Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 56

by Cat Rambo;Jason K. Chapman;John T. Stanhope;Neil Clarke

  “Look, bring me a kiddie laptop,” I tell Dr. Basil when he comes in that night to check on me. “Put whatever kind of lock-downs you want on it. I don’t care if all I can do is read the weather. I just want to feel connected. You know how it is, Doc.”

  I smile as warmly as I can at him, thinking happiness and sensuality, trying to project them. Friendliness. Trust.

  It succeeds. He brings me a cheapie screen. There aren’t even any restrictions on it that I can see. I work with the presumption that it’s all monitored, though. I have more to worry about. Giving it to me he lets his hand linger on mine in a way that made this body flush and warm.

  The new machine has a shiny screen. I can keep an eye on myself even as I tab through web portals, making it look like someone catching up. I’ve been away three years, and some of this is actually just that - catching up. There are only so many ways to access a link, though, so it’s not too hard to navigate.

  I do take a risk and check my mail. A two year old message in one folder reads “Call me. — KC.” And a number. I try to find the number on the net, but it’s out of service, the web tells me.

  I finish by playing a game where you throw an exploding ball from character to character. It explodes in my arms time and time again. I keep holding it too long.

  When Dr. Basil returns that morning, he wants to run tests. He takes my blood pressure, listens to my heart. His fingers stray here and there, never long enough to remark on, but long enough to let me know what he’s thinking. He keeps staring at my eyes.

  “You said you could maybe let me have a couple of visitors,” I ask. “You know. Casey and those others.”

  His eyes widen. “Did I?” he says. “Well, I can see.” His hand on mine. I disentangle, retracting my fingers to fold them in my lap.

  “I wish you would,” I say, looking straight at him. “I would really…appreciate that.”

  Beneath his gaze, I lean back, arching to make my chest more prominent. I hate these kind of mechanical tricks, but when someone is sending out the signals he is, they will work.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he says. He packs away his equipment, piece by piece. “May I come by and eat dinner with you tonight?”

  I force a shrug. My body performs as I wish it to, mimicking acts with a grace that makes it believable. “Depends on what sort of mood I’m in,” I say and, deliberate as removing my lips from a kiss, I look elsewhere, refuse to meet his eyes.

  The breath that comes from him is almost a groan.

  “You’re still female?” he demands.

  “Of course.” I add, “Usually the less stressed I am, the less likely I am to change.”

  That evening he eats with me, bringing take out Chinese, chopsticks, and fortune cookies. I haven’t done much that day so I pick at the food.

  He watches me. I put a piece of Governor’s Chicken in my mouth, biting down with delicate care and licking my lips.

  He grabs my hand and raises it to his face, pulling the fingertips over the cleanly shaven skin of his cheek.

  I pull it away again, shaking my head.

  “I’m out of sorts tonight,” I say. “Sorry.”

  “I suppose having a visitor would settle you,” he says.

  The shrug gets easier with practice, a supple don’t care movement that emphasizes the pendulum sway of my un-bra-ed breasts.

  “Whatever,” I say, and let out a bored breath. “Really.”

  “You’re teasing me,” he says.

  “Am I?” My stare is deliberate and provocative.

  He grins at me, an I know something you don’t smile that clenches at my stomach. “Be careful what you wish for,” he says, then stands. “Be ready tomorrow after lunch.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “We’re going to see Casey,” he says.

  He leaves the scatter of white boxes on the table. I abandon it in turn for the maid that comes in every day while I’m in the shower.

  All through the next morning my stomach burns. I wonder if it’s some new change, but a handful of antacids calms it. Lots of calcium; I’ll need to make sure to take a Vitamin-D pill that night.

  I am much more in tune with my body than the average person; a lack of potassium, for instance, leaves me almost incapacitated by headache. Fish oil restores the lubricants in my tears. Otherwise they’re not quite right, but burn and weep continuously.

  We don’t leave the building, which disappoints me.

