by Ian McDonald
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We’re down in Hypatia with thirty minutes of air and the mother of radiation storms coming straight for us.
No. Let’s try that again. Maybe put the air last? Down in Hypatia—maybe add a little extra detail to make that say more, like: a kilometre under the surface? Dead in the sights of the mother of radiation storms and thirty minutes of air left. Only thirty minutes of air left.
That’s better. Makes it more, you know, dun dunh dah. Kaya, our Drama Colloq Enabler, says you should open with a big bang. Boom. Grab the attention, make them say, Wow, what happens next?
What do you mean, just start at the start and let it unfold naturally? What about tension, and plot beats, reveals, and all that? Drama and climaxes. You’re a psychiatric bot, what do you know about stories? What do you mean, it’s not important what happens, it’s how what happens makes you feel? Where’s the drama? Where’s the excitement?
Okay, I’ll start at the start, but my story, my way.
It’s loathe at first sight.
It’s New Year, in Queen of the South. On the plaza between the Taiyang Tower and Osman Tower. The plaza is full of Queeners, all looking up. The dragon race has just begun.
Understand: I approve of New Year, though what is it? Really? People being noisy and dumb and insisting on unwanted physical contact all because one date turns over to another. Personally, I prefer Zhonqiu, but let no one say that Cariad Corcoran doesn’t allow people the right to celebrate. Even dragon racing. Which isn’t dragons. There are no dragons. Well, there are. But they don’t fly. And they’re not made of paper and nano-film. But they can breathe fire, when they want to.
There are dragons racing in the sky and people dancing in the streets and I am about to meet my new stepfather.
Understand: marriages are difficult. Ring marriages are verging on stupid impossible. That’s why people try them. When you grow up in one you never realise what a weird thing a ring is. Family is what you know. Family is what works.
I’ve lived my whole life with three parents: Laine, my birth-mother, and her two spouses—Dolores to her left, her iz, and Andros to her right, her derecho. And Andros has his two partners—Laine on his iz, Eadward on his derecho—and so it goes, link by link, marriage by marriage, all the way around the ring.
In an ideal world. And since when has the moon ever been an ideal world?
I never liked Dolores, but I did like Andros, so of course his was the link that split. I could see it hadn’t been working between him and Laine for about a year, and when even Kobe notices it, then it’s really, really not working. So it ended, the link split and Laine lost Andros and I lost him too without any say-so or negotiation or contract or anything. Anything.
It ended up a straight swap: Andros out, Gebre Sisay in. But Gebre didn’t like Eadward as derecho, who wanted to stay with Andros, so in came Gebre’s derecha Rachel, whose derecho Noam did like Eadward, and all the links went click click click and locked together. Sweet. Ring marriages: they’re like living in a telenovela. Everybody’s at something with everyone else. Gebre was university, come over from Farside to set up a new astronomy colloquium in Queen of the South. I didn’t even know Laine was seeing him until she announced a shiny new relationship. New Year, new derecho stepfather. But when was Cariad Corcoran ever consulted? Never. Yet I’m expected to stand there, in the middle of all the noise and cooking smells and the body odour, with Kobe looking up at the dragons and telling me in his over-detailed way the difference between the Mackenzie kites and the Suns’, and Jair off buying me horchata from the kiosk because I told him to and he needs direction in his life: expected to stand there in the middle of New Year waiting for Laine to bring her new amor over from the station. ‘They’re all out of horchata,’ Jair says. He offers me a paper cup of pale slush. ‘I got you frozo.’
I let my face say, Frozo? You got me frozo? Then I see that Jair isn’t looking at me being annoyed and Kobe isn’t gazing up at the long New Year dragons all tumbling and twining around the towers. So I turn and look where they’re looking and see what they’re seeing and it’s Laine coming through the noisy, smelly crowd towing this middle-aged, stubble-shave-head man with a big smile. By the hand. But what I’m really looking at is what’s on the end of his other hand.
A girl. A daughter.
He’s towing a daughter.
I think—I know—all our mouths are open.
