Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Routine patrol,” he said to the vacuum-cold night outside. “Indeed?”

  She could see the reflection of her Prince-Consort’s face on the glass, curved to a lengthy sadness. “Suppos’,” Diana slurred. “Earthis’ part’sans.”

  “The wars are over now.” Hektair sighed. “Your allies’ gravity generators could put out the fire in the sun if need be. I understand it all now—why you betrayed Luna, why we switched sides, why millions died dirtside to make our point. Freedom for humankind to grow . . . outward.” He whirled from the window, tears gathering in his clouded brown eyes as his voice slurred to match hers in the roughness of his grief. “The only thing I don’t understand is why this happened to you. Now. When it’s all long over!”

  Some things came in their own time. Some bullets were best stepped into instead of away from. She had become tired of living.

  Diana’s hand crawled across her bandaged chest as if possessed of an intelligence of its own, seeking the spun-diamond locket she had worn since coming to Luna City six decades earlier. “ ‘stime,” she told her husband. I loved him, she told herself. Hektair had stood beside her through marriage and war, raised her sons and tended her hurts.

  He loved her too. She knew that.

  She pulled the spun-diamond locket out of the ruins of her pressure suit liner to thrust it at Hektair with a palsied hand. “Sh’can save me. Only her.”

  Hektair took the locket from Diana, shaking with anger as his wife slipped into dreams of freefall and tumbling helmets and the voice of Stationmaster Marcus cautioning her of something upon which her life depended, if only she could make out exactly what he was saying.

  An unmarked shuttle landed on the concrete pad of Executive Field—Diana’s private spaceport in the crowded heart of Aristarchus Crater. She floated, intubated and dying, within a column of warm saline solution in a tower room high above the crater floor. Her eyes were fixed on a virteo view of the landing pad. Silent med techs moved slowly about the room, exchanging worried glances.

  Hektair swept in from the elevator. He was dressed in his most formal kilt and armored vest, as if to receive an Earthist delegation. He stood in front of Diana’s vat with his arms folded and stared at his wife as she watched the field below.

  “Diana,” said Hektair. “You can hear me.”

  She watched a boarding tube crawl out from a blast-hardened dome.

  “Diana.” Her husband sighed. “Please look at me.”

  He might have been weeping, but Diana concentrated on the landing field below.

  Hektair tapped on the glass. “Stationmistress Aixelle would not come,” he whispered.

  Diana closed her eyes. The monitors all flatlined.

  “You’re dead, silly woman,” Aixelle whispered, drawing her long hair across the tender new skin of Diana’s face.

  Diana opened her eyes. They were in a tiny cabin surrounded by machines, but all she saw was the waterblue eyes of Aixelle. “Am I?” she tried to say. She succeeded only in coughing dust and flecks of blood.

  “Diana is dead,” Aixelle said, stroking her cheek. “Hektair will rule well enough in the General-Governor’s stead. As he was born to do. Trieste, on the other hand . . . well, her life is in balance. But not yet lost.”

  “How?” Not ‘why,’ not after all the lost decades.

  Aixelle laughed, the bells of her voice ringing through the years of Trieste’s memory. “All things are possible to one who is both a Biomistress and a Stationmistress.”

  Where did they wind up? Who knows? Maybe a cometary orbit, to come back someday at our worst hour of need. Maybe a little ice mine on Europa where they finished out their days slurping algae soup and smiling toothlessly at each other.

  Maybe Diana really was cremated like the bookstories say.

  And maybe they’re just really old, living together out somewhere in the deep dark, teaching the lessons of history to kids who drop by to learn something.

  Time to shove off now, helmet-head. I hear my wife calling.

  About the Author

  Jay Lake was a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an award-winning editor, a popular raconteur and toastmaster, and an excellent teacher at the many writers’ workshops he attended. His novels included Mainspring, Escapement, and Pinion, and the trilogy of novels in his Green cycle–Green, Endurance, and Kalimpura. Lake was nominated multiple times for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2004, the year after his first professional stories were published. In 2008 Jay Lake was diagnosed with colon cancer, and in the years after he became known outside the sf genre as a powerful and brutally honest blogger about the progression of his disease. Jay Lake died on June 1, 2014.

