Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 90

by Seth Dickinson

  “If I’m reading this order right,” Steel Eyes says, though she’s got no paper or tablet and the light on her iris makes little crawling signs, “she’s shipping you out.” She opens a glove in invitation. “I’m with Federation wetwork. Elite of the elite. I’m recruiting pilots for ugly jobs.”

  Laporte hesitates. She wants to stay, wants it like nothing she knows how to tell. But Steel Eyes stares her down and her gaze cuts deep. “I know you like you wouldn’t begin to believe,” she says. “I watched you learn what you are. We don’t have many of your kind left here in Sol. We made ourselves too good. And it’s killing us.”

  “Please,” Laporte croaks. “I can’t leave her.”

  The woman from the eclipse depths of Federation intelligence extends her open hand. A gesture of compassion, though she’s wearing tactical gloves. “What do you think happens if you stay? You’re not going to stop changing, Noemi. You’re never going back to humanity.”

  She sighs a little, not a hesitation, maybe an apology. “This woman, here, this loyalty you have. You’re going to be an alien to her.”

  Laporte doesn’t know how to argue with that. Doesn’t know how to speak her defiance. Maybe because Steel Eyes is right.

  “Ubuntu,” the woman says, “is a philosophy of human development. We have a use for everyone. Even, in times like these, for us monsters.”

  What’s she got left? What the fuck else is there? She gave it all up to become a better killer. Humanity’s just dead weight on her trigger.

  Nothing but Simms and wreckage in the poison sunlight.

  “You know we’re losing,” Steel Eyes says. “You know we need you.”

  Ah. That’s it. The thing she’s been trying to say:

  Monsters kill because they like it, and that’s all Laporte had. Until this new thing, this fragile human thing, until Simms.

  Something worth fighting for. A small, stupid, precious reason.

  Laporte gets down on her knees. Puts herself as close to the salt sand cap of Simms’ hair as she’s ever been. Says it, the best way she knows, promising her, promising herself:

  “Boss,” she whispers. “Hey. I’ll see you when we win.”

  For Darius and the Blue Planet crew.

  About the Author

  Seth Dickinson is a lapsed doctoral student at NYU, where he studied social neuroscience, and both an alumnus of and an instructor at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers. Since his 2012 debut, his fiction has appeared—or will soon appear—in Lightspeed, Analog, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

  Human Strandings and the Role of the Xenobiologist

  Thoraiya Dyer

  Very few comprehensive texts have been produced on the wider topic of human strandings. Earthlings Ashore: A Field Guide For Shuttle Crashes (2nd ed.) by Icareg and Yrubsnoul, and the relevant section of the University of Yendys’ Sound Wave Communication In Breathers, Proceedings 335 are probably the most useful.

  Kelly shrank from the rotten-egg smell and the falling ash.

  She tried to shelter in Mama’s shadow, trailing behind her family across the clanking steel walkway. The ash was the awfulest. She’d worn her best dress with shiny pink beads, and her pale pink tights, even though they hurt her bottom where Mama had hit her. Once they reached the office, she shook the dress frantically, trying to get the gray flecks off, trying to get the smell out. She stomped her glittery ballet flats on the dusty carpet, the shoes her mother had told her not to wear because they’d only get wrecked at the spaceport.

  Her head level with the desk top, she examined its electronic undersides while the grown-ups talked.

  “You’ve gotten yourself into some real trouble, haven’t you?” the fat man behind the desk said jovially to Kelly’s father. “I can help you, but I only help people once. You get in this deep again and you’re on your own.”

  Kelly’s father murmured something in reply but Kelly didn’t catch it. She thought she’d seen a mouse whisk behind the components and she bent to peer between the blinking LEDs in the hope of sighting its whiskery face.

  “Well, the freight costs will depend on weight.”

  “We’re not freight,” Mama said coldly.

  “Yes, you are, darling. Just these two kids? Let me have a look at them. And what do you want to be when you grow up, young man?”

  Kelly’s big brother, Chris, puffed up his chest.

  “Salvage pilot,” he said.

