The Long List Anthology Volume 4

by David Steffen

  Behind you someone starts crying.

  Eighth Colony fills with thunder as the starmages crash into it. People fall and scream. The glass splinters further. Miraculously it holds, or you think it holds, because none of you are dying now, nobody is being sucked out to space. Pressed against the straining glass, the body of a dragon blots out the stars, and it is oddly, strangely green. It glows. Something is happening, something so powerful it shreds through the part of you that’s all gift.

  If you call to Suqing now, would it help her? Or kill her?

  The green flares, it burns your eyes, it consumes the shapes of the battling starmages. You drop the gun and cover your face with a cry. A quake tears through your gift. All falls silent, and remains silent. Then the slow babble of the citizenry rises up, a confused clamor of voices and exclamation.

  Very slowly, you lower your hands. Beyond the cracked glass of the atrium lies only starfield. The starmages are gone. You allow yourself to breathe, but air burns through your lungs, and you too can taste vinegar in your throat as your stomach clenches into a small ball.

  The sounds of strife outside the atrium fade; all that’s left are indistinct shouting voices. The sound of boots, quick and heavy against metal. Two gunshots, very brisk, very loud, very close by. And then nothing.

  Your knees hurt and your calves are trembling. You should either sit down or keep patrolling, but you can’t bring yourself to do either.

  “You,” shouts one of the rebels, a dough-faced man with buzz-cut hair. You remember his name, you do, it’s Sung—was it Sung? He’s shouting instructions at you, his wide blunt fingers pointing, gesturing, but the words don’t register. They are only sounds, whistling through the heat in your ears.

  The main atrium doors groan as if they are being pulled apart by force, and a gasp goes up from the citizenry. As the doors rumble open, ten feet high and double-reinforced with steel, you tighten your grip on the gun, ignoring the pain in your broken fingers.

  The first person through is a young rebel, her clothes and hair marked by blood. “Rejoice,” she shouts, “we are victorious.”

  Cries go up from the other rebels, cheers and ululations. Your throat remains sandpaper-dry, your chest a metal vise. The citizenry around you stay likewise quiet and tight-lipped. A coup is a coup is a coup, and a bullet can kill you regardless of ideology.

  “Tian?”

  You see her through the gaps in the rebels flooding the room, through the confusion of the citizenry. Suqing, battered and exhausted, but alive. Alive.

  You run to her, feet getting caught on things as she stumbles towards you. Your shin connects with something, a person or their belongings, you’re not sure which, but you’ve flung your arms out already, you can’t move fast enough. Suqing smells of blood and sulphur and ozone, and her armor bruises your chest, but you don’t care. You don’t want to let her go.

  “You still live,” you say. “I was so afraid.”

  “My love.” The starmage kisses you on the mouth, in public, where everyone can see. Her embrace is raw force, teeth clashing against lips, arms lifting you off your feet. The world tilts and your stomach plummets in free fall—can you dare to hope that for once, something is going right?

  Suqing seizes your hands when she releases you to the world again. Her reddened cheeks shine with a mad sort of joy, the madness that comes with great struggle coming to fruition. “Come,” she says, squeezing your fingers. You ignore the pain. “There’s a meeting of the leaders, we must attend.”

  And so you leave the atrium and its multitudes behind, in the care of the ordinary rebels not invited to this high-level meeting. Suqing leads you through the death-lined guts of Eighth Colony, speckled with the corpses of Authority officers. The rebels jog between and around these mounds of flesh on the floor. Loose shoes, badges. Dark trickles of liquid smeared across metal in the pattern of boot prints. You breathe through your mouth and start keeping your line of sight above shoulder level.

  The blood splatters on the wall look like roses.

  “What now?” The question fills the space between Suqing and you.

  “No one knows,” she says. “This is just the beginning; our struggle is far from over. There will be days and months to come, and no one can predict what they will bring.”

  She stops in the middle of the carnage and turns to you, her smile wide and bright as you’ve ever seen. “But we’ll be together. Now nothing will come between us.”

