Interzone 251

by edited by Andy Cox

  “Don’t touch the bike.”

  “Come stop me. Oh, and Leor? Hurry.”

  She waited for him in the cable terminus, her suit still on but her faceplate open. Her boots were clamped down to the deck and she had one arm looped around one of the ubiquitous wall-bars, beside the airlock out to the surface and his bike. She could hear him as he careened off walls, any grace of movement lost in haste, and she could remember him breathing heavy on top of her, and this time, for once, it didn’t make her cry.

  He came sailing around the corner, still wearing his work overalls from the day before, his face red from exertion and anger. When he saw her he smiled, and she smiled back at him, and both smiles were predatory.

  Leor grabbed a bar, pulled himself around, got his boots down on the floor. “Fari,” he said, almost snarling her name.

  “Leor,” she said. “Are you sorry for what you did to me?”

  “Sorry?” He tripped over the word, staring at her. “I’m not the one who’s going to be sorry,” he said. “I’m not the one who’s going to be begging—”

  “This is your last chance,” she said, and put one hand on the control panel for the airlock. “Ask for forgiveness.”

  “Stupid bitch, there’s a whole safety system that won’t let you open that,” he said.

  “I rewired it,” she said.

  “You expect me to believe a woman—”

  “I expect you to die, Leor,” she said. “Believe that.”

  He rushed her. She pulled the lever.

  The entire air volume of Rock 17 tried to crowd past her, and she clung to the bar as long as she could, long enough to see Leor go flying past her, eyes wide with fear, out into the vacuum of space.

  “I lied,” she said over the comms, though he was beyond hearing the moment she’d opened the door. She was torn from the bar and out after him, the safety tether she’d coiled up behind her snapping taut and leaving her flailing at the end of it. “This place makes us all monsters, and I had no forgiveness to offer you anyway.”

  She’d decompressed all of Rock 17. Huj was safe enough in the autodoc, as long as someone came along to let him out.

  Alarms would be going off now, all over Station.

  As soon as the pressure of the escaping air had let up, she pulled herself back along the tether until she reached the surface again. She’d pinned her toolbag against the rock, and pulled it free, taking out a hand-spider for the cable line.

  The spider powered up the moment she clamped it around the cable she wanted. Grabbing hold with both hands, she squeezed and the spider zoomed down the line.

  She hit Rock 44 hard. Forty-four was Team Green’s mine-in-progress, so there was no airlock, no safety zone, just a few bars and a lot of need for care. She almost missed the nearest bar on first grasp, but then caught it with the tip of her fingers on a second swipe and just managed to pull herself in close enough for a better grasp.

  Her mining rig was where she’d left it, at the entrance to the gigantic hole they’d eaten into the rock like some sort of virus. She checked her chrono as she climbed into the cab; she had to time things just right.

  Sealing herself in, she checked that the cabin was airtight and then pressured it up. Once the inner atmosphere greenlit, she took off her helmet and bottle, most of her frontpack, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Pulling the safety harness tight, she reached up and tore the camera eye from its mounting and ground it beneath her boot heel.

  Then she checked her chrono again.

  It’s time, she told herself, as if the words could make her more brave. She could see the pinprick of light that was the Rep’s ship, already moving towards Rock 17, no doubt responding to the depressurization alarm. She couldn’t pick out the rocket bike until its engines, wired with an old timer out of the retreat kitchen, fired up right on schedule. Then it was a bright streak in the sky, already half-way towards the edge of the rockpile, and the Rep’s ship turned in pursuit.

  She’d pointed the bike in a cut-through between Rocks 3 and 9, and set it in motion with a leaking airtank strapped to the underside. Those rocks made it hard for the Rep’s ship to follow, made it look like it was trying to evade.

  “Come on, come on,” she said out loud, pounding the rig console with her fist. “Do it, you self-righteous bastard!”

  She saw the explosion bloom and dissipate, not Leor’s bike, but back on the surface of Rock 17. The ancient hulk of the colony skip lit up briefly in the glare as the long-dead ejection mechanism of one last lifepod, wired up to the Rep’s detonator, was triggered remotely into overload. Her last, fleeting glimpse of the lifepod was as a shadow crossing in front of Rock 4, headed out into space.