No one ran a daughter past any of us.
‘Emer, Kobe, this is Gebre.’ Why can’t Laine learn this? Do not call me Emer. I hate the name. Hate it. ‘Gebre, this is Jair, my iz’s boy.’
Jair’s little features fold up into sad-face, he makes a sore-paw gesture with his claw-glove. Laine: can you do nothing right? Jair’s neko. Self-identified: neko’s got rights much as I have. Not a boy, a neko. Got it? Right, so, I call Jair he, but that’s an iz-derecha thing. That’s negotiated, not assumed.
‘And everyone,’ Laine says, ‘this is Sidibe.’
Sidibe Sisay. Tall and fit and tight in belly-top and party pants like a smear of body-paint. She’s got boobs. Small, but boobs. I can see them. Jair can see them. Even Kobe can see them. Long lashes and big eyes; skin smooth and soft and flawless; hair in a big wedge on the top of her head. Hair I can never have in a billion years, skin that isn’t pale and pasty and has freckles. And boobs.
‘Close your mouth, Jair,’ I order. Boys, really.
Sidibe Sisay offers a hand to me.
‘Ola, Emer,’ she says. ‘Happy New Year.’
‘So,’ Laine says, pulling me and Kobe in with a Family Hug, ‘Gebre and Sidibe are moving in with us.’
And the dragon race ends and the clock turns over from one tick to the next and the streamer cannons on the towers fire paperchains and lametta and balloons into the air and people are shouting and jumping up and down and kissing each other and Laine and Gebre are kissing each other and I can’t look because it’s disgusting and stupid; not just them, everyone in the plaza, why are you celebrating New Year, don’t you know there can’t be a new year because the world has just ended?
* * *
So: what do you think of that for a start?
Look, I am telling it my own way. My own way is narrative. Story.
That’s the way I do it, take it or leave it.
What did I feel? Isn’t it obvious what I felt?
I am telling you what I felt, just in my own way. You might have to read in, right? And you need to know I never wanted to be here. And your chair smells weird anyway. This whole room smells weird, like fresh printed. And you smell weird as well. Freshly printed too.
* * *
So, I’m two days into the new year 2089 and everyone knows about that girl from Farside. Not just Osman Tower, not just Queen: everyone. Faustini to Shackleton, Amundsen to the Palace of Eternal Light. Everyone. I can’t go on the network. Everyone is talking. I can’t go to the hotshop. Everyone is laughing. I can’t go to colloq: everyone is asking, Who is she, where does she come from, who does her hair, is she moving in?
&n
bsp; I have an answer to that last one.
Yes.
Gebre Sisay contracts constructors to knock through from our apartment into one next door. One big happy family!
The sick feeling in my gut isn’t the violation of our lovely home (though it is: this new extension? I call it the Carbuncle). It’s that it smells of permanence. It smells of happy marriage contracts and Sidibe Sisay, my new stepsister: derecha forever.
* * *
Understand this: there are rules. I don’t know what kind of wrong stuff they do at the university but this is Queen of the South, Queen of the Moon, and we have rules about what is acceptable and they do not include dancing around someone else’s apartment (which it is, Carbuncle or no Carbuncle) in a sports top and offensively short shorts. There are boys here, understand?
So: we are five days into the Sisay invasion and Kobe hasn’t shut his mouth once. I tell him it’s embarrassing. Not to him; he doesn’t understand embarrassment. Embarrassing to me. Which I have taught him to understand. No effect. The mouth stays open, catching dust. In the end I tell it makes him look stupid. Not to him, or me: to her. Still he hovers around the shared space between Castle Corcoran and the Carbuncle, waiting for Sidibe to pass through, smiling at her, standing way too close to her, asking her far too many questions. I give him extra errands to run for me. Trips to the printer, browsing for fashions I might like, preparing my material for colloquium. Kobe needs to be kept busy.
And the rules most definitely include mind your own business. Because you have no right, Sidibe Sisay, no right at all, to storm into my apartment and tell me to my face, ‘You bully that kid.’
