But instead he just shook his head and looked out over Venus, and thought of the package now hurtling towards the Moon. A hack of the Venus nano. Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn't. His skills were rusty. The Winfinity docs were shortspeak for headshots. But he could hope. And, if it didn't take, he could try again.
And in a few thousand years when the Moon blooms, he thought, it doesn't matter if we're around to see it. In a few thousand years when Shekinah and her kind come back to life, your children will be the ones to meet them. And when Shekinah and her kin soar into the sky on brilliant white wings, maybe you'll feel something, something I could never truly express. Hope. Thrill of beauty. Manifold of possibility.
"I don't know,” he told Adele, finally. “But I won't leave you. Not again."
Adele cried and fell against him. He held her, sobbing. Maybe they would make more bodies. Maybe they'd make themselves into something ready to meet Shekinah and her kind as equals. Or maybe not.
Alex closed his eyes, seeing beings like butterflies dancing under a full Earth.
Copyright © 2007 Jason Stoddard
[Back to Table of Contents]
READERS’ POLL—VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!
* * * *
Once again we're asking you to let us know what you enjoyed (and what you didn't) during 2007, from issues 208 to 213 inclusive. You may vote for and against any number of stories or artworks published in issues 208 to 213 inclusive (see list below). As always, we're as keen to hear your opinions of the magazine as we are to get your votes, so don't be shy in letting us know what you think—and we may publish the most interesting comments.
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* To vote by post: Martin McGrath, 48 Spooners Drive, Park Street, St Albans, Herts al2 2HL
* To vote by email: [email protected]
* To vote online: www.ttapress.com/forum (Interzone topic)
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The results will be published in Interzone issue 216, so
please make sure your votes are in before 31 March 2008
* * * *
A Handful of Pearls (212)
Beth Bernobich
illustrated by Jesse Speak
* * * *
Ack-Ack Macaque (212)
Gareth Lyn Powell
illustrated by SMS
* * * *
Big Cat (209)
Gwyneth Jones
illustrated by Stefan Olsen
* * * *
Dada Jihad (212)
Will McIntosh
illustrated by Chris Nurse
* * * *
Deer Flight (211)
Aliette de Bodard
illustrated by Stefan Olsen
* * * *
Dr Abernathy's Dream Theater (210)
David Ira Cleary
illustrated by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
Elevator Episodes (211)
Ahmed A. Khan
* * * *
Empty Clouds (208)
G.D. Leeming
illustrated by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
Exvisible (211)
Carlos Hernandez
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
* * * *
Feelings of the Flesh (212)
Douglas Cohen
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
* * * *
Green Man (210)
cover art by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
Heartstrung (210)
Rachel Swirsky
illustrated by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
Islington Crocodiles (208)
Paul Meloy
illustrated by Vincent Chong
* * * *
Journey to the Center of the Earth (209)
Edward Morris
illustrated by Pamelina H.