  The Rep’s ship slowed; they would have detected the detonation on the rock, know now that the bike was a decoy. It turned, banking, and passed directly in front of the mine entrance on Rock 44.

  Fari fired up the rig’s engines on full, hitting the lower edge of the ramp at the enormous machine’s top speed, and exited the rock itself at only slightly less than that. The rig’s momentum carried it out across the intervening space.

  The ship banked again, trying to swing down below it, but not quickly enough. Fari threw her hands up over her face as the rig slammed into the side of the ship.

  Against all expectation, the cabin held. She scrambled for the rock claws and managed to lock the rig tightly onto the Basellan cruiser. Pulling down her goggles, she began powering up the impact head and injection systems.

  One light blinked orange, and stayed that way even after she thumped the panel. Then she remembered the relay she’d swapped for a bad one; no one had fixed it yet. The retraction system was offline.

  Oh well, she thought, I knew this was a one-way trip anyway.

  She punched a large hole in the side of the ship with the impact head. As it bored its way through the multi-layered hull, she opened the comm channel, found the open link. “This is mining rig Furious Bitch knocking. Can you hear me in there?”

  The voice that came back wasn’t one she recognized, but the Basellan accent was thick; the ship’s Captain, no doubt. “Back away right now,” he said, “or we’ll be forced to take extreme measures. Once you’re off my hull, we’re willing to talk.”

  Talk, right. For however few minutes until they got the upper hand back, then they wouldn’t care about talking any longer. She could see the patrol bikes, along the perimeter of the rockpile, now converging fast and furious on the ship. Somewhere out there, out of sight, a ladybug was slipping past them, unnoticed.

  “Is the Representative there?”

  “I am.” The Rep’s voice made her whole body feel like ice. “Whatever it is you want, the Captain has my authorit—”

  “Do you know what the difference is between people, and livestock, and vessels?”

  “You wouldn’t d—”

  “Vessels don’t bite back, Company Man,” she said. “And I do. So fuck you all the way to Hell.”

  She withdrew the impact head and punched the injectors forward, depositing their twin payload of explosives into the ship’s hull. In moments she had emptied both microweb cartridges into the ragged holes after them, sealing them in.

  “I say again, stand down and back off,” the ship’s Captain said. “You don’t have the arming code, so you can’t do any more damage than you’ve already done, and I’ve got men heading your way to take you out.”

  “I guess we’ll see,” she said, and switched the comms over to the mine channels, seeking out Blue Team’s signature. Whatever further the Captain or the Rep had to say, she didn’t care to hear it.

  “Mer?” she said, as soon as the comms locked on Blue Team. “You out there?”

  “Fari, is that you? What happened? They said Rock 17 decompressed. I thought… And Huj—”

  “Huj is hurt but okay, Mer. You’ll need to go find him. He’s in the old tunnels under our hab. Get him and yourself out, if you can. They’re going to be unable to chase you for a while, but
when they come back, they’re going to be very angry.”

  “Fari, what are you—”

  “I’m almost out of time,” she said, and she saw that she was. The charges were ready to detonate, and she could see small lights now swarming up and over the hull towards where her rig clung, partially embedded, in the side of the cruiser. “There’s something you need to know. The miscarriage…”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “It wasn’t Leor’s, Mer. It was yours. She was yours.”

  “I don’t… We didn’t… I was afraid to touch you, to hurt you the way he did. I— That’s why I—”

  “I was already pregnant when he attacked me, Mer. The baby wasn’t early. I lied. But Mer, I couldn’t give another child to this place, especially not a girl. You understand that, right?”

  “Fari, I don’t—”

  “Shut up, Mer. I sent our daughter out of here. She’s beautiful, and tiny, and has your nose, and she’s gone now. If you can, try to get free yourself. I love you.” She closed down the link before he could reply, and because the tears were making it hard to see.

