Quin seemed to be enjoying himself. “I never asked you about boyfriends,” he said to distract us. “I’ll bet you both have plenty.”
“Zana does.” I was relieved to hear the sound of my own voice. “She gets her share and half of mine.”
“That’s not true.” She frowned. “You do well enough.”
“They say I talk too much.”
“Boneheads.” He patted my arm. “Stick with men as smart as you.”
“And you?” said Zana. “You have people you care about?”
“Yes and no.” He paused, deciding how much to say. “When you get replicated, relationships sometimes fall apart. You’re you, but now you’re somebody else as well. The body is different for one thing, sometimes very different. It wants what it wants. That old you, he’s like someone you read about. It was a really interesting book, and you remember vivid scenes, but you’ve read that last page.”
“What’s it like?” I asked. “Being replicated.”
“Like dying, only you wake up afterwards.”
“You’ve died?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.
“Every time,” he said, as if he was discussing a splinter. “Of course in a direct transfer you’re not dead very long. But these days they can still rep someone thirty minutes after cardiac and respiratory arrest with minimal information loss. After thirty, the brain really deteriorates. Something about ischemic injury.” He shivered in the heat. “So yes, Zana knows this already but I was in a flier crash that killed me just before I came here. Nobody’s fault, really. I was with someone I loved, but he didn’t make it. Rescue took too long to get to us. They say my rep was only ninety-six percent accurate. It was very sad, because I’d probably still be with him if his replication had been successful too.”
Zana took his hand in hers.
“So I’m still learning to be this new Quin in this new body.” His mouth smiled, but his eyes were sad. “But that’s what we all do, isn’t it?”
When I saw that look on my sister’s face, one I’d never seen before, I knew that I’d been right to worry about this upsider. The love she felt for him glimmered from her perfect ratios, Moya’s gifts to her. The length of Zana’s face divided by its width. 1.618. Her smile divided by the width of her nose. 1.618. The width of her nose to the space between her nostrils. 1.618.
I was so focused on my sister that I didn’t realize Quin was still talking until he said, “I’d do anything for you.”
Zana shut her eyes. Was it imagination that they were so tight that they quivered? When she opened them she was staring at nobody, and 1.618 was Divinely revealed in the width of her eye divided by the width of her iris.
“Don’t.” She stood—to get away from her lover? Or from Moya, who had made her in her image and likeness? The Divine was the reason that her height was 1.618 of the distance between her beautiful navel and her flawless hair. The holy numbers began praying themselves, one plus one sisters, two sisters, three, five, eight.…
Quin struggled to his feet and caught her in an embrace, spouting a stream of ardent and unintelligible Anglic. She replied in kind, only her voice was in ruins. More Anglic nonsense and more and then they were shouting. The argument made her so angry that she pulled away from him. His arm dangled and he shook it as if it had fallen asleep but it was too long, too long, his proportions were all wrong. When his fingers curled into a fist, that one nail glowed a sleepy, magical purple.
Nobody said, “Speak Moyan!”
Zana heard. “I do want that, yes, all of it, but I can’t.” She was crying. “It’s a sin. And how can I leave them?”
“They can come too,” Quin said. “I’ll pay for the replication.”
“Rep Father?” Her laugh turned sour, and her mouth twisted, and her ratios skewed. “I love you, Quin, but…”
Love, the voice said to nobody. Thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four. She loves him.
“Jix, what are you doing?” The upsider wasn’t condescending now. “Get away from her, Jix.” Who was he talking to?
The voice was as cruel as stone, as sad as the wind. Fifty-five, eighty-nine, one hundred and forty-four.
“Stop.” Zana tried to twist away, but she wasn’t fast enough. “No!”
And then she was falling, perfect arms flailing, scream slashing the night. On her way to the Thousand Worlds. The truth is that nobody pushed Zana Ferenc to her death from the stone lip of the Bride.
“Call rescue now,” said nobody. “You only have half an hour.”
* * *
I hadn’t expected Mother to be beautiful. She was an only child but the rep they’d given her looked like some younger, sunnier sister. She reminded me of my own sister, the one I no longer had according to Father. She stood aside and smiled me into her apartment. The room felt deliciously cool after the hike from the church, like cannonballing into the river on a summer afternoon. This must be the air-conditioning we’d heard about.
There were no real windows but the entire rear wall was a live image of the ruins as seen from Kai’s Chair. Our village peeked from the far corner.
“Xeni and the others are out,” said Mother. “It’s just us.”
“Xeni,” I said. “She’s your roommate, right?” I paused in the center of what was apparently just a sitting room. Two doors to my left, one to my right, the hall behind. Walls as blue as an egg. Mysterious light from the ceiling. I stared but saw nothing. I had so much to say, to ask, and I was tongue-tied.
“I like your couch.” It was a silly thing to say, but it was all I could come up with. The couch was L shaped and covered with a ridged red fabric. I tried to estimate its cost in cookies as I ran a finger along the outside arm. The material was warm and felt like skin.
“Sit for a minute.” Mother patted the back of the couch where she wanted me. “I’ll be right back.”