  The path of the corridors closes in on the pump room where you first got entangled in all this. In front of it stands the shape of Quartermaster Lu.

  He has a gun in his hands.

  He raises the gun as you draw near.

  Suqing angles her body so that she and her mage suit stand between you and the gun muzzle. “What’s going on?”

  Quartermaster Lu’s face is sweat-slick but businesslike, calm as a storm cloud drifting across a summer’s courtyard. “The rebellion has succeeded. Now we must cut the last ties to the parasitic Authority.”

  This, you realise, with a thick muddy sinking of your stomach contents, means you. The gun is meant for you.

  Suqing’s brow knits. “You doubt my loyalty to the cause? Because of my family?” She still doesn’t understand.

  “It’s not you.” You stare Quartermaster Lu in the face, daring him to crack, to show even the slightest hint of remorse. “You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t understand.” Suqing takes a step backwards, moving closer to you. “She wouldn’t betray us!”

  “Not by choice. But she’s an ansible. She’s an open connection. Someone from the Authority could get through her, send things over. It’s too dangerous.”

  “That’s not how it works!” Suqing’s anger and frustration boils over. “I’ve learned the method, it has to be a two-way connection!”

  “We cannot take the risk. Ouyang, it cannot be helped.”

  Suqing’s hands tighten into fists. “Like Siyun’s death couldn’t be helped?”

  Your face burns, your breath burns. You hiss: “I joined the rebellion so my fate wouldn’t be decided by men like you.”

  The gun points to your face. “Think of the good of the cause,” says Quartermaster Lu, his tone flat. You clench your fists, ignoring the pain that flares through the broken one. Could you strike him, and then run?

  “Everything I’ve done has been for the good of the cause,” Suqing says. “Not anymore.”

  She grabs your hand, your swollen broken hand, and the pain keeps you anchored as her gift flares.

  The world distorts, goes grey, and then muffled. Time stops. Quartermaster Lu’s face is frozen in the half-expression rictus of a new word. The breath of the station’s air system morphs into a loud, constant drone.

  “What is this?” you ask, words shaky.

  “This is in-between.” Suqing breathes like she’s climbing mountains. “You access it with your gift. You don’t learn this as ansibles?”

  You learn nothing as ansibles. They teach you to be nothing but a conduit.

  Suqing pulls at you as you run. “We haven’t got much time,” she gasps. How long can she hold on? You follow after her in a daze, one foot in front of the other, unable to absorb how strange all this is. Your gift sings and sings, a mosquito chorus you’ve never been allowed to hear. In the grey half-light of the in-between the dead bodies littering the corridors seem more like part of the station than anything else. Woven into the fabric of the world.

  “What’s your plan?” you ask.

  “You run. Somewhere they cannot find you.”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  You end up on the docking platform, the struts familiar over your head. By this time Suqing’s face is red with exertion, and you crash out of the in-between into the sound and smell of the ordinary world. You catch her as she falls to her knees. “Are you alright?”

  Suqing pushes past the harsh breathing to get to
her feet. “I’m fine. Only tired.” She points you towards one of the lightspeed cocoons, marked red-on-grey, massive and industrial. A planetary supply cocoon, in transit. “We’ll take that one.”

  The cocoon seats one, just like the vehicle that brought you here years ago. You repeat, “Suqing, what about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. Quartermaster Lu needs me. He cannot dispose of me so easily. Not yet.” The cocoon’s navigation panel lights up under her touch, and she enters coordinates. “Please hurry,” she tells you. “Strap in.”

  You glance at the docking platform doors, wide open, and realise it’s only a matter of time before the rebels find you.

  You wanted to decide your own fate. You wanted to fight for it.

  “Take me to a place where there are wide and deep fields,” you say. “A place where grains grow plump and cherry blossom flourishes.”

  “There’s a sparsely populated planet, not a few light-years from here,” Suqing says. “Farmers, dependable folk. They won’t question too much.”

