by Nisi Shawl
What’s in it for the taxi, you asked. Company?
“Little little.” He held up his hands and waved his fingers. “If something goes wrong, I can fix.”
AIs do not ultimately live in a physical world.
I thought of all those animals I’d seen on the trip: their webbed feet, their fins, their wings, their eyes. The problems of sight, sound and movement solved over and over again. Without any kind of intelligence at all.
We are wonderful at movement because we are animals, but you can talk to us and you don’t have to build us. We build ourselves. And we want things. There is always somewhere we want to go even if it is 27 light years away.
◊
Outside Makurdi Air Force Base, aircraft stand on their tails like raised sabres. The taxi bleeped as it was scanned, and we went up and over some kind of hump. Ahead of us blunt as a grain silo was the rocket. Folded over its tip, something that looked like a Labrador-colored bat. Folds of Fabric, skin colored, with subcutaneous lumps like acne. A sleeve of padded silver foil was being pulled down over it.
A spaceship made of Fabric. Things can only get through it in one direction. If two-ply, then Fabric won’t let air out, or light and radiation in.
“They say,” our taxi driver said, looking even more hooded than before, “that it will be launched today or tomorrow. The whole town knows. We’ll all be looking up to wave.” Our hearts stopped. He chuckled.
We squeaked to a halt outside the reception bungalow. I suppose you thought his fare at him. I hope you gave him a handsome tip.
He saluted and said, “I hope the weather keeps fine for you. Wherever you are going.” He gave a sly smile.
A woman in a blue-gray uniform bustled out to us. “Good, good, good. You are Graça and Cristina Spinoza Vaz? You must come. We’re boarding. Come, come, come.”
“Can we unpack, shower first?”
“No, no. No time.”
We were retinaed and scanned, and we took off our shoes. It was as if we were so rushed we’d attained near-light speeds already and time was dilating. Everything went slower, heavier—my shoes, the bag, my heartbeat. So heavy and slow that everything glued itself in place. I knew I wasn’t going to go, and that absolutely nothing was going to make me. For the first time in my life.
Graça, this is only happening because zey want it. Zey need us to carry zem. We’re donkeys.
“You go,” I said.
“What? Cristina. Don’t be silly.”
I stepped backwards, holding up my hands against you. “No, no, no. I can’t do this.”
You came for me, eyes tender, smile forgiving. “Oh, darling, this is just nerves.”
“It’s not nerves. You want to do this; I do not.”
Your eyes narrowed; the smile changed. “This is not the time to discuss things. We have to go! This is illegal. We have to get in and go now.”
We don’t fight, ever, do we, Graça? Doesn’t that strike you as bizarre? Two people trapped on the 24th floor all of their lives, and yet they never fight. Do you not know how that happens, Graçfushka? It happens because I always go along with you.
I just couldn’t see spending four years in a cramped little pod with you. Then spending a lifetime on some barren waste watching you organizing volleyball tournaments or charity lunches in outer space. I’m sorry.
I knew if I stayed you’d somehow wheedle me onto that ship, through those doors; and I’d spend the next two hours, even as I went up the gantry, even as I was sandwiched in cloth, promising myself that at the next opportunity I’d run.
I pushed my bag at you. When you wouldn’t take it, I dropped it at your feet. I bet you took it with you, if only for the cupaçu.
You clutched at my wrists, and you tried to pull me back. You’d kept your turquoise bracelet and it looked like all the things about you I’d never see again. You were getting angry now. “You spent a half trillion reais on all the surgeries and and and and Rhodopsin…and and and the germ cells, Cris! Think of what that means for your children here on Earth, they’ll be freaks!” You started to cry. “You’re just afraid. You’re always so afraid.”
I pulled away and ran.
“I won’t go either,” you wailed after me. “I’m not going if you don’t.”
“’Do what you have to,” I shouted over my shoulder. I found a door and pushed it and jumped down steps into the April heat of Nigeria. I sat on a low stucco border under the palm trees in the shade, my heart still pumping; and the most curious thing happened. I started to chuckle.
