Quinx reached for Morgan’s hand. “Ninety Nine,” he gasped. “Brother Kurts. Please . . . Stop it. You didn’t need to do this.”
The Machinist shuddered to her feet. One eye was gouged loose, and her mouth bled. Morgan glanced at the dying monk and wondered just how tough a human being could be.
Her eyes were no longer mad. Instead, they were haunted. “Stop,” she said, echoing Quinx’ words.
“Go,” Morgan replied. He had just lately learned the measure of his own courage, and was not sure he could step into the chariot himself. “Go into the future. It cannot be stopped. The stars do not lie, and they are coming toward us.”
“They are my stars.” She stared at them with her remaining eye. “Ours. Not yours.”
The woman stumbled weeping through the opened door. Quinx turned away from Morgan. “It cannot be,” the priest gasped. “I must go where Ion has already led.” Face twisted in some inner agony of the spirit, he followed after her.
“And you?” asked Goins. “Do you choose the future as well?”
Afraid, he stood unmoving a moment. Then: “I would have thought to . . .” The doctor’s words ran out as he marshaled his thoughts. “No. I’ve come to understand that the future is here with us. Whatever comes, comes.”
Morgan Abutti looked up at the smoke trailing into the blue sky from the ruined airship. Goins squatted next to him, pistol still in hand. The door into the Chariot had slid shut.
“What next?” the scientist asked.
“Surely the Increate knows,” said Goins.
“Quinx would have said that the Increate knows all.” Morgan thought about those words. “It seems to me that They do not think to warn us of the truth.”
The remaining Thalassocretes gathered around. Some tended the wounded and the dead, others discussed the advisability of sending a party to look into the crash of the airship.
The Chariot began to whine, a low hum that built slowly in volume. Goins rose, gestured for a general retreat. It seemed wisest.
Morgan was slow to move, staring at the chance of greatness which he’d abandoned. He was the first to see the Chariot break from the trees and rise into the sky. The rest stopped to watch as clouds of dust and steam spiraled beneath it.
“Good luck, Revered Quinx,” muttered the doctor.
Goins tugged at his arm. “The choices are made. You were correct. We must go.”
“You have it almost right,” said Morgan. “His choices are ended. Ours are just begun.” His courage returned to him once more, like a whipped dog coming home. “This is what I get for uncovering the truth. What I had declined to see clearly before. There are great consequences to be accounted for.” He glanced away from the departing chariot. “Are you ready to face those, Judge? I am.”
“Remember, your aetheric vessel was coming anyway, whether or not you had seen it first. You did not cause this.” Goins paused a moment, searching Morgan’s face as if for some truth. “Science finds the path where the light of faith has shown the way.”
Morgan could not tell if the judge meant to be ironic or not. That did not matter. He patted the other man’s shoulder. “Let us go, then. There is work to be done.”
Above them, the future rose ever higher, shedding six thousand years of mud and plants and tradition as it climbed to meet the oncoming stars.
THE MEMCORDIST
Lavie Tidhar
Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, has traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London, the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, and Laos. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), was the editor of Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography, and the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults and The Apex Book of World SF. He is the author of the linked story collection HebrewPunk, the novella chapbooks An Occupation of Angels, Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, Cloud Permutations, Jesus and the Eighfold Path, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier. A prolific short-story writer, his stories have appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, ChiZine, Postscripts, Fantasy Magazine, Nemonymous, Infinity Plus, Aeon, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau, and elsewhere, and have been translated into seven languages. His latest novels include The Bookman and its sequel Camera Obscura, Osama: A Novel, and, most recently, The Great Game. Osama: A Novel won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s Best Novel in 2012. Coming up is a new novel, Martian Sands. After a spell in Tel Aviv, he’s currently living back in England again.
It’s been said that everyone is the hero of their own drama. Here’s a poignant look at a future where everyone else gets to watch as well. . . .
Polyphemus Port, Titan, Year Forty-Three
Beyond the dome the ice-storms of Titan rage; inside it is warm, damp, with the smell of sewage seeping through and creepers growing through the walls of the above-ground dwellings. He tries to find her scent in the streets of Polyport and fails.