  The safety belts click across your chest and hips with a sober finality. “And you? Will you join me?”

  She comes to your side, forehead finding yours, limbs trembling, breaths ghosting against your skin. “Yes,” she whispers. “I will. I promise. I promise.”

  You don’t want to let her go.

  Suqing takes in a shaking breath, and then the rough steps of her melody surround you: 明月几时有? 把酒问青天…

  You sing, matching her tone. 人有悲欢离合、月有阴晴圆缺、 此事古难全。 Warmth floods around you, the connection that cannot be erased. A song, written in the long ages when your people lived on a single planet, shared the same moon. Yet the sentiment is unchanged.

  Light glows between the two of you. 但愿人长久、千里共婵娟。

  You kiss her face, her lips, her hair. You taste the blood on them. You taste the sweat, the fear, the desperation, the hope. What the future holds, you cannot say. But you have your song. It is all that you have, and you have to pray that it will be enough.

  * * *

  JY Yang is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, and two more slated for 2018 and beyond). Their short fiction has been published in over a dozen venues, including Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons.

  JY attended the 2013 class of Clarion West, and received their MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2016. They live in Singapore. Find them online at http://jyyang.com or on Twitter as @halleluyang.

  Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics

  By Jess Barber and Sara Saab

  1: THE MOST HALLOWED OF OUR SPACES

  Amir Tarabi is scrubbing himself down in the misting rooms the first time he meets Mani Rizk.

  The mister in Beirut-4 is being upgraded, the zone’s residents using Beirut-3’s misting rooms on rotation, so it is especially crowded that day. Amir avoids making eye contact with the bathers in adjacent patches with rigorous politeness. At sixteen, he’s already spent a hundred personal growth hours thinking about civic decency, appreciates the role of uninterrupted private rituals in fostering social cohesion—

  —then someone comes out of the mist and straight into his line of vision, Amir thinks by accident. He tries to keep his eyes on what he’s doing. The sparse rivulets of soapy water starting in his elbows and armpits are usually an easy bliss to meditate on, how they track down his skin, how they catch and collect on little hairs. Water coalescing from mist doesn’t have enough body to drip to the floor. Amir can feel it evaporate at his hips, his thighs, his ankles.

  “Excuse me?” says the interrupting someone-who-turns-out-to-be-Mani, and Amir’s head lifts before his principles regroup. Her teeth are chattering but she smiles gamely through it. “My patch is really cold. Does that happen?”

  “Not that I remember?” he says. “Show me?”

  “Sure,” she clatters. “Thanks. This way.”

  He doesn’t recall ever being approached by another bather in the mist before. She’s naked, so is he, so is everyone. Nudity isn’t weird in water-scarce Beirut at the height of summer. Less clothing means less sweat. It’s her still-soapy hair that strikes him: so thick that there’s two inches of it plastered soaking to her head, which of course means she’s nearly at the end of her timeslot. The mist takes a long time to permeate a head of hair.

  It’s so crowded. They weave through an infinity mirror of bathing bodies which fade in the middle distance into a wall of mist. Amir wonders what brought his new friend all the way to his patch when any neighbor would’ve been glad to help.

  “You’re from Beirut-4?” he asks.

  “The finest of all arbitrary urban planning constructs,” she calls behind her.

  At sixteen, Amir doesn’t believe in competitive jokes about city zones, just as he doesn’t believe in identities constructed in opposition. He doesn’t say anything. It doesn’t seem the right moment.

  Mani finds the four lit wands in the mist that mark the corners of patch 49.

  “Cold, right?”

  Amir steps solemnly into the center of her patch for a few seconds. The concentrated plume of mist envelops him.

  “Feels okay to me?”

  Mani shoots him an aghast look, moves into her patch as Amir steps out. She gives a long-suffering sigh. “Why are they upgrading our mister? Beirut-3 needs it more.”

  “Are you sure you’re not physiologically reacting to a new environment?” Amir counters. “All the misters have the same temperature settings.”

