Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 116

by Neil Clarke

  After a long pause, Weihan said: “There’s a neutron star just beyond the asteroid belt that we’re passing through. But we aren’t changing course.”

  Neutron stars were known to rotate extremely quickly, sending off powerful radiation and having powerful electromagnetic fields. Although the gravitational pull of a neutron star was considerably less than that of a black hole, it was still enough to tear apart any spacecraft foolish enough to approach. Getting this close to a neutron star was an extremely dangerous maneuver to undertake on a whim.

  “We’ve been studying neutron stars in our labs for a long time now. Our scientists are stuck, so we decided to capture a neutron star, study it, and make use of it. Just like when we opened the moon up for development thousands of years ago, or when we first landed on Mars, or when we finally completed our first-hand explorations of Jupiter. Each served as catalyst to propel our technological advancement ever higher.”

  Weihan couldn’t help himself. “But our tech is already good enough . . . We’ve survived this far in the universe, haven’t we? It’s stupid to risk everything like this for something that we don’t even need!”

  “If humanity had been willing to stay in the Stone Age eating raw flesh and drinking blood then there would have been no need for us to develop the technology to make fire, either,” Han said, seeming to have been expecting his outburst. “I once read that in before the 18th century the French Academy of Sciences was dead set on denying the existence of meteors. According to their best of science at the time, they believed that all of the stars and planets (including the sun) were made of gas, since solid objects were obviously heavier than air and therefore had no way of floating way up in the middle of nothing. Later on, when they developed better science not only did they accept the existence of asteroids, but they also came to understand that asteroids are incredibly common in the universe. Most terrifying of all, they discovered that the Earth, previously presumed to be a safe home for humanity, had actually been struck by asteroids many times in the past . . . And then, even later, without the ‘unnecessary technology’ of astronomy, when disaster struck in Czechoslovakia they wouldn’t have had any idea what happened, never mind making the necessary preparations.”

  Weihan paused. “I-I think of you like a sister, Han Dan.”

  “That’s an honor I can’t accept,” Han Dan replied after a long silence. In the moonlight, Weihan saw that Han Dan’s eyes were filled with tears.

  He walked her to the bus stop and watched her get on a bus bound for North Seventh Avenue.

  After sending off Han Dan, Weihan went home to pack his bags. Walking past his parents’ door he saw that it was shut tight. Instead of waking them, he tore a sheet of paper off the pad in the kitchen and scratched out a few lines. He stuck it on their door: “Dad, I’m off to apply to military school.”

  Looking up at the sky that night, the planetships seemed to have come alive. Their massive forms were suddenly as lively as a school of fish. Great thrusters accelerated in fits and starts, moving this way and that, weaving through the dense asteroid belt encircling the neutron star.

  X. Neutron Star

  After graduating from military school, Zheng Weihan became a pilot. Sitting in the cockpit of his star fighter and looking out on the crowded launch bay, he always felt as if at one with the planetship, depending on it for survival but also protecting it from danger.

  The planetships would soon emerge from the asteroid belt and the neutron star could be seen directly ahead now. Not surprisingly, the substantial gravity of the neutron star had attracted a number of large celestial bodies to its immediate proximity, indicating its advanced age.

  A fleet of research vessels were in orbit around the star, sending probe after probe into its yawning maw, while technicians hurriedly scrutinized the data sent back by the autonomous craft before they were completely destroyed. The gravitational pull was truly terrible to behold, strong enough to tear apart the very atomic bonds of any matter known to man, giving birth to the neutron by forging an unbreakable union of proton and electron.

  Only a short while earlier a research vessel had been lost, disappearing stern first into the great star without a trace. The scientists had borrowed a battle cruiser from the military, loosing firepower sufficient to destroy a planet onto the surface of the neutron star in the hope of studying its interior structure.

