The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  Wild rumors swept the camp: the government was about to change, and everyone would be set free. Ali had seen the government’s rivals giving their blessing to the use of soldiers to block the bridge; he doubted that they’d show the prisoners in the desert much mercy if they won.

  When the day of the election came, the government was returned, more powerful than ever.

  That night, as they were preparing to sleep, Fahim saw Ali staring at the row of white scars that criss-crossed his chest. “I use a razor blade,” Fahim admitted. “It makes me feel better. The one power I’ve got left: to choose my own pain.”

  “I’ll never do that,” Ali swore.

  Fahim gave a hollow laugh. “It’s cheaper than cigarettes.”

  Ali closed his eyes and tried to picture freedom, but all he saw was blackness. The past was gone, the future was gone, and the world had shrunk to this prison.

  4

  “Ali, wake up, come see!”

  Daniel was shaking him. Ali swatted his hands away angrily. The African was one of his closest friends, and there’d been a time when he could still drag Ali along to English classes or the gym, but since the appeal tribunal had rejected him, Ali had no taste for anything. “Let me sleep.”

  “There are people. Outside the fence.”

  “Escaped?”

  “No, no. From the city!”

  Ali clambered off the bunk. He splashed water on his face, then followed his friend.

  A crowd of prisoners had gathered at the southwest corner of the fence, blocking the view, but Ali could hear people on the outside, shouting and banging drums. Daniel tried to clear a path, but it was impossible. “Get on my shoulders.” He ducked down and motioned to Ali.

  Ali laughed. “It’s not that important.”

  Daniel raised a hand angrily, as if to slap him. “Get up, you have to see.” He was serious. Ali obeyed.

  From his vantage, he could see that the crowd of prisoners pressed against the inner fence was mirrored by another crowd struggling to reach the outer one. Police, some on horses, were trying to stop them. Ali peered into the scrum, amazed. Dozens of young people, men and women, were slithering out of the grip of the policemen and running forward. Some distance away across the desert stood a brightly colored bus. The word freedom was painted across it, in English, Persian, Arabic, and probably ten or twelve languages that Ali couldn’t read. The people were chanting, “Set them free! Set them free!” One young woman reached the fence and clung to it, shouting defiantly. Four policemen descended on her and tore her away.

  A cloud of dust was moving along the desert road. More police cars were coming, reinforcements. A knife twisted in Ali’s heart. This gesture of friendship astonished him, but it would lead nowhere. In five or ten minutes, the protesters would all be rounded up and carried away.

  A young man outside the fence met Ali’s gaze. “Hey! My name’s Ben.”

  “I’m Ali.”

  Ben looked around frantically. “What’s your number?”

  “What?”

  “We’ll write to you. Give us your number. They have to deliver the letters if we include the ID number.”

  “Behind you!” Ali shouted, but the warning was too late. One policeman had him in a headlock, and another was helping wrestle him to the ground.

  Ali felt Daniel stagger. The crowd on his own side was trying to fend off a wave of guards with batons and shields.

  Ali dropped to his feet. “They want our ID numbers,” he told Daniel. Daniel looked around at the melee. “Got anything to write on?”

  Ali checked his back pocket. The small notebook and pen it was his habit to carry were still there. He rested the notebook on Daniel’s back, and wrote, “Ali 3739 Daniel 5420.” Who else? He quickly added Fahim and a few others.

  He scrabbled on the ground for a stone, then wrapped the paper around it. Daniel lofted him up again.

  The police were battling with the protesters, grabbing them by the hair, dragging them across the dirt. Ali couldn’t see anyone who didn’t have more pressing things to worry about than receiving his message. He lowered his arm, despondent.

  Then he spotted someone standing by the bus. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He, or she, raised a hand in greeting. Ali waved back, then let the stone fly. It fell short, but the distant figure ran forward and retrieved it from the sand.

  Daniel collapsed beneath him, and the guards moved in with batons and tear gas. Ali covered his eyes with his forearm, weeping, alive again with hope.

