His eyes hurt. You can’t even look straight at the sun. You can’t even look at the sky. This new Eden was a real beauty!

  “Finished?”

  Nancy is sitting on the ground, her shovel at her side, panting in the dry, thin atmosphere, eyes red, face drawn, hair tangled, and face covered with sweat and dust. The gravity here is too strong; the slightest effort exhausts them both.

  He stands up, legs trembling. They had to carry the bodies up here one by one, to this little plateau, where the dirt is crumbly and loose enough for an iron shovel to penetrate. Down below, it’s as hard as cement under a layer of loose stones. Then they had to dig the graves, place the bodies in them, and cover them up. An utterly exhausting day, all in all.

  “I’ll set up the plate and then we’ll go back to the craft.”

  He takes the last dented canteen plate, on which they had engraved the name, and pushes it painfully into the dirt with a sort of cold rage, a desperate determination. Twenty-two plates, twenty-two names.

  Linda Adjani’. —Twenty-five ye
ars old, maybe — a communications technician. A tiny woman with brown hair, laughing eyes and an easy smile. Her head had been crushed by a computer panel. The same had almost happened to them as well.

  They had just left the main section of the spaceship in a parking orbit and, as planned, the large shuttle was slowly making its way down, using its anti-gravs, leaving behind the colossal ship and the immense nozzles of its tachyon machines. Nancy and he were in their cabin, quietly stretched out in their respective bunks, waiting for the landing, when the alarm sounded. Simultaneously, they had heard Jeff’s voice ordering the evacuation and felt the shuttle suddenly fall, rushing toward the surface. They raced into the corridor, literally scaling the hall above them, grabbing anything they could, as the shuttle continued to lose its seating and the floor rapidly dipped at an alarming angle. Finally, they managed to reach a hatch and both of them crammed tightly into the same evacuation tube. Thomas had pushed the ejection button and there was an abrupt jolt. Then, relying on the altimeter, Thomas had activated the large parachute. They descended slowly in silence. It had taken them more than a week, wandering under the relentless sun at the start of the dry season, subsisting on emergency rations from the escape capsule, before they detected a large plume of black smoke. Then, an exhausting days’ walk and they reached the wreckage. On the way, they found another pod. Crushed, twisted, bent all out of shape by the crash, although they were supposed to be almost indestructible. Inside, Evans. Torn limb from limb. Not a pretty sight. His blood had splattered, leaving colourful stains on all of the walls, right up to the ceiling. The effect was almost joyous, compared to the gloomy grey of the steel panels. He appeared to be the only other crew member who had managed to reach a tube. But his parachute hadn’t opened…

  The wreckage.

  It had shattered strangely and lay broken in three distinct segments. The front was crushed, obliterated, a mass of compressed metal. The rear, containing the anti-gravs, the energy cells and some of the holds, had exploded, burned and lay scattered about. The mid-section, miraculously, was intact. Debris covered a three-kilometre radius; fragments of metal or compound materials of all sizes, smoking, driven into unfamiliar soil ploughed for the very first time, a sinister field of desolation.

  Nancy had collapsed into the dust and wept for a long time. Later, Thomas often wondered why he hadn’t done the same. Probably, he was still deeper in shock than she was, on automatic pilot, to some extent, under the control of someone who was not himself … not anyone. During the initial days an unidentifiable “personality” had taken control of his being, his thoughts, ensuring his survival through all the chaos and despair. And then later, he had collapsed as well. Briefly but spectacularly. A nice little trip into autism that had lasted an entire day. A brief, terrible journey into weakness. Fortunately for both of them, Nancy had been strong enough for the two of them and had taken charge of things. That morning, Nancy had finally stood up, tears exhausted. Then, knowing full well that it was pointless, they went down to search through the debris … that had been five days ago.

  He leans down and helps Nancy up. Then they both climb down into the valley, towards the wreckage. She turns to him, “Do you really think we’ll make it, that we can survive? Do you really think we’ll get things together and hang on until the others arrive?” She is calm now, looking him straight in the eyes. She has overcome her initial shock.

  He sighs. “I don’t know. I’ve been asking myself the same question since we found the wreckage. It all depends on us, on our morale. We have what it takes, I think. The vital minimum, in any case. With a lot of hard work … if we can keep our courage up…”

  They remain silent for a moment. Mentally, Thomas draws up a quick checklist. They can at least salvage as much as possible. They have enough supplies and water for eight months, probably more. Enough to make it through to the rainy season, in any case. The animals were all dead, the embryos lost. But he had managed to save certain plants and most of the seeds were still intact. And something would surely manage to take in this earth. He kicks the ground with his heel, raising a small red dust cloud that slowly falls back. Rice, maybe. At least during the rainy season. If only the damned climate had been better. Two implacable seasons, equally hot, ten months of rain followed by ten months of drought. And between the two, four weeks of furious wind. If they had landed any closer to one of the poles…. There at least, it was relatively temperate. And even though local flora and fauna were rare, at least they existed. They’d manage to grub out something.

