by Neil Clarke
“You think my ship’s a pirate? Because it isn’t. It’s not interesting enough to be a pirate.”
“No,” she said. She’d only told me her first name: Mabel. Her hair was long and silver but her face was young. Maybe from suspended aging treatments, so there was no telling her real age. Not that it mattered. “No,” she repeated. “Not a pirate, but they do recruit in unconventional ways.”
“Yeah?” I took the cigret from her and dragged. I could tell she was trying to read my eyes, but I’d been told enough times that I was “stoic,” that my stare walled people off and forced them to lay siege. So I watched her building a siege tower word by word.
“I found a node on the Send. Where the children are traded.”
She squinted at me as if this was supposed to mean something. When she didn’t get anything, she pressed on.
“They disguise it, of course. It looks like a parenting node where people are just talking about their kids. Getting advice. Arranging meetups at various stations. But there’re codewords. Pictures and codewords. These people know what to look for and how to ask for it.”
“Why are you telling me this? You want me to spy for your story?”
“No—but Paris, your name was there.” She glanced at my tags.
“My name Paris? Lots of kids are named Paris.” But my stomach began to form an ice rock, deep in the centre.
“Isn’t your last name Rahamon?”
I hadn’t told her that. It wasn’t something you told to someone you just shacked with. And maybe she could read my eyes after all.
My last name wasn’t Rahamon. I was reminded every time I heard it.
She said, “I recognized your first name and your face. Your picture had been posted. You were a little boy but the resemblance is obvious.” She climbed off the bed and went to her clothes, which were strewn on the floor in our haste to get together. Her body was flawless in a way that probably spoke of enhancements, but I hadn’t really noticed in the act. Now, as she leaned down to fish something out of her jacket pocket, I just wanted to get away.
But I couldn’t seem to move from the bed. This room. Or out of my own skin. She returned, sliding back beside me with a slate in her hand. She brushed at it, and soon lines of text and an image popped up.
A photo of me. As a child. I knew my own face like you did a vague stranger. Difficult to place but not forgotten.
I looked away before I allowed myself to read the words beside the image. The cigret burned between my fingers, so I pulled on it some more.
“Bright, enthusiastic, inquisitive boy,” she read. It was obvious that she was reading from the text, not making up the words. “Energetic and requires a lot of attention and compassion. He’s had a rough history, but he’s sweet and capable of loving. A family without any other children would do well.”
“Stop.”
“They write these posts like they’re advertising for pet swaps.”
“I said stop it.”
I climbed off the bed, flicked the cigret into the trash, and grabbed my clothes. “I was legitimately adopted. I don’t know what the hell you’re looking at.”
“Adopted by the Dragon Empress?”
No. And we both knew it.
I didn’t reply. Once I got my boots on, I grabbed my gun off the table and left her in the den.
All of my worlds were colliding.
Mabel found me at the bar, four drinks deep. Soochan was there, drunk and high too. “Heeey Mama,” he kept saying. Several of my other brothers from the Empress danced haphazardly to the music funneling in the centre of the floor.
“Paris,” Mabel said, glancing at Soochan.
“Heeey Mama. Heeey Parchisi, she want your comm code?” We ignored him. I wondered what either of them would do if they knew my real origin.
What should I be doing?
Everywhere I went now, I thought of my brother. Swapping drugs for cred or weapons, it was Cairo. Drinking myself into a stupor, it was Cairo. Fucking a woman, it was Cairo.
The ankh on my chest that I saw every day. What had possessed me to wear that reminder? My body was now a walking séance ritual, begging the ghosts to follow. To answer back, letter by letter, yes or no. I invited them now to shake my seating and short-circuit my tech. To stand behind me in the dark when I wandered the corners of the ship.
My brother was a ghost. The kind who made marks on the living.
“Please,” Mabel said. “We need to talk.”
How many kids were outside the system, like me? How many had been put into the system only to be torn out like a splinter? Children that couldn’t be handled so they were hijacked. Especially refugee kids, Mabel said. Good ships with good intentions found themselves over their heads and no longer wanted to deal with the kids.
It wasn’t a bad life, I heard myself telling her, the two of us in a corner booth while the music kept winding up and falling down and everyone around us moved like mannequins of broken robotics.
“Do you remember when you were taken?” she asked.
Do you remember? That question refused to pick another path. It hunted me everywhere.
“What’re you going to do,” I said. “Put me back? That ship has flown— literally.”
“I could find out if you have any family—”
“I don’t.” It came out of my mouth like every answer I’d given to anyone who asked. No family but the Dragon. No ship but the Dragon. No place but the Dragons. Deep space was our home. Mabel took it as stated and I carried on. “The captain of the Chateaumargot had checked. Or the case worker that I had—whoever. Social Services. I don’t even remember the name of the first station they’d put me at. They purged the records anyway.”
Mabel frowned. “The station?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
I gave her a flat stare then let her track my gaze to Soochan, still sitting at the bar mouthing off to the air.
“We’re not pirates but we’re not saints.”
What if, I thought. What if I gave this journalist my real world name? Soochan suddenly appeared at my shoulder, leaning over the table. “Leh we go, Parchisi.”
