Every channel of entertainment tried to bellow its way into my head, as data about food production in Mambila fed through me as if it was something I knew. Too much, I had to switch off again. I am a classic introvert. I cannot handle too much information. Emilda smiled at me—she had a kind face—and wiggled her fingernails at me in lieu of conversation. Each fingernail was playing a different old movie.
Baje’s robe stayed the same blue. I think it was real. I think he was real too. Shy.
Lagos train station looked like an artist’s impression in silver of a birch forest, trunks and slender branches. I couldn’t see the train; it was so swathed in abstract patterns, moving signs, voices, pictures of our destinations, and classical Tiv dancers imitating cats. You, dead-eyed, had no trouble navigating the crowds and the holograms, and we slid into our seats that cost a month’s wages. The train accelerated to 300 kph, and we slipped through Nigeria like neutrinos. Traditional mud brick houses clustered like old folks in straw hats, each hut a room in a rich person’s home. The swept earth was red brown, brushed perfect like suede. Alongside the track, shards of melon were drying in the sun. The melon was the basis of the egussi soup we had for lunch. It was as if someone were stealing it all from me at high speed.
You were gone, looking inward, lost in AIr.
I saw two Chinese persons traveling together, immobile behind sunglasses. One of them stood up and went to the restroom, pausing just slightly as zie walked in both directions. Taking eyeshots? Sampling profile information? Zie looked straight at me. Ghosts of pockmarks on zir cheeks. I only saw them because I had turned off.
I caught the eye of an Arab gentleman in a silk robe with his two niqabbed wives. He was sweating and afraid, and suddenly I was. He nodded once to me, slowly. He was a Voyager as well.
I whispered your name, but you didn’t respond. I didn’t want to latch you; I didn’t know how much might be given away. I began to feel alone.
At Abuja station, everything was sun panels. You bought some chocolate gold coins and said we were rich. You had not noticed the Chinese men but I told you, and you took my hand and said in Portuguese, “Soon we will have no need to fear them any longer.”
The Arab family and others I recognized from the first trip crowded a bit too quickly into the Makurdi train. All with tiny Fabric bags. Voyagers all. We had all been summoned at the last minute.
Then the Chinese couple got on, still in sunglasses, still unsmiling, and my heart stumbled. What were they doing? If they knew we were going and they didn’t like it, they could stop it again. Like they’d stopped the Belize launch. At a cost of trillions to the Cooperative. Would they do the same thing again? All of us looked away from each other and said nothing. I could hear the hiss of the train on its magnets, as if something were coiling. We slithered all the way into the heart of Makurdi.
You woke up as we slowed to a stop. “Back in the real world?” I asked you, which was a bitchy thing to say.
The Chinese man stood up and latched us all, in all languages. “You are all idiots!”
Something to mull over: they, too, knew what we were doing.
* * *
The Makurdi taxi had a man in front who seemed to steer the thing. He was a Tiv gentleman. He liked to talk, which I think annoyed you a bit. Sociable, outgoing you.What a waste, when the AI can drive.
Why have humans on the Voyage either?
“You’re the eighth passengers I’ve had to take to the Base in two days. One a week is good business for me. Three makes me very happy.”
He kept asking questions and got out of us what country we were from. We stuck to our cover story—we were here to teach Lusobras to the Nigerian Air Force. He wanted to know why they couldn’t use the babblefish. You chuckled and said, “You know how silly babblefish can make people sound.” You told the story of Uncle Kaué proposing to the woman from Amalfi. He’d said in Italian, “I want to eat your hand in marriage.” She turned him down.
Then the driver asked, “So why no Chinese people?”
We froze. He had a friendly face, but his eyes were hooded. We listened to the whisper of his engine. “Well,” he said, relenting. “They can’t be everywhere all the time.”
The Co-op in all its propaganda talks about how international we all are: Brasil, Turkiye, Tivland, Lagos, Benin, Hindi, Yemen. All previous efforts in space have been fuelled by national narcissism. So we exclude the Chinese? Let them fund their own trip. And isn’t it wonderful that it’s all private financing? I wonder if space travel isn’t inherently racist.
