by Peter Watts
Normally Ngọc’s array filtered the noises, the sights, the smells, gave her only the ones she needed. Only her shuttle’s announcements. Only enough about her surroundings that she didn’t walk into walls or people. Her array ran on her body’s energy, and she was low: tired and hungry and longing to be home, where she could heat up a packet of phở rather than pay more money than she could spare at one of the food stands, and sit in her own space, small and silent.
Ngọc looked low, away from the bright banners and people’s faces.
One of her hands sought out her most textured hairs, at the top of her head: to run two fingers down each hair, over and over. The hair between her fingers bumped. Pleasing.
An announcement gave her shuttle a slot. She walked towards it.
She passed a wall screen that caught her attention: waves drawn in white on dark blue in neat and intricate detail, moving rhythmically across the screen. She stepped closer. The white lines were raised: touchable. She held a hand to them.
Waves moved against her.
For a long time she stood, feeling the waves against her hand.
She looked at the words spanning the moving image on a plain white background: SERMI HU. WAVES REVISITED.
Waves.
Another announcement.
Ngọc ran to her shuttle, repeating the name Sermi Hu like fingers on hair.
THE WAVE MAPS
I mapped motion. I mapped in clean lines: white on dark blue. My waves move across a coast near Cai Nu City, not the coast as it is now, but as it was a million years ago. The coast changes under the waves far more rapidly than under real waves.
Yet this is realer to me than a static map, a coast that never changes.
By the time I am a hundred years old, it will be our coast. But it will not stop. It will map our possible future.
Ngọc ate more food as soon as she awoke, already hungry. Another packet of phở. Sage crisps. Squid-flavored protein chunks. The last she ate while she dressed in her favorite clothes: plain indigo trousers and a sleeveless knee-length indigo top with repeating print patterns on it. She combed her hair. It was an impractical comb: curving like a moon occluded, with tines on its inward edge. Dull silvery metal. Pointed at its moon-edges. Heavy. A gift from her grandmother, before early death took her away. On its flat faces, its maker had engraved floral lines and animals that Ngọc couldn’t identify. She sat a while after combing her hair, turning the comb over and over, enjoying the engravings and tines on her hands.
She put it aside and turned on her arrays.
Menu symbols hung in indigo at the edges of her vision. Here she didn’t need to filter sensory input, but she added music: songs sent by a friend in a language Ngọc didn’t know. Lively. Like foxes dancing, like the quintet of silvery foxes embedded in her skin and skull at her hairline: the only outward sign of her array. Their feet went deep into her head.
She looked at messages—nothing that meant someone would hire her and pay money—and then she looked for Sermi Hu.
She closed her eyes, to see better.
Looking into nearby public arrays for information was nothing, was shallow, easy, a single step into the un-countable arrays in existence: the arrays anchored in other people’s bodies, the arrays in space stations, in space craft, arrays spanning space and planets and moons. Stepping there, Ngọc was not a person sitting on her bed with her eyes closed. She could ignore herself. Ignore other people. Ignore everything except what she needed to work.
Sermi Hu: exhibit descriptions, interviews, news, images. A confusion of information. A person with complex weaves—like carpets of a single dark brown—in waist-long hair on either side of a dark face. A number of other projects aside from the waves, all exhibited on Cai Nu, where Sermi lived. Ngọc looked for more information about those.
THE STAR MAPS
I found my favorite maps in history: Ammassalik wooden maps, carved in coastlines that sailors could hold in their hands. The shapes in the wood matched the edges of the shore. The sailors followed them home in the thick fogs that fell like darkness.
Some of my distant ancestors, if my family’s tales were told true.
I thought of the shores eroding. Of families changing the maps, over hundreds of years.
I mapped the stars this way.
To hold a map of stars in your hands, to feel it as you saw it—
It was too beautiful a thought.
Ngọc wanted a replica that felt like wood. It took little time to order one.
