She pictures Terminal and listens to Mei’s voice, one amongst so many but somehow it is the voice others return to, it is as though Mei speaks for all of them, telling them of the city being built out of cheap used bruised jalopies, the way Gateway had been put together, a lot of mismatched units joined up, and she tells them, you could fall in love again, with yourself, with another, with a world.
• • • •
‘Why?’ Mei says to Haziq, one night period, a month away from planetfall. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Why did I go?’
She waits; she likes his voice. She floats in the cabin, her mind like a calm sea. She listens to the sounds of the jalopy, the instruments and the toilet and the creaks and rustle of all the invisible things. She is taking the pills again, she must, for the pain is too great now, and the morphine, so innocent a substance to come out like blood out of the vibrant red poppies, is helping. She knows she is addicted. She knows it won’t last. It makes her laugh. Everything delights her. The music is all around her now, Lao singing accompanied by a khene changing into South African kwaito becoming reggae from PNG.
‘I don’t know,’ Haziq says. He sounds so vulnerable then. Mei says, ‘You were married.’
‘Yes.’
Curiosity compels her. ‘Why didn’t she come with you?’
‘She would never have come with me,’ Haziq says, and Mei feels her heart shudder inside her like a caged bird and she says, ‘But you didn’t ask.’
‘No,’ Haziq says. The long silence is interrupted by others on the shared primitive radio band, hellos and groans and threats and prayers, and someone singing, drunk.
‘No,’ Haziq says. ‘I didn’t ask.’
• • • •
One month to planetfall. And Mei falls silent. Haziq tries to raise her on the radio but there is no reply. ‘Hello, hello, this is Haziq, C-6173, this is Haziq, C-6173, has anyone heard from Mei in A-3357, has anyone heard from Mei?’
‘This is Henrik in D-7479, I am in a great deal of pain, could somebody help me? Please could somebody help me?’
‘This is Cobb in E-1255, I have figured it all out, there is no Mars, they lied to us, we’ll die in these tin cans, how much air, how much air is left?’
‘This is jalopy B-2031 to jalopy C-3398, queen to pawn 4, I said queen to pawn 4, and check and mate, take that Shen you twisted old bat!’
‘This is David in B-1201, jalopy B-1200 can you hear me, jalopy B-1200 can you hear me, I love you, Joy. Will you marry me? Will you –’
‘Yes! Yes!’
‘We might not make it. But I feel like I know you, like I’ve always known you, in my mind you are as beautiful as your words.’
‘I will see you, I will know you, there on the red sands, there on Terminal Beach, oh, David –’
‘My darling –’
‘This is jalopy C-6669, will you two get a room -?’ and laughter on the radio waves, and shouts of cheers, congrats, mazel tov and the like. But Mei cannot be raised, her jalopy’s silent.
• • • •
Not jalopies but empty containers with nothing but air floating along with the swarm, destined for Terminal, supplements for the plants, and water and other supplies, and some say these settlers, if that’s what they be, are dying faster than we can replace them but so what. They had paid for their trip. Mars is a madhouse, its inmates wander their rubbish heap town, and Mei, floating with a happy distracted mind, no longer hears even the music. And she thinks of all the things she didn’t say. Of stepping out onto Terminal Beach, of coming through the airlock, yes, but then, almost immediately, coming out again, suited uncomfortably, how hard it was, to strip the jalopies of everything inside and, worse, to go on corpse duty.
She does not want to tell all this to Haziq, does not want to picture him landing, and going with the others, this gruesome initiation ceremony for the newly-arrived: to check on the jalopies no longer responding, the ones that didn’t open, the ones from which no one has emerged. And she hopes, without reason, that it is Haziq who finds her, no longer floating but pressed down by gravity, her fragile bones fractured and crushed; that he would know her, somehow. That he would raise her in his arms, gently, and carry her out, and lay her down on the Martian sand.
Then they would strip the jalopy and push it and join it to the others, this spider bite of a city sprawling out of those first crude jalopies to crash land, and Haziq might sleep, fitfully, in the dormitory with all the others, and then, perhaps, Mei could be buried. Or left to the Martian winds.
She imagines the wind howling through the canyons of the Valles Marinaris. Imagines the snow falling, kissing her face. Imagines the howling winds stripping her of skin and polishing her bones, imagines herself scattered at last, every tiny bit of her blown apart and spread across the planet.
And she imagines jalopies like meteorites coming down. Imagines the music the planet makes, if only you could hear it. And she closes her eyes and she smiles.
• • • •
‘I hope it’s you…’ she whispers, says.
• • • •
‘Sign here, initial here, and here, and here.’
The jalopyman is young and friendly, and she knows his face if not his name. He says, perhaps in surprise or in genuine interest, for they never, usually, ask, ‘Are you sure you want to do it?’
And Eliza signs, and she nods, quickly, like a bird. And she pushes the pen back at him, as if to stop from changing her mind.
