Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  “Your father and I want to talk to you about. . . well, about a lot of things. The clothes that you uploaded, and that commercial that Grant gave you—”

  “Hey,” Nicole protested, “I put that on my private storage drive!”

  “We can monitor everything you upload until you turn sixteen, young lady, and I’m concerned about this ad. It makes the colonies look like some glorious vacation destination,” Mom said, “and I don’t want you to have such an unrealistic idea of what things are like out there.”

  Nicole projected the ad into the empty air above the table. If Mom was going to get into her private storage, what was the point of keeping it private? The commercial started with a hazy orange cloud, and then a pair of translucent jellyfish-creatures drifted across the sky. Aureliads. Tommy poked his hand into the projection, trying to touch a low-dangling tentacle.

  The image shifted to show an aureliad next to one of Opilio’s floating colonies, domed cities the same size as the massive jellyfish that shared the sky. “Come celebrate the wonders of a better life on Opilio,” the recorded voice on the commercial said, “see the aureliads—”

  Mom shut down the projection.

  “Aureliad!” Tommy yelled, pointing at the spot where the projection had been. “Aureeeeeeliad!”

  “No tantrums, please,” Mom said calmly. “You and Nicole go play.”

  The calm quiet voice meant Mom was furious. Nicole took Tommy to the other end of the room. Mom pulled up a sound barrier, but if Nicole didn’t get any privacy she didn’t see why Mom and Dad should either. It only took her a couple minutes to hack through.

  “Rozzy, don’t do this,” Dad said. “She’s upset that her friend is leaving, and if you go down hard about the ad she downloaded it’s only going to make the colonies look that much more appealing. She’ll go for sure the minute she turns sixteen.”

  “Don’t you Rozzy me. You think I’m being unreasonable because I don’t want her facing a five percent chance of turning into wormfood?”

  Tommy pulled on Nicole’s arm. “Aureliads?”

  “Is it really such a terrible idea?” Dad asked. “We could all go, leave this overpopulated cave behind and live in the clouds. You’re only looking at the cost, but what about the reward? There’s more space on Opilio. You could have that garden you’ve always wanted.”

  “A garden?” Mom asked. “I can’t believe you’re falling for all this propaganda, too. They send criminals and defaults through that wormhole, and do you know why? Because either they end up on the colonies or they disappear into a collapsed worm. No more problem. And you want that for our family?”

  Nicole was surprised at the turn the argument was taking. Her parents were big on presenting a united front. Nicole had known that Mom was against Opilio, but she hadn’t realized that Dad was interested in going.

  Too bad Mom was more stubborn than Dad. They’d stay trapped in Baine, and even with both her parents working overtime they’d all live in one tiny room that they had to reprogram any time they wanted to eat or sleep or have “family meetings.”

  “Aureliads, PLEASE?” Tommy asked.

  “Not right now, Tommy,” Nicole answered. Projecting the commercial again would make Mom even angrier and remind her to clear it off Nicole’s private storage, which hopefully she’d forget to do.

  Tired of being ignored and denied, Tommy threw a screaming, kicking, flailing tantrum. Nicole pinged against the sound barrier until Mom and Dad came over to calm him down.

  Saturday morning, Nicole sat in bed with the mini-mint cube in her lap, staring at a wall-projected list of pod departures and arrivals. Grant’s pod had departed forty-seven minutes ago. Wormhole travel was instantaneous, but it took time to get the pods up the elevator, launched into the wormhole, and unloaded on the other station. News of a pod’s safe arrival then had to be brought back to Earth on a returning pod.

  The lists updated every five or ten minutes as pods arrived back at the topside stations all around the world. Earth’s remaining cities shared the updates brought back by each pod. G114 was lost, G115-G122 made it through, G123 was lost. Another couple dozen pods went through. G149, the pod that Grant’s family was on, made it.

  Grant sent her a message a few pods later, “Not tasty enough to be wormfood, ended up as wormshit instead.”

  Nicole laughed harder than the old joke merited; she’d been more worried than she realized. The sound woke Tommy, and Nicole cursed herself for being too lazy to set up a sound barrier around his bed. Mom and Dad were working the weekend, again, leaving her to watch Tommy all day.