  The fat man leaned over the desk and smiled at Kelly. Immediately, she forgot about the mouse. The man had a handsome face and minty breath. Kelly bounced on her toes, waiting for the chance to tell him that she wanted to be a ballerina.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he said. “Have you got a boyfriend yet?”

  Our modest aim is to provide xenobiologists, particularly those less familiar with human anatomy and physiology, with a brief guide to diagnosis, treatment, sample-collection and follow-up for common stranding scenarios.

  Kelly listened to the scream of air being split by the fins and remembered how her mother had screamed at her father, in a fury, when he’d said that Kelly would have to be hidden in a shipment of HIV vaccine.

  She’ll freeze to death.

  She’ll be sleeping, love. Cryo temperature and viral storage temperatures are comparable. You heard what the man said.

  What he said. Why should he tell us the truth? He has our money, now. I don’t see why we can’t all stay together.

  You know why. Splitting us up reduces the risk of getting caught.

  Kelly’s teeth chattered, an echo of the crackling, rattling, defrosting Petri dishes in racks all around her. She gripped the mesh that trapped her in her open capsule. It was too hot. Something was wrong. She was supposed to stay sleeping until her mother woke her.

  “Mama,” she cried. Chris wanted to be a salvage pilot. He’d shown her hundreds of vids of gruesome crashes. She wasn’t supposed to crash. Mama had promised. The Unity would control and correct her ship’s path, steering her to Centauri station, not into a planet with air and heat and fire.

  She wanted to go back to sleep but tapping at the console did nothing.

  ERROR, the Unity told her.

  She pushed all of the buttons at once.

  ERROR. ERROR.

  Kelly screamed and clawed at the mesh. She was burning, cooking in her pee and sweat. She was a tadpole in a puddle being baked dry by the sun.

  Before she could cook to death, she crashed. Her body hit the mesh so hard that a crisscross of blood printed itself into her like grill patterns on chicken. Chunks of silver shell spun away into whiteness. Shattered Petri dishes and their dangerous, diseased contents rained down on her. The Unity console display that had been near her arm now hung near her face.

  BILATERAL TIBIAL FRACTURES, it said.

  Fresh snow fell through the mesh, onto Kelly’s face from a featureless sky.

  She struggled to stop crying long enough to breathe. Breathe. Breathe. There was air outside. The flakes were cool on her skin. She was alive but the white sky was turning to gray fuzz.

  Don’t suck in your stomach, her mother had instructed as they stood at the family’s beloved barre. It was worn smooth by generations of women’s hands. You won’t be able to breathe.

  Kelly poked her tummy out and giggled. Her mother tsked.

  First position.

  Easy, Kelly said, not quite daring to poke out her tongue. She put her heels together and toes out in opposite directions. She was six years old and so flexible she could cross her feet behind her head, if she wanted, but she got told off for doing it school because boys could see her underpants.

  Put your hand on your middle, like this. It should move when you breathe in and out. See? No, you’re breathing too shallow. Breathe in through your nose, then all the way out. Empty out more. More!

  Kelly made choking sounds.

  I am empty!

  Her mother pressed impatiently on her diaphragm. Too hard. It hurt.

  Now you’
re empty. Now you can breathe in again.

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

  Although single stranded humans are much more common, the prognosis for a human stranded alone is generally poor. Mass strandings require greater commitment and involvement.

  –Is it smashed like all the others?

  –Yes. But unlike the others, the computer survived. Jid, you won’t believe this. It has no artificial intelligence in it at all. The shuttle is just a metal body. Its brain is somewhere else; somewhere in space. No wonder they keep crashing here. It’s as if the entity that controlled this shuttle, that fired this human into space, didn’t care enough about where it landed to waste time growing an independent mind for the module.

  –Maybe it thought the human mind would suffice.

  –This is important. We have to send it back. This is a bungled migration. We have to warn the entity that without proper guidance these modules don’t constitute a successful genetic dispersal but, instead, deliver death.

  –How? By sending it in one of our own modules? Who will give up their birth-share of resources for a half-dead human?

  –I will.