• • • •
‘I hope it’s you…’
‘Mei? Is that you? Is that you?’
But there is no one there, nothing but a scratchy echo on the radio; like the sound of desert winds.
* * *
Lavie Tidhar is the author of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize winning and Premio Roma nominee A Man Lies Dreaming(2014), the World Fantasy Award winning Osama (2011) and of the critically-acclaimed and Seiun Award nominated The Violent Century (2013). His latest novel is the Campbell Award winning and Locus and Clarke Award nominated Central Station (2016). He is the author of many other novels, novellas and short stories.
Ye Highlands and Ye Lowlands
By Seanan McGuire
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where have you been?
They have slain the Earl of Moray,
And they laid him on the green.
—Child Ballad 181, “The Bonny Earl of Moray.”
Things have consequences.
Kids figure that out around the time they’re old enough to realize that when they touch a hot stove, they pull back burnt fingers. Things have consequences. Pull a cat’s tail, the cat will scratch. Drop a glass, the glass will break. Things have consequences. Everybody knows that.
But somehow, when science has consequences, when science touches the hot stove and pulls back burnt fingers, when science pulls the cat’s tail, the consequences are “unforeseen” and “just the cost of progress.” Science is immune from bad results. All results are good results, coming from science.
Angie is shivering like she’s going to fly apart, like her bones have turned to ice inside her skin. Nate isn’t sleeping. He isn’t even closing his eyes. He’s watching everything with the harried silence of a wounded child, and every time he looks at me, it’s like he’s waiting for me to take it all back, to say that no kids, it’s all right, if science doesn’t have consequences, you don’t either. If science doesn’t have to pay the piper, it’s not fair that you should have to foot the bill.
I can’t tell him that he’s wrong and I can’t make them understand what’s happened and I can’t take back what we did, and so I reach over and I stroke Angie’s hair, and I wonder when the sky is going to fall.
Science has consequences.
Why the fuck didn’t we figure that out sooner?
“This is not just a great day for American ingenuity and progress,” boomed the President of the United States, gripping the sides of the podium like he thought that
leaning forward with just a little more intensity, speaking with just a little more religious fervor, would somehow bring his flagging approval numbers back up from the graveyard of political hopes and dreams. And maybe they would: after all, he was in the process of dedicating the greatest advancement in transportation science since some brave Cro–Magnon first said “What if we made this thing on the bottom round?” Of such accomplishments are Presidential legacies made.
“No,” he continued. “This is a leap forward for the human race as a whole. Our children’s children will look back upon this day and say ‘That was the moment, that was the time when we turned our eyes away from the cool, green hills of Earth and turned them toward the bright and shining promise of the galaxy.’”
“Nice Heinlein reference,” murmured Lo Hsien. She was one of the astrophysicists who had dedicated the last six years of their lives to the star charts that made the Hephaestus Project feasible, much less functional. She was exhausted and smirking, and looked like she was on the verge of collapse.
I smirked back. “Bets that his scriptwriter snuck it in without telling him what it was?” I asked, and she swallowed her laughter, and we were rulers of the world in that moment; we were at the peak of our careers. The President of the United–goddamn–States was praising us! Nothing was ever going to be that good again.
“I still say we should have pressed for the name ‘Stargate,’” she said, and I elbowed her, and everything was perfect.
We’d known, even then, even at the height of our triumph, that it was all going to be downhill from there. If we’d had any concept of how far downhill, I would have smashed the machine that had defined the past decade of my life with my own two hands, accepted whatever consequences came with the action, and been glad. But I had no idea. No one had any idea.
The President spoke, and the band played, and NASA unveiled Hephaestus as everyone ooh–ed and ahh–ed and pretended to understand what they were looking at: a screen, roughly the size of a suburban garage, ringed with lights and complex electrical systems. Nothing special. It could have been a particularly extravagant flat screen TV.
Until the crew up in the control room flipped the switch to turn it on.
Until the screen began to crackle with bolts of rainbow light, turning into a burning prism so bright and so beautiful that it hurt to look at directly.
Until the prism turned clear as water, and we were looking out on the surface of an alien planet, like something out of science fiction, but it was real, it was happening, it was there in front of us, and even though I had seen that particular view dozens of times, my heart still stuttered in my chest and my mouth still went dry with the wonder and the importance of it all.
“Millions of light years, ladies and gentlemen,” boomed the President. “That’s what we’ve just skipped over: millions of light years of distance, of empty space, between us and another world.”
That was the cue for the control team. They rolled out a bevy of little robots, intentionally anthropomorphic things, designed to look adorable and non–threatening on magazine covers and news blogs all around the world. They rolled on treads instead of walking on legs, but they had things people would recognize as “faces,” and they had arms with grasping hands at the ends, and they were going to be our ambassadors to a whole new world.