  She sent a message back to Grant, “Too bad you weren’t worm barf, then we could hang out today.”

  She watched cartoons with Tommy while she waited for an answer, but nothing came. Someone pinged the door. Nicole read the ID—space allocation services. Damn. She opened a small window in the top of the door.

  “You’ve been reassigned to a new homespace, follow me please. We will ship your personal items separately.” A young woman wearing the lime green uniform of city officials stood outside the door.

  “My parents are both at work,” Nicole said.

  “You’ve been reassigned. I will wait while you contact your guardian for permission to come with me.”

  Nicole called Mom, who double-checked what was going on and told Nicole she’d have to go. It was their fourth reassignment in six months, and every time their room was smaller. At least this time they stayed in the same building. Nicole held Tommy’s hand as they followed the woman down a long corridor and then three floors up on the elevator. A box arrived a few minutes later with the family’s personals—Dad’s ancient paper copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a few old game cubes, a stack of ancient datachips, and a yellowed paper packet of broccoli seeds. Seeds that would never sprout, because Mom wasn’t brave enough to take the risk.

  Tommy started wailing that he didn’t like the new homespace. Desperate to get him to shut up, Nicole showed him the Opilio commercial while she studied their new room. She paced the length of the walls, and sure enough, it was smaller than the old one. This had to stop. Mom might not see that life on Opilio was better for the family, but Dad thought so. If she and Tommy went first, her parents would have no choice but to follow, and the whole family would be better off.

  Nicole reprogrammed her clothing templates to the default.

  Tommy stared.

  “Big trouble,” he told her.

  “Come here, I’ll do yours.”

  “I do it.” He reprogrammed his outfit. Nicole hadn’t realized the little squirt could dress himself.

  The default elevator wasn’t quite close enough for Tommy to walk, so Nicole took him on the blue-line moving walkway. The breeze from the moving belt wasn’t enough to sweep away the odors of sweat and perfume. They passed a lot of buildings, mostly academic offices and classrooms by day, residential space at night.

  When they got off the walkway, Tommy pointed at the metal elevator tube, extending up all the way to the top of the city. “Up?”

  “Yeah, it’s an elevator, like we have in our building,” Nicole explained. “We’re going up.”

  Hundreds of defaults stood in a line that spiraled out from the base of the elevator and filled the surrounding courtyard. They huddled together in clumps, periodically trudging forward as the line moved. They didn’t look happy to be leaving Earth, but surely their lives on Opilio would be better than the default gray nothing they had here.

  Nicole made her way to the back of the line, dragging Tommy along behind her. A pod filled up and made a low rumbling noise as it accelerated up the elevator tube toward the surface.

  The woman in front of them had a grandmotherly look about her, with hair exactly the color of her default-gray jumpsuit. She leaned heavily on her walker as the line moved forward. When they stopped, the woman looked back at Nicole. “Aren’t you a little young?”

  “No.” Nicole turned away, embarrassed that the old woman h
ad caught her staring.

  “I’m three,” Tommy said.

  “That’s a good age to be,” the woman told him. Then, to Nicole, “No need to get snippy, I wasn’t passing judgment.”

  Nicole smiled in a way that she hoped was polite without inviting further conversation.

  “I’m Sorna, and,” she waved to a boy standing in front of her in line, “this is my grandson, Christopher. Fine boy. About your age, maybe. Fifteen, are you?”

  “Fourteen,” Nicole admitted. Did defaults have to be of age to ride the elevator? The uniformed officials that were milling around didn’t seem to be checking anybody’s ID. They were busy directing the movement of the line and keeping the peace.

  Christopher had his back turned and muffs over his ears. Not muffs, Nicole realized, but headphones. He wasn’t wired with implants. Probably most defaults weren’t—it was expensive. Sorna was staring at her.

  “I’m Nicole. This is Tommy.” First names wouldn’t be enough for Sorna to figure out they weren’t supposed to be there. “You said your grandson is fifteen? He looks older.”