  Damned goggles, she thought, and pulled them off her face and threw them to the floor. She pulled up the keypad and began to punch in the arming sequence – the previous number, plus the next prime in sequence. Did they really think she wouldn’t pay attention, see the pattern? They never thought she could think at all, never even saw her as human.

  There was a man leaping from the ship, weapon raised, towards the cabin viewshield. She typed in the last number, blew the man a kiss, and pulled the trigger. The ship before her crumpled into orange and white, blinding and growing and moving outward, and Fari thought, last of all, that she had never seen such a truly joyful thing.

  ***

  Suzanne Palmer is a writer and artist who lives on the top of an ice-covered mountain in western Massachusetts, which she tries hard not to fall off of. Though when she does, she has found that being stuck home with broken limbs is great for making extra writing time. Suzanne has been published several times in Interzone, and also in our sister magazine Black Static.

  A DOLL IS NOT A DUMPLING

  TRACIE WELSER

  illustrated by Richard Wagner

  This is the most perfect dumpling in all of creation.

  ***

  “Thank you, come again,” Yopu’s voicebox says, a dutiful, automatic monotone.

  The customer grunts in response and hurries to an unoccupied section of brick wall near the street. Turning her face to the wall, she stuffs the immaculate white dumpling into her mouth with fingers that look like they’ve never seen the inside of a bathhouse. Her face is filthy, too, grimy under a shock of orange and green hair, and pale against her black unitard.

  On slow days, like when stinging rain falls in sheets over the sooty alleys and crowded thoroughfares of the prefecture, Yopu might sell forty dumplings. Then he’ll spend the rest of his day lumbering from corner to corner on his daily route, and thinking. Not really thinking, just collating data according to program.

  He decodes slogans hidden or overtly displayed in graffiti splashed across brick walls and bamboo fences, and thinks about what trends the words indicate. A popular one says Die, Moddies, and another reads Go home. A phrase, spray-painted with a swirling, elegant script in shades of purple, says Free Nickelhart, assholes. Yopu wonders what Nickelhart is, and why it should be free. Nothing is free, not in an exchange economy where a dumpling costs two credits.

  Yopu considers the shifting topography and demographics of the city, and adjusts his route as needed. The city’s sloping streets, carved out centuries earlier and paved with brick sluiced over in segments by black asphalt, steam and soften in the roiling heat of summer. The decaying geometries of proud old architecture slant and sigh against abutting modernity, brash in plastic gaudiness. Tenements skirt the market district, and light sleepers nest in alleyways near the commercial zone, alert to the urgencies of life and its sudden conclusion.

  Yopu watches migrations from the outer bank of the river near the spaceport, where refugees land, to the inner city and its slums. He notes the numbers of reptilian Newcomers, forever blinking in the unaccustomed brightness. The recent immigrants are easy to distinguish from assimilated city-dwellers, who quickly abandon traditional woven skirts for bright jumpsuits and cheap, chromed sunspecs. He watches with reasoning curiosity as the numbers of non-humans grows and coalesces in the western sector of the city. Newcomers require dumpling service as much as anyone else. He makes calculations based on multiple factors.

  No one but Yopu knows about the thinking he does. Even if he had someone to tell, and he doesn’t, he has no words in his speech programming to convey his thoughts.

  His third daily stop brings him to the corner nearest the Municipal building, a crumbling red brick monolith that serves as the hub of bureaucracy and justice for the prefecture. Massive stone steps unfurl from its base like the silken lines of the Imperial flag that curls and snaps high on the pole above. Attorneys, lobbyists and lawmakers fast-walk in and out. Each is trailed by one or more modified bodyguards, bulky in their kevlar jumpsuits and often sporting tails or feathers. Most hurry through the chill morning air to waiting rickshaws, glancing back over their shoulders. Every day, one particular lawmaker, a man with bushy eyebrows, graying temples and lawmaker’s briefcase, stops on the corner of Lotus Blossom Lane for a dumpling. His blue legal robes flap in the damp summer breeze while he slurps his dumpling from the paper cup. Yopu lingers longest here, mostly for the abundant indigents and Newcomer children who cluster around him clutching precious credits.

