by C. L. Kagmi
“What did they teach you about genetic modification,” Van Aalst asks, “at your university on Earth?”
Chinwe glances around at the other adaptives hanging like angels in the rafters, carrying on secret conversations with each other in hushed tones.
“They taught that it was—dangerous. Certain cosmetic therapies are common among the wealthy now, and gene therapy to cure diseases is very common. Genetic modification of crops is good. But new treatments for humans take a long time to be approved. They have to be deemed very safe. Or bad things can happen.”
“What sorts of bad things?”
“Deaths. Three of them, in the past century. Runaway immune responses. Deemed unacceptable. Research must not introduce risk to those who are not already in danger.”
Van Aalst nods sagely, and Chinwe can feel her cheeks burning. This earthly attitude is directly contradictory to the trailblazing attitude of Orún, and under the pressure of Van Aalst’s gaze Chinwe feels almost ashamed to support the former.
“How long,” Van Aalst asks, “to get a new treatment to market, on Earth?”
Chinwe dredges that information up, from a memory of another world.
“Five years. Average. Three or four rounds of clinical trials with small groups. Exhaustive analysis to confirm no added risk. One vaccine—they said it prevented thousands from contracting illness, but sixteen people had neurological side effects so its approval was revoked.”
Van Aalst pushes off the ground slightly, seeming at once to become playful and to gain imposing height.
“So,” she says, “on Earth, they introduce new and beneficial mutations at a snail’s pace. And—here’s the key—only reactively. They make the body work the way it’s supposed to. The way it used to. Not the way it could, if they scrapped the old design and their old assumptions.”
Van Aalst reaches up, seizes an invisible wire above her head, and pirouettes around it in a backflip. Red-white sashes billow and expose her bare, dark body below the waist before she launches herself horizontally and sails across half the chamber.
“Fly with me!” she commands.
The hands-on lesson is instructive; you cannot soar in Earth gravity.
They are breaking for a meal in the Blue Room when the emissary comes for her.
The Blue Room—home of the Intentionals, who are pure, cold intellect to the Adaptives’ exuberant fire—is darker than the Adaptives’ home. The walls are black but for geometric illustrations in blazing blue. Chinwe recognizes a few of them—one is an illustration of the Golden Ratio, intersecting, she thinks, with an illustration of the paths of the planets around the Sun.
The meal is unusual, even for Orún. It’s mostly protein refined from kelp and yeast—that’s not unusual—but it’s flavored and colored in bizarre ways. One of Chinwe’s entrees is radiating its own blue light.
Her intellect knows that means it was fresh-harvested from a plant imbued with the genes of bioluminescent jellyfish, but her emotions refuse to see it as anything other than radioactive—or maybe heavenly.
A previously hidden door opens in a wall near the dining supplicants. “Chinwe Ondongo,” a man asks, peering in, “would you please come with me?”
Her fear at having sighted Van Aalst has cooled by now, and she does not think this overly strange—Orún’s workings are not well spelled-out in any way that a newcomer can understand, and with each newcomer on their own unique development path, it is not wholly unusual for individuals to be summoned elsewhere without warning. Perhaps it’s her Needs teacher, or perhaps the kelp team is short today after all.
Chinwe rises and walks. She’s half-nervous that she is in trouble for skipping her portion of today's aquaculture rotation—she normally loves kicking through the depths of the ocean-in-space, but today was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up. And the teams usually have a bit of “flex” room which can be made up later in the week.
But soon her spine begins to tingle. The door that is held open for her seems to open onto nothing. Black space—a floor, clearly, because her escort is standing on it, but her eyes perceive only black. Police mode resurging, she makes note of his features the way you would a suspect’s—mostly African, perhaps one European grandparent, dreadlocks, Caribbean origin by the way he walks and speaks.
He regards her with imperious grace, odd for Orún but less odd for the Intentionals’ corner of it. He gestures her into the blackness impatiently, and she ignores her officers’ instinct not to follow the strange man into the dark alley.
