by George Mann
“Figures,” said Marcus.
“What a smart little boy you have here,” said Hesperson. “Somebody will pay big franks for his contract someday.”
Zora was already feeling horrible guilt over nearly losing her temper with Sekou. This just made her want to cry.
“Would you like a nice clean pair of pants?” the assistant asked Sekou. He nodded eagerly and cast an only slightly worried look at Zora and Marcus as she led him out to get cleaned up. Zora buried her face in her hands.
Marcus pulled her hands away and searched her face, perplexed. “Girl, we’re vindicated. They can’t say it was our fault anymore. This Valkiri-Estelle bee has as much as admitted she did it.”
“But we can’t go home, Marcus. And Sekou deserves better than a cubicle two meters square with only minimal utilities.”
“Would be good if we could sue her, or her former corp. But there’s no hope there.” He pulled her to him and stroked her shoulders. “Girl, there’s something worse wrong than that. Call it my hoodoo sense, but you’re grieving a bigger grief than our happy ex-home.”
She sobbed for several minutes into his shirt, then pulled away and said, “I lied, Marcus. I am pregnant, and I’ve stupidly murdered our baby. It can’t live after the dose of radiation I took. It might spontaneously abort, but we can’t take the chance. A damaged infant on Mars—the corp will take it away and kill it.”
He grabbed her shoulders and looked hard in her face. Then he shook his head sadly and hugged her close. “Zora, girl, don’t blame yourself. I should have known. Truth be told, I did know there was no rip in my suit. I just thought you wanted to be the big woman. I thought I’d let you have your pride, be the heroine. But you were storying—I knew that.”
She tried to pull away, but he held her tight. She sobbed some more, then said, “You’re so damned intuitive. Did you know I was pregnant, too?”
His embrace loosened, and she saw his sadness. “Truth be told, I think I did. Something in your eyes. Your skin glowed like it did before, when you were big with Sekou. But I told myself, you’re tripping, Marcus man. Didn’t want to think it, straight up.” His voice sank to almost inaudible. “Didn’t want to think you’d lie to me about that.”
After a while, she said, “And can you forgive me?”
He let go of her and leaned against the cold marscrete wall. “Forgive you, forgive myself for not being the man and telling you right out not to play me.”
She could scarcely make her voice loud enough to hear. “Where do we go from here?”
He shrugged. “The medical for the abortion is cheap. Medbots are clean and fast. And as far as surviving here, what we’ve got in our brains is enough to sell to some corp.”
“Sekou,” she said. “They’ll put him in a group school here. But he needs to go back to the on-line school. More than that, he needs a real home.”
“Sekou needs to hear the truth, which is that he’s a smart kid, and strong, despite his minor ills, and he’ll sell high to some corp that likes his brain as much as Vivocrypt liked yours and mine. Now I’m going to find that sorry assistant and ask what we have to do to get a meal around here.” Marcus pushed the door further open. “Whoa. Look who’s here, in all new clothes.”
“Mama, you think I’m smart... too?” chirped a little voice.
It was Sekou, wearing a jumpsuit that had probably been blue when it was new. At least it was clean. The assistant had apparently brought him back and left.
Marcus rubbed the top of Sekou’s head, then continued down the corridor.
Zora bent over and hugged Sekou. She ran over in her mind what they had been saying. How long had the child been standing there listening? She turned from Marcus and hoisted him up into her arms—a heavy bundle though he was a skinny kid. “Mama thinks you’re way too smart for your britches. Where did that jumpsuit come from?”
“I dunno.” He opened his hand, revealing a bright twist of paper. “They gave me a candy. Can I eat it?”
“No! Bad for you!” She resisted the idea that candy might become part of the Smythe family diet now that they were going to live in Borealopolis. It would be hard to adjust to prepared foods from the refectory after having lived primarily for years on cuy and chicken and stuff from their own greenhouses.