  To the naked eye, the explosion managed only to blast a shallow depression into the neutron star. Even so, the blast managed to badly upset its internal balance. Although it was only a tiny area it had a gravitational pull equivalent to that of the Earth. The celestial bodies formerly in orbit around the neutron star were thrown into disarray, with some flying off into the abyss like kites with cut strings while others crashed back into the neutron star as if on a sudden whim; most terrifying of all was when a planet roughly the size of Jupiter suddenly changed course, heading directly for Europa, home to the central command of the Planetship Alliance. It was only after a great investment of resources that the military had been able to avoid disaster.

  On the mothership, meanwhile, the logistics crew had just completed their overhauls. One by one, the fighters ignited their thrusters and blasted out of the hangar, tracing graceful trajectories in the inky black of the void as they waited to make formation. From his vantage point in the cockpit, Weihan enjoyed the view of the Odin, nucleus of the entire fleet. In mass, it was the size of the moon of old Earth, home berth to innumerable battle ships—a great hornet’s nest of military vessels of all shapes and size. Even so, Odin’s impressive resources could not guarantee the safety of the planetships.

  XI. Return to Life

  On Planetship Europa, a long, narrow rupture had split Chang’an into two separate cities. Some decades earlier, a fragment of a neutron star had grazed the outer crust of the planetship, nearly splitting the planetship in two with the force of its powerful kinetic energy. The wound had healed, but the scar remained, having since been transformed into a mighty river cutting horizontally through Chang’an to the sea. The people of the city had built bridges spanning the wide gap, and planted trees and flowering shrubs along its banks, with grassy meadows in between. A great many planetships were marked with similar scars. Under the snowy blanket of each and every mighty peak, and below the thick forest canopy of every mountain dell, meteorite scars pocked the surface of the planetships.

  In the courtyard of a traditional Chinese home near Chang’an’s seaside district, a gray-haired Zheng Weihan sat in a rocking chair under a parasol tree, his eyes shut tight in quiet meditation. The epaulets on his military uniform bore the gold stars of a general. A young girl ran up from the seashore, carrying a glass jar filled with seawater.

  “Grandfather,” she said. “Tell me your life story.”

  “There’s nothing to tell, really,” Weihan said with a sigh. “If a regular soldier experiences enough war then he’ll advance through the ranks, sure enough; as long you’re able to survive to fight another day, then it’s not anything out of the ordinary to be awarded the rank of general. Take Napoleon’s Saint-Cyr Military School for example: of the four hundred or so graduates, the ones who didn’t die on the battlefield pretty much all became generals.”

  He wasn’t wrong—but of all the students who graduated from military school the same year as Weihan, only three or four were still alive today.

  The little girl winked mischievously.

  “I heard grandma say that you only risked your life so that your rank would be high to go into the All Planetship High Command . . . ”

  Weihan thought back to his first day in that dark underground bunker: at the time he was so scared that he sat staring at the complex web of cables, strung like spider webs through the so-called “brain center” of the Planetship Alliance—and the one hundred or so people, known as the “pathfinders” to which the cables led.

  If a planetship could be said to be a living organism, then the pathfinders were its brain—a brain made up o
f over a hundred brains linked up to form a single super-brain. Han Dan’s sleeping form was easy to pick out among the pathfinders. In the cavernous hall of the “brain center” she seemed even scrawnier than usual. Weihan wasn’t trained in medicine, so he didn’t have even the faintest clue what they’d done to make it possible for Han Dan to stay alive for over a thousand years.

  The people who worked here were already used to thinking of the planetships more as evolved humans, rather than spacecraft. For the sake of survival, some of their number had no choice but to allow themselves to be transformed into a cyborg command center. Innumerable fiber optic cables and signal towers were arranged like nerves in the human body, linking them directly to every spacecraft in the fleet and joining the entire Planetship Alliance into an enormous, unified organism.

  In the ancient Earth Age, whether one looks at the goddess Gaea in the occidental tradition, or great spirit of Pangu in the oriental tradition, the people of the world all saw the land itself as an embodiment of the spiritual realm. History had taken a strange turn here, because the “land” beneath their feet—the planetship—was actually an embodiment of man himself, weaponized and developed with the most cutting-edge technology.

