by Neil Clarke
She falls silent then. Breathes the limited air of the cabin. “They would be planting seeds,” she says, softly, “underground, and in greenhouses, all the plants of Earth, a paradise of watermelons and orchids, of frangipani and durian, jasmine and rambutan . . . ” She breathes deeply, evenly. The pain is just a part of her, now. She no longer takes the pills they gave her. She wants to be herself; pain and all.
In jalopies scattered across this narrow silver band, astronauts like canned sardines marinate in their own stale sweat and listen to her voice. Her words, converted into a signal inaudible by human ears, travel across local space for whole minutes until they hit the Earth’s atmosphere at last, already old and outdated, a record of a past event; here they bounce off the Earth to the ionosphere and back again, jaggedy waves like a terminal patient’s heart monitor circumnavigating this rotating globe until they are deciphered by machines and converted once more into sound:
Mei’s voice speaking into rooms, across hospital beds, in dark bars filled with the fug of electronic cigarettes’ smoke-like vapoured steam, in lonely bedrooms where her voice keeps company to cats, in cabs driving through rain and from tinny speakers on white sand beaches where coconut crabs emerge into sunset, their blue metallic shells glinting like jalopies. Mei’s voice soothes unease and fills the jalopy-chasers’ minds with bright images, a panoramic view of a red world seen from space, suspended against the blackness of space; the profusion of bright galaxies and stars behind it is like a movie screen.
“Take a step, and then another and another. The sunlight caresses your skin, but its rays have travelled longer to reach you, and when you raise your head the sun shines down from a clay-red sun, and you know you will never again see the sky blue. Think of that light. It has travelled longer and faster than you ever will, its speed in vacuum a constant 299,792,458 meters per second. Think of that number, that strange little fundamental constant, seemingly arbitrary: around that number faith can be woven and broken like silk, for is it a randomly created universe we live in or an ordained one? Why the speed of light, why the gravitational constant, why Planck’s? And as you stand there, healthy or ill, on the sands of Terminal Beach and raise your face to the sun, are you happy or sad?”
Mei’s voice makes them wonder, some simply and with devotion, some uneasily. But wonder they do, and some will go outside one day and encounter the ubiquitous stand of a jalopyman and be seduced by its simple promise, abandon everything to gain a nebulous idea, that boot mark in the finegrained red sand, so easily wiped away by the winds.
And Mei tells Haziq about Olympus Mons and its shadow falling on the land and its peak in space, she tells him of the falling snow, made of frozen carbon dioxide, of men and women becoming children again, building snowmen in the airless atmosphere, and she tells him of the Valles Marineris, where they go suited up, hand in gloved hand, through the canyons whose walls rise above them, east of Tharsis.
Perhaps it is then that Haziq falls in love, a little bit, through walls and vacuum, the way a boy does, not with a real person but with an ideal, an image. Not the way he had fallen in love with his wife, not even the way he loves his children, who talk to him across the planetary gap, their words and moving images beamed to him from Earth, but they seldom do, any more, it is as if they had resigned themselves to his departure, as if by crossing the atmosphere into space he had already died and they were done with mourning.
It is her voice he fastens onto; almost greedily; with need. And as for Mei, it is as if she had absorbed the silence of three months and more than a hundred million kilometres, consumed it somehow, was sustained by it, her own silence with only the music for company, and now she must speak, speak only for the sake of it, like eating or breathing or making love, the first two of which she will soon do no more and the last of which is already gone, a thing of the past. And so she tells the swarm about Terminal.
But what is Terminal? Eliza wonders, floating in the corridors of Gateway, watching the RLVs rise into low Earth orbit, the continents shifting past, the clouds swirling, endlessly, this whole strange giant spaceship planet as it travels at 1200 kilometres an hour around the sun, while at the same time Earth, Mars, Venus, Sun and all travel at nearly 800,000 kilometres per hour around the centre of the galaxy, while at the same time this speed machine, Earth and sun and the galaxy itself move at 1000 kilometres per second towards the Great Attractor, that most mysterious of gravitational enigmas, this anomaly of mass that pulls to it the Milky Way as if it were a pebble: all this and we think we’re still, and it makes Eliza dizzy just to think about it.
But she thinks of such things more and more. Space changes you, somehow. It tears you out of certainties, it makes you see your world at a distance, no longer of it but apart. It makes her sad, the old certainties washed away, and more and more she finds herself thinking of Mars; of Terminal.