You asked him if he owned the taxi and he laughed. “Ay-yah! Zie owns me.” His father had signed the family over for protection. The taxi keeps him, and buys zirself a new body every few years. The taxi is immortal. So is the contract.
What’s in it for the taxi, you asked. Company?
“Little little.” He held up his hands and waved his fingers. “If something breaks, I can fix.”
AIs do not ultimately live in a physical world.
I thought of all those animals I’d seen on the trip: their webbed feet, their fins, their wings, their eyes. The problems of sight, sound and movement solved over and over again. Without any kind of intelligence at all.
We are wonderful at movement because we are animals, but you can talk to us and you don’t have to build us. We build ourselves. And we want things. There is always somewhere we want to go even if it is twenty-seven light-years away.
* * *
Outside Makurdi Air Force Base, aircraft stand on their tails like raised sabres. The taxi bleeped as it was scanned, and we went up and over some kind of hump.
Ahead of us blunt as a grain silo was the rocket. Folded over its tip, something that looked like a Labrador-colored bat. Folds of Fabric, skin colored, with subcutaneous lumps like acne. A sleeve of padded silver foil was being pulled down over it.
A spaceship made of Fabric. Things can only get through it in one direction. If two-ply, then Fabric won’t let air out, or light and radiation in.
“They say,” our taxi driver said, looking even more hooded than before, “that it will be launched today or tomorrow. The whole town knows. We’ll all be looking up to wave.” Our hearts stopped. He chuckled.
We squeaked to a halt outside the reception bungalow. I suppose you thought his fare at him. I hope you gave him a handsome tip.
He saluted and said, “I pray the weather keeps good for you. Wherever you are going.” He gave a sly smile.
A woman in a blue-gray uniform bustled out to us. “Good, good, good. You are Graça and Cristina Spinoza Vaz? You must come. We’re boarding. Come, come, come.”
“Can we unpack, shower first?”
“No, no. No time.”
We were retinaed and scanned, and we took off our shoes. It was as if we were so rushed we’d attained near-light speeds already and time was dilating. Everything went slower, heavier—my shoes, the bag, my heartbeat. So heavy and slow that everything glued itself in place. I knew I wasn’t going to go, and that absolutely nothing was going to make me. For the first time in my life.
Graça, this is only happening because zey want it. Zey need us to carry zem. We’re donkeys.
“You go,” I said.
“What? Cristina. Don’t be silly.”
I stepped backwards, holding up my hands against you. “No, no, no. I can’t do this.”
You came for me, eyes tender, smile forgiving. “Oh, darling, this is just nerves.”
“It’s not nerves. You want to do this; I do not.”
Your eyes narrowed; the smile changed. “This is not the time to discuss things. We have to go! This is illegal. We have to get in and go now.”
We don’t fight, ever, do we, Graça? Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre? Two people who have been trapped together on the 24th floor all of their lives and yet they never fight. Do you not know how that happens, Graçfushka? It happens because I always go along with you.
I just couldn’t see spending four years
in a cramped little pod with you. Then spending a lifetime on some barren waste watching you organizing volleyball tournaments or charity lunches in outer space. I’m sorry.
I knew if I stayed you’d somehow wheedle me onto that ship through those doors; and I’d spend the next two hours, even as I went up the gantry, even as I was sandwiched in cloth, promising myself that at the next opportunity I’d run.
I pushed my bag at you. When you wouldn’t take it, I dropped it at your feet. I bet you took it with you, if only for the cupaçu.
You clutched at my wrists, and you tried to pull me back. You’d kept your turquoise bracelet and it looked like all the things about you I’d never see again. You were getting angry now. “You spent a half trillion reais on all the surgeries and and and and Rhodopsin … and and and the germ cells, Cris! Think of what that means for your children here on Earth, they’ll be freaks!” You started to cry. “You’re just afraid. You’re always so afraid.”
I pulled away and ran.
“I won’t go either,” you wailed after me. “I’m not going if you don’t.”