  After dissecting the neutron star, the Planetship Alliance had continued their slow journey through space, with a skeleton crew of “pathfinders” staying behind in the “brain center.” Han Dan had proudly shouldered her beat-up old erhu and set off to wander the alliance—as some might put it, she was “observing popular sentiment.” Two months earlier she had returned from Planetship Africa to Europa, where she had been getting to know Weihan’s granddaughter.

  It was the fifth day of the fifth lunar month—Dragon Boat Festival. Some thousands of years earlier on this very day, Qu Yuan, educator and head of the three noble clans of the kingdom of Chu, had been driven to suicide. To celebrate his memory, the Zheng family had made a great many zongzi—sticky rice balls with date or meat filling. Tradition held that the heartbroken people of Chu could throw zongzi into the river where Qu drowned himself, to entice the fish away from his corpse.

  And so, on a planetship drifting through space, Han Dan found herself throwing zongzi into the sea.

  “Sometimes I think it’s a shame that after old school master Qu wrote Questions to Heaven with all those important scientific questions, nobody thought to take him seriously and figure out the answers. Otherwise our tech would’ve developed way past where we are right now . . . ”

  “You’re supposed to throw zongzi into a river, not the ocean, you know,” Weihan said.

  “I know, I know. But the river is full of dragon boats today, and the banks are full of people. No room for little old me.”

  “Haven’t you ever thought about finding somewhere to settle down?”

  “Isn’t everywhere home on a planetship?” Han Dan said with a smile. “The planetships are my home. Our home.”

  “Grandpa, what’s in here?” Weihan’s granddaughter said, handing him the jar of seawater.

  “Nothing right now,” Weihan said.

  “Wrong!” Han Dan said. “There’s blue-green algae, humanity’s oldest ancestor.”

  “Looks like grandpa should listen to big sis Han,” his granddaughter said. “When I grow up I wanna be a biologist.”

  “Why’s that?” Weihan asked.

  His granddaughter leaned forward onto the armrest of the rocking chair and propped up her face with two hands.

  “I’ve been thinking about how that Earth planet we’re always hearing about was like a desert island in the sea of space . . .

  “But we were also like a single-celled organism, you know? The whole ecosystem was one single cell. And now we’ve evolved so that we can move around the universe and go wherever we want, like one great big space-dust eating animal.

  “Aren’t you curious where we’ll go next?”

  Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, 2007.

  Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

  About the Author

  Luo Longxiang was born in 1981, deep in the mountains of Guangxi province on the China’s southern border, where he studied Chemical Engineering at Guangxi University. After publishing his first sci-fi story in 2003, his fans began to refer to the mysterious author as “Master Luo,” in reference to his hermit-like existence far away from the crowded cities of the coast and northern plains. Of the eleven stories he was written over the past decade, six have earned a Milky Way Award. His works are known for their massive scope, dealing almost exclusively with the question of humanity’s eventual survival in space. Since 2007, he has been working to complete the Planetship Alliance series�an epic space opera recounting the tragic history of mankind’s colonization of the universe.

  Tough Times All Over

  Joe Abercrombie

  Damn, but she hated Sipani.

  The bloody blinding fogs and the bloody slapping water and the bloody universal sickening stink of rot. The bloody parties and masques and revels. Fun, everyone having bloody fun, or at least pretending to. The bloody people were worst of all. Rogues every man, woman, and child. Liars and fools, the lot of them.

  Carcolf hated Sipani. Yet here she was again. Who, then, she was forced to wonder, was the fool?

  Braying laughter echoed from the mist ahead and she slipped into the shadows of a doorway, one hand tickling the grip of her sword. A good courier trusts no one, and Carcolf was the very best, but in Sipani, she trusted . . . less than no one.

