by Ian McDonald
Understand, I was just moving the indoors order of things outdoors. Laine’s away a lot, Dolores is evil, Andros is gone, and someone has to keep the boys shipshape and sweet-smelling. Me. Cariad Corcoran. I know how Kobe works, and Jair, well, he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. I do. They need looking after. They need a captain.
We needed a captain.
Anyway, it’s not me who makes the decision, up there. Lady Luna makes it for you.
* * *
Understand this: the moon at 180 kilometres an hour is fast, fun, and dangerous.
The moon at eighty kilometres an hour is slow, safe, and boring. That’s the speed of a medical emergency override. So as not to shake the patient up too much. Even when Redrover decides Jair is fit and ready to take control again (which is many kilometres after Jair decides he’s fit and ready to take control), we trundle along at Safe. Sane. Speed.
Next flying stone might not be so lucky.
But you have to do something to make that slow time pass, to make the boring fun. And if you can’t drive dangerous, then you have to talk dangerous.
I blame Sidibe. Right, so, I would blame Sidibe, but I also blame myself, too, a little. I have to ask her how she learned the trick with the fix-spray.
‘That would be the time I was out with Geetanjali at Spitzbergen Mountain,’ Sidibe says.
‘Geetanjali?’ Jair asks. My machines tell me in a hundred different ways he’s all right, no harm done, but I know Jair, and this is one uncharacteristically quiet neko. He’s hardly spoken two words since Kobe sent Redrover out again.
‘My ceegee,’ Sidibe says. ‘Before Gebre.’
We’re rolling along the well-worn track beside the new-build equatorial railway, all polite and good. Next year, we could ride the Equatorial Express right to the research facility at Hypatia and walk to the Armstrong Footprint. But that’s not an Adventure. That would be as far from Adventure as I can imagine. That would be tourism. ‘We were an hour out of Archimedes in a selenological survey rover. Prospecting Spitzbergen for rare earths. I was eight but I can still remember it so sharp.’
‘You were eight?’ I said.
‘So?’
‘You were eight and Geetanjali took you prospecting on the Sea of Rains in a rover?’
‘Pressurised,’ Sidibe said. That wasn’t the point, but neither was this my story. ‘If there had been anyone she could have left me with she would have, but this was long before Gebre. Anyway, there we were. Stone stone stone stone crater, stone stone stone stone mountain! And then there was a flash of light in my head and in the middle of the viewing port there was a tiny white mark. Tiny, but it went through the glass outside to inside and I don’t need to tell you, but rover glass is thick. Geets said, did you see that, so she had seen the flash too and I went to get a good close look at the white mark in the window but Geets pushed me away and as she did I heard this noise like a million tiny things breaking and in an instant the whole window was nothing but cracks.’
‘In a pressurised rover,’ Kobe says.
‘It could have blown at any time,’ Sidibe says. ‘The slightest jolt, the tiniest rock under one of our wheels, could have done it. And we would have been . . .’ She makes a whistley-explodey noise.
‘What did you do?’ Jair asks.
‘Well, survived,’ I say. ‘Obviously.’
‘Cariad, I want to hear this,’ Kobe says.
‘Geets knew that all rovers have emergency sealant,’ Sidibe says. ‘But it was on the rover’s skin, so she had to suit up and lock through and do it from the outside. She had to work so so slowly, so so carefully, because if she put the slightest pressure on the window, it would shatter. And she was wearing the only suit.’ Sidibe gives us all a storyteller’s second. ‘The only suit.’
‘She fixed it,’ I says. ‘Obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ Sidibe says. ‘But when we got back to Archimedes the lock-boss took one look at the rover and said, you owe someone. You should be dead.’
‘What did it?’ Kobe asks. ‘Made the white crack?’
‘The lock-boss reckoned it was a cosmic ray strike. Some particle kicked up to super-charge by, like, neutron stars colliding. Travels for half of forever across the universe and ends bang in our view port. That was the flash, you see? It must have gone straight through the port, Geetanjali, and me.’
