by Neil Clarke
Your Tariq, like all pretty men, suffered from the same assumptions. He was never as good to anyone as he was to you, Ziza Angel-faced. When he didn’t ignore me outright, he liked to pick on me for your amusement. He named me Yam Nose and Ogre Teeth, and when I protested, he laughed me off as too sensitive, as if I didn’t have a right to my dignity. People like him are cruel to girls like me in a thoughtless, automatic way, like they can’t imagine us having feelings anymore complex than a dog’s. Yes, I detested him. But the day he made me waffles, throwing me one small, quiet kindness, I realized how happy he made you, that you intended to marry him. He’d be around our family a long, long time. I made my peace.
I am sorry you realized so late the flaw in him that was obvious to me from the first. But know, Ziza, that Tariq must accept responsibility for his own character. If you had married him, when you aged and your beauty began to fade, he surely would’ve turned that same cruelty on you. He may very well have been your soulmate, but take a hard look at your own soul, and ask whether you too mistake your angelic face for more than it is. You are merely human.
So come to Mars, Sister. Come to where this all started that summer our father wanted us to bond, back before we hated the taste of water, before we learned to despise each other in small ways and big. We cannot escape one another. Our hatred has been our brilliance, our secret genius, the harsh red desert that pushed and pinched and goaded us to build towers you can see from the Moon. Imagine what a lifetime of love might have accomplished
Come to Mars, Ziza. Scatter our father’s ashes with me. If we cannot make this place bloom with life, at least we can make it a little more dusty.
Anita
From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza
To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita
Date: 2161-01-11
Dearest Anita,
I can see the GalactiPol cruiser from my starboard viewport. Its black and gold stripes practically glow beneath the strobing orange beacon make it look like a psychedelic bumblebee. Most people in my situation, facing detainment on Mars, endless expensive legal proceedings, possible time in prison, would be locked in the grips of fear and worry. Perhaps even shame. But not me. The one thought stuck in my mind, like a diptera fastened to sticky paper, is how beautiful that cruiser is and how excited I am to begin this second adventure.
It’s all about perception.
During that last picnic on the moon, when you were locked in the service booth, Father talked about perception. “Perception is everything. If you can project what you perceive it will become reality. You will believe it. More importantly, whether good or bad, everyone else will believe in your reality as well, and they will believe in you.” Not until I read your last letter did I realize how right Father was. And how wrong we have been.
In the mirror I’ve always seen the imperfect likeness of our mother, not quite as beautiful, not quite as kind, and with but a fraction of her intelligence. I have our father’s height and amber-flecked brown eyes, but none of his grace, strength, or athleticism. Yet, somehow you see in me the face of an angel.
In you I see the sharp mind and steady hands of a scientist. A fearless tenacious spirit intent on exploring all possibilities even at great cost, able to articulate your ideas, to change hearts and minds. You have boundless strength, so much so that you have been the central support for Mother and me since Father’s death. There is nothing plain about you, little sister, nothing wanting.
How is it that our perceptions have never aligned?
Be right back. GalactiPol is hailing me …
From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza
To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita
Date: 2161-01-12
Sorry it has taken me so long to return to this letter, but I had a few calls to make. Officers Gavalia and Ambrose boarded my ship at 2315 and took me into custody. My detainment cell is surprisingly modish, with full amenities including a computer and personal uncensored communication device. I have even been given unrestricted access to their onboard digital library.
According to officer Gavalia, though entry into GalactiPol requires extensive training and a stringent vetting system, they have little opportunity to actually do the type of policing their organization exists to perform. I suppose there just aren’t that many galactic criminals to catch these days, besides you and me, that is.
Now where was I? Ah yes. Perceptions.
I’ve been mesmerized by the images you sent of the garbatrite homes, the bright multilayered encrusted structures in every shade of red, orange and pink, lambent lights beneath the gaze of the sun. They expound beauty and ingenuity and life and more than anything, a prescience greater than anything either of us could have conceived.
We’ve been darting back and forth through this solar system, in an effort to outdo one another, trying our damnedest to affect the change of our choosing, thinking we are so smart and so in control, when in truth, we are no greater than those garbatrites, and perhaps we are even less wise than they.
Perhaps there is a way for us both to have what we wanted, to terraform Mars and to protect the garbatrites. They were always keen to share their world with us and seeing the ingenuity and beauty of their structures, perhaps we can convince them to help us transform the barren surface of Mars into one of cooperative beauty. We can provide the framework for our cities and homes, and they can build upon them, layering their coral-like exoteric structures, creating homes befitting us all, unlike anything in the entire solar system.
I called Tariq shortly after my detainment aboard the GalactiPol cruiser. Before you think me hopeless, let me explain. Besides being happily ensconced in a polyamorous relationship with two of the nicest men and woman I have ever met, he has long since given up on his art (he was never very good anyway) and has been the Chief GalactiPol Officer for several years. I was hoping that there was still enough lingering affection between us that he would agree to assist me in this difficult situation.
Unfortunately, he is unable, as I had hoped, to have the charges against us repealed, but we have been allowed to serve the entirety our sentence on Mars. Together.