  Another gang of pleasure-seekers blundered from the murk, a man with a mask like a moon pointing at a woman who was so drunk she kept falling over on her high shoes. All of them laughing, one of them flapping his lace cuffs as though there never was a thing so funny as drinking so much you couldn’t stand up. Carcolf rolled her eyes skyward, and consoled herself with the thought that behind the masks they were hating it as much as she always did when she tried to have fun.

  In the solitude of her doorway, Carcolf winced. Damn, but she needed a holiday. She was becoming a sour arse. Or, indeed, had become one and was getting worse. One of those people who held the entire world in contempt. Was she turning into her bloody father?

  “Anything but that,” she muttered.

  The moment the revelers tottered off into the night, she ducked from her doorway and pressed on, neither too fast nor too slow, soft boot heels silent on the dewy cobbles, her unexceptional hood drawn down to an inconspicuous degree, the very image of a person with just the average amount to hide. Which, in Sipani, was quite a bit.

  Over to the west somewhere, her armored carriage would be speeding down the wide lanes, wheels striking sparks as they clattered over the bridges, stunned bystanders leaping aside, driver’s whip lashing at the foaming flanks of the horses, the dozen hired guards thundering after, streetlamps gleaming upon their dewy armor. Unless the Quarryman’s people had already made their move, of course: the flutter of arrows, the scream of beasts and men, the crash of the wagon leaving the road, the clash of steel, and finally the great padlock blown from the strongbox with blasting powder, the choking smoke wafted aside by eager hands and the lid flung back to reveal . . . nothing.

  Carcolf allowed herself the smallest smile, and patted the lump against her ribs. The item, stitched up safe in the lining of her coat.

  She gathered herself, took a couple of steps, and sprang from the canal-side, clearing three strides of oily water to the deck of a decaying barge, timbers creaking under her as she rolled and came smoothly up. To go around by the Fintine bridge was a quite the detour, not to mention a well-traveled and well-watched way, but this boat was always tied here in the shadows, offering a shortcut. She had made sure of it. Carcolf left as little to chance as possible. In her experience, chance could be a real bastard.

  A wizened face peered out from the gloom of the cabin, steam issuing from a battered kettle. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Nobody.” Carcolf gave a cheery salute. “Just passi
ng through!” and she hopped from the rocking wood to the stones on the far side of the canal and was away into the mold-smelling mist. Just passing through. Straight to the docks to catch the tide and off on her merry way. Or her sour arsed one, at least. Wherever Carcolf went, she was nobody. Everywhere, always passing through.

  Over to the east, that idiot Pombrine would be riding hard in the company of four paid retainers. He hardly looked much like her, what with the moustache and all, but swaddled in that ever-so conspicuous embroidered cloak of hers, he did well enough for a double. He was a penniless pimp who smugly believed himself to be impersonating her so she could visit a lover, a lady of means who did not want their tryst made public. Carcolf sighed. If only. She consoled herself with the thought of Pombrine’s shock when those bastards Deep and Shallow shot him from his saddle, expressed considerable surprise at the moustache, then rooted through his clothes with increasing frustration, and finally, no doubt, gutted his corpse only to find . . . nothing.

  Carcolf patted that lump once again, and pressed on with a spring in her step. Here went she, down the middle course, alone and on foot, along a carefully prepared route of back streets, of narrow ways, of unregarded shortcuts and forgotten stairs, through crumbling palaces and rotting tenements, gates left open by surreptitious arrangement and, later on, a short stretch of sewer which would bring her out right by the docks with an hour or two to spare.

  After this job, she really had to take a holiday. She tongued at the inside of her lip, where a small but unreasonably painful ulcer had lately developed. All she did was work. A trip to Adua, maybe? Visit her brother, see her nieces? How old would they be now? Ugh. no. She remembered what a judgmental bitch her sister-in-law was. One of those people who met everything with a sneer. She reminded Carcolf of her father. Probably why her brother had married the bloody woman . . .