by Ian McDonald
The crowd rises in one voice and one blood. Najia Askarzadah howls and raves with them. All Najia Askarzadah knows is two fighting cats leaping and slashing at each other down in the pit as the blood surges in her eyes and ears.
It’s terrifyingly fast and bloody. Within seconds the beautiful silver tabby has one leg hanging from a rope of gristle and skin. Blood jets from the open wound, but it screams defiance at its enemy, tries to dodge and dart on the flapping triangle of meat; slashing with its terrible, killing teeth. Finally it’s down and spinning spastically on its back, ploughing up a wave of bloody sand. The victors have already hooked their champion with a neck loop and are wrestling the furious, shrieking thing towards the pen. The silver tabby wails and wails until someone from the judge’s pew walks over and drops a concrete breezeblock on its head.
Muscle-top girl stands staring sullenly as the mashed, twitching thing is shovelled away. She bites her bottom lip. Najia loves her then, loves the boy whose glance she caught, loves everyone, everything in this wooden arena. Her heart is quivering, her breath burning, her fists clenched and trembling, her pupils dilated and her brain blazing. She is eight hundred per cent alive and holy. Again she makes eye contact with Obvious Hood. He nods but she can see he has had a heavy loss.
The victors step into the ring to receive the adulation of the crowd. The barker screams into the sound system and on the bookies’ bench hands push money money money. This is what you came to Bharat for, Najia Askarzadah, she tells herself. To feel this way about life, about death, about illusion and reality. To have something burn through bloody reasonable, sane, tolerant Sweden. To taste the insane and raw. Her nipples are hard. She knows she’s damp. This war, this war for water, this war that she denies brought her here, this war that everyone fears will come. She doesn’t fear it. She wants that war. She wants it very much.
LISA
Four hundred and fifty kilometres above Western Ecuador, Lisa Durnau runs through a herd of bobbets. They scatter from her, hiking up on their powerful legs and hoofing it, semaphore crests raised. The canopy forest echoes their warbling alarms. The young look up from their grazing, forelegs pawing at air in dread, then shrill and dive for their parents’ pouches. The waist-high sauro-marsupials peel away from Lisa in her running tights and top and shoes in two wings of fright, hatchlings trying desperately to stuff themselves headfirst into belly flaps. They’re one of Biome 161’s most successful species. The forests of Simulated Year Eight Million Before Present throb black with their herds. Alterre is running a hundred thousand years a Real World day, so by tomorrow they could be extinct; this high, humid cloud forest of umbrella-shaped trees desiccated by a climatic shift. But in this ecological moment, this timeslice of what, in another age, another earth, will be northern Tanzania, today belongs to them
The rush and dash of bobbets disturbs a group of tranter, reared up on their hind legs, sucking leaves from a trudeau tree. The big slow tree feeders drop to their longer forelegs and canter disjointedly away. Their internal armour plates move like machinery under willow-striped hides. Camouflage by William Morris, Lisa Durnau thinks. Botany by René Magritte. The trudeau trees are perfect hemispheres of leaves, regularly spaced across the plain like an exercise in statistical distribution. Some of the branches bear seed buds, penduluming on the breeze. They can scatter seed across a hundred-metre radius, like a riot-control flechette gun. That’s how they achieve their mathematical regularity. No trudeau will grow in the shade of another, but the forest canopy is a cornucopia of species.
Flickers of moving shadow between the trees; a flock of parasitic beckhams darts from the dead tranter in which they have injected their eggs. An ystavat stoops from its high glide path, darts and weaves and scoops up a laggard sauro-bat in the net of skin between its hind legs. A flip, a duck of the tearing beak and the hunter climbs away again. Invulnerable, inviolable, Lisa Durnau runs on. No god is mortal in his own world and for the past three years she has been director, sustainer and mediator of Alterre, the parallel Earth evolving in accelerated time on eleven and a half million Real-World computers.