Hers was the scent of basil, and the night. When cooking, he would sometimes crush basil leaves between his fingers. It would bring her back, for just a moment, bring her back just as she was the first time they’d met.
Polyphemus Port is full of old memories. Whenever he wants, he can recall them, but he never does. Instead he tries to find them in old buildings, in half-familiar signs. There, the old Baha’i temple where they’d sheltered one rainy afternoon, and watched a weather hacker dance in the storm, wreathed in raindrops. There, what had once been a smokes-bar, now a shop selling surface crawlers. There, a doll house, for the sailors off the ships. It had been called Madame Sing’s, now it’s called Florian’s. Dolls peek out of the windows, small naked figures in the semblance of teenage boys and girls, soft and warm and disposable, with their serial numbers etched delicately into the curve of a neck or thigh. His feet know the old way and he walks past the shops, away from the docks and into a row of box-like apartments, the co-op building where they’d first met, creepers overgrowing the walls and peeking into windows—where they’d met, a party in the Year Seventeen of the Narrative of Pym.
He looks up, and as he does he automatically checks the figures that rise up, always, in the air before him. The number of followers hovers around twenty-three million, having risen slightly on this, his second voyage to Titan in so many years. A compilation feed of Year Seventeen is running concurrently, and there are messages from his followers, flashing in the lower right corner, which he ignores.
Looking up at her window, a flower pot outside—there used to be a single red flower growing there, a carnivorous Titan Rose with hungry, teeth-ringed suckers—her vice at the time. She’d buy the plant choice goat meat in the market every day. Now the flower pot is absent and the window is dark and she, too, is long gone.
Is she watching too, somewhere, he wonders—does she see me looking up and searching for her, for traces of her in a place so laid and overlaid with memories until it was impossible to tell which ones were original, and which the memory of a memory?
He thinks it’s unlikely. Like the entire sum of his life, this journey is for his benefit, is ultimately about him. We are what we are—and he turns away from her window, and the ice-storm howls above his head, beyond the protective layer of the dome. There had been a storm that night, too, but then, this was Titan, and there was always a storm.
On board the Gel Blong Mota, Earth-to-Mars Voyage, Year Five
There are over twenty million followers on this day of the Narrative of Pym, and Mother is happy, and Pym is happy too, because he’d snuck out when Mother was asleep, and now he stands before the vast porthole of the ship—in actuality a wall-sized screen—and watches space, and the slowly moving stars beyond.
The Gel Blong Mota is an old ship, generations of Man Spes living and dying inside as it cruises the solar system, from Earth, across the inner and outer system, all the way to Jettisoned and Dragon’s World before turning back, doing the same route again and again. Pym is half in love
with Joy, who is the same age as him and will one day, she confides in him, be captain of this ship. She teaches him asteroid pidgin, the near-universal language of Mars and the belt, and he tells her about Earth, about volcanoes and storms and the continental cities. He was not born on Earth, but he has lived there four of his five years, and he is nervous to be away, but also happy, and excited, and it’s all very confusing. Nearly fifty million watched him leave Earth, and they didn’t go in the elevator, they went in an old passenger RLV and he floated in the air when the gravity stopped, and he wasn’t sick or anything. Then they came to an orbital station where they had a very nice room and there was gravity again, and the next day they climbed aboard the Gel Blong Mota, which was at the same time very very big but also small, and it smelled funny. He’d seen the aquatic tanks with their eels and prawns and lobster and squid, and he’d been to the hydroponics gardens and spoken to the head gardener there, and Joy even showed him a secret door and took him inside the maintenance corridors beyond the walls of the ship, where it was very dry and smelled of dust and old paint.
Now he watches space, and wonders what Mars is like. At that moment, staring out into space, it is as if he is staring out at his own future spreading out before him, unwritten terabytes and petabytes of the Narrative of Pym, waiting to be written over in any way he wants. It makes him feel strange—he’s glad when Joy arrives and they go off together to the aquatic tanks—she said she’d teach him how to fish.