“Do what you have to,” I shouted over my shoulder. I found a door and pushed it and jumped down steps into the April heat of Nigeria. I sat on a low stucco border under the palm trees in the shade, my heart still pumping; and the most curious thing happened. I started to chuckle.
* * *
I remember at 17, I finally left the apartment on my own without you, and walked along the street into a restaurant. I had no idea how to get food. Could I just take a seat? How would I know what they were cooking?
Then like the tide, an AI flowed in and out of me and I felt zie/me pluck someone nearby, and a waitress came smiling, and ushered me to a seat. She would carry the tray. I turned the AI off because, dear Lord, I have to be able to order food by myself. So I asked the waitress what was on offer. She rolled her eyes back for just a moment, and she started to recite. The AI had to tell her. I couldn’t remember what she’d said, and so I asked her to repeat. I thought: this is no good.
* * *
The base of the rocket sprouted what looked like giant cauliflowers and it inched its way skyward. For a moment I thought it would have to fall. But it kept on going.
Somewhere three months out, it will start the engines, which drive the ship by making new universes, something so complicated human beings cannot do it. The AI will make holograms so you won’t feel enclosed. You’ll sit in Pamukkale, Turkiye. Light won’t get through the Fabric so you’ll never look out on Jupiter. The main AI will have some cute, international name. You can finish your dissertation on Libro del cortegiano—you’ll be able to read every translation—zey carry all the world’s knowledge. You’ll walk through Urbino. The AI will viva your PhD. Zey’ll be there in your head watching when you stand on the alien rock. It will be zir flag you’ll be planting. Instead of Brasil’s.
I watched you dwindle into a spark of light that flared and turned into a star of ice-dust in the sky. I latched Emilda and asked her if I could stay with her, and after a stumble of shock, she said of course. I got the same taxi back. The roof tops were crowded with people looking up at the sky.
But here’s the real joke. I latched our bank for more money. Remember, we left a trillion behind in case the launch was once again canceled?
All our money had been taken. Every last screaming centavo. Remember what I said about fraud?
So.
Are you sure that spaceship you’re on is real?
Ice
RICH LARSON
Here’s another story by Rich Larson, whose “Meshed” appears elsewhere in this anthology.
In this one, he introduces us to young brothers who live in a somewhat dysfunctional family on a hostile alien world, and whose clandestine expedition to witness an alien wonder just may, if they’re not lucky, turn out to be the last thing they ever do.…
Sedgewick had used his tab to hack Fletcher’s alarm off, but when he slid out of bed in the middle of the night his younger brother was wide awake and waiting, modded eyes a pale luminous green in the dark.
“I didn’t think you were actually going to do it,” Fletcher said with a hesitant grin.
“Of course I’m going to.” Sedgewick kept his words clipped, like he had for months. He kept his face cold. “If you’re coming, get dressed.”
Fletcher’s smile swapped out for the usual scowl. They pulled on their thermals and gloves and gumboots in silence, moving around the room like pieces of a sliding puzzle, careful to never inhabit the same square space. If there was a way to keep Fletcher from coming short of smothering him with a blanket, Sedgewick would’ve taken it. But Fletcher was fourteen now, still smaller than him but not by much, and his wiry modded arms were strong like an exoskeleton’s. Threats were no good anymore.
When they were ready, Sedgewick led the way past their parents’ room to the vestibule, which they had coded to his thumb in penance for uprooting him again, this time dumping him onto a frostbit fucking colony world where he was the only unmodded sixteen-year-old for about a million light-years. They said he had earned their trust but did not specify exactly how. Fletcher, of course, didn’t need to earn it. He could take care of himself.
Sedgewick blanked the exit log more out of habit than anything, then they stepped out of the cold vestibule into the colder upstreet. The curved ceiling above them was a night sky holo, blue-black with an impossibly large cartoon moon, pocked and bright white. Other than Sedgewick and his family, nobody in New Greenland had ever seen a real Earth night.
They went down the housing row in silence, boots scraping tracks in the frost. An autocleaner salting away a glistening blue coolant spill gledged over at them suspiciously as they passed, then returned to its work. Fletcher slid behind it and pantomimed tugging off, which might have made Sedgewick laugh once, but he’d learned to make himself a black hole that swallowed up anything too close to camaraderie.