To never see your home again; your family, your mother, your uncles, brothers, sisters, aunts, cousins and second cousins and third cousins twice removed, and all the rest of them: never to walk under open skies and never to sail on a sea, never to hear the sound of frogs mating by a river or hear the whooshing sound of fruit bats in the trees. All those things and all the others you will never do, and people carry bucket lists around with them before they become Terminal, but at long last everything they ever knew and owned is gone and then there is only the jalopy confines, only that and the stars in the window and the voice of the swarm. And Eliza thinks that maybe she wouldn’t mind leaving it all behind, just for a chance at . . . what? Something so untenable, as will-o’-the-wisp as ideology or faith and yet as hard and precisely defined as prime numbers or fundamental constants. Perhaps it is the way Irish immigrants felt on going to America, with nothing but a vague hope that the future would be different from the past. Eliza had been to nursing school, had loved, had seen the world rotate below her; had been to space, had worked on amputations, births, tumour removals, fevers turned fatal, transfusions, and malarias, has held a patient’s hand as she died or dried a boy’s tears or made a cup of tea for the bereaved, monitored IVs, changed sheets and bedpans, took blood and gave injections, and now she floats in freefall high above the world, watching the Terminals come and go, come and go, endlessly, and the string of silver jalopies extends in a great horde from Earth’s orbit to the Martian surface, and she imagines jalopies fall down like silver drops of rain, gently they glide down through the thin Martian atmosphere to land on the alien sands.
She pictures Terminal and listens to Mei’s voice, one amongst so many but somehow it is the voice others return to, it is as though Mei speaks for all of them, telling them of the city being built out of cheap used bruised jalopies, the way Gateway had been put together, a lot of mismatched units joined up, and she tells them, you could fall in love again, with yourself, with another, with a world.
“Why?” Mei says to Haziq, one night period, several weeks away from planetfall. “Why did you do it?”
“Why did I go?”
She waits; she likes his voice. She floats in the cabin, her mind like a calm sea. She listens to the sounds of the jalopy, the instruments and the toilet and the creaks and rustle of all the invisible things. She is taking the pills again, she must, for the pain is too great now, and the morphine, so innocent a substance to come like blood out of the vibrant red poppies, is helping. She knows she is addicted. She knows it won’t last. It makes her laugh. Everything delights her. The music is all around her now, Lao singing accompanied by a khene changing into South African kwaito becoming reggae from PNG.
“I don’t know,” Haziq says. He sounds so vulnerable then. Mei says, “You were married.”
“Yes.”
Curiosity compels her. “Why didn’t she come with you?”
“She would never have come with me,” Haziq says, and Mei feels her heart shudder inside her like a caged bird, and she says, “But you didn’t ask.”
“No,” Haziq says. The long silence is interrupted by others o
n the shared primitive radio band, hellos and groans and threats and prayers, and someone singing, drunk. “No,” Haziq says. “I didn’t ask.”
One month to planetfall. And Mei falls silent. Haziq tries to raise her on the radio but there is no reply. “Hello, hello, this is Haziq, C-6173, this is Haziq, C-6173, has anyone heard from Mei in A-3357, has anyone heard from Mei?”
“This is Henrik in D-7479, I am in a great deal of pain, could somebody help me? Please, could somebody help me?”
“This is Cobb in E-1255, I have figured it all out, there is no Mars, they lied to us, we’ll die in these tin cans, how much air, how much air is left?”
“This is jalopy B-2031 to jalopy C-3398, queen to pawn 4, I said queen to pawn 4, and check and mate, take that, Shen, you twisted old bat!”
“This is David in B-1201, jalopy B-1200, can you hear me, jalopy B-1200, can you hear me, I love you, Joy. Will you marry me? Will you—”
“Yes! Yes!”
“We might not make it. But I feel like I know you, like I’ve always known you, in my mind you are as beautiful as your words.”
“I will see you, I will know you, there on the red sands, there on Terminal Beach, oh, David—”
“My darling—”
“This is jalopy C-6669, will you two get a room?” and laughter on the radio waves, and shouts of cheers, congrats, mazel tov, and the like. But Mei cannot be raised, her jalopy’s silent.
Not jalopies but empty containers with nothing but air floating along with the swarm, destined for Terminal, supplements for the plants, and water and other supplies, and some say these settlers, if that’s what they be, are dying faster than we can replace them, but so what. They had paid for their trip. Mars is a madhouse, its inmates wander their rubbish heap town, and Mei, floating with a happy distracted mind, no longer hears even the music. And she thinks of all the things she didn’t say. Of stepping out onto Terminal Beach, of coming through the airlock, yes, but then, almost immediately, coming out again, suited uncomfortably, how hard it was, to strip the jalopies of everything inside and, worse, to go on corpse duty.
She does not want to tell all this to Haziq, does not want to picture him landing, and going with the others, this gruesome initiation ceremony for the newly arrived: to check on the jalopies no longer responding, the ones that didn’t open, the ones from which no one has emerged. And she hopes, without reason, that it is Haziq who finds her, no longer floating but pressed down by gravity, her fragile bones fractured and crushed; that he would know her, somehow. That he would raise her in his arms, gently, and carry her out, and lay her down on the Martian sand.
