Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  Orlando is in a generous mood. “I suppose so,” he allows, working faster. “The other people still need doctoring, I guess.”

  I watch him, and I watch quite a lot more. My various antennae reach into the darkness, listening. Searching. I don’t often step outside, escaping the station’s shielded walls. But tonight’s sky is silent. Maybe it will stay this way for the rest of the winter, and maybe longer. The last several decades have grown quieter, the rare bits of radio noise thoroughly encoded. There might be dozens and hundreds of little stations scattered about the Arctic, each taking precautions, keeping their positions and resources hidden from raiders. Or maybe there is no one to talk to, even in code. Either way, I listen, and the boy digs until his hole is wide and hip-deep in the center. Then he straightens his back, saying, “That’s funny. The bags should be here.”

  “Keep searching,” I urge.

  Those words give him new energy. He shifts to his right and digs again, looking like an animal following a last desperate scent.

  “Cull,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “Removing what weakens, making the whole stronger as a consequence. That’s what it means to cull.”

  His arms slow, and he looks straight ahead.

  “Humans cull, and worlds cull too,” I say.

  Orlando sits back on the dry gravel. “Do you think maybe somebody moved my kit?”

  “Perhaps it was stolen,” I agree.

  Then he rises. “Well, I don’t really need it. How far is this walk?”

  “Down the mountains, following this drainage,” I tell him.

  “But if I’m so important, can’t they come meet me halfway?”

  “They don’t want to get close and be seen,” I tell him. “They promised to be waiting where the old lake sits.”

  The old lake was an open water reservoir, dry now for fifty years.

  “I know that spot,” he says. “I can run all the way, no problem.”

  I like my lie so much. So much. Humans living above our heads, comfortable and well fed, and thriving among them—essential and worshipped—a generation of doctors who aren’t consumed by every possible worry and hazard and the miserable future for their stations.

  Orlando looks back at me. “I’ll wave. When I’m flying over your head, I’ll give you a big wave.”

  “And I’ll watch for you,” I say.

  Orlando turns away.

  I lift my least-human hand, aiming for the back of his neck.

  “What a day . . . ” he starts to say.

  I drop him into the hole, and as I do with every cull and with every corpse delivered by natural causes, I cut open the skull. Before I kick the sand over the body, I pull out each of the pseudo-worms. I can’t make them anymore. I need to add them to my stockpile—a hoard that grows only larger with time.

  About the Author

  Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves.” He is currently working on a Great Ship trilogy for Prime Books, and of course, more short pieces.

  The Mermaids Singing Each to Each

  Cat Rambo

  Niko leaned behind me in the cabin, raising his voice to be heard over the roar of engine and water, “When you Choose, which is it going to be? Boy or girl?”

  I would have answered, if I thought it really mattered to him. But we were off shore by then, headed for the Lump, and he was just making conversation, knowing how long it would take us to get there. He didn’t care whether I’d be male or female, I’d still be his pal Lolo. I could feel the boat listening, but she knew I didn’t want her talking, that I’d turn her off if she went too far.

  So I kept steering the Mary Magdalena and said I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter, unless we did manage to cash in on the Lump before the corp-strippers got there. After that we were silent again, and everything was just the engine rumble moving up through my feet. Jorge Felipe turned over in the hammock we’d managed to fit into the cabin, hammering the nails into the paneling to hang the hooks. He let out something that was either snore or fart or maybe both.

  Jorge Felipe was the one who had found out about the Lump. It was four or five kilometers across, the guy who’d spotted it said. Four or five kilometers of prime debris floating in the ocean, bits of old plastic and wood and Dios knew what else, collected by the currents, amassed in a single spot. All salvageable, worth five new cents a pound. Within a week, the corp-stripper boats would be out there, disassembling it and shoveling all that money into company machines, company mouths.

  But we were going to get there first, carve off a chunk, enough to pay us all off. I wanted to be able to Choose, and I couldn’t do that until I could pay the medical bill. Niko said he wasn’t saving for anything, but really he was—there’d be enough money that he could relax for a month and not worry about feeding his mother, his extended family.

  Jorge Felipe just wanted out of Santo Nuevo. Any way he could escape our village was fine with him, and the first step in that was affording a ticket. He wanted to be out before storm season hit, when we’d all be living on whatever we could manage until a new crop of tourists bloomed in the spring.

  Winter was lean times. Jorge Felipe, for all his placid snoring right now, feeling desperation’s bite. That’s why he was willing to cut me in, in exchange for use of the Mary Magdalena. Most of the time he didn’t have much to say to me. I gave him the creeps, I knew. He’d told Niko in order to have him tell me. But he didn’t have any other friends with boats capable of going out to carve off a chunk of the Lump and bring it in for salvage. And on my side of things, I thought he was petty and mean and dangerous. But he knew the Lump’s coordinates.

  I tilted my head, listened to the engines, checking the rhythms to make sure everything was smooth. The familiar stutter of the water pump from behind me was nothing to worry about, or the way the ballaster coughed when it first switched on. I knew all the Mary Magdalena’s sounds. She’s old, but she works, and between the hydroengines and the solar panels, she manages to get along.

