Coop quotes the line, ignoring my Xenth, which he does not understand. He is used to me muttering in other languages. I have done it as long as he has known me. “We refused to destroy Quurzod. We spent time studying the situation, and then we offered our diplomatic services to the Xenth. But during the time we studied them, the Xenth studied us."
So buttoned up, so formal and proper. Hidden, too, but we should have expected that.
Only that isn't my mistake. I wasn't with the initial group. The initial groups came from elsewhere in the Fleet, and somehow they overcame—or maybe never had—their aversion to the Xenth, and their hissing, sibilant-filled language.
I, on the other hand, never trusted them. But I did trust my commanders. I trusted my orders, figuring they all knew the history, the facts, the personalities of both sides.
"The Xenth knew,” Coop says. “They knew about the violence; they've suffered from it. They accused the Quurzod of massacres, not telling us that this was part of Quurzod culture, that they kill anyone—regardless of nationality—if they violate certain rules. The Xenth made sure we did not know those rules. They sent us in blind."
It is so easy to blame another culture. But I shake my head. I believe in mistakes before I believe in deviousness. “That can't be true,” I say. “The Xenth left too much to chance."
"They left nothing to chance,” he says. “If we had actually figured out a way to negotiate with the Quurzod, the Xenth would have gained a solid border, some defined territory, an end to a long war. But if we did not find a way to negotiate, if we aggravated the Quurzod, then the Quurzod would come after us. They would have engaged us—"
"And the Xenth's war would become our war,” I say. He's right. The logic is inescapable. It explains my unease. It explains the lack of preparation the Fleet's diplomatic team gave to my team. The Fleet's team was tricked.
I don't usually believe in the duplicity of other cultures, but this is too big a mistake to miss—at least on the part of the Xenth. And I understand the Fleet's diplomacy well enough to know that had we understood the extreme violence of the Quurzod, no one would have sent my team in unprotected.
"The Xenth's war did become our war,” Coop says. “Only the rest of the Fleet fights it while we wait here."
"We don't know if they're fighting it,” I say.
He stares at me. We know. They're fighting it. And while the Quurzod are fierce on the ground, they are no match for the Fleet in space.
The Quurzod will fight brilliantly, like Klaaynch did. And then the Fleet will destroy something important, destroy the Quurzod's balance.
And they will die within minutes, leaving the Xenth to fill the void.
Without us, the Fleet will think they have done the right thing.
I look at Coop. He smiles, just a little, hesitant, more the boy I remember than the man he is.
"If you knew all of this,” I say, “why didn't you tell me? Why did you let me stay locked in here, with the doubts and the memories?"
"I suspected,” he says. “I had no proof. I just knew you, and your core, and how you would never, ever betray any of us. Nor would you knowingly jeopardize children."
"They weren't really children,” I say softly.
"They weren't yet adults either,” he said.
I nod. I will always carry them—the twenty-three members of my team, and the dozen young friends of Klaaynch, and Klaaynch herself. They died for my curiosity, for my ever-solid core.
"It would've been easier if you executed me,” I say softly.
He puts his hands over mine. His hands are warm. He says, “Anyone who commands lives with these moments."
I shudder. “But I'm done. I've made my mistake. I should have known—"
"No,” he says. “The mistake wasn't yours. In fact, you have done the one thing that might help us."
"What's that?” I ask.
"You learned street Quurzid."
I shake my head. “I don't know street Quurzid. I know as much street Quurzid as the first contact team knows when it goes into a new situation. A phrase here and there, nothing more."
"That's not what your memory says. Your memory knows street Quurzid. You might not be able to speak it, but you have enough of it to help us."
I want to pull my hands from his. I never want to go near street Quurzid again.
"How?” I ask.
"When we get back, you can tell the Quurzod in all of their languages how we both got betrayed."
"And have them destroy the Xenth?” I am appalled.
"Yes,” he says so softly that I can barely hear him. This is not the idealistic man I met on Brazza. This man is ruthless, utterly ruthless.
"But the Quurzod, they're horrible people,” I say.
He studies me.
I wait, but tap my finger ever so slightly. I have lost the gift of patience somewhere. It vanished in that desert.
"You're confusing their culture with ours,” he says.
I flush. I used to say that to him. So young. So idealistic. I would say, One culture cannot judge another until they have a deep understanding of all parts of the culture.
Including the language, he would say, his eyes sparkling.
And the history, and the things that have developed that culture. Just because they have evolved a tradition that we disagree with doesn't make our position right.
"It's not the same,” I say.
"It is,” he says.
"The Quurzod murder each other,” I say.
"So do we,” he says. “You asked me to murder you."
"I asked you to execute me, according to our laws."
He waits. Dammit, he has the patience now.
He waits.
He has made his point.
My shoulders slump. We know each other well enough that he understands my capitulation without my verbal acknowledgement.
"I need you to master street Quurzid,” he says.
"I don't know enough of it,” I say.
"Then do your best,” he says. “You need to become the expert in Quurzid. Then you need to figure out how to teach our people the language."
