Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 110

by Neil Clarke

  Or to allow him to live.

  Mercy was not a thing exclusive to humans.

  The bunian, the apsara, and the Khinnaree had long learned that their bodies had attributes that allowed them to flow easier into the cybernetic interfaces built by the human fleets. They had adapted easier to it, and their engineers had pillaged human technology in order to forge better bodies for members of their colony who had lost their limbs. They began to do the same for the humans that they had rescued or had vanquished.

  The first night we met, I watched as the engineers fitted Jagdeep to the biotech units that replaced his left arm and the entire side of his torso that had been incinerated when his ship crashed into our fleet. It was a painful process. He cried, often. I held his right hand as he looked pleadingly up at me, for mercy, for death. They replaced his limbs, one by one. Except for his right arm.

  His right hand, to hold my own.

  We used a humanoid frame for his body. He did not choose, like you, to be in an insectoid carapace. He clung on to his humanity. Jagdeep did not take to the replacements as easily as the others. He was too weak, too fragile.

  When he could walk, we would walk. I brought him to the sprawling courtyard in my apartments. I astonished him with the grandeur of our plantations and of the ecosystems we had replicated and preserved. And he taught me of the ways of planting that they had improved upon.

  And he would tell me things about his life.

  He was trained as a fighter pilot, but he yearned to be a gardener. They had greenhouses in their fleet. Small, crude things built into abandoned storage halls. They grew yams, and water spinach, and tapioca. Some even tried to cultivate rice, but it was a very different kind of rice from the paddy fields of earth. We tried to improve on that, Jagdeep and I. We grew lentils and spices. He cooked for me dhal curries and parathas. Out of respect for my mate, I too became vegetarian.

  We were happy.

  We lived together, apsara and human, the first such union since our combined fleets had left earth’s solar system.

  And the last.

  We turned their kind into hybrids. They thanked us, one by one, as we switched them off as humans. We connected their consciousnesses to various biotech parts if they were still functional, or to our monolithic mainframes when nothing could be saved of their bodies. Their sakti bolstered our own embodied magics. We watched as consciousness dissipated, to be replaced by pattern recognition and simulacra of consciousness that became our communications systems between ships. They became bodies that could not decay. We harvested not just DNA from their bodies, but sakti, that force that had fueled our floating cities on earth, and kept them invisible to human eyes.

  When age took first his kidneys, and then disease gradually weakened his heart, we knew the engineers would come for him. It was their last chance to get the last batch of pure human DNA, and of human sakti. They would attach his consciousness to one of the monoliths that fueled our ships and our communication systems. He would live on in the fleet.

  On that last night, we sat together on my bed, his right hand in my left hand. I kissed him on the mouth gently, so as not to exert his heart. His eyes begged me again.

  He asked me to smother him with a pillow, to do anything before they severed him completely from humanity, before his heart was replaced the way his kidneys had been replaced, before his brain was severed from his body.

  “Did you do it? Did you snuff him out?” Teng’s silver praying mantis fore-legs were busy at work on a second mat, but her eyes were hungry. Rasakhi’s softening regard towards Teng was halted by those eyes.

  She said, “Why do you suppose we do this? Why do we reproduce a past none of us actually know? Why do we memorialize the humans that we have turned into machines?”

  Teng shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t know. Does it matter?”

  “Why do you ask me questions about remembrance, and of love, when you do not even bother to ask why we play congkak, and weave mengkuang and rattan mats, long after they have lost their relevance? Why do you ask me if I killed the last human when we continue to profit from their systemic death? I did not kill the last human, Teng. We did that.”

  I could not smother him. I wept in his arms, both organic and inorganic. He cried silently into my hair. We fell asleep. In the morning they came for him. I clung to him and screamed into their faces. His eyes begged at me.

  I scrambled and fought them all: bunian, apsara, claw-footed Khinnaree. Yes, even the Khinnaree in full-berserk mode. I kicked, I bit at them.

  Perhaps I have Khinnaree blood somewhere in my ancestry too.