  Sometimes I used to imagine crashing her on a reef and swimming away, leaving her to be covered with birdshit and seaweed, her voice lasting, pleading, as long as the batteries held out. Sometimes I used to imagine taking one of the little cutting lasers, chopping away everything but her defenseless brainbox, deep in the planking below the cabin, then severing its inputs one by one, leaving her alone. Sometimes I imagined worse things.

  I inherited her from my uncle Fortunato. My uncle loved his boat like a woman, and she’d do things for him, stretch out the last bit of fuel, turn just a bit sharper, that she wouldn’t do for me or anyone else. Like an abandoned woman, pining for a lover who’d moved on. I could have the AI stripped down and retooled, re-imprint her, but I’d lose all her knowledge. Her ability to recognize me.

  I’d left the cabin the way my uncle had it: his baseball cap hanging on the peg beside the doorway, his pin-up photos shellacked onto
the paneling. Sometimes I thought about painting over the photos. But they reminded me of my uncle, reminded me not to forgive him. You would have thought they would have been enough, but maybe they just egged him on. Some people claim that’s how it goes with porn, more and more until a man can’t control himself.

  I can’t say my experience has confirmed this.

  Uncle Fortunato left me the Mary Magdalena from guilt, guilt about what he’d done, guilt that his niece had decided to go sexless, to put away all of that rather than live with being female. I was the first in the village to opt for the Choice, but not the first in the world by a long shot. It was fashionable by then, and a lot of celebrities were having it done to their children for “therapeutic reasons.” My grandmother, Mama Fig, said it was unnatural and against the Church’s law, and every priest in the islands came and talked to me. But they didn’t change my mind. There was a program funding it for survivors of sexual assault. That’s how I got it paid for, even though I wouldn’t tell them who did it.

  I couldn’t have him punished. If they’d put him away, my grandmother would have lost her only means of support. But I could take myself out of his grasp by making myself unfuckable. Neuter. Neuter until I wanted to claim a gender. They didn’t tell me, though, that getting in was free, but getting out would cost. Cost a lot.

  When I first heard he’d left the boat to me, I didn’t want her. I let her sit for two weeks gathering barnacles at dock before I went down.

  I wouldn’t have ever gone, but the winter was driving me crazy. No work to be found, nothing to do but sit home with my grandmother and listen to her worry about her old friend’s children and her favorite soap opera’s plotlines.

  When I did go to the Mary Magdalena, she didn’t speak until I came aboard. First I stood and looked at her. She’s not much, all told: boxy, thirty years out of date, a dumbboat once, tweaked into this century.

  I used to imagine pouring acid on her deck, seeing it eat away with a hiss and a sizzle.

  As I made my way up the gangplank, I could feel that easy sway beneath my feet. There’s nothing like being on a boat, and I closed my eyes just to feel the vertigo underfoot like a familiar friend’s hand on my elbow.

  I used to imagine her torn apart by magnets, the bolts flying outward like being dismantled in a cartoon.

  “Laura,” a speaker said, as though I hadn’t been gone for six years, as though she’d seen me every day in between. “Laura, where is your uncle?”

  I used to imagine her disintegrated, torn apart into silent atoms.

  “It’s not Laura anymore,” I said. “It’s Lolo. I’m gender neutral.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “You’ve got a Net connection,” I said. “Search around on “gender neutral” and “biomod operation.”

  I wasn’t sure if the pause that came after that was for dramatic effect or whether she really was having trouble understanding the search parameters. Then she said, “Ah, I see. When did you do that?”

  “Six years ago.”

  “Where is your uncle?”

  “Dead,” I said flatly. I hoped that machine intelligences could hurt and so I twisted the knife as far as I could. “Stabbed in a bar fight.”

  Her voice always had the same flat affect, but I imagined/hoped I could hear sorrow and panic underneath. “Who owns me now?”

  “I do. Just as long as it takes me to sell you.”

  “You can’t, Laura.”

  “Lolo. And I can.”

  “The licenses to operate—the tourism, the sport-fishing, even the courier license—they won’t transfer to a new owner. They won’t pay much for a boat they can’t use.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “You’d fetch a decent amount as scrap.”

  She paused again. “Keep me going, Lolo, and you can take in enough to keep yourself and Mama Fig going. Your uncle had ferrying contracts, and every season is good for at least a couple of trips with very cheap or eccentric tourists.”

  She had grace enough not to push beyond that. I didn’t have much choice, and it was the only way to support my grandmother and myself month to month. With the Mary Magdalena, I was better off than Niko or Jorge Felipe by far. I could afford the occasional new shirt or record, rather than something scavenged.

  At the end of a year, we’d reached an agreement. Most of the time now the boat knew better than to talk to me. She could have been with me everywhere. Button mikes gleamed along the front railing, in the john, even in the little lifeboat that hugged the side. But she stayed silent except in the cabin, where she would tell me depths, weather, water temperature. I told her which way to go. Businesslike and impersonal.