That done, she looked at even more information about Sermi: other exhibits, current work. Sermi’s current whereabouts, Ngọc found, were less certain. Sermi had gone missing a year ago. Last likely whereabouts: the Ivuultu debris field. No one on Cai Nu would go there. On an array for the kind of people who would look there for a fee, Ngọc found a message from Sermi’s wife. Ngọc opened her eyes to play it on a screen in the air above her floor—and to reach for more sage crisps. Running her array made her already fast metabolism faster.
An image of a woman appeared in the air: just her head and shoulders, a dark-skinned face with intricate gold lettering across her cheeks and nose, wearing a hijab of city-patterned gold. “I am Xaliima,” the image of the woman said, the timbre of her voice flattened by the translation Ngọc had run, “but it is my spouse’s name you will recognize: Sermi Hu, who won the Shen Yang prize two years in a row for making maps. Sermi maps changing places: maps of water, maps of coastlines, maps of the bone pits of Psápfa, maps of stars. Maps of the Ivuultu debris.” Xaliima paused, grief among the gold words on her cheeks. “Sermi wanted to map the Ivuultu debris, but not the debris itself. The traps set by the people who live there.”
“Too nice,” Ngọc murmured.
“Sermi must have flown too close. I waited for a while after I stopped receiving messages, knowing how it is to be immersed in work, but eventually I started to worry. I commissioned someone to fly close to the debris and scan it for Sermi’s craft.” A new image appeared: a scan of Ivuultu, chaotic, jumbled. The debris of un-counted spacecraft in orbit around the small red moon. Then another image: a close-up of a particular craft, quite large, highlighted gold, deep within the debris. “I know what happens to people trapped here. But if it is possible, I would like to know with certainty—if there is a body, I would like it returned to me, for burial.”
A sum of money appeared beneath Xaliima.
Ngọc’s eyes went as wide as if she’d found a packet of sage crisps the size of a moon. If only she had a space craft! If only it wasn’t Ivuultu, where a recent contest to enter the debris field and evade its traps had ended with everyone losing. Or winning, if the prize was: your craft gets dismantled for parts by the Ivuultu scavengers, you get to take a swim in space.
Ngọc twisted the ends of her hair with her fingers.
Several people had expressed an interest in finding Sermi, requesting further information from Xaliima. Ngọc skimmed the names. One she recognized: Fox Sansar, a pilot she’d done array work for in the past. Always quick to pay, always straightforward. And a good pilot, she’d heard.
Ngọc asked the image of Xaliima, “Did Sermi send back any maps of the Ivuultu debris before disappearing?”
“I can show you three maps that Sermi made of the Ivuultu debris.” Three icons appeared beside Xaliima’s head.
“Are there any more?”
“I am not provided with that information,” Xaliima said. The real Xaliima, who had programmed this image, hadn’t shared the information. Or hadn’t known it.
An alert sounded: the replica Ammassalik star map was ready. Ngọc ran out to the delivery center to collect it. It fit into her hand. On the way back to her room, she stopped by a window that opened onto the constellations around Goldchair and stood, following the patterns of stars with her eyes, with her fingers—but couldn’t find the stars mapped in her hand.
It fit so well into her hand that she didn’t want to let it go.
In her room, Ng�
��c pulled Sermi’s three Ivuultu maps into her array and opened them: visual maps, line-drawn like the waves and whirlpools. The annotations made little sense to Ngọc. All said false. False, false written along the trap-lines between the debris. Ngọc looked for information about the traps: attempts to determine the traps’ locations, recordings of craft going into the debris and becoming caught. Sermi’s maps. Recordings made since Sermi’s disappearance. Over and over—and turning the star map over in her hands—Ngọc looked, until her array alerted her to the need to eat something more substantial than sage crisps. A big bowl of lemongrass and ginger protein with vermicelli noodles at the local market in this section of Goldchair. Money was not a problem. Ngọc knew how to find Sermi.
