by Neil Clarke
Donna regarded her from the interior of her suit. She looked so small inside it. Khalidah thought of her fragile body shaking inside its soft volumes, her thin neck and her bare skull juddering like a bad piece of video.
“I want—”
“Don’t,” Donna said. “Don’t, Khal. Not now.”
For the first time in a long time, Khalidah peeped at Donna’s aura through the additional layer in her lenses’ vision. It was deep blue, like a very wide and cold stretch of the sea. It was a color she had never seen on Donna. When she looked at her own pattern, it was much the same shade.
Marshall chose this moment to poke his head in. “It’s time.”
Donna reached over to the airlock button. “I have to go now, Khalidah.”
Before Khalidah could say anything, Marshall had tugged her backward. The door rolled shut. For a moment she watched Donna through the small bright circle of glass. Then Donna’s helmet snapped shut and she wore a halo within a halo, like a bull’s-eye.
The landing was as Marshall promised: smooth as silk. With Corvus he was in his element. He and the vessel knew each other well. They’d moved as much of Corvus’s cargo as they could into temporary storage outside the hab; the reduced weight would give Donna the extra boost on the trip back that she might need.
Donna herself rode out the landing better than any of them expected. She took her time unburdening herself of her restraints, and they heard her breathing heavily, trying to choke back the nausea that now dominated her daily life. But eventually she lurched free of the unit, tuned up the jets on her suit, jiggered her air mix, and began the unlocking procedure to open Corvus. They watched her gloved hands hovering over the final lock.
“I hope you’re not expecting some cheesy bullshit about giant leaps for womankind,” Donna said, panting audibly. She sounded sheepish. For Donna, that meant she was nervous. “I didn’t really have time to prepare any remarks. I have a job to do.”
Brooklyn wiped her eyes and covered her mouth. Marshall passed her a tissue, and took one for himself.
“You’ve wanted this since you were a little girl, Donna,” Song said. “Go out there and get it.”
Together they watched the lock spin open, and Donna eased herself out. There was Tango, ready and waiting. And there was Mars, or at least their little corner of it, raw and open and red like a wound.
“I wish I could smell it,” Donna said. “I wish I could taste the air. It feels strange to be here and yet not be here at the same time. You can stand here all you want and never really touch it.”
“You can look at the samples when you bring them back,” Brooklyn managed to say.
Donna said nothing, only silently made her way to Tango and moved the samples back to Corvus. Then she began the procedure to get Tango into manual. Her feed cut out a couple of times, but only briefly; they hadn’t thought to test the signal on the cameras themselves. Her audio was fine, though, and Marshall talked her through when she had questions. In the end it ran like any other remote repair. Even the dig went well; clearing the dirt from the drill and restarting it from the control panel was a lot simpler than any of them had expected.
Halfway back to Corvus, Tango slowly rolled to a stop.
“Donna, check your batteries,” Marshall suggested.
There was no answer. Only Donna’s slow, wet breathing.
“Donna, copy?”
Nothing. They looked at Song; Song pulled up Donna’s vitals. “No changes in her eye movements or alpha pattern,” Song whispered. “She’s not having a seizure. Donna. Donna! Do you need help?”
“No,” Donna said, finally. “I came here to do a job, and now I’m finished with it. I’m done.”
Something in Khalidah’s stomach turned to ice. “Don’t do this,” she whispered, as Marshall began to say “No, no, no,” over and over. He started bashing things on the console, running every override he could.
“No, you don’t, you crazy old broad,” he muttered. “I can get Tango to drive you back, you know!”
“Not if I’ve ripped out the receiver,” Donna said. She sounded exhausted. “I think I’ll just stay here, thank you. Ganesha can deal with me when they come. You don’t have to do it. You’d have had to freeze me, anyway, and vibrate me down to crystal, like cat litter, and—”
“Fuck. You.”
It was the first full complete sentence that Khalidah had spoken to her in months. So she repeated it.