  His heart expired during the struggle.

  They confined me in my quarters for a year.

  I did not kill the last human, we killed him.

  They taught us how to kill. They taught us how to enslave, how to colonize, how to exploit.

  A long time ago, when the first bunian princess was stolen by the first man who dragged her away from her celestial robes, we learned the price of being valued for how we looked.

  A long time ago we learned to transform into tigers, into owls, into trees to hide from them. We learned how to grow wings, to become swan-maidens and owl-vampires. Some of us turned into the chicken-feet Khinnaree of the Himmapan. Some of us became nenek kebayan, old women of the jungle who drugged wicked men with malicious potions and dispensed sage advice to virtuous warriors.

  We learned to build machines, to live in the sky. We learned to harvest the sakti that made us beautiful and powerful. We used that celestial force to create weapons and ways in which to ensure we would never again be stolen.

  We stole back the women they stole from us, the ones they bred with humans to create apsaras, my ancestors. We stole their kind to propagate our own. We became an empire of bunian, apsaras, and Khinnarees.

  We did not learn love from the humans. We did learn nostalgia, that step-cousin of memory. But our relationship with humans has always been complex, for they are bred into us.

  We used our technology to protect them as well. To protect the planet we shared.

  Jagdeep gave me comfort. I held on to the memory of that comfort for a very long time in the year that they had me confined. I yearned to return to his arms, to touch his right arm, to cradle his right palm within the warmth of my own. I knew that what was left of him was now encased in a silver cylinder, with no surface of skin left for me to touch. With no consciousness, no qualia left to recognize what we shared.

  All that was left of him were algorithms and the processing of external stimuli. Simulating sentience.

  He learned from me the apsara ways of silence, and of meditation. We meditated a lot when we did not work in the gardens and plantations together.

  Those human songs you asked me about?

  He sang some of them for me as I strung together cempaka chains for our mutual amusement.

  When they released me from confinement, I was honorably discharged. Retired. They sent me here to be a nursemaid to fledgling apsaras.

  Teng watched as the aging apsara stood up, walking towards the wall that showed them the stars surrounding the void that was a dead galaxy.

  “He fuels this ship,” Rasakhi said.

  “I know,” Teng said, “I tend to his unit. It is the strangest thing, his unit. It is always so cold. He sometimes speaks. But often he does not.”

  Ah. Rasakhi gave the younger woman a speculative look. She said, “All of the humans that we captured or rescued did not believe in ghosts. So strange, considering that we exist, and now they don’t, except as hybrids, a blend between machine, apsara DNA, and human parts. They would have done the same to Jagdeep, except that his body had deteriorated beyond help. And in that last struggle, his heart expired. They punished me for that. Not for killing him. He would have made a far more superior model if he possessed a functioning heart.”

  Teng shivered.

  “It’s getting even colder. How is that possible? I keep double-checking the calibrations on the
heating system. They’re always in order.”

  “It’s always cold on this ship. It will always be this cold.”

  Rasakhi did not articulate the reasons behind the temperature. It was not needed. She met Teng’s eyes. In the end, this at least was understood.

  About the Author

  Nin Harris is a Malaysian poet, writer, and Gothic scholar. Nin writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, space opera, planetary romances and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Nin’s poetry is published in Jabberwocky 3, Goblin Fruit, and Strange Horizons. Nin’s fiction has been published, or is forthcoming, in Lackington’s, Giganotosaurus, Strange Horizons, and Alphabet of Embers.

  In the Queue for the Worldship Munawwer

  Sara Saab

  PRE-TAKEOFF REPORT—WORLDSHIP K5-NME, “MUNAWWER”

  FROM: Suraya Khouri-Smith (Lead Ground Attaché, Munawwer Crew)

  DATE: January 15th, 2139

  FOR: Dougal Smith (Transition Commander, EVAC-Central)

  Commander Smith,

  I hope you’ll forgive the whimsy of this report. I’ve held my silence my entire life, and there are many things I deserve to say to you. I know it’s a breach of protocol, but in a sense, so was I. And there may not be another chance.