* * * *
Knowledge (211)
Grace Dugan
illustrated by David Gentry
* * * *
Light in the Dark (212)
cover art by Osvaldo Gonzalez
* * * *
Lunar Flare (211)
cover art by Richard Marchand
* * * *
Metal Dragon Year (213)
cover art by Kenn Brown
* * * *
Metal Dragon Year (213)
Chris Roberson
illustrated by Kenn Brown
* * * *
Molly and the Red Hat (213)
Benjamin Rosenbaum
* * * *
Odin's Spear (213)
Steve Bein
illustrated by Paul Drummond
* * * *
Preachers (210)
Tim Lees
illustrated by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
Softly Shining (208)
cover art by Kenn Brown
* * * *
Softly Shining in the Forbidden Dark (208)
Jason Stoddard
illustrated by Kenn Brown
* * * *
Sphaira (209)
cover art by Jim Burns
* * * *
Tearing Down Tuesday (210)
Steven Francis Murphy
illustrated by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
Tears for Godzilla (209)
Daniel Kaysen
illustrated by David Gentry
* * * *
The Affair of the Bassin Les Hivers (211)
Michael Moorcock
illustrated by Robert Dunn
* * * *
The Algorithm (212)
Tim Akers
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
* * * *
The Best of Your Life (213)
Jason Stoddard
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe
* * * *
The Final Voyage of La Riaza (210)
Jayme Lynn Blaschke
illustrated by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
The Good Detective (209)
M. John Harrison
illustrated by David Gentry
* * * *
The Lost Xuyan Bride (213)
Aliette de Bodard
illustrated by Paul Drummond
* * * *
The Men in the Attic (213)
John Phillip Olsen
illustrated by David Gentry
* * * *
The Sledge-maker's Daughter (209)
Alastair Reynolds
illustrated by Jesse Speak
* * * *
The Star Necromancers (208)
Alexander Marsh Freed
illustrated by Jim Burns
* * * *
The Whenever At The City's Heart (209)
Hal Duncan
illustrated by Richard Marchand
* * * *
Toke (210)
Tim Akers
illustrated by Douglas Sirois
* * * *
Where the Water Meets the Sky (208)
Jay Lake
* * * *
Winter (209)
Jamie Barras
illustrated by Chris Nurse
* * * *
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
PSEUDO TOKYO—Jennifer Linnaea
* * * *
* * * *
Illustrated by Darren Winter
* * * *
Jennifer is an occasional superhero, an ex marine botanist, and a bicycle adventurer who lives in Eugene, Oregon with assorted housemates including a husband and a cat named after a windstorm.
* * * *
Sean Randall's tour guide, a highly rated professional from Jetless Travel Agency, crossed the shiny steel hall of the jump room and greeted him with a bow so fake it was like Sean was looking in the mirror. “Hey man, I'm Haruki, pleased to meet you."
"You're not Japanese,” Sean said. The man in front of him looked Japanese, but there was no way he was really Japanese. Not with that pink spiky ha
ir and Pacific Northwest accent. He wasn't much older than Sean, either. Maybe even younger. “I was guaranteed a native. This is a weekend immersion tour."
Immersion tours were Sean's favorite. He got to see all the best sights, the ones the hotel tourists never saw. In Australia he'd been to a corroboree with his Aboriginal hosts. In Brazil he'd danced with four generations at Carnival. In Borneo ... well, Borneo had been hard. But he wanted to see the real Japan. He wanted to sip tea and sleep in a room the size of a mousetrap.
"Do you even speak Japanese?” Sean said.
In response, Haruki let out a long string of incomprehensible syllables. Not that Sean would know the difference, but it sounded Japanese to him. Haruki then put on a face of mock hurt feelings, and held his hand to his chest.
"Sorry, man,” Sean said. “My bad. It's just..."
"It's just that I dress New York City and talk Seattle, is that it?"
"Yeah,” Sean admitted.
"And here I am in St Louis.” Haruki shrugged, then looked down at a thick stack of paper in his hands. “Your file says you only do this once a year. Not a moment to lose then, eh? Step on up."
Sean stepped onto the jump dais. It was true, once a year was all he could afford, both in time and money. Jump tech wasn't cheap, was even more expensive than plane tickets had been back in the day, although the savings in travel time made the whole thing well worth it. But add on top of the jump the cost of the mandatory cultural guide, and it was all Sean could do to scrape the money from his lab tech job to travel that often.
"Get ready for two of the best days of your life,” Haruki said. “I'm gonna show you a Tokyo the travel gurus themselves would kill to see.” He joined Sean on the dais and checked his watch. Reflexively, Sean checked his. It was 5:59pm Friday, June 14th, 2020. One minute till the jump.
