Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 106

by Sam J. Miller

  I was shown to a room, and in it I stayed for several hours. My luggage was taken away.

  I could not sleep. It was too hot to sleep anyway.

  My luggage was brought back, my tube of dotsnuff still inside. I took this and slipped it inside my trouser pocket.

  I informed my guards of my need to use the restroom—genuinely, for my bladder was fuller, and bothered me more, than my conscience. I was taken to a restroom with a dozen urinals at one wall and half a dozen sinks at another. A crossword-pattern of gaps marked where humidity had removed some of the tiny blue tiles covering the walls. The shiny floor was not as clean as I might have liked. I emptied my bladder into the white porcelain cowl of a urinal, and washed my hands at the sink. Then, like a character in a cheap spy-story book, I peered at myself in the mirror. My eyes saw my eyes. I examined my chin, the jowls shimmery with stubble, the velveteen eyebrows, the rather too large ears. This was the face that Kate saw when she leaned in, saying either “a kiss before bedtime,” or “a bed before kisstime,” and touched my lips with her lips. I was horribly conscious of the flippant rapidity of my heart, the vulgar insistence of blood perked with adrenaline.

  A guard I had not previously encountered, a tall, thin man with a gold-handled pistol tucked into the front of his trousers, came into the lavatory. “The Redeemer will see you now,” he said.

  8

  Had he come straight out with “Why are you here?” or “What do you want?” or anything like that, I might have blurted the truth. I had prepared answers for those questions, of course, but I was, upon seeing him again, miserably nervous. But of course he wasn’t puzzled that I wanted to see him again. He took that as his due. Of course I wanted to see him—who wouldn’t? His face cracked wide with a grin, and he embraced me.

  We were in a wide, low-ceilinged room; and we were surrounded by gun-carrying young men and women: some pale as I, some sherry- and acorn-colored, some black as liquorish. A screen was on in the corner, but the sound was down. Through a barred-window I could see the sepia plain and, wavery with heat in the distance, the edge-line of the orchards.

  “Redeemer, is it?” I said, my dry throat making the words creak.

  “Can you believe it?” He rolled his eyes upwards, so that he was looking at the ceiling—the direction, had he only known it, of the Company troopers, sweeping in low-orbit with a counter-spin to hover, twenty-miles up on the vertical. “I try to fucking discourage it.”

  “Sure you do,” I said. Then, clutching the tube in my pocket to stop my fingers trembling, I added in a rapid voice: “I’ve taken up snuff, you know.”

  Nic looked very somberly at me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to go outside if you want to snort that.”

  For a moment I thought he was being genuine, and my rapid heartbeat accelerated to popping point. My hands shivered. I was sweating. When he laughed, and beckoned me towards a low-slung settee, I felt the relief as sharply as terror. I sat and tried, by focusing my resolve, to stop the tremble in my calf muscles.

  “You know what I hate?” he said, as if resuming a conversation we had been having just moments before. “I hate that phrase body fascism. You take a fat man, or fat woman, and then you criticize them for being fat. That makes you a body fascist. You know what’s wrong there? It’s the fascism angle. In a fucking world where one third of the population hoards all the fucking food and two thirds starve—in a world where your beloved Company makes billions selling antiobesity technology to people too stupid to understand they can have antiobesity for free by fucking eating less—in that world, where the fat ones steal the food from the thin ones so that the thin ones starve to death. That’s a world where the fascists are the ones who criticize the fatties? Do you see how upside-down that is?”

  I fumbled the tube and sniffed up some powder. The little nanograins, keyed to my metabolism, thrummed into my system. Like, I suppose, fire being used to extinguish an oil well blaze, the extra stimulation had a calming effect.

  The talcum-fine cloud in that room. I coughed, theatrically, and waved my hand to dissipate the material.

  “So you’re free to go?”

  “I’m not in charge of it,” he said brightly. “Fuck, it’s good to see you again! I’m not in charge. I’m being carried along by it as much as anybody. It’s a tempest, and it’s blowing the whole of humanity like leaves in autumn.”