“Fuck you. Fuck you for lying to us. Again. Fuck you for this selfish fucking bullshit. Oh, you think you’re being so romantic, dying on Mars. Well fuck you. We came here to prove we could live, not …” Her lips were hot. Her eyes were hot. It was getting harder to breathe. “Not whatever the fuck it is you think you’re doing.”
Nothing.
“Donna, please don’t,” Brooklyn whispered in her most wheedling tone. “Please don’t leave us. We need you.” She sounded like a child. Then again, Khalidah wasn’t sure she herself sounded any better. Somehow this loss contained within it all the other losses she’d ever experienced: her mother, her father, the slow pull away from the Earth and into the shared unknown.
“This is a bad idea,” Marshall said, his voice calm and steady. “If you want to take the Lethezine, take the Lethezine. But you don’t know how it works—what if it doesn’t go like you think it will, and you’re alone and in pain down there? Why don’t you come back up, and if something goes wrong, we’ll be there to help?”
Silence. Was she deliberating? Could they change her mind? Khalidah strained to hear the sound of Tango starting back up again. They flicked nervous, tearful glances at each other.
“Are you just going to quit?” Khalidah asked, when the silence stretched too long. “Are you just going to run away, like this? Now that it’s hard?”
“You have no idea how hard this is, Khal, and you’ve never once thought to ask.”
It stung. Khalidah let the pain transform itself into anger. Anger, she decided, was the only way out of this problem. “I thought you didn’t want me to ask, given how you never told us anything until it was too late.”
“It’s not my fault I’m dying!”
“But it’s your fault you didn’t tell us! We would have—”
“You would have convinced me to go home.” Donna chuckled. It became a cough. The cough lasted too long. “Because you love me, and you want me to live. And I love you, so I would have done it.” She had another little coughing jag. “But the trouble with home is that there’s nothing to go back to. I’ve thrown my whole life into this. I’ve had to pass on things—real things—to get to this place. But now that I’m here, I know it was worth it. And that’s how I want to end it. I don’t want to die alone in a hospital surrounded by people who don’t understand what’s out here, or why we do this.”
Khalidah forced her voice to remain firm. “And so you want to die alone, down there, surrounded by nothing at all?”
“I’m not alone, Khal. You’re with me. You’re all with me, all the time.”
Brooklyn broke down. She pushed herself into one corner. Khalidah reached up, and held her ankle, tethering her into the group. She squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears bud away. Song’s beautiful ponytail drifted across her face. Arms curled around Khalidah’s body. Khalidah curled her arms around the others. They were a Gordian knot, hovering far above Donna, a problem she could not solve and could only avoid.
“That’s right, Donna,” Marshall said. “We’re here. We’re right here.”
“I’m sorry,” Donna said. “I’m sorry I lied. I didn’t want to. But I just … I wanted to stay, more than I wanted to tell you.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Khalidah said. “I …” She wiped at her face. Her throat hurt. “I miss you. Already.”
“I miss you, too. I miss all of you.” Donna sniffed hard. “But this is where we’re supposed to be. Because this is where we are at our best.”
They were quiet for a while. There was nothing to do but weep. Kh
alidah thought she might weep forever. The pain was a real thing—she had forgotten that it hurt to cry. She had forgotten the raw throat and pounding head that came with full-body grief. She had forgotten, since her mother, how physically taxing it could be.
“Are you ready, now?” Song asked, finally. She wiped her eyes and swallowed. “Donna? Are you ready to take the dose?”
The silence went on a long time. But still, they kept asking, “Are you ready? Are you ready?”
Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in southern Spain, and now lives in Ottawa, Canada. His short fiction appears in numerous Year’s Best anthologies and has been translated into Chinese, Vietnamese, Polish, Czech, French, and Italian. He was the most prolific author of short science fiction in 2015, 2016, and possibly 2017 as well. His debut novel, Annex, comes out in July 2018, and his debut collection, Tomorrow Factory, follows in October 2018. Find more at richwlarson.tumblr.com.
AN EVENING WITH SEVERYN GRIMES
Rich Larson
“Do you have to wear the Fawkes in here?” Girasol asked, sliding into the orthochair. Its worn wings crinkled, leaking silicon, as it adjusted to her shape. The plastic stuck cold to her shoulder blades, and she shivered.