  –Sil, you are still young. Consider that this may be a natural process. Maybe only the fittest specimens, the ones whose minds are capable of guiding a module, are intended to survive.

  –But I like this one. Look at its funny round head. Look how it angles its photoreceptors and auditory canals. It wants to understand us. It’s trying to understand.

  –It hasn’t receptors for the proper spectrum. It can’t differentiate us from the snow or the transport or the sky.

  –It can hear us, though. And it’s only got two legs. Like a—

  –Like a child. Yes, I know. Look, I want you to get back to the work that you are being paid to do. After you’ve done all that, if you clean the containment area out the back of the surgery, I’ll let you keep the human there until the snowstorm quiets down enough for a qualified assessor to get through.

  Inexperienced xenobiologists should be encouraged, once they have made an initial assessment of a stranded animal, to contact an experienced xenobiologist for advice on how to proceed.

  Kelly watched the whispering whiteness when she could; when she couldn’t stand it any longer, she closed her eyes and watched the branching red rivers in the skin of her eyelids.

  They were the only colorful things on this whole white world. She was the only colorful thing. As she lay in invisibly soft, comfortably warm whiteness, with whiteness covering her from the waist down, having traveled for days in invisible hands away from her crashed ship, she wished for the flickering ruby and emerald lights under the man’s desk at the spaceport. She wished for her mother’s melted chocolate eyes and her pet kitten’s amber stare. Even Chris’s calculating blue ones would have been welcome.

  Months might have passed, or years. She slept and woke. Often, invisible hands put white stuff in her mouth that she chewed and swallowed. Sometimes, she reached around her invisible bed until she touched coldness, and ate snow. If she pooped or peed, she didn’t know it. She couldn’t feel her legs.

  Sometimes, she cried.

  One time, when she’d been crying inconsolably, the invisible hands brought her the console display from the ship.

  UNABLE TO CONNECT TO UNITY, it said. RETRY?

  Kelly picked it up and threw it as hard as she could at the whiteness. The invisible hands didn’t bring it to her again.

  Most local agencies have stranding policies and procedures. These can contribute to a more rapid and benevolent outcome.

  –It’s frightened.

  –Of course it’s frightened. It can’t see you and you’re stuffing it inside one of our modules; for all it knows, that is a burial chamber and you’re putting it inside to die. I should never have let you convince me not to call the assessor.

  –I’m not putting it inside to die. I’m returning it to its point of origin.

  –Oh, that’s what you’re doing! Hurry up, and do it, then, before I change my mind about covering for you. I could be expelled from my aggregate if anybody finds out.

  –It’s much heavier since we rescued it. Twice as long. It holds twice as much water and organic stone as it did before.

  –My research findings, if you had bothered to assimilate them, show that time is experienced differently by these short-lived creatures. It has simply reached maturity while in captivity.

  –Jid, look! I plugged the computer into our module to get the coordinates of the point of origin, and it’s connecting to the brain that controlled its original flight! This is great! I can communicate directly with the artificial intelligence. I can tell it about—

  –I’m not sure that is a good—

  –UNITY ADVISES. THIS HUMAN CANNOT RETURN TO EARTH.

  –What? Why not? We healed her body. We removed all traces of the virus. She is safe to reintroduce into the wild.

  –UNITY ADVISES. HUMANS CANNOT BE REINTRODUCED TO ANY SOCIETY GREATER THAN 300 YEARS DISTANT TO THE BIRTH SOCIETY.

  –What kind of monster do you think I am?

  –UNITY ADVISES. UNKNOWN. POTENTIAL TRANSLATION ERROR: MONSTER.

  –I am not sending her to a hostile future version of her home. I’m sending her home.

  –UPLOADED FLIGHT PLAN INDICATES EARTH ON ARRIVAL WILL BE 1337 YEARS DISTANT TO EARTH AT DEPARTURE.

  –That’s only if she travels at the maximum speed of the original module, which was less than the speed of light. In this module, our module, she will exceed the speed of light and arrive simultaneous to her departure. See?