Shall we do this, sister? Shall we make our dreams come true?
I envision us making a home from our old pod quarters. Perhaps we can build on an extra room and invite Mother. We can even build a special corral for Bobo and Cow, where they can play happily and where they won’t be able to disturb you as you work on your next great experiment. With the help of the garbatrites we can build a greenhouse. We’ll grow corn and tomatoes in soil fertilized with the ashes of our father. We will create a real home, a life. And we will relearn one another, our strengths and weakness, our mutual love for each other. One day other Earthers will join us on our red planet and find a world of wonder encased in garbatrite domes. A home.
Can you see it, sister? Good. Now hold that thought in your mind until we are reunited.
With all my love,
Ziza
From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita
To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza
Date: 2161-01-13
Dear Ziza,
Why did the sisters cross the solar system? To get to the other’s side.
See you soon,
Anita
Maggie Clark is a Canadian writer and educator currently acclimating to life abroad. Maggie’s science fiction stories have appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, GigaNotoSaurus, and Lightspeed, as well as Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection and Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2017.
BELLY UP
Maggie Clark
1.
Dirt at dawn. Dirt at dusk.
But while the sun is up
O Mother, have mercy!
Look what grows in us.
—Novuni Proverb
A week after the courts declawed Imbra Tems, the Darwood twins and their cousin Paloma paid him a visit to finish the job. Imbra wasn’t hard to track down; he’d returned to his auto shop overlooking
Esrin’s Gulch, not five klicks from the nearest settlement, and lay under the hot, ticking metal of a ballast tractor when they rolled up in mud-spattered quads. The lesser Darwood, Hurley, pulled so hard on the creeper under Imbra’s feet that Imbra hit his head on the exhaust line on his way out, and hardly recognized the trio during his first few seconds under the glare of the red-brown sun. But the meaner Darwood, Tripp, wanted to take things slow, so he gave Imbra time to collect himself; even to look around.
“Well, Dash,” said Tripp, using an ancient name, a childhood name for the man lying before him. “How’s it feel? They didn’t take away how easy you scare, did they? That’d have been some surgery—coward like you, always running at the first sign of trouble.”
Hurley snickered, at which point Paloma’s continued silence caught Imbra’s notice. The tall kid, fifteen at best, had more anger wound up in his wiry frame than the Darwood twins combined. For the Darwoods, Imbra knew this was all domination sport, but in Paloma, Imbra sensed something deeper and more dangerous. He tried to remember the kid’s lineage, but the local labor pool had always been built on comers and goers—most itching for just enough work to take them to the elevator, and from the elevator, to the stars. But most never made it, and then things got desperate. People cut corners and other people all the time—too much to recall every bad deal, every civvie who lost a friend or family to one bad bridge project or another. The hardness of life in the valley blurred memories at their edges. The crystal Imbra had been hooked on since childhood didn’t help much, either.
“A little, actually.” Imbra spoke lightly, a smile fixed on Tripp. “Remember, fear’s all about adrenaline. No adrenaline, no fight-or flight. So when they stopped the signal that starts the whole business, they did me a bit of a service. Sure, go on, give me the beating of my life. Can’t really stop you, but those mind games won’t work, either, so you might as well get started. Maybe in the ribs, though? I still sorta like this face.”
Tripp smiled back, but he wasn’t pleased. “You were shit before you went into the courts, Dash, and the stink on you’s even worse now. Don’t go putting on airs.”
Imbra shrugged and was about to reply, when a swift boot heel to his stomach drove all the breath and a fair bit of spittle out his mouth. Imbra doubled around the impact site and turned to catch a glimpse of Paloma, already advancing for another stomping, this time to the chest. The kid was pure rage as he moved, the wildness of his kicks and punches a sure sign that he hadn’t done much proper fighting, but before Hurley and Tripp could pull Paloma off, Imbra had at least pieced together some of the kid’s complaint from the rare word flung between blows. Mother—Murdered—Lowlife—
Oh right, thought Imbra, vaguely between strikes. Her.
With no heightened blood pressure, no rush of heat in his muscles with the release of fat-cells for future energy, no surge in lung capacity, no loss of hearing or vision to focus his efforts on the immediacy of response, Imbra experienced the beating acutely, his body surprised by each vividly felt blow. At one particularly hard hit, which flung him from the creeper, the back of his head bouncing off the gravel, Imbra wondered if his body would even figure out when it was dying, and if maybe that was what was happening now. But then he heard the Darwood twins—“Easy, settle down, Pal, that’s enough”—and the sudden stillness of air and light and shadow all around him gave Imbra pause for breath.
He coughed and spat out a tooth while above him the three men conferred.
“Hey—he dies, and anyone finds out, you’ll get the same treatment, understand?”
“But he deserves it.”
“Sure, Pal. Sure he does.” Tripp clapped a hand hard on Paloma’s shoulder. “But you kill him and that’s it, see? Keep him around, though, knowing his place, and we’ve got it made. Dash here’ll always be on hand to fix our rides, or pull our freight, or give us that sweet little hovercraft whenever we want it. Besides, putting him in the ground won’t bring her back, so what’s the point—the waste and the risk of it, you know?”