“Where are we going?” Chinwe asks with the obedient curiosity of a good student. Against her will, she glances back at the pool of blue light retreating behind the closing door.
“You do want to meet Nwosu, don’t you?”
Suddenly there is ice in Chinwe’s veins.
Meet Adele Nwosu? She’s not sure if this is a supreme honor being offered to a precocious student, or a death sentence for a spy.
Images of Nwosu dance before Chinwe’s eyes, mostly drawn from decades’-old holos made before the woman disappeared. She lives in Chinwe’s mind as an elegant young woman in lavender silk—a visionary, a mystic, an entrepreneur—who disappeared amid allegations that she had charmed a series of rich men into supporting illegal human genetic experimentation.
Nwosu had been a dock worker in Lagos herself to start, the daughter of two farmers who moved to the slums to give her a better education. The education had taken, even if conventional success hadn’t. Eventually she had met a businessman on a layover who had taken her to Belgrade to meet his investor friends.
Adele Nwosu had been a beautiful and charismatic thirty-something before her disappearance. She’d have to be middle-aged now.
And she was here. That alone filled in a huge blank in the LAPD’s knowledge. Chinwe thinks of the cruiser force, four days out, coming to extract her and evacuate Orún.
“Adele Nwosu? Why?”
“Hell if I know,” her escort responds eloquently. He is invisible now, ahead of her in the darkness. She feels her way with each step, fingers trailing along the wall to keep her going straight.
She realizes then that this is the deepest darkness she has seen since settling on Orún four months ago. It has to be intentional. Nothing grows here—no white or pink growing lights, no cracks for grass to sprout out of. The floor beneath her feet feels like polished stone.
Her guides’ footsteps stop, and a door begins to open. She sees that he is standing aside to admit her.
A soft pink-orange radiance pours in. It is not like the pink lights of night, not like anything Chinwe has seen since leaving—
Earth.
The door opens onto a garden, lush with plants with huge emerald leaves, delicate spring-like vines, and dark, swollen berries swaying in the breeze. The lighting is the color of dawn, and Chinwe catches glimpses of pink and violet between the leaves.
By the gravity, they’re still on the level of the inner sanctum—but this place clearly belongs to none of the four branches.
Only inches from her face, a brown hand pushes a curtain of leaves aside.
“Hello, Chinwe Contee. I have been watching you.”
Contee. Her real name. American name, LAPD name, FBI name. Nwosu knows. How long has she known?
Nwosu’s face has grown round with age, but she’s a young fifty-something, and she is smiling as she emerges from behind a thick curtain of hanging lilies.
She is the only person Chinwe has seen since on Orún who isn’t green.
Chinwe says nothing. There is nothing to say.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me.” Nwosu smiles, a crooked, mother’s smile.
“I’ve gotten good at hiding my surprise.”
Nwosu steps towards her, apparently unafraid. It strikes Chinwe that this is absurd—Nwosu is nude and clearly unarmed, older, and has probably been living in microgravity for decades. Chinwe could win in a fight easily—could kill Nwosu with her bare hands if it came to it.
Of course, it won’t come to it. This is Nwosu’s turf, no way off for four days. Chinwe wonders how the Skychildren would handle someone who tried to kill their founder. She has never heard of an attempted homicide on Orún.
“What are you going to do with me?” Chinwe asks.
“I am going to let you choose.”
Chinwe’s eyebrows go up, and she’s surprised to feel herself smiling. “You would place your people’s fate in my hands?”
“No,” Nwosu concedes. “Only your own.”
It’s death or allegiance, then. Allegiance: stay; or refuse, and die. She knows nobody gets off of Orún.
Does she dare to lie? Does she dare to tell the truth?
“The Belt Authority already knows where we are. They’re en route. Four days away. Kill me and add murder to the list of crimes you will face.”