  This Wind Blowing, and This Tide

  Damien Broderick

  “Has any one else had word of him?”

  Not this tide.

  For what is sunk will hardly swim,

  Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

  —“My Boy Jack,” Rudyard Kipling (1915)

  The starship was old, impossibly old, and covered in flowers. Despite a brisk methane breeze, not a petal nor a stamen of the bright blooms moved. Under an impervious shield, they remained motionless, uncorrupted, altogether untouchable.

  “They’re alive,” reported the Navy remote viewer. When I was a kid, the idea that the armed services might employ a trained, technologically enhanced psychic would have got you a derisive smack in the ear from your elders and betters, even though the American CIA ran a remote viewing program called Star Gate back in the last century, before they ostentatiously closed it down and took it to black ops. This viewer was blind to light, but saw better than the rest of us, by other means, on a good day. Like me, sort of, in my own itchy way.

  He stood at the edge of the huge, flower-bedecked vessel, gloved, open palms held outward, his hands vibrating ever so slightly, like insect antennae hunting a pheromone. “It’s amazing. Those blossoms are still alive, after . . . what . . . millions of years? I can’t find my way in yet, but I can detect that much even through the stationary shield.”

  “Is that the same as a, you know, stasis field?” I asked the marine master sergeant standing guard beside us. I turned to face her, and bobbed sickeningly. Two days ago I had been on Ganymede, and on Earth’s Moon before that. Now I walked on another world entirely, around yet another world entirely. It wasn’t right for a man as ample as I to weigh so little, especially with Titan’s bruised-peach air pushing down on me half again as heavily as Earth’s. It went against nature. Even with the bodyglove wrapping me, and an air tank on my back, I only weighed about eighteen kilos—say forty lbs. A tenth of what the scales would show back home.

  “‘Stasis’ my ass! That’s sci-fi nonsense,” she barked. “Media technobabble. Like your own—” She bit the rest of her sentence off, perhaps fortunately. “This here is hard science.”

  “So sorry.”

  “And please don’t speak again without an invitation to do so, Sensei Park. We don’t want to put Mr. Meagle off his stroke.”

  Opening his startlingly blue, blind eyes, the Navy viewer laughed. The sound echoed oddly in his bodyglove and through our sound loop. All sounds did, out on the orange-snowy surface of Titan. “Let him natter on, Marion. I’m entangled now. You’d have to cut my head off and pith my spine to unhook me from this baby.”

  I wondered idly how either of them would respond if I told them I was the reason, or at least the proximate occasion, that they were here. They’d regard me as a madman, probably. My role in developing the portage functor was under cover about as deep as any since the creation of the US Office of Strategic Services in 1945, long before CIA got tight with clairvoyants. Perhaps these people already did consider me deluded. Yeah, it was true that I’d told them where to look for the starship, but it wasn’t as if I had the credentials of a remote viewer, so undoubtedly it was just a fluke. Right.

 
; I felt the pressure of the thing, its causal gravitas, as I gazed down at the starship. If that’s what it was, under its stationary shield and floral tribute.

  This thing on Titan had been tugging at me, at my absurd and uncomfortable and highly classified gift, since I was four or five years old, running in the streets of Seoul, playing with a Red Devils soccer ball and picking up English and math. A suitable metaphor for the way a child might register the substrate of a mad universe, and twist its tail. My own son, little Song-Dam, plagued me with questions when he, too, was a kid, no older than I’d been when the starship buried under tons of frozen methane and ethane had plucked for the first time at my stringy loops.

  “If light’s a wave, Daddy, can I surf on it?” Brilliant, lovely child! “No, darling son,” I said. “Well, not exactly. It’s more like a Mexican football wave, it’s more like an explosion of excitement that blows up.” I pulled a big-eyed face and flung my arms in the air and dropped them down. “Boom!” Song laughed, but then his mouth drooped. “If it’s a wave, Dad, why do some people say it’s made of packets?” “Well,” said I, “you know that a football wave is made of lots and lots of team supporters, jumping up and sitting down again.” He wasn’t satisfied, and neither was I, but the kid was only five years old.