  GREG EGAN was born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1961 and earned a bachelor of science in mathematics from the University of Western Australia before attending the National Film and Television School. He gave up a career in filmmaking, which inspired his surreal early novel An Unusual Angle, for science fiction, and has supported himself as a computer programmer when not writing full-time.

  While Egan began publishing short fiction in the pages of Inter-zone and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in the 1980s, his most impressive work is the extensive body of short fiction published during the 1990s, which includes “Reasons To Be Cheerful,” “Learning To Be Me,” “Cocoon,” “Luminous,” and Hugo Award—winning story “Oceanic”—and has established him as one of the world’s most important writers of science fiction. He is a frequent contributor to Interzone and Asimov’s; has made sales to Pulphouse, Analog, Aurealis, Eidolon, and New Legends; and has been represented in every volume of the U.S.-based Year’s Best Science Fiction since 1991. Egan’s short fiction has been collected in Axiomatic and Luminous.

  Egan’s first major novel—the first of his “Nature of Consciousness” novels—was Quarantine, and it was followed by John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner Permutation City, Distress, Diaspora, Teranesia, and the radical space opera Schild’s Ladder. After a lengthy break from writing, when he focused on political issues related to refugees in Australia, he has recently published a new novel, Incandescence.

  His Web site is www.gregegan.net.

  INCOMERS

  Paul McAuley

  If the three friends had seen the man in one of the malls or plazas of the new city, they wouldn’t have spared him a second glance, but in the old part of Xamba, the largest city on Saturn’s second-largest moon, where the weird was commonplace and the commonplace weird, he was as exotic as a tiger strolling down Broadway in old New York. People born and raised in the weak or nonexistent gravity of the various moons, orbital habitats, and ships of the outer reaches of the solar system—Outers—were generally taller than basketball stars and skinny as rails, and most citizens of old Xamba were of pale-skinned, blond, blue-eyed Nordic stock. This man, with a compact build, a shaven head, a neatly pointed black beard, and skin the color of old teak, was definitely no Outer. So why was he sitting at a tiny stall near the bottom of the produce market’s spiral walkway, a place where most incomers never ventured, selling bundles of fresh herbs and various blends of herb tea?

  Jack Miyata said that he was probably a harmless eccentric; Mark Griffin was convinced that he was some kind of exiled pervert or criminal; Sky Bolofo, who had filled the quantum processor of his large, red-framed spex with all kinds of talents and tricks, used a face-recognition program to identify the fellow, then pulled up his public page.

  “His name is Algren Rees. He lives right here in the old city. He sells herbs and he also fixes up pets.”

  Jack said, “Is that it? No links to family or friends or favorites?”

  Sky shrugged.

  “He has to be hiding something,” Mark said. “What about his private files?”

  “No problem,” Sky said complacently, but ran into heavy security as soon as he tried to hack into Algren Rees’s password-protected files, and had to back out in a hurry.

  Jack suggested that he could be a retired spy—just before the Quiet War kicked off, all of the Outer Colonies had been lousy with spies masquerading as diplomats and businesspeople—and Mark jumped all over the idea.

&
nbsp; “Maybe he’s still active,” he said. “Selling herbs is his cover. What he’s actually doing is gathering information. Keeping watch for terrorists and so-called freedom fighters.”

  Sky, his fingers pecking at the air in front of his face, using his spex’s virtual keyboard to erase his electronic trail in case Algren Rees’s security followed it, said that if the fellow wanted real cover, he should have made himself taller and skinnier, which cracked up the other two.

  They were all the same age, fourteen, and went to the same school and lived in the same apartment complex in the new part of Xamba. They were also Quiet War buffs who restaged campaigns, sieges, and invasions on a war-gaming network, which was how Jack had hooked up with the other two. Jack Miyata had moved to Xamba, Rhea, just two months ago. Unlike most city-states in the Saturn system, Xamba had remained neutral during the Quiet War. After the war had ended in defeat for every one of the rebellious Outer Colonies, Earth’s Three Powers Alliance had settled the bulk of its administration there, building a new city of towers and domes above Xamba’s underground chambers. Seven years later, New Xamba was still growing—Jack’s engineer parents were involved in the construction of a thermal-exchange plant that would tap the residual heat of the little moon’s rocky core and provide power for a brand-new sector.