◊
I remember at 17, I finally left the apartment on my own without you, and walked along the street into a restaurant. I had no idea how to get food. Could I just take a seat? How would I know what they were cooking?
Then like the tide, an AI flowed in and out of me and I felt zie/me pluck someone nearby, and a waitress came smiling, and ushered me to a seat. She would carry the tray. I turned the AI off because, dear Lord, I have to be able to order food by myself. So I asked the waitress what was on offer. She rolled her eyes back for just a moment, and she started to recite. The AI had to tell her. I couldn’t remember what she’d said, and so I asked her to repeat. I thought: this is no good.
◊
The base of the rocket sprouted what looked like giant cauliflowers and it inched its way skyward. For a moment I thought it would have to fall. But it kept on going.
Somewhere three months out, it would start the engines, which drive the ship by making new universes, something so complicated human beings cannot do it.
The AI will make holograms so you won’t feel enclosed. You’ll sit in Pamukkale, Turkiye. Light won’t get through the Fabric so you’ll never look out on Jupiter. The main AI will have some cute, international name. You can finish your dissertation on Libro del cortegiano. You’ll be able to read every translation—zey carry all the world’s knowledge. You’ll walk through Urbino. The AI will viva your PhD. Zey’ll be there in your head watching when you stand on the alien rock. It will be zir flag you’ll be planting. Instead of Brasil’s.
I watched you dwindle into a spark of light that flared and turned into a star of ice-dust in the sky. I latched Emilda and asked her if I could stay with her, and after a stumble of shock, she said of course. I got the same taxi back. The rooftops were crowded with people looking up at the sky.
But here’s the real joke. I latched our bank for more money. Remember, we left a trillion behind in case the launch was once again canceled?
All our money had been taken. Every last screaming centavo. Remember what I said about fraud?
So.
Are you sure that spaceship you’re on is real?
Jamaica Ginger
Nalo Hopkinson and Nisi Shawl
“Damn and blast it!”
Plaquette let herself in through the showroom door of the watchmaker’s that morning to hear Msieur blistering the air of his shop with his swearing. The hulking clockwork man he’d been working on was high-stepping around the workroom floor in a clumsy lurch. It lifted its knees comically high, its body listing to one side and its feet coming down in the wrong order; toe, then heel. Billy Sumach, who delivered supplies to Msieur, was in the workroom. Through the open doorway he threw her a merry glance with his pretty brown eyes, but he had better sense than to laugh at Msieur’s handiwork with Msieur in the room.
Msieur glared at Plaquette. “You’re late. That’s coming off your pay.”
Plaquette winced. Their family needed every cent of her earnings, but she’d had to wait at home till Ma got back from the railroad to take over minding Pa.
The mechanical George staggered tap-click, tap-click across the shop. It crashed into a wall and tumbled with a clank to the floor, then lay there whirring. Msieur swore again, words Ma would be mortified to know that Plaquette had heard. He snatched off one of his own shoes and threw it at the George. Billy Sumach gave a little peep of swallowed laughter. Msieur pointed at the George. “Fix it,” he growled at Plaquet
te. “I have to present it to the governor the day after tomorrow.”
As though Plaquette didn’t know that. “Yes, Msieur,” she said to his back as he stormed through the door to the showroom.
The second the door slammed shut, Billy let out a whoop. Plaquette found herself smiling along with him, glad of a little amusement. It was scarce in her life nowadays. “My land,” Billy said, “‘pears Old George there has got himself the jake leg!”
The fun blew out of the room like a candle flame. “Don’t you joke,” Plaquette told him, through teeth clamped tight together. “You know ‘bout my Pa.”
Billy’s face fell. “Oh Lord, Plaquette, I’m sorry.”