They weren’t the first things we’d sent through—that would have been hubris, making our first crossing for a live audience and the President. More traditional robots were already on the other side, building a return gate, gathering samples, doing the things explorers have always done. These robots were our ambassadors to the human race as much as to the stars. Look, they said, with their adorable faces and their relatable forms, look; humanity is conquering this new place. Look, they said, this isn’t just science, this is adventure. This is discovery. And you’re part of it, every single one of you. Look.
The President was explaining how each of the robots had been loaded with recordings explaining their purpose in every known human language—including Klingon, which got a laugh from the watching journalists. They would tell our story to the stars until we were ready to go out there and tell it for ourselves. They would tell anything that moved who we were and that we were coming in peace.
(And I do mean “anything that moved.” We didn’t know what life might look like, that far out and that far away from home. Maybe it would be mammalian, bipedal, alien life through the Roddenberry lens. Or maybe it would be glittering and silicate, or a sequence of musical notes suspended in an organic wind. We had no way of predicting what our first contact would be, and so we had programmed the robots to stop and deliver their spiel to anything that seemed like it might be even potentially receptive. A lot of rocks were going to hear about how peaceful humanity was.)
The sun was shining and the reporters were asking the President questions he was in no way qualified to answer, and my team had done what no other group of people past, present, or future had been able to do: we had given mankind the stars. We had changed the universe forever.
Things have consequences.
Angie isn’t shivering anymore. I have to resist the urge to reach over and shake her, to confirm with my hands what I can see with my eyes: she’s just asleep. She’s exhausted, she’s fifteen, and she’s sleeping. The fact that she’s stopped shivering is a mercy, not a warning sign. Maybe. Maybe.
It’s not like it makes any difference one way or the other. I can’t help her. I can’t save her. I can’t do anything for her, or for Nate, except to keep them moving, keep them fleeing from the epicenter, while the people who were able to get into clean rooms—the people who had no one outside the compound that they cared about—keep arguing with our visitors, trying to make them understand that they got it wrong, they got it wrong, this isn’t what we asked for. This isn’t what we asked for at all.
Nate still isn’t sleeping. I offer him as much of a smile as I can dredge up from the bottom of my broken heart, leaning a little closer and saying softly, “Hey, buddy, try to get some rest while you can, okay? We’re going to be moving again soon.”
He looks at me with narrow, wary eyes, and he doesn’t say anything. I don’t think he’s ever going to say anything again. I don’t think—honestly—I don’t think he’s going to have time to get over the shock and remember what it is to scream.
The last email I got before the Internet went down like the house of electronic cards it always was indicated that the chemical compounds our visitors (not guests, never guests; guests don’t do this to their hosts, guests bring wine and cheese and platitudes, not wind and chaos and pathogens) have been pumping into the atmosphere are heavy. They’re taking out the lowlands first. Denver is supposedly fine. Thriving, even, as waves of refugees come staggering past the city limits with their worldly possessions on their backs, ready to pay anything for a glass of water and a place to sleep.
All those people have been exposed. All those people are counting down on a clock no one human has ever seen, and when they start to fall apart, Denver’s going to have a whole new set of problems. There’s a reason we’re not heading for the Mile–High City. If there’s going to be any chance of survival, we’re not going to find it there.
Besides, we wouldn’t make it to Denver. We wouldn’t even make it halfway there. Angie has almost certainly been exposed, and Nate… I don’t know about Nate. I wish I knew. I wish I could say that it wouldn’t make a difference.
I wish he could tell me.
He looks at me with those wounded eyes, and I sigh. “Would you like me to sing for you?” I ask. He nods, fractionally, and so I scoot a little closer, and slip my arm around his shoulders, and sing softly, “Oh ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, oh, where have you been…”
He closes his eyes. He rests his head against my shoulder. And we’re all going to die, because things have consequences, but we’re not dead yet, and if there’s anyone left in the world with a responsibility to keep fighting until the end, it’s me.
We lost a few of our junior members after it became clear that success didn’t come with a pay raise when you were working for the government. They hadn’t been expecting to get rich, but they’d been expecting to get, I don’t know, a little job security. A promise that they’d be able to keep refining what they’d made for at least the next five years. When that didn’t materialize, they’d walked away for the sake of their own sanity, and none of us had blamed them.
Besides, having a string of departures from the project right after we’d dropped off the front pages of all the magazines was a great excuse to keep having cake, and any excuse for cake was a good one.
It was sort of amazing at the time, how quickly people got over the magnitude of our discovery. Oh, there were Tumblrs and roleplay blogs dedicated to our intentionally adorable robots, and one of our mechanical engineers got to go on the Discovery Channel and help their latest crop of pop scientists blow stuff up for an afternoon, but for the most part, people forgot we were there almost as quickly as they’d noticed us. We had no relevance in their daily lives. Let us figure out how to move people from airport to airport, instead of moving robots from solar system to solar system, and maybe then we’d talk.
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 11