  “Is that so?” Mani says.

  “Pretty sure.”

  She readies a retort, then shakes it off. “Thanks anyway,” she says, kneading her hair. “I pulled you away while your mist is running.” Sudsy water trickles onto her shoulders.

  “That’s okay. Enjoy your shower,” Amir says, and waves himself off. Enjoy your shower. He’s vaguely disappointed by the whole exchange for a reason he can’t examine.

  In the airing room, hot blasts of air spread warmth through his chest. This fills him with something like gratitude. He second-guesses whether he might’ve been cold, before.

  “Two degrees lower,” says a voice he recognizes.

  “Really?” he says after a moment. Now he’s vaguely happy for reasons he can’t place.

  “I asked the supervisor. By community agreement, motion passed five years ago, the Beirut-3 misting room is two degrees cooler than default in summer.”

  “Ah,” says Amir. “Good of you to correct a misbelief.”

  “My pan-humanist agenda’s pretty on point,” she says. The wry note in her voice doesn’t irritate him. “I’m Mani. I live near al-Raouché. Want to do a personal growth hour together?”

  Amir doesn’t remember what he stammered then, but it must’ve been affirmative, because the rest of his teenage days have Mani in them, as the water situation worsens, then gets a bit better, then worsens, then stabilizes.

  It’s a lot of days to have with someone. A lot of staring at the cloudless sky on a blanket from the exposed seabed of al-Raouché, a lot of synth-protein shawarmas in Hamra, a lot of silent meditative spans huddled in Mani’s bed because talking hurts too much with the thirst and their mouths so dry.

  But it’s also true that all the days in a human life can feel like not enough.

  • • • •

  The first time the water situation shows signs of getting better is a Monday. Amir knows this because that’s the day for municipal announcements in Beirut-1 through -5. He and Mani are sitting in a seabed café in the shadow of al-Raouché. The rock pillar’s become a sort of geologic Champs-Élysées, and though the bay has begun to recover from the decades of hyperwarming that dried it out, Beirut Grid have installed a seawall to protect the shops and cafés that went up while water was critically scarce.

  “It’s oddly beautiful,” Amir says to Mani. The seawall is murale
d with depictions of water-protection craft, the lighthouse, the rickety old Ferris wheel on the boardwalk. Beyond it, the sea shushes loudly. The sun festers behind the clouds and because Amir and Mani have been through screen-mist they’re lounging in just swim knickers.

  Amir rotates his cup and watches bits of tealeaf bob near the bottom. “Do you think it’s unethical to celebrate a built environment that’s a direct result of water scarcity?” he asks.

  Mani looks up from her book: Pan-Humanism in the Middle East. It’s just come out, and she’s been excited to read it because it challenges some of the core arguments of Stella Kadri’s Pan-Humanism: Hope and Pragmatics, a book of heroic stature for how it butterfly-effected the sociopolitics of the modern world.

  “Not unethical to feel joy if no one’s suffering,” she says.

  “Fish desperate to swim figure eights around al-Raouché could be suffering.”

  “You have to draw a line where arguments descend into absurdity.” She cracks a smile, powers off her book.

  “But there’s nothing absurd about a healthy marine ecosystem,” Amir says. Her pragmatism makes him uneasy. As a life skill it sits uncomfortably against his complete dedication to absolutes: the True, the Good. But it’s captivating. It makes her quick to laughter and gracious, even excited, about changing her mind.

  Mani gulps her tea. “Still hot. So now I’ve burned my tongue worrying about the fish.” She glances down. “Didn’t I turn that off?” Her book’s flashing a notification. So’s her watch. So are her shades.

  Amir blows on his tea before he sips. “On override? Must be important.”

  They read the message, heads hovering together. It’s from the municipality. Beirut Water pilot. First sectors, random pick: Beirut-4, Beirut-9. Water reconnected via mains for 24hrs from 2PM. OK: taps, showers, hoses. Use judgment: industrial electronics.