Nwosu smiles, and Chinwe thinks suddenly of the girl who died in Javier’s care. “I will already face charges of murder if I return to Earth.”
Chinwe is silent at that. Considers springing, grappling her, trusting that Nwosu was too confident to have guards waiting in the thick foliage.
Adele taps her head and points at Chinwe. At Chinwe’s skull, she realizes. At the chip in her brain that her falsified medical records said was a stimulator for a motor cortex fried by bad heroin.
“How long have you known?” Chinwe asks.
“Only a day. Our sensor fields caught the signal you sent out last night. I have been thinking very hard about what to do with you since breakfast.”
Nwosu cannot possibly be offering her mercy.
That Orún still exists is a testament to Nwosu’s thoroughness in expunging elements who might betray them. Chinwe has learned in the course of her months here that Orún’s agents interact with dozens of Belt mining stations on a regular basis.
She knows from her FBI briefing that her agents, when captured, have a nasty habit of committing suicide rather than revealing any information about the asteroid.
And she knows from her catechism with Nwosu’s agents in Nigeria that no one is allowed to return to Earth after they have seen Orún.
“You cannot trust me,” Chinwe says. “You know that.”
Adele’s eyes rest on her with a heavy curiosity. “Do I?”
Chinwe feels the hairs on her arms stand up. She feels it now, the force of personality that has convinced dozens of people to give their wealth and freedom to make this dream a reality.
A bastion of human experimentation, beyond the reach of earthbound law enforcement, to advance the human race.
That most procedures worked best on those not long past puberty was a mere nuisance, which Adele explained by saying that she believed in children’s right to self-determination. The right to choose their own futures.
Chinwe wonders; the adaptive abilities of a child’s body are well-documented, but aren’t children also more vulnerable to indoctrination?
Chinwe hates this woman.
And loves what she has created.
Orún. To walk through the residences, to swim through the kelp. The Adaptives. The Intentionals. The fusion core between the stars.
“Why would you ever think that you could trust me?” she asks.
Nwosu is still studying her with unnerving intensity. “You chose to go to the Adaptives today. The day after you reported us, you broke your routine to go there. And we decoded your report; it’s incomplete. You could have told them so much more.”
Chinwe’s face is burning.
“You did your duty. Followed the letter of your law—and then you went to the Adaptives. You probably told yourself that you had to see them before they were destroyed. But you never really wanted to destroy them, did you? You complied with your superiors’ orders out of fear of them. You went to the Adaptives out of love.”
“What do you know about love?” Chinwe spits at her, remembering Akeem, the boy who died screaming.
“Quite a lot, actually,” Adele says softly. What other force do you think brought me here?”
Egomania. Messiah complex. Words from her briefings back on Earth buzz through her head. But what she finally says is: “Pride.”
Adele’s laugh is light and musical. She is moving toward Chinwe again. “Yes,” she laughs. “Pride. Pride caused me to become a fugitive. To forfeit any right to return to the world of my birth.”
“You do not love these people.”
“Who are you trying to convince, Chinwe? Yourself, or me?”
Chinwe wants to realize that talking will do no good. She does not want uncertainty. She wants a death sentence. Wants the certainty of Mama’s cruelty, wants to be gone when the agents arrive to tear this place apart—
She wants to at least want to go back to Los Angeles. She wants to be sad about the prospect that she may never return.
“I’m not going to give you what you think you deserve, Chinwe. I’m giving you a choice.”
Chinwe waits.
“If you stay, the chip comes out. Right now. I have attendants waiting in the back with sedatives. The chip is removed, no harm, no foul. And you have no way to contact Earth. We move Orún. Four days gives us time to get far away from here. You can stay. Or you can die.”
Chinwe feels like she is dying.
And she is not, she is not going to cry in front of Adele Nwosu.
Nwosu reaches for Chinwe. Chinwe lets Nwosu fold her in her arms.