He looked at the candy fondly, then put it in Zora’s outstretched hand. “Mama, what does ‘big’ mean?”
“What? It means not small. What are you talking about?”
“I thought it meant like when some lady is going to have a baby.”
Oh no. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I thought maybe you might have a baby in there.” He patted her tummy shyly.
“No.” Her stomach twisted. “No baby.”
Sekou dug in the pocket of the jumpsuit and brought out a tiny action figure, a boy in an environment suit. “But Daddy said—”
“You shouldn’t be listening when Daddy and Mama are talking privately.” But would there be any privacy once they had settled in to Borealopolis? Even the best paid city hires lived in quarters not much bigger than the passenger compartment of their rover. Speaking of which, they would probably have to sell the rover. What use do city people have for such a thing?
“Sorry.” His voice was very soft.
She had some credit, and she noticed the holding area had a tea dispenser. “Would you like some mint tea? I think they can put sweetener in it.”
She figured she had lied to Marcus; it would be a bad thing to lie to Sekou, young though he was.
When they had gotten their tea, which did indeed come with sweetener, she sat opposite Sekou on the little bench and then, in a rush of affection, moved over and grabbed him in a hug.
“Mama was going to have a baby, but something bad happened. You know about radiation, about the accident.”
“Yes. I’ve been thinking. I wanted to ask you something.”
She had been poised with a careful explanation, but Sekou’s question threw her. “About what?”
“About my camera.”
“The camera.” She was momentarily at a loss, and then, before he opened his mouth, all in a rush, she guessed what he was about to say.
“Mama, the camera works because light turns the chemical into something different, so it looks black after you develop it.”
She dropped her hands and stared at him.
“Mama, radiation comes in different kinds. Light is one kind. But the radiation from our nuke, that would turn the chemical all black too.”
She began to giggle.
“Mama, the picture took. So there wasn’t any radiation.”
Zora’s giggles shook her body until, if the fetus was developed enough to be aware, it would have gotten the giggles too. She fingertipped on her com and called Marcus.
How HAD VALKIRI done it? How had she ruined every sensor and monitor in the whole hab and pharm?
They never found Valkiri, of course. But when they went back to the pharm—cautiously, of course, because who trusts the reasoning of a child?—they found that Valkiri—they couldn’t believe the other two had abetted her—had dusted the surfaces of every sensor, including the one in Marcus’s environment suit, but not her own, with Thorium 230 powder. It had been imported from Earth for some early experiments in plant metabolism. It was diabolic.
It cost a lot of credit to have everything checked out. Several other habs that had been contaminated made vague threats about suing the Smythes for not notifying them, as if they could have known any earlier what happened. But the fact that Sekou (Sekou!) had solved the mystery and pushed back the specter of death made the other pharmholders back down.
Ultimately, Zora and Marcus didn’t trust the work of the decon crew. They had to do their own investigation. Nothing else would convince them it was okay. The sensors had to be replaced, and that wasn’t cheap. But they had a home. They had a place for Sekou to play.
Sekou didn’t get his camera back from the municipality of Borealopolis, but Marc
us traded a packet of new freeze-resistant seeds for an antique chemistry set, and that seemed to satisfy the boy.
Why had Valkiri been willing to make her victims homeless but not actually murder them? Zora never figured it out. Marcus said it was because she was afraid that if she had really breached the nuke, their home corp would have charged her with murder. Or maybe she was afraid she herself would be in danger if she sabotaged the nuke.
Or maybe she had some ethics, said Marcus. He always said things like that. Seeing both sides. Zora found it exasperating. Ultimately, though, it made him lovable.
THE BABY, A girl, was pretty and small, always quite small for her age, but with big eyes favoring Zora’s and a sly smile favoring Marcus’s. Zora treasures a digital image of the two children, boy and girl, taken soon after the birth.