  Niko went out on deck. I didn’t blame him. It was too warm in the cabin. I knew the Mary Magdalena would alert me if there was any trouble, but I liked to keep an eye on things.

  Jorge Felipe stirred, stuck his head out over the hammock’s edge. His dark hair stuck out in all directions, like broken broom straws.

  “Morning yet?” he rasped.

  “Couple more hours.”

  “Where’s Niko?”

  “Went to smoke.”

  He grunted. “Shit, it’s hot in here,” he said. He swung his legs out from under the blanket’s basketweave, thumped onto the floor. “We got soup left?”

  “Thermos in the cupboard.”

  Behind me the microwave beeped out protests as he thumbed its controls. The display was a steady, grainy green, showing me the surface far below the boat. Drifts and ridges. They said you could spot a wreck by the unnatural straightness of a line, the oddness of a corner. Unlikely, but it had been heard of, in that friend-of-a-cousin-of-a-neighbor’s sort of way.

  “Heat me one,” I said.

  “Soup or coffee?”

  “Coffee,” I said, and he clanked another mug into the microwave.

  Niko came into the doorway. “Mermaids out there,” he said. “Be careful if you swim.”

  Jorge Felipe handed me my mug, so hot it almost bit into my skin as I cupped it.

  “Fucking mermaids,” he said. “I hate them even worse than sharks. One tangled with my sister, almost killed her.”

  “Everyone on the island’s tangled with your sister. I’m getting coffee and going back out,” Niko said, and did.

  Jorge Felipe watched him go. “He’s fucking obsessed with those mermaids.”

  Mermaids. Back before I was born, there were more tourists. There’s always tourists now, but not quite as many. Some of them came here specifically, even, for the beaches. Or for the cheap black-market bio-science. And one black-market bio-scientist specialized in making mermaids out of them.

  They paid a lot for it, I guess. A moddie body that they could go swimming in, pretend like they were always sea creatures. It was very popular one year, Mama Fig said.

  But the scientist, he wasn’t that good, or that thorough. Or maybe he didn’t understand all the implications of the DNA he was using. Some people said he did it deliberately.

  Because mermaids lay eggs, hundreds at a time, at least that kind did. And the natural-born ones, they didn’t have human minds guiding them. They were like sharks—they ate, they killed, they ate. Most of the original human mermaids had gotten out when they found out that the seas were full of chemicals, or that instead of whale songs down there, they heard submarine sonar and boat signals. When the last few found out that they were spawning whether they liked it or not, they got out too. Supposedly one or two stayed, and now they live in the sea with their children, twice as mean as any of them.

  I said, “Watch the display for me” and went up on deck. The sun was rising, slivers of gold and pink and blue in the east. It played over the gouges in the Mary Magdalena’s railing where I’d picked at it with a knife, like smallpox marks along the boat’s face.

  Niko was watching the water. Light danced over it, intense and dazzling. Spray rode the wind, stinging the eyes. I licked salt from my drying lips.

  “Where a
re you seeing them?” I asked.

  He pointed, but I didn’t see anything at first. It took several moments to spot a flick of fins, the intercepted shadow as a wave rose and fell.

  “You see them out this deep all the time,” I said. Niko hadn’t been out on the boat much. He got nauseous anywhere out past ten meters, but Jorge Felipe had enlisted him to coax me into cooperating, had supplied him with fancy anti-nausea patches. I looked sideways. One glistened like a chalky gill on the side of his neck.

  “Yeah?” he said, staring at the water. He wasn’t watching me, so I looked at his face, trying to commit the details to memory. Trying to imagine him as a photograph. His jaw was a smooth line, shadowed with stubble. The hairs in front of his ears tangled in curls, started to corkscrew, blunted by sleep. He had long eyelashes, longer than mine. The sun tilted further up and the dazzle of light grew brighter, till it made my eyes hurt.

  “Put on a hat,” I said to Niko. “Going to be hot and bad today.”

  He nodded but stayed where he was. I started to say more, but shrugged and went back in. It was all the same to me. Still, when I saw his straw hat on the floor, I nudged it over to Jorge Felipe and said, “Take this out to Niko when you go.”

  Looking out over the railing, I spotted the three corp ships long before we got to the Lump. For a moment I wondered why they were so spread out, and then I realized the Lump’s size. It was huge—kilometers wide. The ships were gathered around it, and their buzz boats were resting, wings spread out to recharge the solar panels.

  They must have seen us around the same time. A buzz boat folded its wings, shadows spider-webbed with silver, and approached us. As it neared, I saw the Novagen logo on its side, on its occupant’s mirrored helmet.

  “This is claimed salvage,” the logo-ed loudspeaker said.

  I cupped my hands to shout back, “Salvage’s not claimed till you’ve got tethers on it. Unless you’re pulling in the whole thing, we’ve got a right to chew on it, too.”

  “Claimed salvage,” the pilot repeated. He looked the Mary Magdalena up and down and curled his lip. Most of the time I liked her shitty, rundown look, but pride bristled briefly. “You want to be careful, kid. Accidents happen out here when freelancers get in the way.”