  Instead, Dr. Basil takes me up to a third floor laboratory. One wall bears huge jars, a gallon size at least, some much larger, five gallons, ten. Not old yellowed pickle jars either, but clear. Newly made equipment with every line and measurement conforming to Science.

  On the table one of the largest jars holds a shaggy mass the size of a bowling ball overgrown with kelp and barnacles. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s a head. Underneath it, dangling like a puppet, swims a body in miniature. A troll’s body, barely six inches tall. My face, horrified and appalled, is reflected over it. My breasts are absurdly large now.

  Now that I look, the rest of jars hold other parts. A hand, a shin. A ribcage. All with these bodies, ranging in size from two inches, up to a foot, attached, like absurd, horrifying key chains to each.

  The only eyes that are open, thankfully, are not the miniature sockets on the heads dangling from elbows and tibia — is that an armpit? — but the full-sized ones in the jar on the table. There, the eyes, the sorrowing green eyes that I think must be Casey’s, track my movements. The blenched lips move as though to speak, but I have no idea what they try to whisper as I reel away.

  Dr. Basil’s grip on my shoulder is like iron. “Look,” he says. “It’s an amazing regenerative process. These have only been growing for two weeks, two and a half really. Each of them will have the original’s capabilities. And more, according to whatever genetic modifications I’ve made.”

  “Is that what you did with all of them?” I ask.

  “Don’t be so horrified. It’s how you were grown too. Disassembly, some genetic tweaking, and then reincorporation.” His other hand trails over my breast, pinches a nipple as he pulls me towards him. “God, you’re so lush. I know how perfect you are. You become what the people around you want you to become. Your skin is like velvet.”

  He groans and buries his face in the side of my neck. I feel the body responding, opening, growing wet. I waste time hating it for what it cannot help. I push him away. He pulls me back to him, suffocatingly close.

  “Do it,” he breathes into my ear. “Do it, or I’ll cut you up and raise myself a new crop. A more pliable crop No more raising you in an uncontrolled environment. That little experiment in socialization proved far too risky.”

  “You don’t have the right to do this.”

  “I own you. I own this.” His fingers pinch the nipple harder, but my time as a beast has left me with advantages, and one of them is sharp teeth.

  One swift motion. Rip and tear. He reels away, the side of his head spraying blood where I have removed his ear.

  I step back but he’s not looking at me any more, stumbling in the spray of blood which coats his face like a mask. I grab the keys from his hands and run away, up the stairs. Past the flashing lights and the people running in. He shouldn’t have let me keep the black leather jacket; the blood doesn’t show on it.

  He’ll think I’ll move far away, try to escape by train, by plane, by automobile. He won’t realize that I can stay close, that there are shelters in Pinhook Park where I can sleep if I keep a step ahead of the rangers, and that’s easy enough if I give into the beast and its senses.

  I cannot believe that Hettie, who kept me, who was doctor and nursemaid and governess and keeper, would have wanted me to be the beast, but maybe she did. Maybe she spoke to my own desire to free myself from the house that was all I knew. I had escaped, I thought, and the others could too.

  Basil has shown me the key to his own destruction. I found what I need in Hettie’s garden s
hed. A saw, twine, salt, and a jar that will do for the first one. Sawing off my own hand is hard, but the beast surges and lets me look down dispassionately at my work. I tie it off and drop the hand in the jar before filling it with water and salt.

  I will raise my own army, I think. I vanish back to the park with my jar.

  The next few months pass quickly. I waver in and out of beast and human form. By the time summer is ripe and the world is full of food, my hand has fully regrown twice, and in a cave in the Park’s heart, there are four of me in varying shapes and sizes, and two more jars, along with white plastic buckets, hidden in a cluster of sewer pipes. I bring them sacks each night, the contents of the park’s trash containers. We feast on discarded potato salad and rolls and pizza crusts, eating quietly and efficiently, like the biological machines, the wonders of the universe we are.

  It’s not exactly like having Hettie back, but it feels close. We sit into the night and tell stories, stories about who we are and I tell them about Hettie. About cartoons I watched when growing up. About the others.