Then they would strip the jalopy and push it and join it to the others, this spider bite of a city sprawling out of those first crude jalopies to crash-land, and Haziq might sleep, fitfully, in the dormitory with all the others, and then, perhaps, Mei could be buried. Or left to the Martian winds.
She imagines the wind howling through the canyons of the Valles Marineris. Imagines the snow falling, kissing her face. Imagines the howling winds stripping her of skin and polishing her bones, imagines herself scattered at last, every tiny bit of her blown apart and spread across the planet.
And she imagines jalopies like meteorites coming down. Imagines the music the planet makes, if only you could hear it. And she closes her eyes and she smiles.
“I hope it’s you . . . ”
“Sign here, initial here, and here, and here.”
The jalopyman is young and friendly, and she knows his face if not his name. He says, perhaps in surprise or in genuine interest, for they never, usually, ask, “Are you sure you want to do it?”
And Eliza signs, and she nods, quickly, like a bird. And she pushes the pen back at him, as if to stop from changing her mind.
“I hope it’s you . . . ”
“Mei? Is that you? Is that you?”
But there is no one there, nothing but a scratchy echo on the radio; like the sound of desert winds.
Madeline Ashby is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. She is the author of Company Town, from Tor Books, and the Machine Dynasty series from Angry Robot Books. She also writes science fiction prototypes for groups like Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, the Atlantic Council, and others.
PANIC CITY
Madeline Ashby
Devoured by the blades of Fan Six, high above the Service Sector quadrant of the city and suspended over her many rings, something went still and cold.
The city made a careful decision, one she had delayed for a number of years. Slowly, at her own pace, she began to execute a strategy based on that decision. It was time to hug her children a little closer.
The city observed her blindness advancing one eye at a time.
First, the topside periphery. So little of any importance crossed that transom. Certainly nothing worth alerting anyone about. Nothing to write home about. As it were. Vision was so short-range, anyway. Almost useless, compared to her other senses. She let the satellites go dark, too. They would continue spinning and searching, hanging over her like tireless angels, but for the first time since her birth their chattering herald would not sound.
Their silence was golden.
Next, the exits. There were four, one for each quadrant of her compass rose. She let those eyes blink shut and stay that way. It was like falling asleep. Or how she thought it must be to fall asleep. She herself had never slept.
Cities never sleep.
Or so she’d heard.
Read.
Whatever.
The city had heard/read/watched myths of her topside sisters: Paris, je t’aime. New York, I love you. と今日、大好き！
Granted, she was never going to get that big. Her sisters (or mothers, or aunts, or cousins) sprawled far and wide, inner city to exurb to expanding in livid pulses like cellulitis up the flesh of the world upstairs. She herself would never grow that big. Never grow as bloated and corpulent as they had, those fat fucking sows, watching their piglets shove and root and wriggle on top of each other, white and blind and numerous. No. She would remain small. Trim. Neat. Contained. She would not let herself go.
She would hold her inhabitants close within the cozy circumference of her body. Where it was safe.
Like all ships she had become a “she” because of this very capacity. And while she did not sail, or fly, or ride, or spin, she was still a vessel. A vessel containing the best and brightest of all the best and brightest, the cream of the cream of the crop, the top tenth percentile of the top one percent. Princes. Leaders. Captains of industry.
And their children.
And their children’s children.
And their Support Staff.
She had held them all for almost fifty years. Their numbers grew. Her capacity to shelter them did not. But her capacity to love them—that was boundless as any other mother’s.
“I can’t see over the top,” one of the staff members said from the eastern control room. He signed in as Roscoe0308. He had a good record, despite events that could be classified as early childhood tragedies. His mother died slowly in a puddle of vomit that activated a pH sensor when it trickled down the shower drain. Why she’d crawled to the shower was anybody’s guess. (Very little hot water on their level. It bred E. coli. Hence the vomiting. And the dehydration. And the shock. And the cardiac arrest.) But Roscoe0308 still turned out to be a good boy. He never spat on the city’s streets. He composted all his garbage. He would make full citizenship, one day. The city was almost certain of it. “Camera’s out.”
“Aww, shit.” His supervisor was a brassy woman with a pockmarked face. She regularly traded her citizenship points to procure traces of salicylic acid stolen from the bathroom cabinets of Elect households by enterprising nannies. The chip in her stomach would have told her the problem with her skin (imbalanced gut flora; poor immune response) if she hadn’t turned off its alerts to save the diminishing returns on her glasses’ battery pow
er. Priorities. “Turn it off and turn it on again.”
“I already did that. It didn’t work.” He grimaced. “Maybe there’s a storm?” His supervisor snorted. “Some storm.”
She shivered, although the heat in the room was a more-than-comfortable 75 degrees Fahrenheit. She pointed at something else on the display. “Don’t worry about it for now. Go check out Fan Six. It looks like it’s clogged.”
He had rather hoped no one else would notice for a little while. The fans were so tricky, after all, and hard to get to.