by Neil Clarke
“What’s this?” he asked, gesturing at the weary faces, gray or brown as the rocks of the seafront. “We broadcast that people of childbearing age get priority.”
A younger man stepped out of the four-abreast queue. “Mind your manners, habibi. We treat our grandparents with respect, even at times like these.”
“Brother, that’s nonsense,” returned Nizar with his usual gift for diplomacy. “This is a worldship. The idea’s to continue all of goddamn humanity out there.” He pointed to the sky, inky and flat. “Your grandpa can’t help with that, no matter how sprightly he might be.”
“I’ll punch your face in if you speak that way around your elders, brother.”
At this point we were forced to remove the young man from the queue and debar him from the boarding procedure. He produced an old-fashioned Marlboro from the back of his slacks and swaggered away cussing towards a viewing point for Pigeon Rock. All of him seemed to billow in the breeze. He smoked his cigarette and watched waves crash against the limestone formation where it crouched out in the shallow sea, diligently ignoring the massive moonlike presence of the Munawwer blotting out most of the horizon.
Officer Nizar’s team has been guarding access to the ship since it appeared in the sky, pinwheel shadow spreading over all the wards of the city.
We had been practicing the procedures for a year—since we opened EVAC’s holo pings and found that we’d been chosen. Most of my ground crew have military backgrounds. Nizar was a Major in the Armed Forces. I’m not a soldier, but you know, I suppose, that I’m no stranger to protocol.
Commander Smith—I topped every mathematics exam at school. Headmaster Boutros brought me brochures on EVAC-Central, the United Nations Space Program, Lebanese Astronautics. But at university I fell credit by credit into Anthropology, thinking, I guess, of lecturing at the Sorbonne, thinking, I guess, of staying rooted to humanity. Rooted to Earth.
Do you already know this? Did my mother ever sneak you messages about me? Did she tell you about the poem I wrote about you in secondary school, the one that won an award? As far as I know she never spoke to you after you left.
If you do know, you can hear it again: I was a civil servant for the Interior Ministry until the Munawwer, my days crammed with the amplified tedium of the entire nation. You found out about me somehow, found my name: a vain search for your own, a flight through billions of census archive files, the fuzzy match that finally snagged my hyphens, my half-concealed identity.
I suppose you chose me for my experience with projects that mobilize our population? Perhaps you would not have let blood run thicker than reason if you’d known that nothing mobilizes our population that doesn’t originate within their own hearts.
And since there is nothing else to lose which isn’t already fated to be lost—homeland, loved ones, history—perhaps you would not have granted me a ground crew member’s golden ticket to fly away had you known, father. About my loose procedural skill, the hours of my youth I spent staring blankly through scrolling municipal notices, statistics, memos, recommendations. Saying just enough. Nights, returning to an empty house, one parent gone too soon, another gone too far away. The stop-start friendships and intimacies I increasingly shed. Then illness tightening like a cast over these last few years of my own decline. Yes, that.
We followed your procedures to the last letter. We deployed our ground crew, arranged the queue four-abreast as specified, heated it, and distributed insulated overshoes, food packets, blankets. We asked desperate people out in the cold to smother cooking fires and pack away shisha pipes. We switched off the Fairouz songs and arrested hooligans and shushed panicked outbursts.
The Munawwer is almost full now. We will leave millions behind.
Nearly a month ago I sent the passenger guidance checklist to Officer Nizar. Today, I caught up with his patrol near Khalde, pulled him aside by the seawall in the calm of drifting snow to go through it.
I read from my holo. “Are we ‘screening boarding worldship passengers for weapons or materials which may be used to fashion weapons’?”
He stared at me with self-assurance and a dirty sort of pity. “Why would we do that? If anyone’s going to be so deranged and damaged,” he corkscrewed a finger into his temple, “as to blow up humanity’s only chance in this fucked-up universe, then we don’t deserve to survive.”
“Not humanity’s only chance,” I said on reflex. “At least one worldship per member-nation and—” I looked back over the hillsides of Khalde, heard the living noise of the queue and ran out of words to rely on.
Nizar scanned the holo he’d pulled up, presumably the checklist. Presumably for the first time. “What stupid shit.”
I ached for the sweetness of striking his perfect nose with a closed fist. Instead, I trembled in the instantly filthy snowdrift and pulled rank: “What screening have you been doing, Officer?”
Nizar watched me over his twenty-twenties moustache, back in fashion for the end of the world.
“We frisk them, Ms. Suraya, Your Excellency,” he quipped. “Mostly for tobacco pipes. The ground crew boys deserve a good pipe. The ones who are staying, I mean.” His face slackened around its folds and wrinkles, leaving the shelf of his brow to carry his countenance. According to his EVAC records, Nizar is thirty-four. The apocalypse has aged us early.
“Are you using your ticket?” I asked, my voice a snowflake, too soft for authority.
Nizar switched off the holo he’d been staring past and turned to relieve himself against a railing.
“Excuse me. Urgent need,” he said, squinting at the gray bulk of the Munawwer ten miles down the coast. His planted stance reminded me of the upstart we’d ejected from the queue the night before.