  “Some of it was Company,” I said. “The ADP to ATP protocols weren’t, legally speaking, yours to give away, you know.”

  “The hair stuff was mine,” he said.

  “I’m only saying.”

  “Sure—but the hair stuff.”

  I thought of the troops, falling through the sky directly above us, their boot-soles coming closer and closer to the tops of our heads.

  “The photovoltaic stuff, and the nanotube lysine fabrication of the conductive channels along the individual strands of hair—that was you. But that’s of no use without the interface to do the ATP.”

  He shrugged. “You think like a lawyer. I mean, you think science like a lawyer. It’s not that at all. You don’t think there’s a moral imperative, when the famine in the southern African republics is killing, how many thousands a week is it?” Then he brightened. “Fuck it’s good to see you though! If I’d let the Company have this they’d have squeezed every last euro of profit out of it, and millions would have died.” But his heart wasn’t really in this old exchange. “Wait till I’ve shown you round,” he said, as excited as a child, and swept his right hand in an arc, lord-of-the-manor-wise.

  Somewhere outside the room a siren was sounding. Muffled by distance, a warbling miaow. Nic ignored it, although several of his guards perked their heads up. One went out to see what the bother was.

  I felt the agitation building in my viscera. Betrayal is not something I have any natural tolerance for, I think. It is an uncomfortable thing. I fidgeted. The sweat kept running into my eyes.

  “All the old rhythms of life change,” Nic said. “Everything is different now.”

  I felt the urge to scream. I clenched my teeth. The urge passed.

  “Of course Power is scared,” Nic was saying. “Of course Power wants to stop what we’re doing. Wants to stop us liberating people from hunger. Keeping people in fear of starvation has always been the main strategy by which Power has kept people subordinate.”

  “Don’t know if I ever told you,” I said, squeakily, “how much I love your sophomore lectures on politics.”

  “Hey!” he said, either in mock outrage, or in real outrage. I was too far gone to be able to tell the difference.

  “The thing is,” I started to say, and then lots of things happened. The clattering cough of rifle fire started up outside, in the courtyard beyond the walls. There was the realization that the high-pitched noise my brain had been half-hearing for the last minute was a real sound, not just tinnitus, and then almost at once the sudden crescendo or distillation of precisely that noise; a great thumping crash from above, and the appearance, in a welter of plaster and smoke, of an enormous metal beak through the middle of the ceiling. The roof sagged, and the whole room bowed out on its walls. Then the beak snapped open and two, three, four troopers dropped to the floor, spinning round and firing their weapons. All I remember of the next twenty seconds is the explosive stutter-cough and the disco flicker of multiple weapon discharges. And then the stench of gunfire’s aftermath.

  A cosmic finger was running smoothly round and round the lip of a cosmic wineglass.

  I blinked, and blinked, and looked about me. The dust in the air looked like steam. That open metal beak, rammed through the ceiling, had the disconcerting appearance of a weird Avant-art metal chandelier. There were half a dozen troopers; standing in various orientations and positions but with all their guns held like Dalek-eyes. There were a number of sprawling bodies on the floor. I didn’t want to count them, or look too closely at them. And, beside me, on the settee, was an astonished-looking Neocles.

  I moved my mo
uth to say something to him, and then either I said something that my ears did not register, or else I didn’t say anything.

  He didn’t look at me. He jerked forward, and then jerked up. Standing. From a pouch in his pocketstrides he pulled out a small Γ-shaped object which, fumbling a little, he fitted into his right hand. The troopers may have been shouting at him, or they may have been standing there perfectly silently, I couldn’t tell you. Granular white clouds of plaster were sifting down.

  Nic levelled his pistol, holding his arm straight out. There was a conjuror’s trick with multiple bright red streamers and ribbons being pulled instantly and magically out of his chest, and then he hurtled backwards, over the top of the settee, to land on his spine on the floor. It took a moment for me to understand what had happened. I was a little stunned by the whole sequence of events.