Paloma’s hands curled into fists as he stared down at Imbra. “Some worlds, they put garbage like you into holes in the ground, and they leave you there for years.”
Tripp sighed. “Yeah, yeah. And the state pays for it all, and no one gets anything out of it, and everyone’s still pissed when the assholes get out with time served. Trust me, Pal, this is better. Social justice with a little on the side for us keepers of the peace—you, Hurl, and me. Right, Dash? You gonna contribute now, for once in your sorry excuse of a life?”
Imbra sat up slowly, arm braced at his ribs; another mouthful of blood hucked to the ground. “Could’ve just asked, you needed something realigned. That head of yours, maybe.”
“Nah. Tripp’s a believer in even trades.” Hurley bared a grin with wide gaps, teeth lost from too much time in the pits. “Body work for body work.”
“Speaking of which—” Tripp tipped his head to the garage. “We’re taking Bullet for a spin. Loaner ’til our main rides get spiffed up. You don’t mind, do you, Dash?”
Imbra nodded to a shelf through the open door. “Keypass, top drawer. Knock yourselves out. Preferably into a lava flow.”
Tripp whistled. “That’s not very nice, Dash.” Hurley approached Imbra as if to further the point. Imbra eyed Hurley’s boots, then the rest of him.
“No, I guess not,” said Imbra, meeting Hurley square in the eye. “Not fair to Bullet, going down with the likes of you.”
Hurley was smarter than Paloma about his blows, and the ones to Imbra’s hip ricocheted through Imbra’s bone, sure to leave a deeper ache and more persistent bruising. But Tripp had the hovercraft out soon enough, its silver coat glinting in the midday light, and Hurley was quick to join him up front. Only Paloma lingered by the ballast tractor, where Imbra had propped up himself against one of its wheels.
“You should be begging for your life,” said the kid. “Like she did.”
“No—she didn’t.” Imbra took a ragged breath, the ache in his chest starting to constrict in ways even the declaw couldn’t prevent. “I was higher than you’ll ever know, but that much is true. I just—I panicked, kid. I already had the goods but I hit her anyway—hard—and I ran. Still, she was strong. Your mum, at the end she just …”
Imbra tapered off as Paloma leaned in and took him by his shirt collar and clocked him across the cheekbone. Calmer this time. Aim’s improving, too, thought Imbra, as the Darwood twins called out “Pal, you coming or what?” and Paloma, dropping his mother’s killer and shaking his hand out, stepped over Imbra’s body and said, “Yeah, hold up, I’m done.” But Imbra, watching the kid not so much as glance back as he stalked off, knew that Paloma would return, and sooner rather than later.
And next time, he’d come alone.
Stev Biggs, the court-appointed adjustment counselor, squinted sideways at the shiner turning Imbra’s right cheekbone into a spray of nebula-purples and dusky grey-pinks.
“You oughta be more careful around the tow trucks,” said Biggs. “Rough business, walking into a hook and chain like that.”
“Comes with the territory.” Imbra offered Biggs a cup of roast. “How’s the war?”
“Which one.” Biggs settled at Imbra’s bench and scratched under his wide-brimmed hat, surveying the lay of the garage—graffiti across the walls, tool cases in disarray, more than a little blood spatter on the concrete floor. “Seen plenty of action yourself, it seems.”
“Gulch rats. Big ones.”
“No kidding.” Biggs took a long, loud slurp of brew, eyeing his charge over the mug. “They’ll settle eventually, you know. There’s not much sport in it, and soon they’ll feel ashamed with themselves for doing it at all. That’s usually how it goes.”
“Or they’ll take that shame out on me, too, for making them feel something in the first place. Starting to think we could all do with a declaw, in the valley at least.”
Biggs set down his mug. “That kinda attitude, might as well hand
everything over to the Allegiance. We need more fight, you ask me, if we’re going to get through it all.”
“That bad?”
“You tell me. General Asarus has the shipyards working all hours, trying to double the fleet by the equinox. Ask me, she’s not gonna make deadline, but at least the attempt’ll improve foot traffic around these parts—open up the mines, drive recruitment, see more money in bridgeworks again. Might even be good for your business. Who knows.”
Imbra’s answering snort nudged Biggs into a bit of a smile. “Looks like we didn’t take all the fight out of you, did we?”
But that we gave Imbra pause, the sudden schism of it. Biggs as old friend. Biggs as brother’s keeper. He studied the calluses on Biggs’s hands, only a little darker than his own. One creation story going that the sun had scorched their ancestors in a fit of rage. Others saying that the sun loved them so much it tried to get too close, until its children cried out Mother, you’re hurting me! and the sun, ashamed when she saw what she had done, blushed a livid red-brown forever. Both tales as good as true: all life on Novun a matter of dualities.
“I’ve heard the stories,” said Imbra. “About the ones who walk out of surgery and right off a cliff. Some for what they’d done to deserve the declaw in the first place. Some for what they were afraid everyone else would do, once the law was through.”
“But not you.”
“No, not me.” Imbra’s eyes gleamed hard. “Sitting in the courts those last few weeks, while they cleaned all that shit from my system to prep for surgery, I found religion instead.”