‘Excuse me,’ I say. Like that, offended. ‘Excuse me? Kid?’
‘Kobe. You make him run around for you and you never thank him or anything.’
And I say, ‘Understand this.’ And I explain very slowly that I’m doing this all for her, that Kobe latches on and doesn’t go away, that he has boundary issues and that’s how Kobe is so she should really be thanking me, not screaming at me.
‘You should show him respect,’ Sidibe says and swanks away back to the Carbuncle and this time it’s my mouth open and not a word in it.
And then Jair. Oh, Jair. You are shameful. Shameful. After his first hello on New Year’s Night, he collapsed in like some kind of superdense matter and mooched around the apartment trying to drift into the edge of Sidibe’s field of vision. He plays the kawaii card. He sits in corners with his knees pulled up to his chest. He crouches on ledges, paw-gloves between his feet. He curls up on loungers. He looks out windows all moody and sensitive. Always, always his hair falling over his right eye. I like him as neko—he’s been it for almost a year and he’s committed, though Dolores refuses to let him have surgery for the ears—but this is kitty-too-far.
This is hell. I am in hell. The thing about hell, as far as I understand from my research, is that you’ve done something to deserve it.
So this is worse than hell.
* * *
Cariad. If we’re going to do this, that’s what you call me. This is a negotiation, right? Everything is a negotiation. Even therapy.
Cariad. I picked the name about three lunes ago. It’s taken longer than it should for everyone to use it. I need to put word around. Enforce a little.
Cariad. It means something beautiful in something Celtic.
Cariad. Say it.
Cariad. No. Not Cariad. Cariad.
Good.
I mean: what kind of name is Emer? Eee-muh. Sounds like a painful spot on your guiche. With a red tip that turns white. Then bursts. You’ve got an Emer? Oh, vile. How did you get that?
Yes, I know Emer is Celtic. Irish. Laine tells me Irish is amazing. Freckles are Irish and they are not amazing. Emer is not amazing, Irish is not amazing. How can I be Irish? I was born in Ibn Bajja Med Centre in Queen of the South, in the Aitken Basin at the South Pole of the moon. Just because one of your ceegees comes from Ireland (you can’t even see it from Queen, wrong hemisphere), how do you inherit it? What’s the genes for that? My bio-father was a Real Madrid fan. That’s a terrestrial soccer team. By that logic, because I share genes with him I should be a Real Madrid fan. I tried to watch Real Madrid on the network once but it was so slow and low. Ultimate Fighting: that’s a sport.
I never met my father.
You’re going to try and get something out of that, aren’t you?
* * *
The delivery arrives by BALTRAN, from Farside.
‘Can’t you just print it?’ I say.
‘You don’t have the tech here,’ Sidibe says and sweeps into the elevator. Gob-daw and Smitten-Kitten are two steps behind her. I tell you, Cariad Corcoran is not going to be left behind, so I dash in just as the gate closes. I know about the BALTRAN: it’s an essential part of our transport infrastructure, but I’ve never seen a station. Kobe tells me more about ballistic transport than I ever want to know as we ride the moto out to Nobile. Magnetic launchers and catchers that lob cargo containers from one to another on ballistic trajectories. BALlistic TRANsport. BALTRAN. Infrastructure is Kobe’s thing. Trains, motos, tethers, rovers, rockets: he lights up.
Turns out the BALTRAN is interesting, not for the infrastructure but for the people. People can ride the cans. If they’re in a hurry. You should see them when they come out: clinging to the lock walls, grey, heaving. Some have vom on their faces. Being fired around the moon on a ballistic trajectory is not stylish. It is very, very funny.
Sidibe’s delivery does not have any human body fluids on it. But it is bulky. She pays the waybill and slings her delivery onto her back. It’s almost as big as she is, but she moves proud, showing off, like it’s some fantastic secret.
Back in the Carbunculum she unrolls it on the floor of Gebre’s family space. A suit, like a sasuit but tighter and goldier. Complex folded things where a suitpack would be, but this is not a sasuit. Sidibe takes it to her room and returns in skintight glitter and gold.