  9

  He may have been thinking, either in the moment or else as something long pre-planned, about martyrdom. Perhaps the Redeemer is not able to communicate his message in any other way. It’s also possible that, having gone through life protected by the tight-fitting prophylactic of his unassailable ego—and, I suppose, having watched too many rubbishy Thriller and Action-Killer books—that he may have genuinely believed that he could single-handedly shoot down half a dozen troopers, and emerge the hero of the day.

  I honestly do not know.

  What’s not moot is the violence that followed his death. It was extraordinary. Riots and demonstrations, calls for International Courts and military interventions. My involvement in the assassination (as it was styled—assassination!) leaked out. Many accused my employers of planning to murder him. As if the Company benefited in any way from Nic dead! As if they wouldn’t have paid billions to recover him alive! At any rate, I was forced to leave my home, to live in a series of hideouts. Of course a Judas is as valuable and holy figure as any other in the sacred drama. But religious people (Kate kneeling beside the bed at night-time, praying to meekling Jesus gent and mild) can be faulted, I think, for failing imaginatively to enter into the mind-set of their Judases. Nobody loved Nic as deeply as I. Or knew him so well. But he was rich, and not one motion of his liberal conscience or his egotistical desire to do good in the world changed that fact, or changed his inability to enter, actually, into the life of the poor. The poor don’t want the rich to save them. Even the rioters in the Indian Federation, even the starving Australians, even they—if only they knew it—don’t want to be carried by a godlike rich man into a new realm. What they want is much simpler. They want not to be poor. It’s at once very straightforward and very complicated. Nic’s hair was, in fact, only a way of making manifest the essence of class relations. In his utopia the poor would actually become, would literally become the vegetation of the Earth. The rich would reinforce their position as the zoology to the poor’s botany. Nothing could be more damaging, because it would bed-in the belief that it is natural and inevitable that the rich graze upon the poor, and that the poor are there to be grazed upon. Without even realizing it Nic was laboring to make the disenfranchised a global irrelevance; to make them grass. I loved him, but he was doing evil. I had no choice.

  10

  Last night, as we lay in bed together in my new, Company-sourced secure flat in I-can’t-say-where (though I’m the one paying the rent) Kate said to me: “I am cut in half like the moon; but like the moon I grow whole again.” I was astonished by this. This really isn’t the sort of thing she says. “What was that, sweet?” I asked her. “What did you say, my love?” But she was asleep, her red lips were pursed, and her breath slipping out and slipping in.

  Originally published in When It Changed: Science Into Fiction, edited by Geoff Ryman, 2009.

  About the Author

  A Senior Reader in English at London University, Adam Roberts is an SF author, critic, reviewer, and academic who has produced many works on 19th Century poetry as well as critical studies of science fiction such as The Palgrave History of Science Fiction. His own short fiction has been collected in Swiftly. His novels include Salt, On, Stone, Polystom, The Snow, Gradisil, Splinter, and Land of the Headless. His most recent novels include Yellow Blue Tibia, New Model Army, Bete, and, with Mahendra Singh, Twenty Trillion Leagues Under the Sea. His most recent books are a chapbook novella, An Acount of a Voyage from World to World again, by way of the Moon, 1726, in the Commission of Georgius Rex Primus, Monarch of Northern Europe and Lord of Selenic Territories, Defender of the Faith, undertaken by Captain Wm. Chetwin aboard the Cometes Georgius, and a collection Adam Robots. Coming up is a new novel, The Thing Itself. He lives in Staines, England with his wife and daughter.

  Eternal Wanderers Between Fire and Ice

  Tomas Petrasek

  Before we had glimpsed the worlds of other suns, we thought they would look like those in our own solar system, where all major planets revolve in orderly, almost circular orbits, like a giant clockwork. But it was a mistake. After the very first discoveries of extrasolar planets, it became clear that the reality out there was much wilder than our imagination, surpassing both theoretical predictions of astronomers and most of the visions offered by science-fiction authors. In many, and perhaps most planetary systems, hardly any signs of order or general rules could be traced. Gas giants circled in tight, scorching orbits almost hugging their suns, or swept through the habitable zone, extinguishing any hope of Earth-like worlds in their systems. Many of the new worlds, including super-jovian giants, traced highly elliptical orbits, which would be more suited for a comet than a well-behaved planet!