Tong Yun City, Mars, Year Seven
Mother is out again with her latest boyfriend, Jonquil Sing, a memcordist syndication agent. “He is very good for us,” she tells Pym one night, giving him a wet kiss on the cheek, and her breath smells of smoke. She hopes Jonquil will increase subscriptions across Mars, Pym knows—the numbers of his followers have been dropping since they came to Tong Yun. “A dull, provincial town,” Mother says, which is the Earth-born’s most stinging insult.
But Pym likes Tong Yun. He loves going down in the giant elevators into the lower levels of the city, and he particularly loves the Arcade, with its battle droid arenas and games-worlds shops and particularly the enormous Multifaith Bazaar. Whenever he can he sneaks out of the house—they are living on the surface, under the dome of Tong Yun, in a house belonging to a friend of a friend of Mother’s—and goes down to Arcade, and to the Bazaar.
The Church of Robot is down there, and an enormous Elronite temple, and mosques and synagogues and Buddhist and Baha’i temples and even a Gorean place and he watches the almost-naked slave girls with strange fascination, and they smile at him and reach out and tousle his hair. There are Re-Born Martian warriors with reddish skin and four arms—they believe Mars was once habituated by an ancient empire and that they are its descendants, and they serve the Emperor of Time. He thinks he wants to become a Re-Born warrior when he grows up, and have four arms and tint his skin red, but when he mentions it to Mother once she throws a fit and says Mars never had an atmosphere and there is no emperor and that the Re-Born are—and she uses a very rude word, and there are the usual complaints from some of the followers of the Narrative of Pym.
He’s a little scared of the Elronites—they’re all very confident and smile a lot and have very white teeth. Pym isn’t very confident. He prefers quiet roads and places with few people in them and he doesn’t want anyone to know who he is.
Sometimes he wonders who he is, or what he will become. One of Mother’s friends asked him, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and he said, “A spaceship captain—” thinking of Joy—and Mother gave her false laugh and ruffled his hair and said, “Pym already is what he is. Isn’t that right, sweetheart?” and she gathered him in her arms and said, “He’s Pym.”
But who is Pym? Pym doesn’t know. When he’s down at the Multifaith Bazaar he thinks that perhaps he wants to be a priest, or a monk—but which religion? They’re all neat.
Fifteen million follow him as he passes through temples, churches and shrines, searching for answers to a question he is not yet ready to ask himself, and might never be.
Jettisoned, Charon, Year Fifty-Six
So at last he’s come to Jettisoned, the farthest one can get without quite leaving completely, and he hires a small dark room in a small dark co-op deep in the bowels of the moon, a place that suits his mood.
Twenty-three million watch, less because of him and more because he’d chosen Jettisoned, the home of black warez and wild technology and outlaws—the city of the Jettisoned, all those ejected at the last moment from the vast majestic starships as they depart the solar system, leaving forever on a one-way journey into galactic space. Would some of them find new planets, new moons, new suns to settle around? Are there aliens out there, or God? No one knows, least of all Pym. He’d once asked his mother why they couldn’t go with one of the ships. “Don’t be silly,” she’d said, “think of all your followers, and how disappointed they’d be.”
“Bugger my followers,” he says now, aloud, knowing some would complain, and others would drop out and follow other narratives. He’d never been all that popular, but the truth was, he’d never wanted to be. Everything I’ve ever done in my life, he thinks, is on record. Everything I’ve seen, everything I’ve touched, everything I smelled or said. And yet had he said or done anything worth saying, anything worth doing?
I once loved with all my heart, he thinks. Is that enough?
He knows she’d been to Jettisoned in the past year. But she’d left before he arrived. Where is she now? He could check, but doesn’t. On her way back through the outer system—perhaps in the Galilean Moons, where he knows she’s popular. He decides to get drunk.