But Marcus prefers the quite deft drawing Sekou did of the family, though of course, as the artist, he put himself in the picture wielding a camera that by that time rusted in a crime lab in Borealopolis.
Four Ladies of the Apocalypse
Brian Aldiss
THIS YOU MUST encompass in your minds. This happens in the distant past, in the distant future. This happens now.
Gigantic epochs carved by cthonian eccentricity into threatening hieroglyphs of basalt. Bizarre and byzantine centuries laid underfoot like lithic linoleum. The air itself, unbreathed by those four ladies progressing there, a condensation of smoke and wormwood and volcanic eructations. For eyes in skulls, little visibility. For senses in carapaces, little actuality.
Just to progress there was to have to part the foliage of an enduring entropy. It painted itself dull brown, yellowy green, mucus red, ocher, all shades of inelegant excretas. Through these mazes the ladies made their way, four ladies and one more, on foot, untiring, undeterred.
An archway of bone was formed of intertwined figures, in which hooves, breasts, heads, haunches, horns, cogs, coils, carburetor, calves, thighs of enormous size, faces, femurs, the hind quarters of nightmares, all as if designed by some paralytic psychotic Polish painter. Through this enticing arch the four ladies passed, to music of a daring discordance.
In a glorious garden where, on a placid lake, an ebony sloop lay moored, a diligent sun focused its gentlest rays on a group of persons at picnic. They sat on the greenest grass ever devised. Among them, his fundament protected from contact with the ground by four silkette cushions, sat the world’s last and greatest dictator.
His companions, lovely and lissome and of alternating sex, were all simulacra. They turned their artificial heads to unsee the four approaching ladies and one more.
“We are picnicking of cheese and fruit,” said the dictator in a subdued bellow. “The fruit is pear and raspberry, the cheese Dolcelatte, the bread ground-down bones of my nearest and dearest. Will you join me, ladies, before you are exterminated for encroaching on my sacred preserves?” The noise of his converse was slipped between the speed of his speech.
He laughed in a falsetto, although his face, the product of surgery, was of deep red and testicular purple.
Then spoke the four ladies in turn. Said the first formidable dame, whose thin form was clad in armor, “Sir, we are unable to fear your threats since you are a mere byproduct of our designs. We are agents of destruction, whereas you are just a figment of destruction.”
The second lady spoke in a deep tone from the depths of a great metal helmet, from which only the glint of her yellow cat eyes could be seen.
“Sir, we come to you on foot because our patrons, the four horsemen, are worn out by constant activity over many centuries. Likewise, their four steeds are ground down to shadows.”
“You should have stayed away,” said the dictator. His speaking voice was deep with hints of fathomless seas and the monstrous forms living there. “In this place you will be decapitated when you have had your meaningless say.”
Then spoke the third lady, a skeletal creature who wore only a plastic loincloth, exposing her worn and useless breasts. “I am the agent of starvation in the world. My name is Famine. What my sisters of war have failed to exterminate, my agency lays low. What was once a world of plenty is now a field of ashes and corpses. This you have achieved, in collaboration with many men as wicked as you, if not as powerful.”
“No one is as powerful as I,” said the dictator. An element of uncertainty was discernable in his voice, as he surveyed the four phantasmal females, and the one other, before him.
The fourth lady was an upstanding ghoul of dried and withered skin, from which fountains of pus erupted. She spoke now in a shrill whisper. “Our male predecessors rode on four horses, a white, a red, a black, and my predecessor on a pale horse. I am the ultimate of the four and my name is Pestilence. All dread things find termination with me. All great senators and ministers finish in a pile before my feet, their cells smoldering like candle ends. I have but to breathe on you and you will slowly deliquesce.”
“You have no breath left to breathe, you vile hag!” roared the dictator. But then the fifth guest spoke, a childish figure with long crinkly fair hair and a face carved from a small pumpkin. “I am but a child,” it said in a mouse voice.” I am brought to you to tell you that all you have achieved in the name of ruin is solely because you are the culmination of the wicked aspect of the human race, of those who have no feeling for the suffering of others. My name is Empathy and I am already dead.”