Beckhams. Tranters. Trudeaus. Lisa Durnau loves the mischief of Alterre taxonomy. It’s the principles of astronomy applied to alternative biology; you find it lurking in your hard-drive, you name it. Mcconkeys and mastroiannis and ogunwes and hayakawas and novaks. Hammadis and cuestras and bjorks.
So very Lull.
She’s settled into her rhythm now. She could move like this forever. Some listen to music when they run. Some chat or read their mail or the news. Some have their aeai PAs brief them on the day. Lisa Durnau checks out what’s new across the ten thousand biomes running on eleven and a half million computers participating in the biggest experiment in evolution. Her usual route is a loop around the University of Kansas campus, her marvellous and mysterious bestiary laid over the Lawrence traffic. There’s always something to surprise and delight, some new phone-directory name hanging off a fantastical creature that’s fought its way out of the silicon jungle. When the first arthrotects had appeared out of the insects by pure evolutionary leap on a Biome 158 host in Guadalajara, she had experienced that thrilled satisfaction you feel when a plot twist hits you that you didn’t expect. No one could have predicted the lopezs, but they had lain there, latent, in the rules. Then, two days ago the parasitogenic beckhams evolved from an elementary school in Lancashire and it hit her all over again. You never see it coming.
Then they fired her into space. She hadn’t seen that coming either.
Two days ago she had been running her loop of the campus, past the honey stone faculty buildings, Alterre laid over Kansas summer. She turned by the student halls to run back to shower, shampoo and office. In which a woman in a suit had been waiting as Lisa came in screwing water out of her ears with twists of tissue. She’d shown identifications and authorisations for responsibilities Lisa hadn’t known her nation ever needed and three hours later Lisa Durnau, Director of the Alterre Simulated Evolution Project, was on a government hypersonic transport seventy-five thousand feet over central Arkansas.
The G-woman had told her luggage was strictly mass-limited but Lisa packed her running gear anyway. It felt like a friend. Down in Kennedy she took it out on to the space centre roads to unwind, to explore, to try to get some perspective on where she was and what her government was doing to her. With the sun setting across the lagoons, she ran past sentry rows of rockets, old boosters and missiles and heavy lift launchers. Glorious, perilous machines, now jammed like pikes into the earth, their purpose defeated, their shadows long as continents.
Forty-eight hours on, Lisa Durnau runs orbits of the centrifuge wheel of the ISS, wheeling over Southern Colombia. In her Alterre-sight she sees a krijcek castle rising in the distance above the trudeau tree cover. The krijcek are evolutionary arrivistes from Biome 163 in south-east coastal Africa. They’re a species of finger-sized dinos that have developed a hive culture, complete with sterile workers, breeders, egg laying queens, a complex social order based on skin colour and herculean architecture. A new colony will work outwards from a small underground bunker, converting anything and everything organic to pulp, moulding it with dextrous tiny hands into soaring piers and towers and buttresses and vaulted egg chambers. Sometimes Lisa Durnau wishes she could override Lull’s naming policy. ‘Krijcek’ has a nice tone of lethality, but she would have loved to call them ‘gormenghasts’.
A chime in her auditory centre tells her her pulse rate has hit the required digits for the requisite amount of time. She has caught up with herself. Alterre’s un-reality has anchored her. She jogs to a stop, goes into her cool-down regime and flicks out of Alterre. ISS’s centrifuge is a hundred-metre diameter ring, spun to give a quarter gravity. It rises sheer in front and behind her, she’s forever at the bottom of a spin- gravity well. Plant racks lend a gloss of green but nothing can conceal that this is aluminium, construction carbon, plastic and nothing beyond. NASA doesn’t build its ships with windows. Outer space fo
r Lisa Durnau has thus far been crawling from one sealed room to another.