  “Sixteen. When you get to be my age, there’s not much difference between sixteen and fourteen. I got grandkids from three to twenty-two. Lots of family here in line. That’s Christopher’s dad there at the front end of the family, never could abide that man.” Sorna waved toward a surly-looking man about thirty people ahead of them. “Since my daughter Eavie died, he’s done nothing but drink and piss—excuse my language—and now he’s got little choice but to go to the colonies.”

  “There’s so many of you,” Nicole said.

  Tommy nodded. He liked to play as though he were part of grown-up conversations, even when he didn’t understand what people were saying.

  “A bigger family means more mouths to feed, more rent to pay, and more medical bills,” Sorna snapped.

  “Sorry.” Nicole hadn’t meant to make her angry.

  “No, you didn’t mean anything by it,” Sorna said. “I failed them. I always worked a couple jobs, sometimes three, but it was never enough. We’re a sickly lot, too much medical debt to ever hope to pay it off. It’d almost be a blessing if the worm takes us.”

  They stood quietly for a while, long stretches of waiting punctuated by occasional bursts of movement. Nicole fished a couple protein bricks out of her purse and gave one to Tommy while she munched on the other one. It was time for his nap, and after a while he started nodding off every time the line stopped.

  “What happens if you don’t all end up in the same pod?” Nicole asked.

  “We’ll go separate,” Sorna said. “We tried to count up, but people come and go from the line . . .”

  Mom would’ve insisted that the whole family go together. The thought made Nicole pause. Mom would be madder than a topside snowstorm when she found out what Nicole was doing. Why couldn’t she see that living in the clouds was better than being buried under the surface? Ninety-five percent safe was good odds and the reward would be worth the risk.

  Nicole stared at the gray metal ‘sky’ of Blaine. The upper dome was dotted with yellow lights that illuminated the city for daytime. There weren’t any windows to the surface; there was nothing to see up there but snow. She thought about the ad Grant had given her. What a wonderful thing it would be, to live in a floating city with huge viewing windows onto a beautiful sky.

  The line moved forward.

  Most of Sorna’s family got into a pod, but it filled up. The doors closed and the pod accelerated up the elevator shaft. Another identical pod rose up from below. Plain metal spheres dotted with small windows. No point to anything fancy since eventually all the pods would be eaten by the worm.

  The pod doors opened and the line moved forward. The wheels of Sorna’s walker scraped on the metal floor inside. Nicole followed her. Christopher was in their pod too. He made no sign of knowing or caring that his father had gone in the other pod.

  Following the instructions that blared over speakers inside the pod, everyone strapped themselves into seats mounted in a big circle along the curved walls. Sorna pushed a button on her walker, and it folded up small enough for her to slide it into the bin under her seat. Nicole sat down next to Sorna and strapped Tommy into the seat on her other side. Tommy was only half awake as they got into the pod, and as soon as he was belted in his head drooped over to rest against Nicole’s arm. He drooled a big blob of spit onto the sleeve of her jumpsuit.

  At first, all Nicole could see through the tiny windows was the inside of the elevator tube rushing by. When the pod reached the surface, the elevator tube opened up into a set of vertical tracks. There was a brief glimpse of snow and a howl of angry wind, and then they were above the clouds.

  Tiny points of light appeared against the darkness. Stars. Nicole called up some skymaps and saved them to the not-so-private local storage on her implant, alongside Grant’s commercial. She’d seen skymaps before, but she hadn’t realized the stars would be so small.

  “Shouldn’t we have stopped by now for the topside station?” Nicole asked, peering at Sorna through the dim light inside the pod. Her arm was falling asleep from the weight of Tommy’s head.

  “Oh, child, you got on not knowing? They don’t let us off until we’re through the worm. Last thing they need is a bunch of defaults clogging up the station.”

  “Oh.” Nicole tried to stay calm. She thought she’d have a last chance to bail out—to cut things off if she’d had enough adventure. Grant had told her how it worked with the private pods, and she hadn’t known the default elevator was any different.

  Nicole hadn’t even sent a message to her parents to tell them where she and Tommy had gone. She’d planned to do that from the station. She started composing something, then realized her connection to Baine was gone.