  Very few incomers from Earth ever ventured beyond their apartment complexes, malls, and leisure parks, but Jack had caught the exploration bug from his parents. He’d roamed through much of the old and new parts of Xamba, and after passing a pressure-suit training course had taken several long hikes through the untouched wilderness in the southern half of the big crater in which the city was located and from which it took its name, had climbed to the observatory at the top of the crater’s central peak, and had visited the memorial at the crash site of a spaceship that had attempted to break the blockade during the war. It had been Jack’s idea to take his two new friends to his latest discovery, the produce market in the oldest chamber of old Xamba. As far as Jack was concerned, the market was a treasure house of marvels, but as they’d wandered between stalls and displays of strange flowers and fruits and vegetables, streamers of dried waterweed, tanks of fish and shrimp, caged birds and rats, and bottle vivariums in which stag beetles lumbered like miniature rhinoceroses through jungles of moss and fern, Mark and Sky quickly made it clear that they thought it was smelly, horribly crowded with strangely dressed, alarmingly skinny giants, and, quite frankly, revoltingly primitive. When food makers could spin anything from yeast and algae, why would anyone want to eat the meat of real live animals, especially as they would have to kill them first? Kill and gut them and God knew what else. But all three agreed that there was definitely something intriguing about the herb seller, Algren Rees.

  “Maybe he’s a double agent,” Jack said. “He’s in the pay of the Three Powers, but he’s gone over to the Outers, and they’re using him to feed our side false information.”

  Mark nodded. “There’s plenty of people who want to sabotage the reconstruction. Look at that blowout at the spaceport last month.”

  “The newsfeeds said it was an accident,” Sky said. “Someone fitted some kind of widget upside down or the wrong way round.”

  “Of course they said it was an accident,” Mark said scornfully. “It’s the official line. But it doesn’t mean it really was an accident.”

  He was a stocky boy who, with his pale skin, jet-black hair, and perpetual scowl, looked a lot like his policeman father. His mother was in the police too, in charge of security at the spaceport. He had a vivid imagination and an opinion about everything.

  Jack wanted to know if Mark had inside information about the accident, and Mark smiled and said that maybe he didn’t and maybe he did. “I had a feeling there was something wrong with Mr. Algren Rees as soon as I saw him. All good police have what they call gut instinct, and my gut very definitely told me that this fellow is a wrong one, and Sky’s run-in with his over-the-top security confirmed it. It’s up to all of us to find out exactly who he is, and why he’s living here. It’s our duty.”

  Jack and Mark quickly decided that they would follow Algren Rees—or “Algren Rees” as Mark called him, drawing quotation marks in the air with his little finger—and made Sky promise that he would use his data miners to ferret out anything and everything about the man. They were fourteen years old, secret masters of all they surveyed, possessed by restless energies and impulses that war gaming was no longer enough to satisfy, and hungry for adventure, for anything that would fill up the desert of the school holidays. Following Algren Rees and uncovering his secrets was just the beginning.

  Algren Rees had no fixed routine. He spent only an hour or so at his stall in the produce market (which explained why Jack hadn’t seen him there before); he tended the little garden where he grew his herbs; he sat outside the door of his apartment, a one-room efficiency on a terrace directly above the market, drinking tea or homemade lemonade and watching people go by; he took long, rambling walks through the old city. Jack saw more of the place in the three days he spent following the man, sometimes with Mark, sometimes on his own, than he had in the past two months.