“Don’t shit around,” he said. “It’ll scan you.”
“I don’t care,” Fletcher said, with one of those disdainful little shrugs he’d perfected lately, that made Sedgewick believe he really truly didn’t.
The methane harvesters were off-cycle, and that meant the work crews were still wandering the colony, winding in and out of dopamine bars and discos. They were all from the same modded geneprint, all with a rubbery pale skin that manufactured its own vitamins, all with deep black eyes accustomed to the dark. A few of them sat bonelessly on the curb, laid out by whatever they’d just vein-blasted, and as Sedgewick and Fletcher went by they muttered extro, extros den terre. One of them shouted hello a few beats too late.
“Should run,” Fletcher said.
“What?”
“Should jog it.” Fletcher rubbed his arms. “It’s cold.”
“You go ahead,” Sedgewick said, scornful.
“Whatever.”
They kept walking. Aside from the holos flashing over the bars, the upstreet was a long blank corridor of biocrete and composite. The downstreet was more or less the same plus maintenance tunnels that gushed steam every few minutes.
It had only taken Sedgewick a day to go from one end of the colony to the other and conclude that other than the futball pitch there was nothing worth his time. The locals he’d met in there, who played with different lines and a heavy ball and the ferocious modded precision that Sedgewick knew he wouldn’t be able to keep pace with long, more or less agreed with his assessment in their stilted Basic.
Outside the colony was a different story. That was why Sedgewick had crept out of bed at 2:13, why he and Fletcher were now heading down an unsealed exit tunnel marked by an unapproved swatch of acid yellow hologram. Tonight, the frostwhales were breaching.
* * *
Most of the lads Sedgewick had met at last week’s game were waiting at the end of the exit tunnel, slouched under flickering florescents and passing a vape from hand to hand. He’d slotted their names and faces into a doc and memorized it. It wasn’t Sedge
wick’s first run as the new boy and by now he knew how to spot the prototypes.
You had your alpha dog, who would make or break the entry depending on his mood more than anything. Your right-hand man, who was usually the jealous type, and the left-hand man, who usually didn’t give a shit. Your foot-soldiers, who weathervaned according to the top three, ranging from gregarious to vaguely hostile. Then lastly your man out on the fringe, who would either glom on thick, hoping to get a friend that hadn’t figured out his position yet, or clam right up out of fear of getting replaced.
It was a bit harder to tell who was who with everyone modded and nobody speaking good Basic. They all came up off the wall when they caught sight of him, swooping in for the strange stutter-stop handshake that Sedgewick couldn’t quite time right. Petro, tall and languid, first because he was closest not because he cared. Oxo, black eyes already flicking away for approval. Brume, compact like a brick, angry-sounding laugh. Another Oxo, this one with a regrowth implant in his jaw, quiet because of that or maybe because of something else.
Anton was the last, the one Sedgewick had pegged for alpha dog. He gripped his hand a beat longer and grinned with blocky white teeth that had never needed an orthosurgery.
“Ho, extro, how are you this morning.” He looked over Sedgewick’s shoulder and flashed his eyebrows. “Who?”
“Fletcher,” Sedgewick said. “The little brother. Going to feed him to a frostwhale.”
“Your brother.”
Fletcher stuffed his long hands into the pockets of his thermal and met Anton’s gaze. Sedgewick and his brother had the same muddy post-racial melanin and lampblack hair, but from there they diverged. Sedgewick had always been slight-framed and small-boned, with any muscle slapped across his chest and arms fought for gram by gram in a gravity gym. His eyes were a bit sunk and he hated his bowed nose.
Fletcher was already broad in the shoulders and slim-hipped, every bit of him carved sinew, and Sedgewick knew it wouldn’t be long before he was taller, too. His face was all angles now that the baby fat was gone: sharp cheekbones, netstar jawline. And his eyes were still reflecting in the half-lit tunnel, throwing light like a cat’s.
The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection Page 89