“There are no facilities suitable for temporarily caging them.”
She held out the last sequin, willing Baby to come and take it from her. The little robot drifted closer, closer, finally plucked it as delicately as a fish’s kiss from her fingertips, then darted away. It stopped a few feet off, turning the sequin over and over in its claws, watching her, making its hello/goodbye gesture.
Based on what she’d observed so far, it was almost an adult. She wondered if it and Creature would keep interacting after Baby was full-fledged, its back studded with bits of rubbish or perhaps even her opals, or whether they would be as aloof as the scissors to each other.
“Would you be willing to take some home?” the robot said.
She looked down at the claws, at the plier-grip tips capable of cracking a finger. She’d seen it destroy a small tree in order to harvest the limp Mylar balloon tangled in its upper branches. She had nothing capable of keeping it caged.
She shook her head.
• • • •
Her supervisor called her in, a special meeting that left her hot-eyed, fighting back tears.
She’d known she was skirting the edges, but when she was in the office, she worked twice as hard and twice as smart as anyone there, she’d rationalized. She’d thought she could cover for herself, use her skills and experience to compensate for slack caused by bot-watching.
She was wrong, and the aftermath was the thin, stretched feeling of embarrassment and shame and anger that sent her marching quickly through the September rain to the park.
She couldn’t give them up entirely, could she? Maybe the Park Inspector shutting things down was the best possible outcome. Saved her from her own obsession. But it would be like losing a host of friends. It would leave her days so gray.
“There’s a way to save the creatures,” the robot said.
“What is it?”
“It’s illegal.”
“But what is it?”
The robot held out a metal orb inlaid with golden dots, dull black mesh at eight points. “If you trigger this while the drone wave is going past, it’ll overwrite the actual data with a false version that I’ve constructed.”
Renee didn’t move to take it. “Why can’t you set it off?” she asked.
“My actions are logged,” the robot said. “Most are categorized. This conversation, for example, falls under interaction with park visitors. Programming the image of the park falls under preservation of data, but triggering it would be flagged. Someone would notice.”
Reluctantly, Renee took it. “What if she arrives at a time when I can’t be here?” she said.
“I don’t know,” the robot said. “You’re the only hope the creatures have, and I never said the plan was foolproof. But she’ll be doing the inspection at one on Monday afternoon.”
Relief surged in Renee. That was easy enough. She could take a late lunch that Monday. She’d make sure of it by building up as much goodwill and bonus time as she could by then.
• • • •
Her mother said, “Nana’s coming to town. She’ll expect to see you.”
Renee’s mouth watered at the thought. Nana always paid for dinner, and she liked nice restaurants, places where they served old-style proteins and fresh-grown greens.
“Wear the opals,” her mother said.
Renee’s heart sank. But she simply said, “All right,” and got the details for the dinner.
Afterward she laid her head down flat on her kitchen table and closed her eyes, trying to savor the cool, slick surface throbbing against her headache.
The Park Inspector would be there the day before Nana’s visit. If she could figure out the location of Creature’s lair—maybe the robot would have some suspicions?—then she might recover them and no one would be the wiser, particularly Nana. She took a deep breath.
The com chimed again. The office this time, wanting her to come in and initial a set of layouts. She needed to build goodwill, needed to look like a team player, so she made no fuss about it.
She was lucky; the errand took only a few minutes. Leaving, she hesitated, then turned her footsteps toward the park.
It was a cold, rain-washed night and she pulled her jacket tight around herself as she stepped onto the tree-lined path.
Ahead, a cluster of small red lights, low above the ground. She stopped. They continued moving, a swirl around a point off to one side of the path. As she approached, she saw several of the bots gathered near an overturned trashcan beside the path. Inside it was Creature. Someone, perhaps a mischievous child, had trapped Creature under the heavy mesh and it was unable to lift the can enough to extricate itself.
A brighter light, like a bicycle, flashed in the distance, and she heard the manticore’s cry, coming closer.
She braced herself, shoved the trashcan over. It was much heavier than she expected; her feet slipped on the icy path. It banged onto its side, rolling as it went. Creature stood motionless except for a swiveling eye. She backed away a few feet and knelt, keeping still.
The night was quiet, and the little red lights from the machines cast greasy trails of color on the wet leaves and the concrete. She stayed where she was, crouched by the path despite the hard surface biting at her knees.
Creature finally stirred. The struggle with the trashcan had damaged it. It limped towards her.
Had she trained them too well? Did it expect her to have something for it? She held out her hands, spread them wide to show them empty.
Creature stopped for a moment, then kept moving toward her. She lowered her hands, uncertain what to do.
It stopped a foot from her and lowered its body to the concrete. Indicator lights played across its side but the patterns were indecipherable.
Perhaps it was saying thank you? She returned her hands to her sides and said, tentatively, “You’re welcome.”
But it stayed in place, lights still flickering. It whistled a few notes, the song she’d sometimes heard from the underbrush.