  They reach the floor of the valley.

  In terms of equipment, the picture is much less rosy. Everything has either been destroyed or is unusable: energy cells, tractors, jeeps, and communication systems. Most of the equipment is nothing more than piles of useless scrap. None of the larger computers have survived; just a few small specialized gizmos with limited functions and capacities. Nancy thinks they may be able to use a few of the solar panels that have remained intact. But neither of them knows much about it and Thomas thinks it would be better not to rely on something that could blow up in their faces without warning at a critical time, something they would most likely be unable to repair.

  Oh, there’s just so much to do! They have to pick a site, build a dwelling — on one of the hills, not too close to the wreckage. That would be better for their morale. Then the crops Thomas wants to try to grow — they need a reservoir for water, greenhouses, a barn. But first of all, they have to salvage everything they can from the ship, even things that might appear useless at the beginning. With all this work, there won’t be time for thinking too much, for feeling sorry for themselves, and for getting down in the dumps. Thirty years! Thirty years before the others — the second expedition — will join them!

  “I’m ashamed, you know.”

  Astounded, he turns to look at her.

  “Why?”

  “In our situation, a botanist can be of some use, whereas a geologist…”

  Oh no. This is serious. He stops and grabs her roughly by the shoulders.

  “Listen to me, now! ‘In our situation,’ as you said, if it was only the botanist who had survived, without the geologist, the botanist would soon have given up all hope and most likely would have thrown himself over a cliff. Believe me.”

  He smiles. She does likewise.

  “So … feeling better?”

  “It was stupid.”

  “No, pretty human.”

  She hugs him and they go back to walking. He places his arm around Nancy’s shoulders as they walk around the remnants of a blackened generator, hidden behind the wreck.

  “Do you know what we could eat tonight?”

  But, as he chats with her, part of him realizes just how much truth there was in his words. He would have jumped over a cliff. And that frightens him terribly. His hand tenses on Nancy’s shoulder, making sure she really is there beside him.

  Blood.

  Blood everywhere.

  On the floor, the sheets, the sleeping pad and his clothes, his arms, his hands, and in Nancy’s blond hair, hair that he caresses desperately, streaking it red. His hands move from her hair to the almost white face with the closed eyes.

  “Nancy, Nancy,” he moans.

  Outside the wind howls and strikes the walls of the house, sand spraying noisily against the thick plastic of the windows and the dust clouds, the infernal red light burying everything in obscurity.

  “I’ve tried, Nancy. I’ve tried everything.”

  Their life, their survival, rather, had gradually taken shape over the past five years. They had salvaged, repaired, built and set themselves up. Finally, everything was livable. Hard and difficult, but livable, once they had made it through the first few months. They got used to it. You can get used to anything. Sometimes, they even managed to find this world beautiful. Quiet, calm, silent, restful. Terrible as well of course, bu
t consistent in her moods.

  Yes, this world could be almost beautiful. During the dry season, for example, when the dawn cool arrived with the small east wind, and the sun had been chased off by the two large red moons and stars, countless stars of all colours could be seen through the slightly thin air, more brilliant and more numerous than on Earth.

  And during the windy season as well, when the deep purring voice of the winds, with their strength, their majesty, occasionally, for brief periods, calmed to a whisper then grew back to clamouring, growling, roaring. Then the spirals of red dust, like slender dancers in some strange ballet, rose and twirled in the valley below, reaching up to lick the hills with scarlet foam, like waves in the sea slowly falling back to bury the carcass of the wreck a little deeper.

  But the calm and the security they found brought with them long, silent nights, interminable nights despite the fatigue caused by the day’s work. And sometimes, Nancy’s tears, choked back, smothered in a pillow, in the dark. He did nothing, said nothing. He took her in his arms, as he had done so often those first days. He had not made love to her because he knew it would not have been enough. It would have been a mild analgesic for her pain, a small, ephemeral euphoria. He needed something more lasting, more concrete, more tangible. Something vitally permanent. He needed something that would call to her constantly, that would demand all of her attention, that would monopolize her. Something she needed. Something that needed her. He thought he had understood. He thought he had found the solution.

  Finally, they talked about it.

  She had thought about it, too. And, yes, she wanted to. But their situation, their life was so precarious. Was it wise? Maybe they should wait a while. Thinking that it was for the better, he patiently set aside her objections, one by one. They had a full complement of nursing equipment and facilities that had been left virtually intact by the catastrophe. Hadn’t he studied medicine for a year? He had insisted and finally won her over. They had decided.