‘That’s the scary bit,’ I say. ‘A cosmic ray from the dawn of time went right through your brain.’
Jair butts in. ‘The scary bit is how many have gone through us since we got up on the train; how many are going through us right now.’
‘Eight lunes later, Geets got sick with cancer,’ Sidibe says. ‘That’s how I moved in with Gebre.’
‘What happened to her?’ I ask.
‘She died,’ Sidibe says. That bums us all into a long quiet, not thinking about the millions billions trillions of things shooting through us as we sit strapped in our seats merrily rolling along in Redrover. But it has given us our fun game to make the time pass quickly: what’s the scariest thing ever happened to you?
* * *
‘I heard it long before I saw it.’
Now it’s Kobe’s turn to tell us the scariest thing ever happened to him. And that is a way to start a scare-story.
‘Because what I heard, I didn’t want to see.’
And that is the way to follow your scary story through.
‘I was asleep, in my room. It was late.’
I know this story, I was asleep in the next room and I heard the noise and I saw the thing and I helped chase it out. This all happened about eight lunes ago. It’s scary-fresh. Kobe has to have a little bio-light, a little glow by his head, to be able to sleep. Dark scares him. But this thing he heard; it wasn’t afraid of the light. It was bigger, bolder, braver than the things that crawled only in the dark.
‘It made this noise,’ Kobe says, and somehow a sound comes out of him that is so uncanny, so un-Kobe, that it makes me shiver right into the marrow of my backbone; and I know the story. One moment there’s his slow, careful voice, then there’s this fluttering, rattling, wheezing sound that seems to have no connection with anything human. ‘It . . . it was in the room with me, moving around above me.’ Again he makes the noise. Sidibe and Jair do not say a word. We’re suited up on the outside of a rover rolling beside the railroad track towards West Tranquility, hard vacuum and hard radiation out there, and we are scared stupid. By a silly little noise.
And I know the story . . .
‘I pulled the sheet over my head,’ Kobe says, and I am there, with him, with his nightlight turning it to a glowing tent of fabric. ‘But I could still hear it moving around above.’ Flutter flutter flutter. ‘Sometimes high, sometimes low. Then all of a sudden it was real loud and I saw a shadow flash across on the sheet. Flash! And I yelled and threw back the sheet and it flew up right up and away from me and I scared it because it was just flying around and around and I couldn’t get away from all the flappiness and noise and not knowing what it was going to do next.’
‘What was it?’ Sidibe asks.
‘A bird.’
‘A bird?’
‘A ring-neck parakeet,’ I say. ‘There’s a small feral population in Queen.’
‘All I saw was flapping wings and all this sudden dartiness and that was really scary,’ Kobe says. He needs to have things worked out, to have a plan. He can’t deal with the unpredictable, the flappy.
‘What happened?’ Sidibe asks.
‘I started screaming,’ Kobe says. That was the first time I heard his fear scream, which is like nothing that could possibly come out of a human mouth. ‘It just made the bird worse.’
‘I came to help,’ I say.
‘Cariad came,’ Kobe says. ‘And Laine. They put out all the lights in the room and went onto the balcony with a bio-light and lured it out.
‘It flew away.’ I say. ‘There’s a couple of pairs up on the top of the tower. Folk feed them. This one must have come in through t
he balcony and got trapped. Kobe likes fresh air.’
‘I didn’t know what I was,’ Kobe says. ‘I didn’t know there was such a thing as a bird. I’d never seen one. Everything was wrong with it. Living and flying? That thing on its face, and the feet? Flapping, those long beaty things . . .’
‘Wings,’ Jair says.
‘Feathers,’ I say. ‘It had shed a bit. Kobe had to move in with me until we got the room sterilised.’
‘I might catch something from them,’ Kobe says, and I can hear the disgust still in his voice. ‘Birds are wrong.’
He’s right, though. Birds are the wrongest wrong.