  The information you need, first: the worldship Munawwer, evacuation vessel for the territory of the Lebanese Republic, began boarding two weeks ago. It rests in shallow water off the coast of Beirut, covered in knobbly city gulls and their droppings. Its access ramps are down and secured to a section of the corniche’s wide boardwalk.

  Autocount figures tell me there are 845,912 people on board.

  This number has been creeping up through the night despite orders to cease boarding until daylight. People jump from the corniche’s pier, swim the span between the boardwalk and the worldship under cover of night, clamber up sea-facing loading bays. When we do catch them, they are half-drowned, and we send them to the Munawwer’s medical bays, and someone willfully forgets they are on board.

  At other times it would be funny, how it is here; how open to interpretation even the most mortally important rules are. Cousins sneak on board cousins; husbands sneak on board sisters-in-law.

  Fathers, their daughters.

  For the official record I’ll confirm that the total passenger count permitted is the usual 900,000. The queue outside is four people abreast to the mountain horizon and beyond.

  We expect to fill the Munawwer to capacity in the next three days.

  Commander, last night in my assigned Munawwer bunkroom, I undressed in utter dark. I pulled the film of laminate from the brand new porthole; it came away in a single satisfying sheet—tack-tack-tack—that I balled up inside my hot fist. I pressed it hard over my breastbone, felt the complaint of my failing body. The coast of Beirut was a luminous thing, swaying, dancing with the emissions of the city. But more than that, I was entranced by the Munawwer’s queue, a thick cable of light threading up and into the Lebanese foothills.

  I do not remember getting into my bed, but I remember shaking in the controlled atmosphere kept at an ambient temperature. It was the sterility of the moment versus the literal mass of our undertaking; lifting the bigness of the Munawwer into the sky, the long game of searching out a welcoming planet over generations, the unliftable weight of what’s sure to be left behind.

  Yesterday our engineering crew began dismantling Beirut’s decrepit old lighthouse for fear of the structure interfering with the hover-and-power phase of our upcoming liftoff. Other early clearance checks are as done as they can be, given the chaos, and should be completed tomorrow morning by eleven-hundred.

  DATE: January 16th, 2139

  Officer Nizar and Junior Officer Bahaa conducted a floor by floor walkthrough this morning, assisted by a huge surveyor crew from EVAC-Central. I wonder if you’ve ever spoken to their prissy Lead face-to-face? I didn’t ask him about you.

  Everything is going to plan. Occupied berths are correctly locked down if you don’t count the villagers Nizar found wandering galley to galley looking for Northerners, Southerners, Beirutis, cousins—looking for something to hold onto that wasn’t their soil, the musk of their air, or the familiar mountainous contours of their horizon.

  After we closed boarding for the night, I was startled by the familiar strains of Fairouz issuing from the Munawwer’s loud PA system. Ballads of patriotism and yearning. It took me two whole folkloric masterpieces to find the culprit: our own Officer Nizar. I told him I hadn’t authorized music, although I’d gamble you—hapless lover of the Orient—wouldn’t fault his taste.

  “Have a heart, Suraya,” he said. “These people are leaving their homes forever.”

  “We’re carrying digital archives of the last five hundred years of Lebanese culture, Officer,” I said.

  “I can see that you think that’s enough to make up for this colossal heartbreak,” he said.

  I insisted.

  In the resulting silence I thought I heard a collective intake of breath from nearly a million people, a noise that groaned through windpipes, a sound of rope under load. But I could not allow those in the queue—those to be left behind—to hear jubilation from the ship. It wasn’t fair to anybody.

  Against official guidance, we never issued dig-forms to announce the evacuation. Half of the population do not own personal holos; the ones who do won’t wear them because of superstition, or discomfort, or because they are too vain or traditional to have anything ported to their faces.

  I was seven when it became a legal requirement to fit a sinus air filter almost everywhere in the world. Lebanon too. My mother fought so hard to avoid putting me through the procedure. It’s unclear whether she was right. Air quality did improve drastically in the next five years. But given where I am now, perhaps even the one year she appealed against the surgery was a year too many.