Orún station glides away from the shade of the companion asteroid that has shielded it for so long. It is silent as nightfall, cloaked with fields and geometries poached from the secrets of the Earth’s best militaries. Its mass is void-black, visible as nothing but a brief eclipsing of the stars.
Sheanna
This is Sheanna’s first publication, following a gaggle of “we almost bought her” letters from major spec fic magazines. She’s a little bit old school, but I like her for that reason.
She remembers when the planets formed. The condensation of the atoms from primordial fire, the light of creation blooming into the darkness of the void. She remembers matter condensing, circling, falling inward until atoms fused, liberating the fires of creation stored within.
She remembers dust becoming—
This. A bird sings outside her window, its vocal cords a delicate mesh of atoms. The bird sings its lungs out, pumping molecules of air through a sharp tiny beak in an effort to attract a mate.
Mating. This is how animals propagate. But not gods.
It is strange to think that humans are animals like any others. She has taken their form for so long that she forgets how this shape originated. It is easy to think of them as godforms. So easy. Until one of them missteps.
The humans crave gods who look like them, even while reaching for something higher. They are not rational.
She finds she loves them anyway.
She loves especially the one named Marcus, who was once a child, who is now a young adult, who will flower through manhood and old age in what will seem a span of breaths to her. She’s seen it before. She will miss him when he dies.
This bothers her. The Divine should not feel attachment to temporary forms.
She looks across her throne room—a small space, made for intimacy and carved out of solid stone. Windows in the outward-facing wall have no need for glass in the equatorial spring. The openings permit her worship space to breathe freely of the sun and air. These are, after all, her kin.
The little bird hops off of the window ledge, descends in a fluttering swoop to the rug-strewn floor. The rugs are woven of the finest wool, dyed in every color, each rug a gift from a worshipper, each telling a story through symbol. Some of them are supplications; others simply praise. Some were complicated magic, weaving together carefully chosen symbolic elements towards the weaver’s goal. Others were artists’ achievements of pure aesthetics. The two have much in common.
The little bird hops around on one of them, a spell-rug of gold, magenta, and scarlet that had been woven by a farmer
hoping for a bountiful crop to bring him luck in love. Sheanna had made it happen, and he had grown old and died a happy man with many children. His rug lives on, a testament to his ambition.
Children are another thing that she will never understand. Divinities are born old; they do not need to be reared into it. What must it be like, she wonders, to have a growing brain?
Soon, her attendants will be out to beat the rugs and rearrange them; without such regular care, the rugs may grow damp and rot. She shifts restlessly in her golden chair, robes the same fine softness as the rugs, the same shining gold as the intricately worked throne itself.
And she realizes with distress that she is lonely. How can she be lonely here, amid the sun and air?
No sooner has she registered the feeling than an attendant comes; Anna, a black-haired, pale-skinned woman with a pleasant face and great dark eyes. Sheanna knows her past and secrets, as she knows all her people. The woman enters the sanctuary and makes the necessary prostrations; she lights fresh incense in the golden dishes at each side of Sheanna’s throne.
Sheanna favors her with a warm smile. But despite the warmth she feels for the woman, a coldness pervades the back of her mind.
Something is unsettled deep within her. Something is changing. And the Divine is not supposed to change.
She remembers the evolution of the animals. The mutation that allowed organic life to host intelligence: a long-awaited fruit of Earth. She did not guess the worth of that gem when she made it. Only the forces of time and randomness could make things that were new to her, and on Earth they had.
She remembers the little spaceships, metal-cased seeds scattered across the stars. Remembers the choice to split: one Divinity into many gods, to give the humans the companionship they so craved.
Sometimes still she speaks with her sister, dozens of light-years away, the mistress of an ice world where human culture takes shapes that Sheanna finds fascinating. Her sister’s is a world of cold, harsh beauty, of strange things the likes of which her own soil won’t permit.