“A difficult decision,” he said, hitching his hips and zipping up. “Ticket off-planet in my back pocket, nieces and nephews up in the middle of the queue. No chance they get to board. With my ticket, one of them survives to start life new, start a new nation.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“Near Zahle,” he said. “Too far. They refused to leave the village any earlier.”
Maybe it’s naive to think this is noteworthy, but we’ve all pulled strings to place friends and family in the Beiruti sections of the queue. Forcibly camped them out on the corniche as soon as we heard about the landing. But no one dares smuggle relatives on board a near-capacity worldship. No one wants to tempt fate. Being debarred is one thing; having your entire family debarred by EVAC-Central is an especial cruelty.
“It’s just a single ticket,” I said. “How many can you save with one ticket?”
“One youngster more worthy than me, habibi,” he said.
“They’ve said there might be another ship for Lebanon,” I muttered into the wind off the Mediterranean, hoping he wouldn’t catch it. But he did, and his skeptical bark broke my heart.
“What about you?” he asked after a meaningful silence. “Are you using your ticket?”
“I don’t have any family left here. My cousins emigrated years ago to countries where worldships queue for you, not the other way round.”
“But you mentioned your father was . . . ” he said.
“None of your business.” It’s nobody’s business. It’s barely even yours. You left and never came back. You forfeited everything.
“So you’ll take it,” Nizar rejoined softly. “You’ll get on that goddamn ship with the goddamn rest of them.”
I had no useful response. I breathed in the tang of fish and old fossil fuel spills, and now and again the new smell of ozone off the Munawwer, carried by the icy breeze.
DATE: January 18th, 2139
Our evacuee numbers hit 900,000 this morning.
Actually, there are 900,124 on board according to autocount. There were children, so many children—how could I leave them behind? We rounded up the healthiest ones, the ones who could bear to be separated from wailing parents. The ones whose parents let them go. And yes: the ones whose eyes burrowed holes
in our hearts.
In my bunk last night, I could not sleep for the torment of all the little ones in the winding queue, foreheads lucent in the night, too far from Beirut to break my crew’s hearts. They’re the living ghosts of our dreams now. One day soon they will disperse as invisible particles into the sky, while the ones we save live on, we hope, on and on, in the vastness of traversable space.
Surely one hundred and twenty-four slight bodies cannot disrupt the stability of a craft like the Munawwer. We brought them on board on my direct orders. What horrifies me is that you never told us how many more we could have saved—how big the occupancy headroom really was.
Thoughts that keep me up despite the Munawwer’s atmospheric sedatives:
That the Munawwer will go up in flames during hover-and-power (the sadness, then, of those left behind).
That the children on board will forget their parents and grandparents and their language and the generosity of their culture.
That humanity is a meaningless thing, transplanted far from its origins.
That they will all die of heartbreak, lightyears away from this ill-luck country.
That there will never be another worldship allocated to this tiny, insignificant land on the edge of the sea. (The certainty of this.)
That it has all been a giant mistake. That Earth is as fine as it seems, and will remain here, blue and green and giving, to pine after forever.
That Nizar’s nieces and nephews will be left behind.
That Nizar will be left behind.
That you and I will one day meet.
That we will all kill each other on the ship, anyway, for the same reasons we’ve killed each other at home.
That you and I will never meet.
That I will die in the end of the world.
That I will die before the end of the world.
DATE: January 19th, 2139
Commander Smith—I’ve tagged the section below for excision; please ratify and pass it to EVAC-Central’s Specialist Services team.
I understand from guidance document PUB-214 that I may only commend a single person from the Munawwer’s ground crew.
According to my EVAC profile, I command a crew of ten thousand across Lebanese territory. I’ve only had brief interactions with a handful of my crew, devolving most responsibilities to more capable hands. This is my failing. My heart has shied at every juncture from the sad business of evacuating the Earth.
Of the half dozen ground crew members I’ve worked with nearly daily, the one I have come to know best is Officer Nizar Adel Taleb, my second-in-command.
I understand, further, that any officer given a formal commendation to Specialist Services will be promoted to flight crew on the next available worldship. I have good reason to believe this is the good craft Kuro-Obi, L6-AUAS, which will land along the Japanese mainland at an unspecified time in the next six months. Non-native flight crew members on a foreign country’s ship, according to the guidance document, are permitted to evacuate all remaining blood relatives.
Therefore, please take this as my formal commendation of Officer Nizar Taleb.
Off the record, I maintain that Officer Nizar is as self-important and narrow-minded a prick as they come. Be that as it may, he’s done nothing to warrant the conflict between his own bodily survival and the tearing of his soul to pieces.
This morning, after every last one of our 900,124 evacuees was safely on board, I went walking along the corniche.
I meandered towards that stabbing void in the sky where days ago the lighthouse would have been, barnacled, salt-streaked. Then I turned on my heels to walk the way I’d come.
I had changed out of my attaché’s uniform right after we sounded bugle calls all the way up the queue—the worldship’s full, the worldship’s full. The official clothing felt like a betrayal.