  Did you have a chance to know that about her? That she was more principled than right, most of the time? It makes me wonder how she let you fall for her, just enough that here I am.

  A decade later, I got my own holo fitted, and the sinus filter upgraded, because I could. When my mother found out, she didn’t speak to me for a month.

  Anyway, no dig-forms. Instead, as approved by the Worldship K5-NME Steering Board on June 20, 2138, we sent criers to every town and village. The megaphone and magcar approach—the jolt of building panic—was enough. At its peak, the queue for the Munawwer was a 130-mile phalanx snaking south from the Mediterranean coast then turning up winding mountain tracks towards the northern border.

  The queue has a thousand character traits, a volatile temperament. As if by some orderly law of physics, the closer to the waiting worldship the queue gets, the wilder it is. In the nearer villages to the coastline, rowdy end-of-the-world parties have ransacked homes and businesses. Those in the far away half, winding through mountain villages, are more sedate. They stare at my ground crew before they take the rations they’re offered. Their infants wail in ways that bring to mind footage of long-eradicated famines, but they are not hungry or cold or sick. They are scared.

  Commander Smith, it played out as an incident of geography—to save the nearest ones to the sea and doom the rest. Doom. A silly word, so grave-sounding it is hard to take seriously. When you learned you had a child back on Earth, did you worry that she was doomed to die there, having never threaded through the far reaches of space? Did you really believe, then, that the projections were right, that the collision course had been accurately charted? Did you laugh, disbelieving, when they said the asteroid storm was the width of our solar system, big and fast enough to wipe out the planet? I wonder if you thought about your fourth-grader—your teenager, your adult daughter—when one by one the missions EVAC launched to vacuum the critical debris failed?

  Vacuum the critical debris. Like a bit of dust under the sofa.

  Of course, we broadcast capacity warnings. 900,000 people per EVAC member-nation: enough to preserve race, language, culture. Still, 900,000 is
not a whole country. Here, it’s two out of five.

  This, at least, is clear to everyone. We shouted it in ringing voices from the backs of the magcars.

  DATE: January 17th, 2139

  Officer Nizar’s been compiling hasty geographic and demographic statistics on the queue. He is behind schedule sending these to EVAC-Central. In lieu of official figures, some notes:

  Last week, we sent surveyor crews to every signposted village across the country, from the Bekaa Valley to the Jnoub to the Chouf. Every town is a ghost town—even the people left behind are near enough ghosts, the very old and stubborn, spirits stronger than their bones.

  Gourds and winter fruit rot in open steriles by the roadside. Chimneys are without their curls of smoke; hawker bots make lazy figures-of-eight in the snow outside shops and markets. They call out in mechanical confusion to the crew, promising prices so low they indicate a complete cessation of demand.

  We will never know the exact geographic and demographic spread of those queuing for evacuation. You didn’t broadcast details of the landing until the worldship’s bulk was nearly above us. The arrival surprised us. If anything, the people were better primed, more ready to strap their belongings to pallets or their own bodies, to abandon their magcars at the milling ends of the mag-proofed queue, which quickly packed tight and spilled farther and farther up the mountain.

  You would think they would fight, butcher each other out of envy, make pilgrimages to the front and demand entry. At first, they did. We’re not a lie-down-and-die kind of people. This is something you might not have known, if you tasted only pleasure here, if you knew us only through that lens. When we began to debar not just individuals but entire innocent families, a sort of order fell over everything.

  Doom. A silly word.

  Still, scuffles erupt, old sectarian allegiances flare, fossilized in forenames and surnames. Everyone, though, seems tired. The uncertainty is another kind of mass spreading in our chests, heavy as the Munawwer squatting in the sea.

  Last night, Nizar reported that thousands and thousands of the elderly and the infirm had sieved to the front of the queue almost overnight. I asked to see for myself. We went down the access ramp together, past the corniche and the cordoned-off half-mile, to where the queue began.