A thought occurred to her. She held out her right hand, tapping the ring on it with her left. “You have the stones like this one. If you want to thank me, just give those back. Please.”
Her voice quavered on that last word. Please just let something go right for once.
It stretched out a limb and touched the opal. She held her hand still, despite its metal cold as ice against her skin.
Creature sang two notes, sad and slow, and retracted its arm. The manticore coughed once in the underbrush but stayed where it was, perhaps deterred by her presence. She gathered herself and went home.
• • • •
The next day she felt happier. She woke early, refreshed, lighter. She’d swing through the park in the morning on the way to work and then again at 1:00, when the Park Inspector would be there. She’d set the device off. Then the park robot would help her find her opals. They had to be there somewhere.
As she came up the path, she saw Creature close to where it had been the night before. It made her smile. Even Creature, who had always been so shy, was getting to know her.
But as she moved toward it, Creature slipped away, leaving a glittering heap where it had been sitting.
Her opals! Though the pile looked, surely, too large.
Then, as she moved closer, horrified realization hit her in the pit of her stomach, taking her breath.
Baby, dismantled.
The parts laid in neat little heaps, stacked in rows: the gears, the wheels, the blank lenses of its eyes.
The back panels, each inlaid with a starburst of her opals. She picked them up, held them in her palms.
The metal bit at her skin as she gathered her fists together to her mouth as though to cram the burgeoning scream back inside the hollow shell she had become.
The brush rustled. The manticore emerged beside the heap.
She couldn’t look, couldn’t watch it scavenge what was left behind. She fled.
All through the morning, tears kept ambushing her.
Her coworkers could tell something was wrong. She heard them conferring in hushed whispers in the break room.
Why bother going back at one? she thought. Let the creatures die. They were all going to eventually anyway. And they weren’t even real creatures! Just machine bits, going through the motions programmed into them.
Even so, at 1:00 she was there. She’d packed a lunch specifically so she could escape the office, orb tucked inside her pocket. She wouldn’t press it, though. Wouldn’t save Creature or the manticore. They didn’t deserve it.
The Park Inspector was a pinch-faced woman in a navy and umber uniform, datapad sewn into the right sleeve, her lensed eyes recording everything they passed over. Renee saw her scolding the park robot for something as the robot began to set up the cylinder that would release the microdrones in the center of the park.
She went to the Park Inspector, said, “Ma’am?”
The Inspector turned her head. Her nametag read Chloe Mesaros. This close up she looked even more daunting, held herself even more rigidly. “Yes?”
“Is it safe to set that off when people are around?” Renee asked, nodding at the cylinder.
The Inspector sniffed, a fastidious, delicate little sound of scorn. “Of course. The drones are programmed to avoid humans.”
The Park Robot was almost done setting up the cylinder. It didn’t acknowledge Renee, which made her feel like a conspirator in a movie.
“Will we see them?” Renee asked. She could feel the weight of the orb at her side.
Was there any reason to save the park creatures? Maybe this was a blessing in disguise, the universe plucking away the temptation she’d been unable to resist, the temptation that was affecting her very job?
“No. The only indication that they’ve been triggered will be the light turning from red to amber and then to green when they’re done.”
She’d have to press the orb while the light was amber, the robot had told her.
If she chose to do it.
After all, who was to say that the plan the robot had come up with was a good one, that it even had a chance of working? Perhaps the Inspector would notice it. Perhaps Renee would be charged with crimes—wouldn’t that be a nice capper to this shitty day?
She avoided looking at the robot. It was, like the others, just a machine.
Far away she heard the manticore’s cough. Hunting other creatures in this savage little jungle. Red in tooth and cog, she’d thought at one point, an amusing verbal joke but it was true, it was savage and horrible and not worth preserving.
The robot stepped away from the cylinder. “Ready, Inspector,” it said.
The Inspector tapped at her sleeve, inputting numbers. “On my mark.”
The orb was hard and unyielding in her fingers. There was no need to press the button.
“Three.”
Let them die, the lot of them. Not even die, really. Just be unplugged. Shut down.
“Two.”
There are no shelters for abandoned machines, the robot said in her memory. We are reprocessed. Recycled. Reborn, perhaps.
Probably not.
“One.”
She looked at the park robot. It stared impassively back.
“Engage.”
The light went from red to amber.
Renee thumbed the button on the orb.
• • • •
The Inspector had been right; there was no visible sign of the microdrones. Within a half-minute, the light shifted to green. The Inspector tabbed in more data. The park robot remained motionless.
If she got back to the office now, she could be seen putting in a little extra work. She could still redeem herself. She started down the path that crossed the park.
Perhaps a third of the way along, the manticore flashed in the underbrush, a few meters from the path.
She stopped, waited to see what it would do.
It assessed her. She had no fear of it attacking. While it was capable of destroying small bots, one good solid kick from her would have sent it tumbling.
Two arms raised, one tipped with a screwdriver bit, the other with a clipper.