  The interior light went out.

  “That’s normal,” Sorna whispered.

  “Quit talking to the stow, Gran,” Christopher said. “She got herself into this, and worse, she brought some unsuspecting toddler with her. She’s just some rich kid playing default for a free vacation. When we get to Opilio, she’ll message her family and they’ll send money to ship her precious ass home in a private pod.”

  “I will not,” Nicole snapped. Her parents had enough money for a private pod to Opilio, but they weren’t so well off that they could afford the price of a trip back to Earth. Oh wormshit, what had she done? She and Tommy couldn’t go back now, even if they wanted to.

  Sorna patted her on the shoulder. “Christopher, be nice. Scared is scared.”

  “It makes me mad, that’s all. Serve her right if the worm eats her on the trip home.”

  “Christopher,” Sorna said. “Go back to your music, and leave the poor girl alone.”

  “She should’ve left us alone,” he said.

  The walls vibrated, and the force of the launch pressed Nicole down against her chair. Through the tiny windows, she could see Earth’s horizon stretched out in a fingernail crescent of white and blue.

  Their pod detached from the shuttle. “Is that supposed to happen?”

  Sorna nodded. “Watch Polaris.”

  “Why?” Nicole found the point of light that was labeled as the North Star in her skymaps.

  “That’s where they anchored the mouth of the worm.”

  The star moved.

  It jumped to the left of where it had been. No. . .it split. There were six other stars, in a circle around the spot where Polaris had been.

  “Lensing,” Nicole whispered. She’d learned about it in school, the way the gravity of the wormhole bent light around it to create a ring of stars. Back then she’d thought the ring of stars was pretty. Now they were the teeth of the open-mouthed worm about to eat her.

  Everything she and Grant had joked about was real. Would she be wormfood or wormshit? The walls of the pod clanged and rattled. Nicole clutched her purse in her lap. She could feel the corners of her mint-plant cube pressing through the thin fabric. Around her, people joined hands with t
heir neighbors, praying. Sorna reached out and Nicole took her hand. She put her other hand over Tommy’s, holding his tiny fingers as he slept.

  The pod passed into the center of the circle of stars.

  Discontinuity.

  Nicole stared out the window. Something had happened, an odd sort of blink, but not with her eyes. The view was much the same, except she couldn’t make out the worm teeth stars, and her skymaps didn’t recognize the constellations.

  A cheer went up among the other travelers.

  “Smile, dearie, we made it,” Sorna said.

  Nicole searched the sky for the bright colors of the Crab Nebula, but all she saw was stars in an ordinary black sky. “Are we in the wrong place? Shouldn’t it be more colorful?”

  “Arrivals go through the space station, rich girl. Those orange skies you saw in all the ads are only once you get to the planet,” Christopher sneered.

  “But aren’t we in the Crab Nebula?”

  “Not as pretty up close as it is from far away.” Christopher glared at her. “Which is true for a lot of things.”

  The pod docked with the Crab Nebula’s worm station, and the doors opened onto a narrow metal hallway. A pair of station officers came into the pod to make sure everyone got off. Grant was right, everyone was welcome in the colonies, but travel back to Earth was strictly regulated. Earth was overpopulated, and they didn’t want colonists coming back home.

  This would be their home now. Hers and Tommy’s, and her parents when they came. There was no doubt in Nicole’s mind that they would come. The only question was how many years she’d be grounded once they arrived.

  The gravity on the transfer station was wrong, too low, but one of the station officers handed her a set of magnets for her shoes, and a smaller pair for Tommy. Tommy wasn’t all the way awake yet, so he didn’t complain when she put his on for him.

  “Please follow me to the immigration area. There are screens with recent arrival information, if you have need to know.”

  The group moved in a herd, packed together, following the officer. They passed a window, and Nicole caught her first glimpse of Opilio, angry red with swirling storms. Tommy pulled on her hand. He wanted her to lift him up so he could see better, but the crowd pushed them past the portal. He grabbed at Nicole’s arms and dragged his feet and whined until she picked him up and carried him, which actually wasn’t too bad in the lighter gravity.