Jair’s eyes go wide. Another one of Dolores’s directives from afar: an absolute ban on anime eyes. See you, Dolores, wherever you are: Jair has them now, over shiny Sidibe.
‘Kobe, mouth,’ I say.
Sidibe hooks her hands into bindings and stretches out her arms. ‘I haven’t room in here to unfold them fully,’ she says. Wings. She’s got wings. Great shimmering wings that flutter, that fill El Carbunculo’s family space and shiver and tremble in the flow from the air con. She flexes her wings, sending a waft of fresh nano-filament aroma into my face.
For this is the worst, the very worst thing about Sidibe Sisay.
‘You can fly,’ Jair says.
‘I can fly,’ she agrees.
‘You can’t, I mean, you’re from Farside, it’s all tunnels and tubes,’ I say. ‘I mean, where is there to fly?’ Then I bite the inside of my mouth because I have just handed Sidibe victory over my boys.
‘I’ll arrange a demonstration,’ she says and folds her wings and slips back to her room to change out of the flight suit.
‘Your ass looks big in that,’ I shout after her.
* * *
So we all have to watch Sidibe Sisay fly.
Gebre takes us all in the construction elevator up the side of Osman Tower, right to the very top. We all wear safety harnesses and are told to clip on before we clip off. I’m good with that. I don’t find that patronising, not at all. Safety at heights is a good thing.
Such things do not apply to Sidibe. She prances around in her clingy gold suit, pretending to be excited and nervous. Looking down, I feel sick, even clipped to a construction beam. It’s two kilometres to the floor of Queen of the South. Looking up is worse: I see the sun panels, the girders reaching for the roof, and feel like I’m falling backwards. So I keep my eye on Kobe because he just might unclip his harness for some reason in his little logic. Jair is comfortable and easy at height. Relaxed, flexed. Cute.
Gebre hugs Sidibe, then she steps to the edge and flexes her arms. Her wings snap out from
the pack and lock. Up here she can open them fully and she’s almost as wide as the whole tower. Everyone but me goes ooh. Then she throws her head back, lifts her arm-wings, and falls forward into space.
I gasp with everyone else. I admit it. Anyone would. Everyone but me lunges forward to see what has happened. I grab Kobe’s tether, just to be sure. Jair grips a girder and leans out over the drop. I can’t look. I’m still coming to terms with what I just saw. She threw herself off the top of Osman Tower. Then Sidibe soars up over, over the edge of the platform, and climbs high above us. She is shining and gold. She flaps her wings. Her feathers catch the sunline and flash it into our eyes. She burns. She is an angel. She spins on a wingtip and in a breath is a kilometre away. Two wingbeats and she wheels around the soaring spike of Kingscourt across the plaza. She tucks her wings and flips into a dive. We all strain our tethers to see where she has gone. Sidibe pulls out of her dive, scrapes the tops of the trees that line the Boulevard of Heavenly Peace. All Queen of the South can see her. The entire city is watching. Another flash of light: wingbeats catching the sun. Another banked turn and now she’s spiralling up around Taiyang Tower like a golden ribbon winding around an arm. She swoops across two cubic kilometres of air, then flashes up over the edge of our home tower once again, hangs a moment, folds her wings, and lands light as a breath on the tower top.
Gebre hugs her hard. She complains: Mind the wings the wings.
Laine says: That was amazing, amazing.
Jair: That was cool, really cool. Coolest thing I ever saw. For Jair, that’s really losing his shit.
Kobe: That was one of the greatest things I have ever seen. Sometimes the way he says whatever is in his head is mortifying, sometimes it’s beautiful. With Kobe you have to learn his patterns. Whatever he says, it’s always honest.
Me? I hug her. That was amazing, I say. And it was. I cannot deny it. Sidibe has won. Sidibe has won big. But this is only a battle. The war is far from over, and only ultimate victory counts. I stand at the back of the elevator as we ride back down the side of Osman Tower so she can’t try to read my face. Her ass still looks big in that flying suit.