“No.” Pierce made no move to pull off the smirking mask. “It makes you nervous,” he explained, groping around in the guts of his open Adidas track-bag, his tattooed hand emerging with the hypnotic. “That’s a good enough reason to wear it.”
Girasol didn’t argue, just tipped her dark head back, positioning herself over the circular hole they’d punched through the headrest. Beneath it, a bird’s nest of circuitry, mismatched wiring, blinking blue nodes. And in the center of the nest: the neural jack, gleaming wet with disinfectant jelly.
She let the slick white port at the top of her spine snick open.
“No cheap sleep this time,” Pierce said, flicking his nail against the inky vial. “Get ready for a deep slice, Sleeping Beauty. Prince Charming’s got your shit. Highest-grade Dozr a man can steal.” He plugged it into a battered needler, motioned for her arm. “I get a kiss or what?”
Girasol proffered her bruised wrist. Let him hunt around collapsed veins while she said, coldly, “Don’t even think about touching me when I’m under.”
Pierce chuckled, slapping her flesh, coaxing a pale blue worm to stand out in her white skin. “Or what?”
Girasol’s head burst as the hypnotic went in, flooding her capillaries, working over her neurotransmitters. “Or I’ll cut your fucking balls off.”
The Fawkes’ grin loomed silent over her; a brief fear stabbed through the descending drug. Then he laughed again, barking and sharp, and Girasol knew she had not forgotten how to speak to men like Pierce. She tasted copper in her mouth as the Dozr settled.
“Just remember who got you out of Correctional,” Pierce said. “And that if you screw this up, you’d be better off back in the freeze. Sweet dreams.”
The mask receded, and Girasol’s eyes drifted up the wall, following the cabling that crept like vines from the equipment under her skull, all the way through a crack gouged in the ceiling, and from there to whatever line Pierce’s cronies had managed to splice. The smartpaint splashed across the grimy stucco displayed months of preparation: shifting sat-maps, decrypted dossiers, and a thousand flickering image loops of one beautiful young man with silver hair.
Girasol lowered the chair. Her toes spasmed, kinking against each other as the thrumming neural jack touched the edge of her port. The Dozr kept her breathing even. A bone-deep rasp, a meaty click, and she was synched, simulated REM brainwave flowing through a current of code, flying through wire, up and out of the shantytown apartment, flitting like a shade into Chicago’s dark cityscape.
Severyn Grimes felt none of the old heat in his chest when the first round finished with a shattered nose and a shower of blood, and he realized something: the puppet shows didn’t do it for him anymore.
The fighters below were massive, as always, pumped full of HGH and Taurus and various combat chemicals, sculpted by a lifetime in gravity gyms. The fight, as always, wouldn’t end until their bodies were mangled heaps of broken bone and snapped tendon. Then the technicians would come and pull the digital storage cones from the slick white ports at the tops of their spines, so the puppeteers could return to their own bodies, and the puppets, if they were lucky, woke up in meat repair with a paycheck and no permanent paralysis.
It seemed almost wasteful. Severyn stroked the back of his neck, where silver hair was shorn fashionably around his own storage cone. Beneath him, the fighters hurtled from their corners, grappled, broke, and collided again. He felt nothing. Severyn’s adrenaline only ever seemed to spike in boardrooms now. Primate aggression through power broking.
“I’m growing tired of this shit,” he said, and his bodyguard carved a clear exit through the baying crowd. Follow-cams drifted in his direction, foregoing the match for a celebspotting opportunity: the second-wealthiest bio-businessman in Chicago, 146 years old but plugged into a beautiful young body that played well on cam. The god-like Severyn Grimes slumming at a puppet show, readying for a night of downtown debauchery? The paparazzi feed practically wrote itself.
A follow-cam drifted too close; Severyn raised one finger, and his bodyguard swatted it out of the air on the way out the door.