"Not just those on the Ivoire,” I say.
"I want a plan of instruction, something recorded, so that all of the ships in the Fleet can learn it,” he says. “I want us to be ready as soon as someone hears our distress call. I want to be able to end the fighting around Ukhanda immediately."
His hands are still around mine. He shakes, just a little, as he says that.
"You think we'll get out of this, then?” I ask.
"Are you asking if we'll be becalmed forever?"
I nod.
"No,” he says.
"But you put us on rations,” I say.
"It might be a week,” he says. “It might be a year. I want to be prepared."
"The Quurzod damaged the anacapa drive, didn't they?"
"While we were engaging it,” he says. “It'll take some time to figure out what exactly went wrong. That's why I need you."
"Me?"
He nods, and his hands tighten around mine. “I need you to figure out what's wrong with the communications array. I'm convinced our distress signals aren't getting through."
I flush, then let out a small breath. “You trust me to get back to work?"
His gaze meets mine. “Mae,” he says, “I've trusted you all along."
He has. He's been the only one. I didn't even trust myself.
I bow my head, stunned at his faith in me. Stunned that I still have a future.
He stands, puts his hands on my shoulders, and kisses the top of my head.
"Welcome back,” he whispers.
I lean into him for just a moment.
"It's good to be back,” I say, with more relief than I expected, and resist the urge to add, You have no idea how good it is.
Because I have a hunch he does know, and that's why he didn't leave me behind.
Because I am still part of the ship. A necessary part of the ship.<
br />
And you never abandon the necessities. No matter how difficult it is to retrieve them.
Copyright © 2011 Kristine Kathryn Rusch
[Back to Table of Contents]
Poetry: BLACK HOLE by William John Watkins
* * * *
* * * *
With gravity compounding like a destiny,
The walnut shells of stars succumb and crack,
Scattering dust mote embers big as galaxies,
Down the cosmic rabbit hole with no way back.
—
Does some song lure them to the blazing rim,
Or is it fascination with the black abyss
A love song is it, or a funeral hymn,
That promises a world more bright than this?
—
The crowning glory of what stars might be,
Of endless light without the intervening dark.
What irresistible dominion do they see
Before they fling themselves down that last arc?
—
A final flare, a last epiphany before they're gone,
A twinkling light for some small child to wish upon.
—William John Watkins
Copyright © 2011 William John Watkins
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: NEXT ISSUE
JUNE ISSUE
June's blockbuster cover story is a novella from John W. Campbell Award-winning author Mary Robinette Kowal. Follow homicide detectives Scott Huang and his AI partner Metta as they attempt to prevent another murder. The stakes are high and the detectives have to move fast if they're going to save something that may be even more precious than life. You're sure to be captivated by Metta, who can customize her interface for each officer, but who chooses to be a certain silver screen starlet for Huang.
ALSO IN JUNE
In addition to this nearly novel-length tale, we've managed to cram five other stories into the same issue. Ian R. MacLeod's novelettecombines a near balletic sense of the martial arts with the harsh reality of “The Cold Step Beyond"; Carol Emshwiller explores what it's like to grow up knowing only “All the News That's Fit"; in his first story for Asimov's, Alan DeNiro takes us on a unique road trip, one that our heroes might survive if they can get past “The Walking Stick Fires"; Colin P. Davies returns with a short story both funny and poignant about the last hours in the life of a “Fighter"; and Felicity Shoulders explores the corporate world of fighters and survivors who must all play the “Apocalypse Daily."
OUR EXCITING FEATURES
Robert Silverberg's “Reflections” column reminds us that there's “Nothing New Under the Sun"; James Patrick Kelly's “On the Net” lets us know what's “Fantastic” about some modern FanFic; Peter Heck contributes “On Books"; plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our June issue on sale at newsstands on April 5, 2011. Or you can subscribe to Asimov's—in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com's Kindle, BarnesandNoble. com's Nook, and ebookstore.sony.com's eReader!
COMING SOON
new stories by Paul Cornell, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Ken Liu, Kit Reed, Norman Spinrad, Felicity Shoulders, Chris Beckett, Eleanor Arnason, Bruce McAllister, Robert Reed, Theodora Goss, Neal Barrett, Jr., Will Ludwigsen, and many others!
[Back to Table of Contents]
Department: ON BOOKS: URBI ET ORBI by Norman Spinrad
THE CITY AND THE CITY
by China Miéville
Ballantine/Del Rey, $15
978-0345497529
* * * *
KRAKEN
by China Miéville
Ballantine/Del Rey, $26
978-0345497499
* * * *
THE DERVISH HOUSE
by Ian McDonald
Pyr, $26
978-1616142049
* * * *
ARES EXPRESS
by Ian McDonald
Pyr, $16
978-1616141974
* * * *
Not to be insulting, but for those of you who might be baffled by the Latin title, it more or less simply means “the city and the world,” or “to the city and the world"—originally the opening line of Roman proclamations, long since adopted by Popes doing likewise. Here I am bending it considerably to mean of the city and the world; in speculative fiction terms, science fiction and fantasy alike, fiction in which a fictional city or a fictional world is one way or another as much a central character as any of the humans (or non-humans) inhabiting it.