THE WHIRLPOOL MAPS
I returned to rapid motion, to fluidity: the best metaphor I found. I mapped the summer whirlpools on Cai Nu.
I remember when I first heard that most children are expected to understand gender—theirs, other people’s—at a very early age. Like verbal communication. Like socialization.
I labeled parts of the whirlpools with ten different words for gender.
I never liked these maps. Belatedly, it occurs to me: to map it is to state that it exists.
Ngọc met Fox at his local market, on the other side of Goldchair, at his preference. Their first time meeting in person. Array turned on, Ngọc filtered the loudness, the people—it was bigger by far than her local market. It was pretty, with static storytelling art along the walls. Most of the foods were unfamiliar.
Fox already waited at the designated table. Dark blonde hair: not a color Ngọc saw often. Fox’s face was more familiar, with brown eyes even narrower than hers. He ate something Ngọc didn’t recognize. White disks with a lump of dark red sauce.
“I know how to get through the Ivuultu debris,” Ngọc said, glancing at one of the story panels on the nearest wall. It depicted two people embroidering stars onto black fabric.
“A lot of people think that,” Fox said.
“A lot of people die in the debris.”
At the edge of her vision, his lips twitched.
“What I doubt anyone is doing,” Ngọc said, “is looking at Sermi’s maps. Not just the Ivuultu ones. The star ones.” Ngọc held up the replica star map. “This is based on a too-old map, from Earth days, old Earth days, when people needed to know their way along coasts in boats and didn’t have orbital arrays. Bumps are headlands, dips are inlets. Even if you can’t see, you can feel the way and steer your boat. Sermi did that, except with stars: if you’re flying in space, you can align your way with stars. Keep a constellation on your ‘left.’ You can make a pattern of the stars, like a coastline.”
“You could . . . ” Fox looked doubtful.
“You need this to get through Ivuultu, because the traps aren’t true, the stars and debris are.”
“The traps looked true enough when people got caught in them and killed.”
“They’re there, they’re real, but they’re not where you see them. Sermi figured that out.” False, false. “And now,” Ngọc said, holding up the star map again, “Sermi’s changed them, re-mapped them. Now you need these.”
Fox frowned at her. “How is flying with these going to work?”
“I . . . ” Ngọc ran out of words under his scrutiny.
The map, it was about the map, couldn’t he see that?
“I can’t.” Words were so difficult. Still staring. Ngọc filtered out visual input entirely. “I can’t tell you in words. I can do it with my hands, and my array. I use array-generated maps like these to interact with the array that generates the true traps, to see them, and I feed that to you. You fly. I tell you where to fly. We split the money.”
Fox turned silent. Ngọc un-filtered visual input and found him poking his food with a thoughtful look. Ngọc couldn’t figure out what it was made of.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Chwee kueh.” Ngọc didn’t know what that meant. “Rice flour cakes with pickled radish. It’s really nice. Do you want some?”
“Mmm.”
Fox handed her a single chopstick, which was enough to eat it with: to break off some of the radish-covered cake and stab it to get it into her mouth. It was nice.
“Have more,” Fox said. “I probably went too far ordering three plates. It’s just the vendor here is really good.”
Ngọc needed to ask him what vendor it was.
The chwee kueh on the table disappeared quickly. Only then did Fox say, “Shall we go flying in the Ivuultu debris?”
THE BONE MAPS
The small moon of Psápfa, orbiting Gumiho, is notorious for its adherents: the leapers.
I received special permission to map the bone pits. I saw the place where the people stand, high on a white rock, before they leap. A two-hour leap. Gravity is not great on Psápfa. They program a machine array to spend those two hours writing their stories on their bones, to, after a quick killing, disintegrate their bodies—all but the bones.
I followed an adherent down a rocky path to the pits where the bones fall.
According to their faith it is an act of devotion to wade into the pits and read aloud the stories written on the bones.