"Aren't you gonna change?” Sean asked, tugging on the sleeve of his new kimono. It fit perfectly, but he knew it made him look whiter and more western than cowboy boots and an i (heart) ny T-shirt would have. He felt the same awkward way in it that he did in a Halloween costume at a party. But Tokyo was strict about its Uniformity Laws. Also, it was considered the polite thing to do. His travel vids all said that the Japanese were very polite.
So why was this Haruki guy dressed like he was on the set of The Urban Cultural Collective? The silver chain of his wallet jangled softly in the artificial silence of the Jetless jump room. The patch on the arm of his leather jacket had definitely been designed by someone doing too many hallucinogens.
"Relax, man,” Haruki said. “It's chill."
Sean wasn't so sure. He'd had bad luck with Hi Jump, his previous travel agency, or more particularly with their cultural guide. The guy had knowingly let Sean violate the Borneo Rural Uniformity Laws, and it had cost him the respect of the entire community. He didn't want a replay of his last trip.
"Look, I don't want to be rude,” Sean said, “but—"
"But your last guide turned out to be the Son of Satan."
"How did you know..."
Haruki tapped his file. “Don't worry, man,” he said. “Where we're going, the Uniformity Laws amount to a hill of beans."
Hill of beans? Where did they get this guy? “Maybe I'd better talk to your—"
"Eight up,” Haruki said. He grabbed Sean by the wrist with one hand and placed the fingers of his other hand underneath the tattoo on his throat, moving his lips soundlessly. Sub vocalizing, Sean thought. Keying the jump sequence.
Then he was standing in front of a row of painted fans, and the air smelled of fish and flowers, the way he'd known it would.
He was in Tokyo.
"Follow me,” Haruki said, and Sean let himself be led out of a small white room and down a softly lit hallway. Indirect lighting, pale wood floors, and just one well-placed potted plant near the end: every detail was even better than he'd expected. Sean breathed in deeply. Then remembered his watch, and looked down in expectation. He'd bought it just for this trip—it downloaded the time via satellite anywhere in the world. But the display showed just a row of zeros, blinking. Disappointed, he reset it manually to 8am Saturday, fourteen hours ahead of St Louis time.
The hall opened out into a main customs area, and Sean gasped. It was huge. He'd known Tokyo was a center for world travel, but this was on a scale that dwarfed even the New York City hub, which he'd passed through for quarantine on his way to Brazil. A room big enough to house a skyscraper enclosed not one, but numerous processing units, where long lines of travelers waited for admission into the city. Walkways crisscrossed the empty space, and—he strained to see—bicycles sped along on them, hundreds of feet above the main floor. “It's incredible,” he said.
"Yeah,” said Haruki. Even he seemed awed, though it must have been a regular sight for him.
They descended along a spiraling walkway teeming with travelers from around the globe, and Sean understood what Haruki had been talking about. Almost none of them were wearing Japan-approved garb. Sean turned to his guide, who was gazing out over the customs floor with something like reverence on his face. “Why didn't you tell me the guide-vids were wrong? I look like a poseur."
It took Haruki a moment to turn away from the view over the railing. “You're fine, man,” he said, and grinned. “You wanted the real experience, didn't you?"
Sean supposed that he had, but he still felt ridiculous in his pale blue kimono. He glanced around. Their fellow travelers were wearing everything from burkas to sarongs. Quite a lot of dyed hair and leather was in evidence. Haruki no longer stood out; he had become just another face in a swarming, world-culture crowd.
Sean didn't stand out either. No one was looking at him sidelong and snickering to their friends. He began to relax; maybe he wasn't the gaijin here that everyone had told him he would be.
He and Haruki came out onto the main floor and joined the line. It went quickly, and soon they were standing before a uniformed Japanese customs official. But what the man said sounded approximately like a cross between the hum of a diesel motor and his neighbor's pet parakeet. Haruki responded in garden-variety Japanese, or at least that's what it sounded like to Sean, and the two of them were ushered through the checkpoint. Sean didn't even have to show his passport.
"What was that?” Sean said.
"What?” Haruki said.