  –UNITY ADVISES. TIME PARADOX DISTRESSING TO HUMAN PSYCHE.

  –So I’ll set it to, what, a distance, as you call it, of ten earth years? That’s about how long she’s been here, so there won’t be any incongruity, right?

  –Don’t waste time arguing with that thing, Sil. You’ve got the coordinates. Disconnect it.

  –No, Jid, it’s interesting! If this version of the intelligence has been traveling so slowly that—

  –UNITY ADVISES. AT LIGHT SPEED, MASS IS INFINITE. INFINITE ENERGY IS REQUIRED TO MOVE INFINITE MASS.

  –She will have no mass outside the Higgs field. Please, stop deleting the flight plan. Stop deleting those other things; what are you doing? I’m trying to send the information you need to stop your shuttles from crashing here. The beings that gave you life are being killed. Don’t you care about that?

  –Sil. Sil. Sil! I’m going to be missed at work. You’re never going to convince it of things that aren’t in its database, and who can blame an AI for that? If you don’t unplug it right now, I’m going to leave you here to do a two-person launch by yourself.

  It is the xenobiologist’s moral imperative to relieve the distress of animals but in attempts to relieve distress it must not inadvertently be perpetuated.

  Kelly woke, too early, for a second time.

  At first, she thought she was reliving the cooking-alive nightmare, but then she saw the whiteness. It was the alien ship that was white, not the human ship, and there were no Petri dishes.

  There was no mesh, either. She was cushioned in the white unknown she’d grown to hate and fear, but it was melting; it was turning gray.

  For a second time, she was burning.

  Then, black-gloved human hands were pulling her from half-submerged wreckage. She saw a sky that was blue, not white. She saw a face, and moving lips, and bleeding scratches on the face.

  She had made the scratches.

  She knew that face.

  “Kelly?” it said with disbelief. Chris’s calculating blue eyes were unmistakable. His voice was deeper and his head was shaved. His fluorescent orange SALVO helmet, which should have been on his head, was in his other hand.

  She couldn’t apologize for the scratches. She’d forgotten how to speak.

  “She’s wild, like an animal,” one of the other men said. The black silhouettes of burned trees made a stick-forest around the edge of a small lake. A six-man, orange
-suited salvage crew looked on. Their boots made wavy imprints in deep ash. Kelly fought the urge to shake her dress clean.

  “Shut up,” Chris exclaimed. “I know her.”

  A second man whistled. “That’s no animal. That’s the most perfect woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “Let me get to know her,” a third man suggested. “Share and share alike.”

  “We should ditch her,” said a nervous-sounding fourth. “We’re not supposed to bring back no bitch. Just the alien shit.”

  “She’s a present from the aliens. A pretty present for us. Like a peace offering.”

  “They won’t be sending no more of those, then, will they? Not after we shot this one out of the sky!”

  “Shut up,” Chris said again. He felt her for broken bones. She realized she had sensation in her body again, but the body was unfamiliar; she felt like she was dressed in her mother’s clothes, except that she wasn’t wearing any clothes. “She’s my sister, got it?”

  “Hell, Jamie,” said the man who had called her a wild animal. “You don’t have a sister.”

  Chris made a growling sound in his throat, pulled something that looked like a sewing needle out of his pocket and plunged it into Kelly’s thigh muscle. She whimpered and jerked her too-long legs.

  “Ask Unity if we share DNA,” he said to his team-mate, defiant. “Ask Unity if we’re brother and sister.”

  The man’s eyes unfocused for a fraction of second. His ugly expression went slack. When he spoke again, his voice was soft; apologetic.

  “Like you said, Jamie. She’s your sister. I’m asking no questions about her. Why don’t you put her in the cab while we grunts tag and bag all the bits of this busted-up beast that we can find.”

  Chris, or Jamie, or whatever he was called now, tried to lift her carefully in his skinny arms, but after a couple of staggering steps, it was obvious she was too heavy for him. He put her down in the ash, bent over her and tucked back a lock of her long hair. It was white; it had turned white while she was on the white planet. His scored cheeks were so thin. His eyes were sunken.