“Just help me get this George to its feet. It weighs a ton.” Billy was a fine man, of Plaquette’s color and station. Lately when he came by with deliveries, he’d been favoring her with smiles and wistful looks. But she couldn’t study that right now, not with Pa taken so poorly. Together they wrestled the George over to Plaquette’s work table. There it stood. Its painted-on porter’s uniform had chipped at one shoulder when it fell. Its chest door hung open as a coffin lid. Plaquette wanted to weep at the tangle of metal inside it. She’d taken the George’s chest apart and put it back together, felt like a million times now. Msieur couldn’t see what was wrong, and neither could she. Its arms worked just fine; Plaquette had strung the wires inside them herself. But the legs….
“You’ll do it,” Billy said. “Got a good head on your shoulders.”
Feeling woeful, Plaquette nodded.
An uncomfortable silence held between them an instant. If he wanted to come courting, now would be the time to ask. Instead, he held up his clipboard. “Msieur gotta sign for these boxes.”
Plaquette nodded again. She wouldn’t have felt right saying yes to courting, anyway. Not with Pa so sick.
If he’d asked, that is.
“Billy, you ever think of doing something else?” The words were out before she knew she wanted to ask them.
He frowned thoughtfully. “You know, I got cousins own a lavender farm, out Des Allemands way. Sometimes I think I might join them.”
“Not some big city far off?” She wondered how Billy’s calloused hands would feel against her cheek.
“Nah. Too noisy, too dirty. Too much like this place.” Then he saw her face. “Though if a pretty girl like you were there,” he said slowly, as though afraid to speak his mind, “I guess I could come to love it.”
He looked away then. “Think Msieur would mind me popping to the showroom real quick? I could take him his shoe.”
“Just make sure no white folks in there.”
Billy collected Msieur’s shoe, then ducked into the showroom. Plaquette hung her hat on the hook near the back and sat down to work. Msieur’s design for the George lay crumpled on her table where he’d left it. She smoothed out the sheets of paper and set to poring over them, as she’d done every day since she started working on the George. This was the most intricate device Msieur had ever attempted. It had to perform flawlessly on the day the governor unveiled it at the railroad. For a couple years now, Msieur had depended on Plaquette’s keen vision and small, deft hands to assemble the components of his more intricate timepieces and his designs. By the point he decided to teach her how to read his notes, she’d already figured out how to decipher most of the symbols and his chicken scratch writing.
There. That contact strip would never sit right, not lying flat like that. Needed a slight bend to it. Plaquette got a pencil out of her table’s drawer and made a correction to Msieur’s notes. Billy came back and started to bring boxes from his cart outside in through the workroom door. While he worked and tried to make small talk with her, Plaquette got herself a tray. From the drawers of the massive oak watchmaker’s cabinet in the middle of the shop, she collected the items she needed and took them to her bench.
“Might rain Saturday, don’t you think?” huffed Billy as he heaved a box to the very top of the pile.
“Might,” Plaquette replied. “Might not.” His new bashfulness with her made her bashful in return. They couldn’t quite seem to be companionable anymore. She did a last check of the long rectangle of black velvet cloth on her workbench, hundreds of tiny brass and crystal components gleaming against the black fur of the fabric. She knew down to the last how many cogs, cams, and screws were there. She had to. Msieur counted every penny, fussed over every quarter inch of the fine gauge wire that went into the timekeepers his shop produced. At year’s end he tallied every watch finding, every scrap of leather. If any were missing, the cost was docked from her salary. Kind of the backwards of a Christmas bonus. As if Msieur didn’t each evening collect sufficient profits from his till and lower them into his “secret” safe.
Billy saw Plaquette pick up her tweezers and turn toward the mechanical porter. “Do you want Claude?” he asked her.
He knew her so well. She smiled at him. “Yes, please.” He leapt to go fetch Claude out of the broom closet where they stored him.
Billy really was sweet, and he wasn’t the only one who’d begun looking at her differently as she filled out from girl to woman this past year. Ma said she had two choices: marry Billy and be poor but in love; or angle to become Msieur’s placée and take up life in the Quarter. Msieur would never publicly acknowledge her or any children he had by her, but she would be comfortable, and maybe pass some of her comforts along to Ma and Pa. Not that they would ever ask.