"That man, the thing he did. That wasn't Japanese. What was he saying?"
"Oh,” Haruki said. “That. That's a little-known dialect from the southern islands. Yaeyama-shoto, I think. And he had a bad cold."
"A cold,” Sean said, but Haruki had already walked ahead and joined another line.
Everyone else in the building spoke normally, and by the time they came out of customs Sean had almost forgotten the whole thing. When he saw the streets of Tokyo, he forgot entirely.
"Come on,” Haruki said, “let's storm this town.” He took off into the crowd swarming in the street.
Sean's first hour in Tokyo was far more unbelievable than the guide-vids had promised. They got into a metro train so crowded Sean thought he was going to suffocate, and rocketed through the city. Out the window Sean saw all the teeming people, temples, and vending machines that he had been promised, all the ultra-skyscrapers pushing in on street-side parks. But nowhere in evidence were the perfect haircuts and kimonos of the vids. He saw uniformed schoolgirls and neo-samurai, monks and punks and businessmen. A great explosion of culture reaching back to the pre-Uniformity days, and stretching ahead past where Sean's imagination gave out.
After a while, overloaded, he looked at his sandals.
They got off the train at a platform built of wood, overarched by pagodas of huge polished logs and carved filigree. It was nothing like the sleek, ultra-modern bullet train stations his vids said the Japanese were so proud of, and he looked around in awe. It was like going back in time, or maybe sideways, to a world where technology lived side by side with something ancient.
"Can I take pictures?” Sean asked.
"
Of the train platform?"
Sean blushed, but got out his camera nonetheless. He got a shot of the filigree with the train in the background, and another with two businessmen leaning against one of the gigantic log pillars. In that one, a boy with bright green eyes stared at him from his perch atop a crossbeam; but when he took the camera away from his face the boy was nowhere to be seen.
Sean followed Haruki down a flight of stairs and onto a narrow side street. Old wooden archways stained with a hundred years of grease from the open-air fish vendors spanned the cobbles over legless beggars and chipped Buddha statues. The old men they passed were dressed in clothes that seemed historic in a way Sean couldn't place, until he realized they didn't sport a single logo. How they could wear that and not get arrested, Sean didn't know. He checked the collar of his kimono, reassured to see the neat black Japanese letters and wavy blue pattern of the manufacturer.
Little shrines with incense burning huddled in every nook, and Haruki stopped before one of them. Sean wondered if it was Shinto or Buddhist, but was afraid to ask. His guide-vids had given careful instructions on how to tell the difference, but this one didn't have any of the things they'd said to look for in either one. Haruki put a five-yen coin in a bowl on the shrine, which a little one-eyed girl snatched up as soon as Haruki closed his eyes to pray.
What was a hipster like Haruki doing praying?
Sean looked further down the street. There was an interesting statue a little way ahead, of a small being with webbed hands and feet, and he went to look at it more closely. It had a curious indentation in the top of its head, filled with water, where little bits of Styrofoam and algae floated. He reached his hand in the water to take out the Styrofoam; it distracted him from his fantasy that he had traveled to a place out of time.
The statue blinked and took a step back from him, tilting its head back just a little to look into his face with its bottomless eyes. It said something in Japanese, and smiled. Behind him Haruki shouted, “Mr Randall!"
Sean was so amazed by the thing in front of him that he couldn't look away. Its skin was pale green, and smooth as rock, but it was alive. A living, non-human creature, and it had spoken to him!
"What did it say?” he asked Haruki, who'd rushed up behind him.
"Mr Randall,” Haruki said, “if you value your life, bow to the kappa right now."
It was the uncharacteristic formality of the ‘Mr Randall’ that decided it. Sean leaned forward at the waist, feeling awkward and stupid, wondering what unwritten cultural norm he had offended this time. To his amazement, the thing bowed back, in the process spilling the water in its head onto the cobbles.
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #214 Page 9