Lisa stretches and flexes. Low gray puts different loads on new muscle groups. She slips off her runsoles, flexes her toes against the metal honeycomb. As well as an intensive NASA exercise regimen she takes calcium supplements. Lisa Durnau’s at the age a woman starts to think about her bones. ISS virgins have puffy faces and upper limbs as body fluids redistribute; sophomores a stretched, light, cat-look but the long-termers eat their own bones. They spend most of their time up in the old core from which ISS has grown chaotically over its half-century in the sky. Few ever come down to dirty gravity, centrifugal or otherwise. Legend is they never can. Lisa Durnau wipes herself down with a moist towelette, seizes a wall rung and hand-overhands up the spoke towards the old core. She feels her weight dropping exponentially; she can grab a rung and swoop herself upwards two, five, ten metres. Lisa has a meeting with her G-woman up in the hub. A long-termer dives towards her, executing a neat mid-course somersault to point his feet downwards. He nods and he tumbles past Lisa. His flexibility makes her look like a walrus, but the nod encourages her. It is as warm a welcome as ISS has offered. Fifty people is small enough for first names, big enough for politics. Just like the faculty, then. Lisa Durnau loves the physicality of space but she does wish the budget had stretched to windows.
Shock number one came on the first Kennedy morning as she sat on her verandah with the ocean view and the maid poured coffee. That was when she realised that Dr Lisa Durnau, Evolutionary Biologist, had been vanished by her own state. She had been unsurprised to learn from the woman in the suit that she was to be sent into space. The State Department did not fly people down to Kennedy in a hypersonic shuttle to study the bird life. When they confiscated her palmer and gave her a lookie-no-talkie model it had been a displeasure but not a shock. Startlement but no shock to find the hotel had been cleared for her. The gym, the pool, the laundry. All for her, alone. Lisa felt good Presbyterian guilt about calling room service until the Nicaraguan maid told her it gave her something to do. That is, the maid said she came from Nicaragua. She poured the coffee and in that same moment of vertiginous paranoia came the second shock: Lull had vanished too. Lisa had never thought it anything other than a reaction to his marriage disintegrating.
At their next meeting Lisa Durnau confronted Suit Woman, whose name was Suarez-Martin, pronounced the Hispanic way.
‘I have to know,’ said Lisa Durnau, shifting her weight from foot to foot, unconsciously recapitulating her warm-up routine. ‘Was this what happened to Thomas Lull?’
The government woman Suarez-Martin kept the executive suite as her office. She sat with her back to the panoramic of rockets and pelicans.
‘I don’t know. His disappearance was nothing to do with the United States government. You do have my word on that.’
Lisa Durnau chewed the answer over a couple of times.
‘Okay then, why me? What’s this about?’
‘I can answer that first part.’
‘Shoot then.’
‘We got you because we could not get him.’
‘And the second part?’
‘That will be answered, but not here.’ She slid a plastic bag across the desk to Lisa. ‘You’ll need this.’
The bag was marked with NASA logos and contained one standard issue one-size-fits-all flight-suit liner in hi-visibility yellow.
When next she saw Suarez-Martin the G-woman was not wearing her suit. She lay strapped into the acceleration couch on Lisa Durnau’s right with hints of NASA yellow peeking through her flight gear at wrists and throat. Her eyes were closed and her lips formed silent prayers but Lisa had the idea that these were the rituals of familiar terror rather than stark novelty. Airport rosaries.
The pilot occupied the couch on the left. He was busy with pre-flight checks and communications and treated Lisa as he would any other cargo. She shifted on her couch and felt the gel flow and conform to her body contours, a disturbingly intimate sensation. Beneath her, down in the launch pit, a thirty terawatt laser was charging, focusing its beam on a parabolic mirror underneath her ass. I am about to be blasted into space on the end of a beam of light hotter than the sun, she thought, marvelling at the cool with which she could contemplate this insane notion. Perhaps it was self-defensive disbelief. Perhaps the Nicaraguan maid had slipped something in the coffee. While Lisa Durnau was trying to decide the count hit zero. A computer in Kennedy flight control fired the big laser. The air ignited under Lisa and kicked the NASA lightbody orbitwards at three gravities. Two minutes into flight a thought so ridiculous, so absurd hit her that she could not help giggling, sending laughter ripples through her gel bed. Hey ma! Top of the world. The most exclusive travel lounge on the planet, the Five-Hundred-Mile-High Club! And all this in something that looks like a designer orange squeezer.