I walked, and Beirut heaved around me. There were still millions in the queue, now a shapeless inflamed gathering of people and magcars pouring towards the coast. Thousands of ground crew in riot gear and heavy arms held people back from the half-mile cordon leading to the Munawwer’s access ramps. It was something between a funeral procession and a terrible mob. A deafening noise reverberated in the air. Gulls flapped off the Munawwer in agitation. It was all the ground crew could do to prevent a crush.
Faces streamed past me, fixated on the motionless worldship and its blue blinking lights of habitation. If anyone looked back at me I thought: is this the one I’ll send away into outer space?
A cousin, a sister, a lover. Any of these would have provided me with a selfless sacrifice. But isn’t it an impossibility to pull a single stranger, unwitting, from the crowd? How dare I play a god’s game?
Another god’s game: to learn, one day before a worldship lands to carry 900,000 people away, that the growing wrongness in your chest is wronger than you thought. To be given the choice to go to Europe for treatment, or to stay and serve your people at your father’s bidding, the only thing he’s ever asked. Little doom and bigger doom, braiding, lines in a palm.
The night after I learned this, Commander Smith, I had a dream. I was inside a station-city, a pearl in the sealed-shell darkness of deep space. And you were there. I was laying curled into myself and you were healing me. And I would live.
I woke up and my veins were pulsing with loneliness, and my chest was throbbing with pain.
So this morning, I walked the corniche and stopped as close along the railings as I could get to the Munawwer, jostled by a field of people and their confusion. It was huge, bright, sublime—a promise of safety and stability by virtue of mass alone.
With every fiber of my broken lungs I inhaled. Then I inhaled again. I held my breath and felt dizzy with the sticky task of living. And I felt that death was neither a foe, nor something I could grab by the scruff.
Then I went, slowed by the drag of the doomed, towards the worldship’s access ramp. And then on board, to complete the last of the paperwork.
About the Author
Sara Saab was born in Beirut, Lebanon, not far from Pigeon Rock. She now lives in North London, where she works on transport systems for the future. In her spare time she boxes, runs, and continues to hunt for the perfect almond croissant. Sara is a 2015 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her fiction has recently appeared in Interzone and The Dark, and you can find her on Twitter as @alixanaeuphoria.
The Hexagonal Bolero of Honeybees
Krista Hoeppner Leahy
Hum
“For so work the honeybees . . . The sad-eyed justice with his surly hum Delivering o’er to executors pale The lazy yawning drone.”
—Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Fifth
We cannot tame vibration, much as we long to suss its purpose.
Are there those among us who fly only to mate and then die? Some who work perpetually, some who are queens? Or is it more that we are each—we are all—the hive? The honeycomb and the bees? The sticky-sweet-surly hum a chorus we cannot hear, only sing?
Pluck a sunbeam, a bee sings.
Pluck an oceanwave, the earth rings.
But whose hand is doing the plucking?
And what hum signals tomorrow’s fall of the executioner’s blade?
Hope
“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”
—Henry David Thoreau
Ciro loved his daddy, and loved painting flowers like a bee. Daddy said he was better than a bee, but Ciro didn’t think that was true, ‘cuz bees made honey. Ciro couldn’t make honey, but he could climb the highest, licking his paintbrush in between painting the teeny-tiny flowers. Yummy, but not as yummy as honey. Sometimes after he crept along the tallest branches, Daddy would say “Fly, bee, fly” and Ciro would back flip down into his daddy’s waiting arms. Maybe Daddy wasn’t his real daddy, and maybe Ciro would never be a real bee, but none of that mattered when it was just Ciro painting flowers.
Hunger
“To make a prairie it takes a clov
er and one bee,
. . . revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
—Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems
The atrium air was warm, impossibly warm compared to the frozen tundra outside, and redolent of blooms delicious as forgotten dreams. The cross-latticed Sunglass atrium was separated from the body of the greenhouse by mechanical sally ports, but the bees could smell enough of the Allmond orchards beyond to pulse with anticipation—of course some ventilation would be required, even with the closed loop geothermal heating system. Mishka’s bees crawled through her honeycomb crown, tickling her scalp, as they sussed for the source of the fragrance. She ignored the tickling and the damnable itching of her nectarways and focused on the hand-pollinator’s bid. Gabhan was the competition, she reminded herself, never mind the boy he wore on his shoulders, like an accessory proclaiming his innocence.
“ . . . hand-pollination offers more control, more finesse, more flexibility, more artistry—the human touch will honor your trees, Arborist. We cradle your Allmond blooms as only a human hand can. Isn’t that right, Ciro?”
“Right-ee-o!” The boy, who had to be younger than four, smiled; the boy’s crinkled eyes echoed the curve of his mouth—a triple grin!—and he looked as pleased as if he had invented human hands himself.
Mishka refused to smile back. No doubt Gabhan had coerced the boy to make him perform with such utter charm. She breathed in through her nose, out through her mouth, soothing her itching as best she could. The boy’s charm—forced or not—could only hurt her chances, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted.
Gabhan lifted his hands towards the vaulted Sunglass ceiling, adding, “Of course, if you care to risk your crop with the unregulated wildness of hiver bees,” he laughed, and was that a wink he aimed at Mishka? Unbelievable. “Who am I to convince you otherwise?”