  On Tuesday, on this busy corner, Yopu sees the girl with the dirty hands again.

  She waits in silence behind a diminutive man in a multicolored robe and two giggling female porcupine Moddies who appear to be exactly alike and are engaged in animated conversation. The girl orders two dumplings this time and pauses to regard him, looking directly into the dusty mono-lens mounted on Yopu’s torso.

  “You’re a good ’bot, aren’t you?” she says in a low voice, deeper than her slight frame would indicate. She pats him once, a hand touching Yopu’s side just out of his camera’s range.

  It is simple to match her face to previous encounters in a database of customer interactions. Her face is clean today, and her large eyes are wide unnatural pools of purple under her orange and green hair. She swipes a generic credchip, a no-name quickcard that functions like cash on the street, and hands one of the dumplings off to a lanky figure behind her whose face is hidden deep inside the dark interior of a stained gray hoodie. The pair squats together next to the decaying building, and they confer over the dumplings in whispers. She glances back at Yopu once, twice. Her eyes flick between the robot, her companion and the front steps of the Municipal building.

  Yopu loses sight of the girl and her companion when a crowd of tussling Newcomer children surround him, shouting over one another for Yopu’s attention. A steady stream of customers occupy him until his red “empty” indicator clicks on.

  “Sir or Madam, I regret to inform you that this dispenser’s contents are sold out. Please come again.”

  “Damn,” says a single customer, the every-day lawmaker. He fumbles with his tattered briefcase as he tries to tuck away a blue government credchip. His owlish bodyguard stands a few feet away, disinterested in dumplings but on the alert.

  A Newcomer child approaches.

  “Hey, Mister Owl, can you turn your head all the way around?”

  The Moddie bodyguard obliges, twisting to peer with enlarged eyes over his shoulder at the child from under tufts of brown-gold feathers. The child gives a reptilian squeal of delight and claps its leathery hands.

  “Buy me a dumpling?” it asks.

  “Scat!” says the owl’s human lips, and he raises his taloned hands in mock threat. The child dances away.

  A subroutine activates, and Yopu’s servos power up. He steps off the curb and waddles down the street.

>   A while later, when he finds himself powering down in an alley in the warehouse district, Yopu begins to suspect something faulty in his programming. The coordinates of the alley do not match any prior destination record. The red indicator means he should return to the DDS warehouse, not squat in an alley in the dark. He switches on his headlamp, at low power to conserve energy.

  A hooded figure stands in front of Yopu, illuminated in the lamp’s glow. A dog’s face, with the gold and black markings of a German Shepherd, emerges from the hoodie’s shadows and bares its teeth.

  “Here he is, Injee.” The mechanical voice comes from a small box clipped to the dogboy’s hoodie. The bared lips do not move.

  A scrabbling sound, and the dirty girl comes climbing down a nearby gutter pipe, catching toeholds as deftly as a ninja. She lands next to Yopu, her breath hanging in the air for a moment as a cloud of vapor.

  “Here’s our good little ’bot,” she says in her curiously deep voice, and touches his side as she had earlier that day. This time, he hears a beep. “Come on, then.”

  Yopu finds no appropriate pre-recorded response to the request in his database, but when the dirty girl and her dogboy companion walk away, he follows.

  ***

  “What does it need language circuits for?” the girl asks. “You’re just reprogramming it to do the job.”

  “You’re asking me?” says the dogboy’s talkbox. “Injee, you’re asking me, the talking dog, why it needs to be able to talk.”

  Injee says nothing.

  “I’m giving him the circuits because I want to, how’s that?”

  Yopu watches Injee through his mono-lens. Zooming in, he detects a slight flush on her cheeks, and a three-inch scar on her temple at the edge of the orange and green hair.

  “That’s not where I’d start, is all,” she says. She sits cross-legged on a sagging plastic chair, eating from a pink take-out carton with chopsticks. An overhead industrial lamp casts a circle of light around her and the dogboy, who works at a rolling workbench topped with a diagnostic monitor. Six separate cables run from the monitor to the panel on Yopu’s backside.