  The cylindrical chambers of old Xamba were buried inside the rock-hard water ice of the crater’s eastern rimwall like so many bottles in a snowbank, and most had transparent endwalls facing what was generally reckoned to be one of the most classically beautiful views on all of Saturn’s family of moons, across slumped terraces and flat, dusty plains toward the crater’s central peak, which stood right at the edge of the close, curved horizon. In the little moon’s microgravity, just 3 percent of Earth’s, there was little difference between horizontal and vertical. Inside the old city’s chambers, apartments, shops, cafes, workshops, and gardens were piled on top of each other in steep, terraced cliffs, rising up on either side of skinny, landscaped parks and canals in steep-sided troughs. Apart from the boats in the canals that linked the chambers, traffic was entirely pedestrian. Jack had no problem blending into the crowds as he trailed Algren Rees through markets and malls, parks and plazas, up and down ropeways, chutes, and chairlifts.

  Although Mark insisted on teaching him some basic tradecraft (he claimed to have learnt it from his parents, but more likely had gotten it from some text), Jack figured out most of his moves for himself. Staying well behind his quarry and trying to anticipate his every move, walking straight past him or dodging up a ropeway or down a chute if he stopped to talk to someone, lurking inconspicuously when he lingered over a bulb of coffee at a cafe or a tube of beer at a bar. It was a lot more exciting than any war game, and a lot scarier, too. There was no wizard to ask for a clue or hint about what to do next, every decision was unconditionally permanent, and any mistake would be his last, game over. But Algren Rees seemed quite unaware that he was being followed, and by the third day Jack plucked up the courage to chat with the woman behind the counter of the cafe where the man ate his lunch and breakfast, learning that he had moved to Rhea two years ago and that he was originally from Greater Brazil, where he’d worked in the emergency relief services as a paramedic and helicopter pilot. He seemed well liked. He always stopped to talk to his neighbors when he met them as he went about his errands, and had long conversations with people who bought herbs or herb tea at his stall. He was a regular at the cafe and several bars in various parts of the city, trading fresh herbs for food and drink, and apart from eating out, his life seemed as austere as any monk’s. Still, Jack didn’t see how he could stretch the minuscule income from his market stall and fixing broken pets to cover the rent on his apartment, and his power and water and air taxes.

  “I guess he must have some kind of private income,” Jack said to Mark.

  “He has secrets, is what he has,” Mark said. “We don’t even know if ‘Algren Rees’“—he did the thing with his little fingers—”is his real name, no thanks to Sky for bailing on us. Some hacker he turned out to be, when it came down to it.”

  “He was majorly spooked when he
ran up against our friend’s electronic watchdogs,” Jack said.

  “Which also proves our friend has something to hide, or why else would he be using military-grade security?”

  It was late in the evening. The city’s sky lighting was beginning to dim. The two boys were sitting in a little park near the top of the east side of the chamber, taking turns with a pair of binoculars to keep watch on Algren Rees’s apartment, which was near the top of the west side. Across the wide gulf of air, the man was sitting on the little raised porch outside his front door, wearing shorts and nothing else and reading a book. Books printed on paper were a quirky tradition in old Xamba. Algren Rees read slowly, licking the top of his thumb before turning each page. Yellow light from inside the apartment spilled around him. Pretty soon, judging by the last three days, Algren Rees would turn in. He wasn’t a night owl.

  “What we need to do,” Mark said, “is take this to the next level.”

  Jack felt a tingling rush of anticipatory excitement. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we have to get into his apartment.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  Mark had a determined look, a jut of his heavy jaw like a dog gripping a bone it isn’t willing to let go of. “It’s what real spies would do. I bet he has all kinds of stuff stashed away in there. Stuff that would crack this case wide open.”

  “He probably has all kinds of security, too,” Jack said.

  “Oh, I can handle that.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s simply a matter of police tradecraft,” Mark said.

  “Right.”

  “I’d like to tell you more, but if I did, I’d have to kill you afterward,” Mark said. Like his father, he never smiled when he made a joke.

  They decided to do it the very next day, even though it was a Monday, the one day in the week when the produce market was closed, when Algren Rees wouldn’t be safely occupied at his stall for an hour or so. Jack would find some way of keeping the man at the cafe where he ate breakfast; meanwhile, Mark would break into the apartment, to see what he could see.