I spent weeks there. I worked on real bone: banding stories around it like embroidery, a guide—on each of the ten bones I used—to the one-and-a-half centuries of pits, the changing styles of stories, the history of habitation of our star system that ran under everyone’s own lives. I was too awed by the people’s stories. I could only point to the pits, my maps like an outstretched arm.
I would have liked to die there.
The Ivuultu debris orbited a small, massive red moon of the same name, far from its planet, the gas giant Gumiho. In four years, the debris had accumulated from mishaps and arrogance. Scavengers profited greatly—and managed the debris, made it stay whole longer than usual collisions would allow. Protected it for themselves.
Fox brought his space craft close, saying, “No sign of the scavengers.”
Good. Only Sermi’s craft, deep in the debris. Ngọc put the star map in her pocket and held her hands at her sides and directed her array: to see Fox’s array, to see the false lines of the traps, to put maps in her hands. For seconds, she saw only arrays. Patterned lines like Sermi’s maps. Lines beyond words. Truer than any space craft holding her in high orbit over a moon. The maps in her hands solidified her: simulated, changeable star maps. She remembered her body, her location. Filtered in enough visual input to see the debris. Connected her array to Fox’s. Said, “Ready.”
Fox flew closer, flew right up to the debris and the traps until he dipped into it like the thin atmosphere of Psápfa. There, on the edge of Ivuultu, the debris remained in their shared view: ghost-translucent, layered shapes in every direction. Stars shone in them like navels. The red moon lay beneath them like a sea floor.
Ngọc mapped.
In her right hand: the stars, each at the peak or trough in the map. A coastline in space.
In her left hand: the clusters of debris too big for Fox’s shield to destroy.
Ngọc fit them together, the stars like a slow, steady beat beneath the rapid rhythm of the debris in her hands. “That’s the way through.” Keep them together. Her hands worked ahead of their position, mapping, un-mapping, until she found the next step: the next inlet or headland. The way through.
What she mapped went in gold into what Fox saw in his array, interfacing with his craft.
She saw, dimmed-out, the debris they avoided, the meaningless trap-lines like contour lines crossing a path, the stars, the sea-moon. The gold globe of Sermi’s craft. She felt it all.
“Look,” Fox said, “I’m actually doing this.”
Ngọc breathed out: “Ha.” Felt the next inlet. Wrist twisted to account for three-dimensionality. Other arm outstretched. Her whole body moved to follow the map: felt in fingers, arms, chest, mouth, feet. Fox followed her.
THE LAST MAPS
A pair
of maps. Stars and debris. I thought I would feel them forever: stars wheeling with Ivuultu’s orbit, debris constantly changing—disappearing. Leaving me alone with my last recorded maps.
I never thought I would share them.
The maps stilled.
“Here.” Fox’s un-filtered voice barely touched Ngọc. “We’re here.”
Slowly she let the maps fade. Stretched her fingers. Looked—open-eye looked—at the gold globe in front of them.
“I’ve never . . . ” Fox said.
How strange to only have visual and audio input.
“Flying’s never been like that.”
Time to find Sermi.
“There’s an opening in the side,” Fox said, highlighting it in red on their shared arrays. “Weapon or collision damage. Looks like a good place to get in.”
Ngọc agreed. It took her a while to remember to say so out loud.
The craft easily flew through. The cavernous space within looked like a cargo bay, now empty, its bare back wall a good place for Fox to land: magnetically hooking his craft to the wall, angled just-so to fly back out.
“Time to skin up,” Fox said, standing up with a grin like he enjoyed going out of air. Ngọc hated the skin on her arms, her face: pressing against her. But. No Sermi without the skin. Fox handed her one and she took it, activated it, thinking that soon she would be back among the stars and debris, bare-faced, maps in her hands.
Their arrays led them through the corridors of Sermi’s blast-marked craft. Hull-holes opened to space like mouths. No possessions remained. Yet the walls didn’t look opened for their innards: the scavengers had been to Sermi’s craft, but not successfully.