We’re quiet for a while, rolling along respectable beside the rail track, imagining the terror of something totally unknown in your room with you. Because it wasn’t a ring-neck parakeet, it wasn’t a bird, it was the most alien alien.
‘I’ve got a story,’ Jair says after a time. ‘If you want to hear it.’
‘I would like to hear that, Jair,’ Kobe says.
‘It was the last time I saw a dead person,’ Jair begins in a voice so low and soft it’s like licking my ear.
* * *
The moon wants to kill you and knows a thousand ways to do it.
We’ve all seen dead people. Maybe we’ve even seen people die. I have, says Jair, for this is his scare story. My abuelo-izquierda Huw got cancer. He was one of the early settlers. He came up with Robert Mackenzie. No one really knew what it was like here then. The radiation was chipping away at him for years. I say cancer, but it was like cancers. All everywhere. So maybe it wasn’t cancers but he was one big cancer, all of him. I was there when the medics came from the dignity house. We were all there. It was happy; he was in a lot of pain and really old and we all just wanted the best for Abuelo Huw. He wouldn’t let a bot do it. He wanted someone to look into his eyes.
I looked into his eyes afterwards. What I couldn’t work out was, what was different? It was the same cells, the same liquids and everything, so why was Huw alive ten minutes ago and dead now? Strange.
That wasn’t the scary thing.
My three-iz, Oleg, he was a zabbaleen.
Have you ever met a zabbaleen? Didn’t think so. Everyone knows about them; no one ever meets them. But they’re real people. You can be related to them. I was, until it all moved around again. Oleg was a zabbaleen. And he was not a nice person. He was a piss-drip. Dick-wipe. Not a good man. For a start, he was way older. And he liked to try and surprise people, shock them, get some reaction off them.
He said to me, Do you ever wonder what happens to them after they’re dead?
I said: You take them.
And he said: That’s smart, but after we take them, what happens?
And I said, Everything gets recycled.
He said, Would you like to see what really happens?
And I said, Abuelo Huw?
No no no, he said. That would be disrespectful. Someone else.
So I said yes. I don’t know why I said yes. I knew it would be vile: that’s Oleg being Oleg. But I said yes. I wanted there to be more than just a person on a bed, dead. I wanted there to be more than just me, with Abuelo Huw, and maybe I’d kiss him or touch him or just say something to him, and then I would walk out of the room and there would be nothing of him ever again. Maybe it was he was the first person I ever saw die and I was still just messed around because I couldn’t take in what happened.
But I said yes.
There’s a whole other world, in there. Inside Queen. Inside every city. It’s like the veins and arteries in your body; that takes all the stuff around you but you never see it. In every building, under every street, there are doors and entrances and hidden tunnels and the zabbaleen come out, do their work, disappear again, and you never know. You never see. They don’t want to be seen. They want it to be like a trick. But they make everything work.
So I met Oleg in the lobby of Kingscourt Tower and he opened a bit of the wall I didn’t know could open and we stepped through and we were in this corridor, right beside the lobby, right beside all the things and people I saw every day. I could hear them, I could see them through the cameras. And they didn’t know I was there, right beside them.
Oleg took me down to the tunnel. They have tunnels, and roads, and jitneys. They got to move a lot of stuff around real discreet. I got to ride with Oleg in one of the jitneys, right under the boulevards, around the roots of the towers, where all the pipes and cables and trunking goes.
The place where they recycle the bodies is at the very middle of Queen, right under the Taiyang Tower. Oleg said they had their own name for it, but he couldn’t tell me because it was a zabbaleen secret. I think it was because it was some bad taste joke. Professionals make jokes like that, that are just for them.
First place Oleg took me was the de-sleeving room.
Do you know what de-sleeving is?
I’ll tell you. It’s removing the skin. Before you can get to anything else, you have to get the wrapper off.
Do you want to see it, Oleg asked. And then I really saw where I was and I said, No, oh no, gods no, and Oleg shrugged and said, Well, we’ll move along then.
The skin. They take the skin off. One piece. Peeled off.