‘Sides, she wasn’t even sure she was ready to be thinking about all that bother just yet.
Plaquette yawned. She was bone tired, and no wonder. She’d been spending her nights and Sundays looking after Pa since he had come down with the jake leg.
Claude’s books had excited Plaquette when she first heard them, but in time they’d become overly familiar. She knew every thrilling leap from crumbling clifftops, every graveside confession, every switched and secret identity that formed part of those well-worn tales. They had started to grate on her, those stories of people out in the world, having adventures she never could. Pa got to see foreign places; the likes of New York and Chicago and San Francisco. He only passed through them, of course. He had to remain on the train. But he got to see new passengers at each stop, to smell foreign air, to look up into a different sky. Or he had.
He would again, when he got better. He would. The metal Georges would need minding, wouldn’t they? And who better for that job than Pa, who’d been a dependable George himself these many years?
But for Plaquette, there was only day after day, one marching in sequence behind another, in this workroom. Stringing tiny, shiny pieces of metal together. Making shift nowadays to always be on the other side of the room from Msieur whenever he was present. She was no longer the board-flat young girl she’d been when she first went to work for Msieur. She’d begun to bud, and Msieur seemed inclined to pluck himself a tender placée flower to grace his lapel. A left-handed marriage was one thing; but to a skinflint like Msieur?
Problems crowding up on each other like stormclouds running ahead of the wind. Massing so thick that Plaquette couldn’t presently see her way through them. Ma said when life got dark like that, all’s you could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other and hope you walked yourself to somewhere brighter.
But as usual, once Billy set Claude up and the automaton began its recitation, her work was accurate and quick. She loved the challenge and ritual of assemblage: laying exactly the right findings out on the cloth; listening to the clicking sound of Claude’s gears as he recited one of his scrolls; letting the ordered measure take her thoughts away till all that was left was the precise dance of her fingers as they selected the watch parts and clicked, screwed, or pinned them into place. Sometimes she only woke from her trance of time, rhythm, and words when Msieur shook her by the shoulder come evening and she looked up to realize the whole day had gone by.
Shadows fell on Plaquette’s hands, obscuring her work. She looked around, blinking. When had it gone dus
k? The workroom was empty. Billy had probably gone on about his other business hours ago. Claude’s scroll had run out and he’d long since fallen silent. Why hadn’t Msieur told her it was time to go? She could hear him wandering around his upstairs apartment.
She rubbed her burning eyes. He’d probably hoped she’d keep working until the mechanical George was set to rights.
Had she done it? She slid her hands out of the wire-and-cam guts of the mechanical man. She’d have to test him to be sure. But in the growing dark, she could scarcely make out the contacts in the George’s body that needed to be tripped in order to set it in motion.
Plaquette rose from her bench, stretched her twinging back and frowned—in imitation of Mama—through the doorway at the elaborately decorated Carcel lamp displayed in the shop’s front. Somewhat outmoded though it was, the clockwork regulating the lamp’s fuel supply and draft served Msieur as one of many proofs of his meticulous handiwork—her meticulous handiwork. If she stayed in the workshop any later she’d have to light that lamp. And for all that he wanted her to work late, Msieur would be sure to deduct the cost of the oil used from her wages. He could easily put a vacuum bulb into the Carcel, light it with cheap units of tesla power instead of oil, but he mistrusted energy he couldn’t see. Said it wasn’t “refined.”
She took a few steps in the direction of the Carcel.
C-RRR-EEEAK!
Plaquette gasped and dashed for the showroom door to the street. She had grabbed the latch rope before her wits returned. She let the rope go and faced back toward the black doorway out of which emerged the automaton, Claude. It rocked forward on its treads, left side, right. Its black velvet jacket swallowed what little light there still was. But the old-fashioned white ruff circling its neck cast up enough brightness to show its immobile features. They had, like hers, much of the African to them. Claude came to a stop in front of her.