  We do not light a fire. The full moon shines down on our faces. We are thinly furred and built for speed now, much the same, but the small details of our appearance shift now and then, darkening and lightening, an ear tilting, nose building into a ridge.

  The moonlight catches our eyes, reflecting each other as surely as our faces do, our faces, our face that is the thing to come.

  But still, whose face this is, I do not know.

  About the Author

  Cat Rambo lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. Her works have appeared in such places as Asimov’s, Tor.com, and Weird Tales. Her collection, Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight, was a 2010 Endeavour Award finalist. She has served as the fiction editor of Fantasy Magazine.

  The Architect of Heaven

  Jason K. Chapman

  Waking up, as always, is disorienting. His mind insists that it’s only been a moment since the stinging injection and the deep breaths of cold gas that taste like metal and sugar. One of the attendants, her voice soft, tells him it’s been half a century since he last opened his eyes. Not a fleeting local century, either. Those whiz by in something under a decade. She means a real century, an Earth century. Her mother hadn’t even been born when he last walked on Terranova’s ruddy soil.

  He adjusts more slowly than the other times. It’s his age. Though hiber-sleep provides the chapter breaks in the story of his life, that story still covers eighty-three waking years. He suspects that this chapter, the one he’s just beginning, is likely to conclude with “the end.”

  His voice is little more than a croak until the attendant gives him water to sip. In a gritty whisper, he asks her if it will be a happy ending.

  She smiles and tells him of the new star in Terranova’s sky. It’s the rich blue color of a chipchip’s egg — a bright dot pointing back toward Earth.

  Diaspora, he whispers.

  Tell me, she begs, her voice bright with a child’s eagerness. Tell me the story.

  To her, it’s all a fairy tale, and he, a hero who has stepped from fiction to fact.

  Why not? There is time. An hour or two before his legs will carry him properly. A year or two before Diaspora makes orbit. It will be good to have his memories in order before the big day.

  With as deep a breath as he can manage, he plunges into the past.

  Trent Bishop was the third generation of the Moon’s most prominent business dynasty. His grandfather had been instrumental in founding the original colony that had grown into an independent nation of thirty million people. Now, fifteen years into his own turn at the helm of Bishop Industries, Trent was beginning to hate his life.

  He stood on the dull, dusty lunar surface, listening to the roar of his own breath inside his pressure suit’s helmet. He was on the lip of a crater two kilometers from the cluster of structures that were the core of the Lunar Republic. Below, on the crater floor, a dozen behemoths, sporting “Bishop Const.” stencils, raked and scraped the regolith into the foundation for a new dome. Above, glaring down at him from orbit, was the biggest mistake he’d ever made.

  Diaspora. He looked up to where sunlight glinted off the great ship in orbit. Once it launched, the starship would spend the next one hundred fifty years ferrying four thousand people in cold sleep to the Gliese star system. It was a colony in a can, ready-made to fulfill the dreams of those who wanted to see the human race established around another star.

  That was the problem. Trent had never cared much about that dream. Too late, he’d realized just how much Irene DeSart had.

  “Starting over on a whole new planet?” he’d said the last time the subject had come up between them. They’d been in the Earthlight Café, grabbing a quick dinner between her back-to-back shifts at the North Dome’s oxygen garden. “Those people are crazy.”

  She’d smiled at him, her head tilted to the side and her eyes narrowed. “You build cities on the Moon,” she’d said.

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Seventy-five years ago, you would have been one of those people.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “It’s in your blood, Trent.”

  His blood. Maybe so. His grandfather had certainly been one of those people. He’d conquered the Moon. Trent’s father had tamed it. What was Trent doing, then?

  He’d found himself losing interest in the pressed soy patty on his plate. “I have a business, here,” he’d said. “We have lives here.”

  She’d sighed deeply enough to blow her napkin across the table. “Plural again,” she’d said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Lives.” She’d smiled, but there’d been a sadness in it that Trent hadn’t understood. “I always thought we’d have one life — together.”