It was there that the third shock crept up and mugged her. It was the realisation of how few people would ever miss her.
The ident patch on the yellow suit liner reads Daley Suarez-Martin. The G-woman is one of those people who will set up office anywhere, even in a cubby full of film-wrap astronaut food. Palmer, water bottle, television patch and family photos are velcroed in an arc on the wall: three generations of Suarez-Martins arrayed on a big house porch with palms in large terracotta pots. The TV patch is set to timer and tells Lisa Durnau she’s at 01.15 GMT. She does a subtraction. She’d be at Tacorofico Superica with the Wednesday night gang on her third Margarita.
‘How are you settling in?’ Daley Suarez-Martin asks.
‘It’s, uh, it’s okay. Really.’ Lisa still has a small back-of-skull headache, like you get the first few times you use a lighthoek. She suspects it’s the ash of the launch trauma drugs she hasn’t run out of her system in the rat wheel. And zero-gee leaves her feeling horridly exposed. She doesn’t know what to do with her hands. Her breasts feel like cannons.
‘We won’t keep you long, honest,’ Daley Suarez-Martin says. In orbit she smiles more than in Kennedy or Lisa Durnau’s Lawrence office. You can only do so much authority wearing something that looks like an Olympic luge suit. ‘First, an apology. We have not exactly told you the actualité.’
‘You’ve told me exactly nothing,’ Lisa Durnau says. ‘I presume this is to do with the Tierra project, and it’s a great honour to be involved on the mission, but I really work in a completely different universe.’
‘That’s our first tactical misdirection,’ Daley Suarez-Martin says. She sucks in her bottom lip. ‘There is no Tierra mission.’
Lisa Durnau feels her mouth is open.
‘But all that Epsilon Indi stuff . . .’
‘That’s real enough. There’s a Tierra all right. We’re just not going to it.’
‘Wait wait wait, I’ve seen the light sail. On television. Hell, I even eyeballed the thing when you sent it out to the L-five point and back on that test run. Friends of mine had a telescope. We had a barbecue. We watched it on a monitor.’
‘You certainly saw that. The light sail is perfectly real and we did run it out to the Lagrange-five point. Only, that wasn’t the test. That was the mission.’
In the same year that Lisa Durnau made the Fremont High soccer team and found out that rock boyz, pool parties and sex are not a good combo, NASA found Tierra. Extra-solar planetary systems had been popping out of the big black faster than the taxonomists could thumb through their dictionaries of mythology and fable for names, but when the Darwin Observatory’s rosette of seven telescopes turned back for a closer look at Epsilon Indi, ten light years away, they found a pale blue dot hugged up close to the warmth of the sun. A waterworld. An earthworld. Spectroscopes peeled the atmosphere and found oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, water vapour and complex hydrocarbons that could only be the result of biological activity. There was something living out there, close to the sun in Epsilon Indi’s shrunken habitable zone. It might be bugs. It might just be people with scopes watching our own little blue spot on the sun. The discovery team
christened the planet Tierra. A Texan immediately filed a claim to the planet and everything that dwelt upon it. It was this story that broke Tierra through the celebrity gossip and crime-of-the-month scandal into checkout chitchat. Another Earth? What’s the weather like? How can he own a planet? He just has to file a claim, that’s all. Like half your DNA’s owned by some biotech corporation. Every time you have sex, you break copyright.
Then came the pictures. Darwin’s resolution was high enough to resolve surface features. Every school in the developed world carried a map of Tierra’s three continents and vast oceans on its wall. It alternated with Emin Perry, reigning Olympic five thousand metres champion, as the screen saver on Lisa Durnau’s A-life project in her first year at UCSB. NASA put an interstellar space probe proposal together with First Solar, the orbital power division of EnGen, using its experimental orbital maser array and a light sail. Transit time was two hundred and fifty years. As development schedules grew ever longer Tierra receded into the wallpaper of public perception and Lisa Durnau found it easier and more satisfying to explore strange worlds and discover new life forms in the universe inside her computer. Alterre was as real as Tierra and much cheaper and easier to visit.