Hours later, he is staggering along a dark alley, home to smokes bars, doll houses, battle arcades, body modification clinics, a lone Church of Robot mission, and several old-fashioned drinking establishments. Anything that can be grown on Jettisoned gets fermented into alcohol, sooner or later. Either that or smoked. His head hurts, and his heart is beating too fast. Too old, he thinks. Perhaps he says it out loud. Two insectoid figures materialise in the darkness, descend on him. “What are you—?” he says, slurring the words, as the two machines expertly rifle through his pockets and run an intrusion package over his node—even now, when all he can do is blink blearily, he notices the followers numbers rising, and realises he’s being mugged.
“Give them a show,” he says, and begins to giggle. He tries to hit one of the insectoid figures and a thin, slender metal arm reaches down and touches him—a needle bite against his throat—
Numb, but still conscious—he can’t shout for help but what’s the point, anyway? This is Jettisoned, and if you end up there you have only yourself to blame.
What are they doing? Why have they not gone yet? They’re trying to take apart his memcorder, but it’s impossible—don’t they know it’s impossible?—he is wired through and through, half human and half machine, recording everything, forgetting nothing. And yet suddenly he is very afraid, and the panic acts like a cold dose of water and he manages to move, slightly, and he shouts for help, though his voice is reedy and weak and anyway there is no one to hear him . . .
They’re tearing apart chunks of memory, terabytes of life, days and months and years disappearing in a black cloud—“Stop, please,” he mumbles, “please, don’t—”
Who is he? What is he doing here?
A name. He has a name . . .
Somewhere far away, a shout. The two insectoid creatures raise elongated faces, feelers shaking—
There is the sound of an explosion, and one of the creatures disappears—hot shards of metal sting Pym, burning, burning—
The second creature rears, four arms rising like guns—
There is the sound of gunshots, to and from, and then there’s a massive hole in the creature’s chest, and it runs off into the darkness—
A face above his, dark hair, pale skin, two eyes like waning moons—“Pym? Pym? Can you hear me?”
“Pym,” he whispers, the name
strangely familiar. He closes his eyes and then nothing hurts any more, and he is floating in a cool, calm darkness.
Spider’s Hold, Luna, Year One
Not a memory as much as the recollection, like film, of something seen—emerging from darkness into a light, alien faces hovering above him, as large as moons—“Pym! My darling little Pym—”
Hands clapping, and he is clutched close to a warm, soft breast, and he begins to cry, but then the warmth settles him and he snuggles close and he is happy.
“Fifty-three million at peak,” someone says.
“Day One,” someone says. “Year One. And may all of your days be as happy as this one. You are born, Pym. Your narrative’s began.”
He finds a nipple, drinks. The milk is warm. “Hush now, my little baby. Hush now.”
“See, already he is looking around. He wants to see the world.”
But it isn’t true. He only wants to sleep, in that warm, safe place.
“Happy birthday, Pym.”
He sleeps.
Polyphemus Port, Titan, Year Seventeen
The party is crammed with people, the house node broadcasts out particularly loud Nuevo Kwasa-Kwasa tunes, there is a lot of Zion Special Strength passing around, the strong, sweet smell latching on to hair and clothes, and Pym is slightly drunk.
Polyport, on his own: Mother left behind in the Galilean Republic, Pym escaping—jumping onto an ancient transport ship, the Ibn-al-Farid, a Jupiter-to-Saturn one-way trip.
Feeling free, for the first time. His numbers going up, but he isn’t paying any attention for once. Pym, not following the narrative but simply living his life.
Port bums hanging out at Polyport, kids looking for ships for the next trip to nowhere, coming from Mars and the Jovean moons and the ring-cities of Saturn, heading everywhere—
The party: a couple of weather hackers complaining about outdated protocols; a ship rat from the Ibn-al-Farid—Pym knows him slightly from the journey—doing a Louis Wu in the corner, a blissful smile on his face, wired-in, the low current tickling his pleasure centers; five big, blonde Australian girls from Earth on a round-the-system trip—conversations going over Pym’s head—“Where do you come from? Where do you go? Where do you come from?”
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