  Later, I thought of that wave, sort of not there at all at one end, then plumping up in the middle, falling to nothing again as it moved on. Follow it around the bleachers and you’ve got a waveform particle moving fast. Kind of. But for a real photon, you needn’t follow it, it’s already there, its onboard time is crushed and compressed from the moment of launch to the final absorption, just one instantaneous blip in a flattened, timeless universe. Why, you could jump to the Moon, or Ganymede, or even Titan, all in a flash. Just entangle yourself with it, if you knew how (as I showed them how, much later), like Mr. Meagle remote viewing his impenetrable stationary starship.

  Physics—you’re soaking in it!

  “I can likely get more now sitting in my relaxation cell back at Huygens,” Meagle said. He looked very calm, as if he’d just stepped out of an immersion tank, but there was a faint quivering around his blind eyes. I watched his face in my viewmask, as if neither of us wore gloves over our heads. The man was exhausted. “So tell me, Mr. Park,” he said, as we turned and made our way to the big-wheeled jitney, “what were your own impressions, sir?” Scrupulous about not front-loading me with hints of his own; I liked that.

  “Anyone, or any thing, who loves flowers that much,” I said judiciously, “can’t be all bad.”

  Huygens had provided me with a customized broad-beamed sanitary personal; I have authoritative hams, and a wide stance. It degloved me with slick efficiency. I relieved myself with a gratified sigh. While bodygloves have the capacity to handle such impositions of the mortal order, the experience is undignified and leaves a residual aroma trapped inside with one’s nostrils, so I tend to hold on. We had been outside for hours without a pit stop. The sanitary squirted and dabbed, removed sweat from my perspiring hide with its dry tongue, dusted powder across the expanse, set me free. I dressed in my usual unflattering robe, and made my way directly to the commissary bubble. I was starving.

  Banally, the wall&ceiling display showed a faux of thrice-magnified Saturn, four hand-widths across, tilted optimally to show off the gorgeous ring system. I’d just seen the reality outside, with nothing between me and the ringed planet itself but a protective film and a million or so kilometers of naked space above the bright Xanadu regional surface where we’d stood. Since we were almost at the equator, Saturn’s belt had been a thin glitter in the photomultipliers in our bodyglove masks (and would be invisible to the naked eye), directly overhead, right and left of the primary’s waist, not truly impressive. Of course, even with the high frequency step-downs of the photomultipliers, the atmosphere looks hazy anyway.

  This magisterial feed on the wall was probably coming, today, from one of the polar sats keeping an eye on the big feller. It seemed to me a bit tacky, a lame pretence, but then again, Titan is tidally locked, so it must get a tad wearying for the regular staff, seeing exactly the same thing in the sky forever, whatever installation dome you’re at, Huygens, or Herschel at the north pole. Except that nothing is ever the same; all is nuance, the slow fortnightly progression of light and shade, the phases of the Sun’s illumination of the big ball of gas . . . Well, these were scientists and military, most of them, what could one expect?

  I loaded my tray with rather edible boeuf bourguignon from the dedicated cuisine printer, took it to a table where a handful of my new colleagues were chowing and jawing away, sat down at the spare place, set to after a genial glance around. At least with the queasy low gravity I wasn’t worried that this spindly conventional chair would give way abruptly beneath me, tipping my considerable butt ungraciously to the floor. It had been known to happen back on Earth. Nobody laughed derisively if it did, at least there was that. Not any more, they didn’t.

  “Why, Sensei,” said the Japanese biologist, Natasha Hsai, with the slightest edge in her tone, “won’t you join us for dinner?” I do not give her title, nor do I mean any disrespect; all these eggheads had at least a couple of doctorates apiece, it went without saying.

  “Why, Natasha, thank you, I believe I will.” I started in on my second pearl onion. “Good fare, they don’t stint you—nor should they, you are doing sterling work out here.”

  Several of the boffins shared glances, perhaps amused. They fancy themselves a cut above.