I was so miserable that I considered running away as she passed from the room. But I couldn’t take another step carrying the weight of all those sleepless nights. I needed someone to talk to, so I sat. Mist curled from the vaporizer on the low table in front of me. I sniffed, some kind of ambient drug. It smelled green. Mounted on the wall was an antique bicycle wheel, rust eating through the chrome, the tread on the tire worn to a shiny black.
“Xeni’s.” Mother returned, carrying a tray. “She races. Apparently that wheel was on some bike that won Omeo’s Climb, back who knows when.”
She put the tray on the table and settled beside me. I glanced from it to her. “Am I staying?”
“If you want.”
She’d made my favorite treats: bittersweet clusters, cheese and figs on skewers, pickled cob, salami with tiny crowns of mustard.
I reached for the bittersweets. “What, no cookies?”
She had a way of snorting and laughing at the same time. “That’s your father’s specialty.” Hearing that intimate sound that only she could make carried me back to a sunny memory of the four of us on our boat on the river, Father rowing us home from church and Mother laughing as Zana and I pulled snack treasures from the picnic basket.
“How is he?” said Mother.
And then I was back in an apartment in Skytown, and our little family was in ruins. “Bitter,” I said. “I had to move out. I’m living in the church for now.”
“It was past time, I think. You needed to be on your own.” She frowned. “But the church?”
“Nobody knows what happened that night,” I said. “Nobody in the village, that is. They think it was an accident.” My tongue felt like a brick. “But you know.”
She nodded.
The silence stretched so tight, I thought I might snap. “I like your place.” Why was everything that came out of my mouth so trite?
“You never visited.”
“No. Sorry.” This was a reproach I’d feared, but somehow it wasn’t as awful as I’d thought it would be. “That was wrong.” Mother had every right to blame me; I didn’t know what I was doing or who I was anymore. “Did Za
na?”
Mother spoke an order in Anglic. I’d been taking lessons and picked up something about a holiday or a birthday. Then the wall displayed a picture of Mother and Zana sitting on the couch just as we were and with practically the same snacks in front. This was the Zana I knew, my sister. Not the other, the rep I’d never seen.
“Did she say anything after she was repped?” I said. “About me, I mean?”
“Not much.” Mother spoke as if she were tiptoeing around broken glass. “She didn’t know why you did it.”
I should’ve said something—Mother expected me to. But I was back on the Bride, seeing it all again for the millionth time and still not understanding. I’d heard Moya’s voice, so how could I have sinned?
“She left the orbital yesterday,” she said. “Should arrive at the wormhole’s insertion point next Friday.”
“But no message? Nothing?”
She sighed. “They say that a rep’s most vivid memories are her last moments. For me, it was just fog, but then I was a direct transfer. They put me to sleep, I died, they woke me up. But somewhere in between, I remember wrestling with … well, like I said. Fog.” She waved the mist wafting from the vaporizer toward her and breathed deeply. “It was like swimming, almost drowning, and I needed to stay upright except my feet kept sinking and I couldn’t pull free and it … it took a while, is all. I was ready for it to stop.” She shook her head as if to part that remembered fog. “Zana’s memories were more painful, I guess.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt my throat close. How many messages had I sent my sister apologizing every which way I could think of? None of which she answered.
Then I was crying, hot tears, choking sobs.
Mother patted my arm. “I think she knows.”
But it wasn’t only for my sister that I cried. I wept for Mother and Father and the life we all had lost. And for Moya, who answered to an upsider drug.
I finally got myself under control. “He was telling us that he died in a flier crash”—I swiped at my eyes—“Quin, that night. So at least he knew what she went through. Maybe that was a help.”
“I hope so.” She picked up a round of salami and examined it critically. “I didn’t like him at first. Too much the upsider, always talking about how we’ll have to give up our ways and become citizens of the Thousand Worlds. I think what he really wants is to chase down his Exotics, and go live with them.” The tip of her tongue licked the mustard crown and then she nibbled an edge the way she always did. “But he did right by her, paid her way to Ravi’s Prize. Says he’ll follow her there after he finishes his research. We’ll see. I think he means well.”
“Is there a picture of her?” I said. “After, I mean.”
She spoke in Anglic again. I recognized daughter.
A woman stared at me from Mother’s wall—not quite a stranger. Her eyes were as deep as the night sky, just as I remembered her. But she had an ungodly pale complexion and her hair was cropped too short and the proportions of her face were all wrong. My breath caught when I realized that she looked more like me than herself. My twin.
“I hope,” I said, “she’ll be happy someday.”
“Yes,” said Mother. “I pray the numbers that she will.”
Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts
KEN LIU
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among many other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. In 2015, he published his first novel, The Grace of Kings. His most recent books are The Wall of Storms, a sequel to The Grace of Kings, a collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, and, as editor and translator, an anthology of Chinese science fiction stories, Invisible Planets. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Here he demonstrates that even in what most of us would consider a disastrously ruined Post-Catastrophe world, there will probably still be tourists.…
Before she became a hermit, Asa
Nonetheless, I will tell you that she was responsible for United Planet’s public offering thirty years ago, at the time the biggest single pooling of resources by any individual or corporate entity in history. She was, in large measure, responsible for convincing a wearied humanity scattered across three planets, a moon, and a dozen asteroid habitats to continue to invest in the Grand Task—the terraforming of both Earth and Mars.
Does telling you what she has done explain who she is? I’m not sure. “From cradle to grave, everything we do is motivated by the need to answer one question: who am I?” she wrote. “But the answer to the question has always been obvious: stop striving; accept.”
A few days after she became the youngest chief managing director for JPMCS, on Solar Epoch 22385200, she handed in her resignation, divorced her husbands and wives, liquidated all her assets, placed the bulk of the proceeds into trusts for her children, and then departed for the Old Blue on a one-way ticket.
Once she arrived on Earth, she made her way to the port town of Acton in the Federation of Maritime Provinces and States, where she purchased a survival habitat kit, one identical to the millions used by refugee communities all over the planet, and put the pieces together herself using only two common laborer automata, eschewing offers of aid from other inhabitants of the city. Then she set herself afloat like a piece of driftwood, alone on the seven seas, much to the consternation of her family, friends, and colleagues.
“Given how she was dressed, we thought she was here to buy a vacation villa,” said Edgar Baker, the man who sold Asa her habitat. “Plenty of bankers and executives like to come here in winter to dive for treasure and enjoy the sun, but she didn’t want me to show her any of the vacant houses, several of which have excellent private beaches.”
(Despite the rather transparent ploy, I’ve decided to leave in Baker’s little plug. I can attest that Acton is an excellent vacation spot, with several good restaurants in town serving traditional New England fare—though the lobsters are farmed, not wild. Conservationists are uncertain if the extinct wild lobster will ever make a comeback in the waters off New England as they have never adapted to the warmer seas. The crustaceans that survived global warming were generally smaller in size.)
A consortium of her former spouses sued to have Asa declared mentally incompetent and reverse her financial dispositions. For a while the case provided juicy gossip that filled the XP-stations, but Asa managed to make the case go away quickly with some undisclosed settlements. “They understand now that I just want to be left alone,” she was quoted as saying after the case was dismissed—that was probably true, but I’m sure it didn’t hurt that she could afford the best lawyers.
“Yesterday I came here to live.” With this first entry in her journal, Asa began her seaborne life over the sunken metropolis of Boston on Solar Epoch 22385302, which, if you’re familiar with the old Gregorian Calendar, was July 5, 2645.
The words were not original, of course. Henry David Thoreau wrote them first exactly eight hundred years earlier in a suburb of Boston.
But unlike Thoreau, who often sounded misanthropic in his declarations, Asa spent as much time alone as she did among crowds.
* * *
Excerpted from Adrift, by Asa
The legendary island of Singapore is no more. But the idea of Singapore lives on.
The flo
ating family habitats connect to each other in tight clan-strands that weave together into a massive raft-city. From above, the city looks like an algal mat composed of metal and plastic, studded with glistening pearls, dewdrops or air bubbles—the transparent domes and solar collectors for the habitats.
The Singapore Refugee Collective is so extensive that it is possible to walk the hundreds of kilometers from the site of sunken Kuala Lumpur to the surviving isles of Sumatra without ever touching water—though you would never want to do such a thing, as the air outside is far too hot for human survival.
When typhoons—a near-constant presence at these latitudes—approach, entire clan-strands detach and sink beneath the waves to ride out the storm. The refugees sometimes speak not of days or nights, but of upside and downside.
The air inside the habitats is redolent with a thousand smells that would overwhelm an inhabitant of the sterile Venus stations and the climate-controlled domes of the upper latitudes. Char kway teow, diesel fumes, bak kut teh, human waste, raja, Katong laksa, mango-flavored perfume, kaya toast, ayam penyet, burnt electric insulation, mee goreng, roti prata, sea-salt-laced reclaimed air, nasi lemak, charsiew—the heady mixture is something the refugees grow up with and outsiders can never get used to.
Life in the Refugee Collective is noisy, cramped, and occasionally violent. Infectious diseases periodically sweep through the population, and life expectancy is short. The fact that the refugees remain stateless, so many generations after the wars that stripped their ancestors of homelands, seems to make it impossible for a solution to be envisioned by anyone from the Developed World—an ancient label whose meaning has evolved over the centuries, but has never been synonymous with moral rectitude. It was the Developed World that had polluted the world the earliest and the most, and yet it was also the Developed World that went to war with India and China for daring to follow in their footsteps.
I was saddened by what I saw. So many people clinging to life tenaciously on the thin interface between water and air. Even in a place like this, unsuitable for human habitation, people hang on, as stubborn as the barnacles on pilings revealed at every low tide. What of the refugees in the deserts of interior Asia, who live like moles in underground warrens? What of the other floating refugee collectives off the coasts of Africa and Central America? They have survived by pure strength of will, a miracle.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 80