"World building” in its extended sense of an imagined physical venue for the story has always played a central role in more speculative fiction than not, whether a fictional planet, or a fictional generation starship, or a fictional space habitat, or a fictional city, or a fictional fantasy world, and there are probably those who would contend that it can't be the real deal without it.
But here we have four novels by two of the leading literary lights of the current speculative fiction era—The City and the City and Kraken by China Miéville, The Dervish House and Ares Express by Ian McDonald—in which the city in the first three and a fictional Mars in the fourth become as much foreground as the characters embedded in them, and in which even the story line itself, to one degree or another, becomes almost secondary.
And, interestingly enough, both authors—McDonald unintentionally, and Miéville quite overtly—are champions of two drastically divergent streams of speculative fiction, so much so that one might oversimplify them as science fiction and fantasy. Nevertheless in all four of these novels these streams converge on this world-building centrality, albeit in radically different manners.
McDonald writes science fiction. It may, as in Ares Express, be so rococo as to have the feeling of fantasy, but however he does it, whatever contortions it may take, he does try to create suspension of disbelief in the traditional science fictional manner, by shoehorning what might otherwise be fantasy into accommodation with the known laws of mass and energy.
Miéville, on the other hand, couldn't care less. He not only writes fantasy, but much of it is written in the mode he has dubbed, and of which he is champion—namely the “New Weird."
Ares Express, first published in Britain in 2001, brought to the United States by Pyr in 2010, is a peculiar kind of sequel to McDonald's first novel, Desolation Road. That characters are not repeated is not particularly peculiar, that McDonald sets both novels on his version of Mars is not peculiar, for many writers return to further explore a world they created in one novel in another one—literary recycling, as it were, waste not, want not.
What is peculiar is that it is and is not the same fictional Mars in both novels. Both novels are set on a future terraformed Mars with human cultures spreading all over it, and both McDonald versions of Mars owe much to Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance, which is to say the cultures in question are in their ways as baroque and colorfully realized a bouillabaisse as Vance's Dying Earth or Bradbury's own Martian Chronicles. But this is Ian McDonald, who even in a first novel took care to make what has the flavor of fantasy fit within the confines of science fictional realism, paying attention to creating a belief in the reader who cares that both his versions of Mars lie within the possible, if not the probable.
But these two literary planets created a decade apart are not the same Mars, not exactly, and the significant differences are mainly literary.
The Mars of Desolation Road feels something like Bradbury puffing on a doobie, the love affair of the writer with his dream of a Mars that never was, except maybe in a way in Edgar Rice Burroughs, baroque in style, culturally dense and complex. It's a true novel, not a collection of short stories written over time like The Martian Chronicles with consistency not entering into at all, but with a set of interweaving story lines that do form a whole—but which, like the characters, colorful and bizarre though they be, escape the forefront of the reading experience an
d the memory thereof.
Ares Express gives us another baroquely complex stew of arcane local cultures and extreme characters. It is another dream of an improbably terraformed Mars, it does therefore have a certain fantasy feel, but here there is a viewpoint character with centrality and simpatico personal depth. And this McDonald Mars owes quite a bit to steampunk.
Quite literally. Sweetness Octave Glorious-Honeybun Asiim 12, the heroine of the story—and she is a real picaresque heroine—is a punk to her family, a black sheep runaway wise-girl out to boogie. And her family is a tribe of the engineers who crew the great trains that traverse the surface of the planet, transporting goods, passengers, con artists, and popular culture from one more or less isolated culture to another.
The locomotives may be powered by onboard fusion reactors, but as aesthetic artifacts and Rube Goldberg technology, like most of the rest of the infrastructure and architecture on the surface of the planet until higher forces intrude, they are Victoriana. You can see how it all could work by pushing such technology to its very limits, but if you ask why in hell do it this way, the only answer is aesthetic.
Retro aesthetic. Ian McDonald has managed to write a romance of the rails, a railroad novel with all the trimmings, set on a far future Mars. There certainly is a literary tradition of this sort of thing, and any number of classic films, but you don't see much of it in science fiction, or, for that matter, fantasy. Though, interestingly enough, China Miéville did it too in Iron Council, albeit with a razor sharp and iron hard political edge.
There's just a certain allure to trains and railway odysseys for many people, obviously McDonald among them—nor am I immune—or rather to what they once were in the nineteenth century and what they might become again in the future, at least within the pages of a novel.
Trains were adventurous cutting edge transport back in Victorian times, and they were also perambulating hotels of whatever level—or, better, Mississippi riverboats on wheels and running on rails. The look and feel of this pre-auto and pre-airplane technology, like the iron tube bridge across the Firth of Forth in Scotland, as far as you could go without cable suspension technology, seems both quaint and touchingly heroic to our eyes now.
Asimov's SF, April/May 2011 Page 33