  Only looking back on that moment, with the naked stars above and the naked landscape around him, both daring him to bare himself as well, did he understand that smile. It had been the mask of accepted pain. Inside, she’d already said goodbye.

  He looked down at the crater floor. Work lights cut dagger-shadows behind the heavy equipment. Dust clung to everything despite the antistatic paint. Inside his helmet, his sigh became a moan. He took a deep breath and told his suit radio to call his attorney.

  “Trent, you’re not even supposed to know she signed up.” Carter Harmon, all lawyer jokes aside, was a fierce ethicist. He took the Republic’s laws seriously, both in letter and intent. The two had been friends since college. More than once, Trent had referred to Carter as his conscience’s conscience. “I don’t know how you found out,” Carter went on, “and if you tell me, I’ll report you. We have strong privacy laws for a reason.”

  Bribery, theft, digital trespassing. He’d used a little of each in increasingly desperate measure until he’d found her. He couldn’t say he was proud of it, but what else could he have done? He’d been busy with the new dome. There’d been deals within deals to make; water contracts, space commitments, air rights. He’d even had to negotiate which hotel chain’s signage would be most conspicuous from the main glidewalk. When he’d come up for air, she’d been gone. Her phone canceled. Her apartment vacated. He’d wasted weeks using conventional means to find her.

  “I just need to talk to her,” Trent said. He heard the plea in his own voice. He was sounding like the whiny rich kid he’d never wanted to become.

  “It can’t be done.” Carter’s declaration was a wall of finality. “According to the foundation, the passengers are already in hiber-sleep. The process is too risky. They’re not coming out of it until the other end.”

  Trent watched a scoop truck deliver another load of regolith to one of his mining haulers. It would go to another site to be processed, its oxygen and precious metals extracted. More money. More residents. More customers. Just like the last one. Like the next one.

  “Trent?” Carter said. “Did you hear me?”

  “You have to get me on board, Carter. Whatever it takes.”

  “I already t
old you,” Carter said. “No visitors.”

  “I know that!”

  There was a long silence before Carter spoke again. “I’ve been your lawyer for fifteen years,” the man said at last. “I’ve been your friend a lot longer than that. I think you know I’d do anything for you — up to a point. What you’re asking — . It’s way on the other side of that point, Trent.”

  “I want you to get me on — ”

  “You screwed up,” Carter said. “I think you knew you were screwing up while you were doing it. Hell, I told you you were screwing up.”

  “ — as a passenger.”

  “Shit,” Carter breathed.

  “I can’t do this, Carter. Not anymore. Not without Irene.”

  Carter sighed. “Yeah,” he said. “I get that. Look, are you sure about this? It’s a hell of a life we’ll be — . It’s a lot to give up.”

  Trent looked up at Diaspora again. “I used to think so.”

  The attendant gives a little schoolgirl swoon. Love, she whispers.

  Potent stuff, love. It wounds. It wrecks and rends. It tears down dynasties. Builds up worlds. It makes you squirm through sickly slime. Lets you fly on wings of woven light. Love, he says, is a bitch.

  He stands on shaky legs and takes a few brief steps. She holds his arm protectively. Her grip is firm enough to be reassuring, but gentle, too. She doesn’t support him as if he’s feeble. She guides him as if he’s important. He’s not, of course. He’s just a gear — a pulley for the ropes of the universe to pull their weight on.

  Love, he says again, this time without the sharpness in his voice. It’s love that’s done all the work.

  Trent stood in the tenth floor observation lounge of East Dome. Broad sheets of lunamum window wrapped a third of the way around the building. His back was to the panoramic view of Mare Tranquilitatis. Instead, he watched the approach of an angular, self-assured woman whose sure-footed glide marked her as a lunar native. Her gray hair was cropped close to her head and she wore a tailored business-casual jumpsuit. She was Marina Valikova, chief coordinator of the Diaspora Project.