“Be there in a second.” I pushed his hand away as it coursed through my hair. Big brother, except he wasn’t. He wandered off to hook up with our other brothers, now headed off the dance floor.
I had this information locked inside my chest. If I let it out, what other explosion would it cause? Would that birth yet another world, one that I couldn’t predict or control? Another situation I couldn’t defend myself against?
No one could know.
To Mabel: “Can you do me a favour?”
Her eyebrows arched.
“Whatever you need for your story, I’ll tell you. As a source. No names, on your word.”
She nodded. “Anonymous. I promise.”
“Because you know what I’ll do if you break our deal.”
She’d seen the gun. More importantly she’d seen the ink on my body and read the affiliation well enough.
“What’s your question?” she said.
“Find out Macedon’s next port of call.” I did, in the end, slip her my comm code. “And let me know ASAP.”
Somehow she came through. The message on my system said simply: Austro Station. And gave a date.
It wasn’t difficult to go to Austro Station, despite what we did for a living. Austro was a main hub even for us, with its rampant underdeck activity and illicit commerce. I didn’t have to mention a thing to Madame Leung, beyond the usual conversation about scoring big there. We bought and sold drugs at Austro for the rich elite in the higher modules because exploitation was the true ecosystem of the galaxy.
The Dragon Empress docked at the station a day after Macedon. To the galaxy outside, we were basic trade merchants in harmless cargo like transsteel and mechanical goods. It was a different story for the boys Madame Leung sent off in other directions on deck. I was one of that crew.
Now I had to conjure my bro
ther’s face—in the delicate balance of stalking the dock where the carriers were moored, not going too close, but hovering outside the broad doors to catch every person that flowed back and forth. Casing the airlock directly was impossible in such a restricted area. Instead, I disappeared from my Dragon brothers in the hopes of seeing another. Hiding myself behind garish kiosks and aromatic food stalls. I felt like a pervert, but maybe that was fitting. A perverse turn in my life. As if the universe agreed, it made me wait and gave me ample opportunity to get the fuck out of there.
Of course I didn’t.
I wanted to see him. I recognized his walk before anything else. In all the years, that detail hadn’t changed. He was taller, and he tried to hide beneath a hoodie and civilian clothes, passing through the concourse toward the carrier docks. But I knew those shoulders and the gait of someone who knew where he was going. He didn’t cover up out of fear, but from stealth.
I moved with him, slipping along the edges of the crowd between his path and mine. It took me a minute to notice the child.
A little boy. Maybe four or five, but who could tell? They held hands. The boy carried a stuffed bear wearing soft armour, its furry ears dragging on the deck.
I was that age once. Cairo held my hand like that.
It’s me, I wanted to shout. As if those two words could make up for a decade or more as some humans reckoned time.
Come back.
It happened all at once; the little boy said something and Cairo leaned down to pick him up in his arms, barely breaking stride. Smaller arms went around broad shoulders. The bear dropped to the deck in their wake and Cairo kept walking, oblivious.
I saw the boy open his mouth to protest and then I was there. The crowd was no longer a wall. I hadn’t made the conscious decision, but I found myself holding the stuffed toy, reaching to touch Cairo’s arm.
He turned before I could tap him, sensing proximity maybe. Or his son’s distress. The little boy twisted in his arms to keep his own eyes on the toy, reaching toward it. Toward me.
“He dropped this,” I heard myself say.
My brother wasn’t the only one covered up. My hood was pulled low, long sleeves covered all of my ink. Maybe he saw my mouth move but that was it. I stared somewhere at his chest and below. At the blue boots his son wore, dangling at his side.
The bear left my outstretched hands, plucked to safety.
“What do you say, Ryan?” A deep voice. But I knew that accent.
Meridian. Like mine. What it had been three worlds ago.
“Thank you,” a small voice said.
“Welcome.”
“Thank you,” my brother said.
I just nodded.
They turned to go. He wasn’t going to waste time on a stranger.
I looked up as they moved further into the concourse crowd, still headed toward the carriers. Cairo didn’t turn around, but his son was looking over his shoulder, holding the armoured bear in his arms.
The boy had blue eyes. Not like mine. Not like his father’s. Big, searching blue eyes that stared at me as if he knew. Ryan, Cairo had said. My nephew.
I didn’t follow them. They walked away and I stayed where I was, the ghost they left behind.
Now all I do is remember.
My fourth world is the clearest. Sun bright and comet swift, all I can do is chase it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to enter in again. Like it’s a room left open for me. Like a voice offering a greeting, something as simple as hello. Maybe next time I’ll look up and stare him straight in the eyes, dark eyes like mine, with just enough tilt at the corners to speak of our common ancestry. His son’s gaze was a start, but it was only the edge of the solar system. There’s more.
Soochan found me sitting on the deck outside of the carrier docks. He twitched, all nervous.
“Them Marines gonna sweep you away from their stoop, you can’t stay here. Come back to the Empress.”
He didn’t ask why I was sitting there. Maybe he thought I was high.