Oleg took me to another room and said, This is where we get the bones out. Best bit of the human body, the bones. Bones and teeth. We’re a calcium-deficient population. Don’t suppose you want to see that either, and no I did not, and I did not want to see the tanks where they sloosh in what’s left when they take the bones out and enzymes dissolves it all to goop, and where they separate out the chemicals from the goop and the room where they compost the bits they can reprocess and the audit office where they measure and weigh all the chemicals and give you an account: calcium this, carbon that, phosphorous other. I didn’t want to see any of it, I didn’t want to be there, I wished I’d never gone, because I could see, in my mind; I could see Huw on the table and the machines going in and unpeeling him like a banana.
Down there, that place, that was the most scared I ever was. Because there’s dead, and I understand that, it’s the thing that wakes me up in the night, out there, perching on my balcony, never going away, but after death: there’s that. And that will happen to every single one of us. No escape, no exemptions. If the zabbaleen are anything, they are thorough. Even if we died out here, however long it took to find whatever the moon left of us, the zabbaleen would take it back to their deep rooms, and take it all to pieces.
And I know, in my head, that I’m dead, what do I care, it’s natural and right that I return everything I borrowed back to the moon again. It’s that it will happen to everyone you ever know, you ever love. Your ceegees, your friends. If you ever marry, in or out of the ring: them too. You Kobe, you Cari, you Sidibe. I see you on that table, the skin peeled back from your face. I see your bones cut out of your body. I see you sliding down that chute into the big enzyme bath.
And that scares me.
* * *
‘Jesus Joseph and Mary, Jair,’ I say on the common channel.
‘You asked me,’ Jair says. ‘I told you.’
‘Kobe?’ Sidibe’s voice. ‘Are you all right?’
There is a silence so long I check Kobe’s suit read-outs on my HUD. Green spiking into yellow. Anxiety, fight-or-flight reactions.
‘Is this true?’ Kobe asks.
‘Truest thing . . .’ Jair starts, and there is a hardness, an edge like black moon obsidian in his voice that I have never heard before and never suspected from my neko boy.
‘I’m scared,’ Kobe says, and I hear fear in his voice, the fear that can’t move and can’t breathe.
‘No more scare stories,’ I say. ‘That’s an Executive Order.’
‘Just before you have to tell yours,’ Jair says, but he shuts up and I see on my HUD that Sidibe and Kobe have a private channel open. I try to listen in—Executive Privilege—but I don’t have the access code and anyway at that moment a blip appears on my map. Theon Habitat.
Which is a good thing, because in all our excitement at getting to Meridian, getting the rover, getting out onto the surface, getting on our way to adventure, we forgot to pack any food.
And who is Department of Surface Activity, Sidibe Sisay?
* * *
So, as my story takes a natural break while we load up food, I’m going to talk to you about Jair. I’m going to tell you exactly how it is because I don’t want you putting your theory on him. I don’t want you stroking your beard, which you don’t have, or your chin which you even more don’t have and thinking, mm, Thanatos death force; aha, Eros life force.
Understand: ring marriages are not just complicated, they are more complicated than you can know. Not everyone-you. You-you. You can pull up all the data you like, but you will never know it, truly, because you have to be in one to know one. So, I can’t speak for other rings, in Oruka Ring, no one has ever married an AI. Yet.
Yes, I know ‘Oruka’ is Yoruba for ring. Ring-ring. Your point?
So, it’s a tautology. I will try and help you understand.
Jair is: the cutest neko in the Queen of the South. Jair was: the cutest kid this side of the ring. Jair has always been: my iz. Jair’s ceegee, Dolores, is also his bio-mom, but she engineers things and so she’s been on one build or another for most of his boy-and-neko-hood. So she asked Laine to be his primary ceegee and now he lives with us. Laine also engineers things and she’s away a lot, but somehow that’s not a problem to Dolores.
I’ve said that I will never understand what Laine sees in Dolores?
Jair hardly ever goes back to Dolores now. Why couldn’t it have been her crossed the ring?