Girasol jolted, spiraled down to the floor. She’d drifted too close, too entranced by the geometry of his cheekbones, his slate gray eyes and full lips, his swimmer’s build swathed in Armani and his graceful hands with Nokia implants glowing just under the skin. A long ways away, she was dimly aware of her body in the orthochair in the decrepit apartment. She scrawled a message across the smartpaint:
HE’S LEAVING EARLY. ARE YOUR PEOPLE READY?
“They’re, shit, they’re on their way. Stall him.” Pierce’s voice was distant, an insect hum, but she could detect the sound of nerves fraying.
Girasol jumped to another follow-cam, triggering a fizz of sparks as she seized its motor circuits. The image came in upside down: Mr. Grimes clambering into the limo, the bodyguard scanning the street. Springy red hair and a brutish face suggested Neanderthal gene-mixing. Him, they would have to get rid of.
The limousine door glided shut. From six blocks away, Girasol triggered the crude mp4 file she’d prepared—sometimes the old tricks worked best— and wormed inside the vehicle’s CPU on a sine wave of sound.
Severyn vaguely recognized the song breezing through the car’s sponge speakers, but outdated protest rap was a significant deviation from his usual tastes.
“Music off.”
The backseat was sealed in silence. The car took an uncharacteristically long time calculating their route before finally jetting into traffic. Severyn leaned back to watch the dark street slide past his window, lit by lime green neon and the jittering ghosts of holograms. A moment later he turned to his bodyguard, who had the Loop’s traffic reports scrolling across his retinas.
“Does blood excite you, Finch?”
Finch blinked, clearing his eyes back to a watery blue. “Not particularly, Mr. Grimes. Comes with the job.”
“I thought having reloaded testosterone would make the world … Visceral again.” Severyn grabbed at his testicles with a wry smile. “Maybe an old mind overwrites a young body in more ways than the technicians suspect. Maybe mortality is escapable, but old age inevitable.”
“Maybe so,” Finch echoed, sounding slightly uncomfortable. First-lifers often found it unsettling to be reminded they were sitting beside a man who had bought off Death itself. “Feel I’m getting old myself, sometimes.”
“Maybe you’d like to turn in early,” Severyn offered.
Finch shook his head. “Always up for a jaunt, Mr. Grimes. Just so long as the whorehouses are vetted.”
Severyn laughed, and in that moment the limo lurched sideways and jolted to a halt. His face mashed to the cold glass of the window, bare millimeters away from an autocab that da
rted gracefully around them and back into its traffic algorithm. Finch straightened him out with one titanic hand.
“What the fuck was that?” Severyn asked calmly, unrumpling his tie.
“Car says there’s something in the exhaust port,” Finch said, retinas replaced by schematic tracery. “Not an explosive. Could just be debris.”
“Do check.”
“Won’t be a minute, Mr. Grimes.”
Finch pulled a pair of wire-veined gloves from a side compartment and opened the door, ushering in a chilly undertow, then disappeared around the rear end of the limousine. Severyn leaned back to wait, flicking alternately through merger details and airbrushed brothel advertisements in the air above his lap.
“Good evening, Mr. Grimes,” the car burbled. “You’ve been hacked.”
Severyn’s nostrils flared. “I don’t pay you for your sense of humor, Finch.”
“I’m not joking, parasite.”
Severyn froze. There was a beat of silence, then he reached for the door handle. It might as well have been stone. He pushed his palm against the sunroof and received a static charge for his trouble.
“Override,” he said. “Severyn Grimes. Open doors.” No response. Severyn felt his heartbeat quicken, felt a prickle of sweat on his palms. He slowly let go of the handle. “Who am I speaking to?”
“Take a look through the back window. Maybe you can figure it out.”
Severyn spun, peering through the dark glass. Finch was hunched over the exhaust port, only a slice of red hair in sight. The limousine was projecting a yellow hazard banner, cleaving traffic, but as Severyn watched an unmarked van careened to a halt behind them. Masked men spilled out. Severyn thumped his fist into the glass of the window, but it was soundproof; he sent a warning spike to his security, but the car was shielded against adbombs, and theoretically against electronic intrusion, and now it was walling off his cell signal.