I’m waiting for them to come back, I wanted to say. But of course I didn’t. It wasn’t the truth anyway. What would I say in that moment if they had?
I’m your brother, take me with you? Take my DNA and test it against yours. Check how far back we’re connected. Tell me where you’ve been all this time, when time slipped so easily between the stars. What war are you fighting? Will you fight mine for a while?
Save me just this once.
Come back, my brother. Come back, Cairo. You’re tattooed on my skin, beneath my heart, inside my blood. I tried to forget you, but nothing worked.
I want you to hear me say our family name. I’ll only say it to you. No one else would understand what it means.
You were my first world.
Kathleen Ann Goonan is a writer, speaker, and recovering academic. She has published seven widely translated novels, including the first novel of her Nanotech Quartet, Queen City Jazz (a NYT Notable Book) in 1994 and In War Times (Tor, 2007), winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the American Library Association’s Best Novel of the Year. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Clarke, BSFA, and Nebula Awards. She has published over fifty short works in markets such as Discover Magazine, Asimov’s, Omni, Appalachian Heritage, F&SF, and many anthologies. Her latest academic publication was in Sisters of Tomorrow (edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharpe, Wesleyan, 2016). She is working on two novels and a screenplay. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and is a member of X Prize’s Lifeboat Foundation.
THE TALE OF THE ALCUBIERRE HORSE
Kathleen Ann Goonan
Here stands a house all built of thought,
And full to overflowing
Of treasures and of precious things,
Of secrets for my knowing.
—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Latch Key
T here is a theory that consciousness arises through self-organizing mass. This takes ages. Think of the thousands of years the oldest bristlecone pine grew, nearly five thousand, and it could grow older, if it had a chance, though it no longer has that chance. Except here. And maybe somewhere, but that is a mighty thin maybe.
Nevertheless, think of all the systems that went into growing that tree, all that time. What kind of entity can possibly understand time that long, except that bristlecone pine? And then, think of all the time we have been riding this horse. Who could understand that?
If anyone could, they would seem like magical creatures to us. That’s why this is a fairy tale.
Time is a Kelvin—Helmholtz function. You know, like the clouds in Van Gogh’s Starry Night. We surf the waves, the whorl, the crush of energies that cause time, that cause us. You may disagree with it, but that’s our present theory. It seems that our particular neighborhood of time, which created us, is the only weather in which consciousness can survive. We are the products of a very fragile environment.
We are the magic beans Jill climbs the beanstalk to find.
We are life.
Pele, two days older than one hundred and five, waits in crowded Galaxies Bar on Moku, the Entertainment, Amusement and, much less importantly, R&D Exoplanetary Exploration Ship. Robotic and print construction commenced in 2030, when Pele was forty, during one of the rare confluences of available capital and passionate interest in space.
Pele’s hands are folded in her lap in an attitude of calm, but she simmers, despite the faint scent of gardenia, the low tones of a flowing music specifically designed to generate a state of relaxed attention, and the zen landscaping. A tube of green tea floats unopened near her shoulder, its tether clipped to the table. Dr. Zi, Chief Safety Engineer, is late for this meeting, one that Pele requested and that the ship’s scheduling algorithm arranged.
Lights are always low in Galaxies, unlike other bars on Moku designed for dancing or the roar of a hundred unheard conversations. As usual, it’s two-thirds populated by tourists and crew. The Velcro floor is scattered with
zabutons and low, gently glowing cylinders that serve as tables. A row of portholes affords a spectacular view of Mars rising as Moku slowly spins.
“Sorry I’m late, Dr. Hsu.” Zi, in full quasi-military Chief Safety Engineer regalia, billed hat and all, drops onto a zabuton. Peering over his shoulder, he unbuttons his shirt pocket, removes his ever-present salad tube, takes a pull, and slips it back into his pocket, which he buttons.
Pele says, “I want to discuss last week’s report, in which I raise serious issues. You didn’t respond.”
Zi is busy scanning the room. “Ah! There she is. Eleven o’clock.” He waves, showing most of his teeth in a camera-ready smile that beams from his well-tanned, rugged face.
Stormy, a raven-haired reality star, threads her way around seated groups of people toward them, encased in a retro space suit that emphasizes her long legs and shapes her breasts into pointy weapons. The camera drones trailing her blink like synchronous fireflies, as required by law.
Pele shakes her head emphatically in Stormy’s direction, uninterested in being dragged into the kind of propaganda puff pieces with which Zi is building his celebrity.
Stormy pivots as quickly as the Velcro on the two contact points of her very high heels allows and heads off at a right angle, trolling for the perfect feel-good space chat.
Zi frowns. “You just blew a perfect opportunity to communicate with the public.”
“I communicate very well with the public, except when you bump my podcast, like you did yesterday.” Pele, temporary liaison between the many factions on board, sees new fault lines daily, foresees minor disasters and deflects them before they emerge, furnishes solutions, and shares concerns in forceful, direct language with those on the ship and on Earth who need to know. She also drops a weekly public podcast, working hard to present this information gracefully, so as to avoid being characterized as an alarmist crank by the all-powerful entertainment industry.