  The handsome dark-haired fellow at the head of the table cleared his throat. “So, have you been outside yet to pay your respects to the Enigma, Mr. Park?”

  From the dossiers I’d memorized before leaving Jupiter space, I recognized him, beneath his heavy straggled beard, as the head of molecular engineering, Antonio Caetani. “Just got back from the tour, Dr. Caetani. Fascinating. Right up my street.”

  “That’s Tony,” he said gracelessly. More glances flickered about the table. He chose to go right for it. Had to give him points for that. “Unless I’m mistaken, your street is paved with donations from the ID Institute.”

  I had encountered this kind of feral attitude previously, of course, especially from hard-headed scientists of conventional stamp. I could even share a kind of empathy for his rancor. It was as if, from his highly-credentialed point of view, a government-sponsored raving crackpot were to be imposed on his team. As if a SETI astronomer in the Fermi Taskforce had been obliged to include a rectally-probed UFO abductee, or a global proteome program forced to sign up a fundamentalist creationist. I shrugged.

  “Oh, give the guy a break, Tony,” said the Iranian artifact expert, Mansour Khosrojerdi. “Let him eat his meal.” His beard was darker and thicker even than Caetani’s. Granted, the temperature was nearly minus two hundred degrees Celsius on the other side of the bubble, but this was self-mythologizing on a preposterous scale. Did they imagine they were rehearsing the doomed expeditions of the Arctic explorers? “We can postpone the ideological catfights until after the cheese and amontillado.”

  “No need to spare my delicate sensibilities,” I said with a hearty laugh, and reached for the carafe of red wine, luminous as a garnet under spurious golden Saturn light. The woman to my right, the string loop specialist Jendayi Shumba, got there first with her competent, chunky hand, dark as night.

  “Allow me, Sensei Park.”

  “You are gracious, thanks. But let’s all be friends, no need for formality, call me Myeong-hui.” I grinned with big teeth at her dismay, then laughed out loud. “No, that’s an impossible mouthful, it’s all right, just call me Sam, love. Everyone does.”

  “Sam.” A slightly uncomfortable silence fell. Scrapings of plastic flatware on realistic plates. I gobbled up my tasty beef, placed the empty plate back on my tray, slurped off some more of the stunningly convincing compiled shiraz, took a bite of a lemon-ginger dessert to die for, decorated with pistachios. “Fermi-53, that’s my considered opinion,” I said w
ith my mouth full. “My tentative, preliminary opinion, naturally.”

  “There are no recognizable roses or jonquils or violets or orchids, obviously. But the flowers scattered over the vehicle certainly do appear to be derived from Earth angiosperms, specialized to a range of climates and coevolutionary biomes,” said Natasha Hsai. “So far as we can tell purely from visual inspection.”

  “Which rules out Fermi-53 instantly,” Antonio Caetani said. “Blossoms of such complexity and beauty did not evolve on Earth until the Holocene. Probably not until humans deliberately bred the cultivars during the rise of agriculture.”

  “Oh, let’s not oversimplify, Tony,” Natasha said. “Pollinator insects and hummers and lizards and all the rest, they speciated along with the angiosperms; they sculpted each other without any help. Yes, I grant you, early humans broke up the soil to an unprecedented extent so they could grow their dinner, and then as a sideline retained and cultivated those blossoms that especially . . . well, made them happy. They’re our botanical pets, now, because flowers make us smile and feel good. They induce positive emotions.”

  “They’re scented sex organs,” Caetani said, “doing their job.”

  I’d finished eating, for the moment. “The first flowering plants,” I pointed out, “evolved sixty-five million years prior to the Chicxulub catastrophe. Nice symmetry, that.” As far back in time before the extinction of the dinosaurs as we now stood after it. I didn’t need to spell that out; these were, after all, highly trained intellects. But I had to add the obvious, the intolerable, the all-but-unthinkable crux. “Humans, I remind you, were not the only cultivators.” I found I had no appetite for cheese, and pushed back my chair. “Do you allow smoking here? Anyone for cigars and port?”