“THEN YOU SHALL be dead again,” roared the dictator, casting aside his Dolcelatte sandwich and jumping to his feet. He snatched up a great sword that had been lying ready by his side. This he swung with all his might. This sword he loved more than all his weapons of mass destruction, for this sword brought him close to the moments of the deaths of others. He could savor the deaths, he could taste them on his blade. Other deaths were mere abstractions.
But these ladies would not die. They were themselves mere abstractions. Hack them apart, slice through their skulls, slice off their limbs—they instantly reformed. As they reformed, they uttered hideous laughter. They did not suffer, they could not bleed.
He swung the savage blade and continued to swing. He never tires. He swings that blade yet.
The Accord
Keith Brooke
Tish Goldenhawk
Tish Goldenhawk watched the gaudy Daguerran vessel slide into the harbor. If she had known then what she was soon to learn, she might even have settled for her humdrum existence, and even now she and Milton would be living a quiet life, seeing out their days before finally joining the Accord.
But no, unblessed with foresight, Tish stood atop the silver cliffs of Penhellion and watched—no, marveled—as the Lady Cecilia approached the crooked arm of the dock.
The ship was unlike any she had seen. Far taller than it was long, it rose out of the mirrored waters like some kind of improbable island. Its flanks were made of polished wood and massed ranks of high arched windows, these revealing bodies within, faces pressed against glass as the grand touristas took in yet more of the sights of the worlds.
He might have been among them. Another face staring out, its perfect features only distinguished by a crooked incisor. But no, he wouldn’t have been part of that gawping crowd. She would have known that if she had been blessed with foresight, if she had somehow known that there was a “he” of whom she could speculate just so at this moment.
The ship, the Lady Cecilia... it towered unfeasibly. Only vastly advanced engineering could keep it from toppling this way or that. The thing defied gravity by its very existence. It sailed, a perfect vertical, its array of silken sails bulging picturesquely, its crew scrambling over the rigging like squirrels.
At a distant screech, Tish tipped her head back and stared until she had picked out the tiny scimitar shapes of gliding pterosaurs. It was a clear day, and the world’s rings slashed a ribbon across the southern sky. Why did beauty make her sad?
Tish breathed deep, and she knew she should be back at the Falling Droplet helping Milton and their fifteen
year-old son Druce behind the bar.
And then she looked again at the golden, jeweled, bannered sailing ship now secured in the harbor and she felt an almighty welling of despair that this should be her lot in a world of such beauty and wonder.
She walked back along a road cut into the face of the cliff. She was lucky. She lived in a beautiful place. She had a good husband, a fine son. She could want for nothing. Nobody starved or suffered in the worlds of the Diaspora, unless it was their choice to do so. People were born to different lots and hers was a good one.
She was lucky, she told herself again. Blessed by the Accord.
THE FALLING DROPLET was set into the silver cliffs of Penhellion, its floor-to-ceiling windows giving breathtaking views out across the bay to where the coast hooked back on itself and the Grand Falls plunged more than a thousand meters into the sea.
Rainbows played and flickered across the bay, an ever-changing color masque put on by the interplay of the Falls and the sun. Pterosaurs and gulls and flying fish cut and swooped through the spray, while dolphins and merfolk arced and flipped in the waves.
Tish was staring at the view again, when the stranger approached the bar.
“I... erm...” He placed coins on the age-polished flutewood surface.
Tish dragged her gaze away from the windows. She smiled at him, another anonymous grand tourista with perfect features, flawless skin, silky hair, a man who might as easily have been twenty as a century or more.
He smiled back.
The crooked tooth was a clever touch. A single tooth at the front, just a little angled so that there was a gap at the top, a slight overlap at the bottom. An imperfection in the perfect, a mote in the diamond.