They writhed around each other, briefly, the familiar sign.
Baby’s sign.
Something gone right.
Relief surged, overpowered her, made her grin helplessly. She lifted on her toes, almost laughed out loud as her heels came back down.
It was an ecosystem, and in it the little lives moved along the chain, mechanical flower and fruit as well as tooth and cog. A chain into which, somehow, she and her handfuls of batteries and microchips fit.
She looked back to where the robot stood with the Inspector. It nodded at her and appeared to shrug, its hands spreading infinitesimally, and she could hear its voice in memory, Probably not.
Did it matter? Probably not. But she would act as though it did. She went back to work, whistling.
* * *
Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her 200+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and the magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Her story, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain,” from her collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). She is currently working on Exiles of Tabat, the third book of the Tabat Quartet. A new story collection, Neither Here Nor There, appears from Hydra House this fall.
A Salvaging of Ghosts
By Aliette de Bodard
Thuy’s hands have just closed on the gem—she can’t feel its warmth with her gloves, but her daughter’s ghost is just by her side, at the hole in the side of the ship’s hull, blurred and indistinct—when the currents of unreality catch her. Her tether to The Azure Serpent, her only lifeline to the ship, stretches; snaps.
And then she’s gone, carried forward into the depths.
• • • •
On the night before the dive, Thuy goes below decks with Xuan and Le Hoa. It’s traditional; just as it is traditional that, when she comes back from a dive, she’ll claim her salvage and they’ll have another rousing party in which they’ll drink far too many gems dissolved in rice wine and shout poetry until The Azure Serpent’s Mind kindly dampens their incoherent ravings to give others their sleep—but not too much, as it’s good to remember life; to know that others onship celebrate surviving one more dive, like notches on a belt or vermillion beads slid on an abacus.
One more. Always one more.
Until, like Thuy’s daughter Kim Anh, that one last dive kills you and strands your body out there, in the dark. It’s a diver’s fate, utterly expected; but she was Thuy’s child—an adult when she died, yet forever Thuy’s little girl—and Thuy’s world contracts and blurs whenever she thinks of Kim Anh’s corpse, drifting for months in the cold alien loneliness of deep spaces.
Not for much longer; because this dive has brought them back where Kim Anh died. One last evening, one last fateful set of drinks with her friends, before Thuy sees her daughter again.
Her friends… Xuan is in a bad mood. No gem-drinking on a pre-dive party, so she nurses her rice wine as if she wishes it contains other things, and contributes only monosyllables to the conversation. Le Hoa, as usual, is elated; talking too much and without focus—dealing with her fears through drink, and food, and being uncharacteristically expansive.
“Nervous, lil’ sis?” she asks Thuy.
Thuy stares into the depth of her cup. “I don’t know.” It’s all she’s hoped for; the only chance she’ll ever get that will take her close enough to her daughter’s remains to retrieve them. But it’s also a dangerous dive into deep spaces, well into layers of unreality that could kill them all. “We’ll see. What about you?”
Le Hoa sips at her cup, her round face flushed with drink. She calls up, with a gesture, the wreck of
the mindship they’re going to dive into; highlights, one after the other, the strings of gems that the scanners have thrown up. “Lots of easy pickings, if you don’t get too close to the wreck. And that’s just the biggest ones. Smallest ones won’t show up on sensors.”
Which is why they send divers. Or perhaps merely because it’s cheaper and less of an investment to send human beings, instead of small and lithe mindships that would effortlessly survive deep spaces, but each cost several lifetimes to build and properly train.
Thuy traces, gently, the contours of the wreck on the hologram—there’s a big hole in the side of the hull, something that blew up in transit, killing everyone onboard. Passengers’ corpses have spilled out like innards—all unrecognisable of course, flesh and muscles disintegrated, bones slowly torn and broken and compressed until only a string of gems remains to mark their presence.
Kim Anh, too, is gone: nothing left of Thuy’s precocious, foolhardy daughter who struggled every morning with braiding her hair—just a scattering of gems they will collect and sell offworld, or claim as salvage and drink away for a rush of short-lived euphoria.
There isn’t much to a gem—just that familiar spike of bliss, no connection to the dead it was salvaged from. Deep spaces strip corpses, and compress them into… these. Into an impersonal, addictive drug.
Still… still, divers cannibalise the dead; and they all know that the dead might be them, one day. It’s the way it’s always been done, on The Azure Serpent and all the other diver-ships: the unsaid, unbreakable traditions that bind them all.
It didn’t use to bother Thuy so much, before Kim Anh died.
“Do you know where she is?” Xuan asks.
“I’m not sure. Here, perhaps.” Thuy points, carefully, to somewhere very near the wreck of the ship. “It’s where she was when—”
When her suit failed her. When the comms finally fell silent.
Xuan sucks in a sharp breath. “Tricky.” She doesn’t try to dissuade Thuy, though. They all know that’s the way it goes, too.
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 3