  Although we have subsequently learned that not all planetary systems are so exotic, those worlds on wildly eccentric orbits still attract the attention of both scientists and dreamers.

  The original question of their origins seems to be settled now—there are actually many pathways leading to elliptical orbits. Perhaps the most important one is chaotic orbital evolution in forming planetary systems. Although planets do form on circular orbits, they may migrate closer to their star during the process. Sometimes, two massive planets get just too close to each other, and their mutual gravitational interaction during a close encounter radically changes their orbits. More likely than not, one of the planets ends up on a wildly elliptical orbit, which may intersect orbits of other neighboring bodies. Chaos ensues, with worlds colliding, falling into their suns, or being ejected into the void. The surviving planets may end up on almost any kind of orbit, including the most eccentric.

  Another recipe for extreme eccentricities is the disturbing influence of a massive companion. Sufficiently massive planets or even companion stars in binary systems may excite eccentricity of their smaller neighbors through long-term gravitational perturbations even across a considerable distance. In this case, the orbit of the unfortunate planet may even regularly oscillate between a circular and extremely elliptical shape.

  Eccentricity of an ellipse is measured by a dimensionless number, with zero for a perfect circle, and values close to one for the most elongate ellipses (eccentricity of one would signify a parabola, i.e. a celestial body no longer in regular orbit). As the star lies in a focus of the elliptical planetary orbits, there is a single point where the planet is closest to its star (periastron) and the opposite point of the maximum distance (apastron).

  How extreme can things get in the observed planetary systems? Take for example the planet HD80606b, a gas giant with extreme eccentricity of 0.93. It can get as far as 0.87 AU from its star at apastron (almost as far as the Earth is from the Sun) but dives to 0.03 AU at periastron (less than one tenth of Mercury’s distance). During such close, but very quick encounters with the star, the planet gets enormous amounts of heat in a very short time—the atmospheric temperature, which can be actually measured, rises from 500 °C to 1200 °C in just six hours! No wonder this creates an explosive storm, with superheated gases spreading in hypersonic velocities from the dayside to the night side.

  From the habitability point of view, the occurrence of an eccentric giant
planet in a system is generally a bad sign. In many cases, it directly precludes existence of any “pale blue dot” in the habitable zone. Small rocky planets also make the most likely victims during the wild and dangerous period of orbital maneuvers. They may not form at all, they may be destroyed—or end on eccentric orbits themselves, which spells doom over their habitability . . . or does it?

  At first glance, the idea is absurd. If the eccentricity of an Earth-like planet got excited to the values not uncommon among exoplanets, it would sweep all the way from the vicinity of Mercury to the distant reaches of the asteroid belt. An endless cycle of boiling, condensing, and freezing seems inevitable, precluding habitability, perhaps with the exception of the most extremophilic life forms, such as bacteria and tardigrades.

  But the common sense would be misleading, as was shown by the pioneering work of Darren Williams and David Pollard from Penn State University, published in 2002, and several follow-up studies.

  The Earth with its atmosphere and oceans is actually very efficient in buffering temperature extremes, provided they don’t last too long. An eccentric Earth’s twin would be quickly speeding away from periastron before its oceans would be heated to uncomfortable temperatures, and very long before they would have any chance to boil. In the other extreme, at apastron, the waters would release the stored heat and warm the climate, until the planet falls back towards the sun. Maximum and minimum temperatures would occur with a considerable delay after the extremes of insolation, because of the thermal inertia of the planet.

  As Kepler’s laws dictate that planets move faster during periastron and slower at apastron, and therefore spend most of their time at the more distant reaches of their orbits, we would expect eccentric planets to be colder than their counterparts on circular orbits with the same orbital period. The opposite is true, actually—such planets accumulate heat very efficiently during their quick and hot periastron passage, which outweighs the effect of long, dark and cold “winter.”