by Neil Clarke
“Uyghurstan will never again be Xinjiang province,” she murmured.
He was determined to do his part in returning Xinjiang to the fold—and he loved her anyway. Her passion was all the more endearing for its futility. Did she say it to test his reaction? Could she read micro-expressions like he could when overclocked? Had she been waiting for him at the border? If so, who betrayed him?
In his endless final moment, he guesses that she must have tracked him after Tashkurgan. He was probably watched in Urumqi. Perhaps he was chosen as a test subject for the virus. When it first yanked him from slow-thought into overclocked fever, he knew what was at work in his brain. For a baseline moment he was there with the doctors in the cell. He heard enough before they sank into slow motion. Then came three subjective weeks in a universe not much faster than the one he’s trapped in now. When Han insurgents overran the place—like a rumbling, inexorable storm front—he had ample time to wonder if they would kill him along with his captors.
The clocking malfunctions got more extreme as he returned south. He was trekking over moaning sands when days strobed by in seconds, bringing hunger and thirst like a knife in the gut. He emerged baseline on a straw pallet in a Silk Road Buddhist cave. The ancient walls danced with demons and saints as an old Han anthropologist nursed him back to health. The hermit and his heritage site had survived the Uyghur Dawn. Wang Zhe was grateful for the peeling, oxidized murals when the next overclocking hit: he lost himself in Sakyamuni’s Temptation for a subjective month.
When he emerged again, he confessed everything to the old man in a desperate rant.
An underclocking followed. Suddenly he was in the old man’s rickety ACV, hurtling south over the Taklamakan. Somehow sensing that Wang Zhe was baseline conscious, the old man explained, “We’re both Han, after all.”
Another underclocking zapped him into a flea-bitten room in an old Kashgar hostel. The place had once catered to laowai backpackers, and the walls were papered with old maps. Turn-of-the-millennium China was prominent, with its quaint autonomous regions and special economic zones.
The old man lay beside him on a dusty mattress. Breathing weakly, lips blood-flecked, he whispered, “Little brother, are you a Buddhist?”
“No,” Wang Zhe said.
“Some of us like to tailor our final moment. Optimize our eternity. I looked through the library here. A lot of old Lonely Planets, but no Bardo Thodol. Guess I’d need a lama anyway.” A coughing fit wracked him. Wang Zhe suspected the old man had spent the last of himself coming here. “Maybe you’ve read it?”
Wang Zhe knew of the text—Bardo Thodol, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Liberation through Hearing—but he hadn’t read it. The old man wanted guidance as he crossed over. “Sorry, uncle,” Wang Zhe answered. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“Tell me, do you really think this place can be China again?”
“It has strayed before,” Wang Zhe said, “and been brought back home.”
The old man smiled. He began to mutter snatches of the Bardo Thodol, playing lama for himself: “I have arrived at my time of death. By means of this death, I will adopt the characteristics of an enlightened mind. I will become compassionate. I will attain perfect enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings.”
He barely whispered his last words: “The present moment is a Bardo, lying between my past and future selves. This Bardo is a chance to know true reality, which is also true self.”
In the Bardo of his final moment, Wang Zhe has repeated these words thousands of times. They have become a mantra. The unmoving raindrops have become prayer beads. Past and future have melted away. He has worn his memories out. They’ve been rewritten too many times.
He can only accept the street, the girl, the gun. In the end he can only become them.
When a syringe dart finally emerges from the pistol, crawling at a snail’s pace through the rain-studded air, Wang Zhe is incapable of surprise. He cannot hope it contains a vaccine.
Pockets Full of Stones
Vajra Chandrasekera
The ghost of my grandfather Rais flickered when he talked about first contact. He was a decade younger than me now, unwrinkled and black-haired, far from grandfatherly.
Beside me, Hadil gestured for a pause. My grandfather’s ghost stopped talking, his features losing expression. The rich brown of his skin faded, became ghostlier, as the imago switched over to standby mode.
“Dike,” Hadil said, nudging me unnecessarily. “You notice the flicker?”
“Probably lost some frames in the cooker,” I said. Error-correction was tricky with neutrino-based communications over the light-years. The original Rais, very much alive, was extremely far away and traveling fast. “Did he say first contact?”
“He did,” Hadil said. He took off his augmented-reality glasses to rub his temples. Without them, his eyes looked too big, the red veins standing out. Too much time behind the glasses. “But I think that’s all the time he’s going to spend on it, no matter how important it might be. He just wants to talk to you.”
I would have argued, except it was true.
Picked up a neutrino transmission, the ghost of Rais had said tiredly. Could be pulsar activity. Some talk of first contact. See attached update for details. As if that closed the matter. Then he had changed the subject to his obsession: the petition to open up a bandwidth allocation for family members of his twenty thousand fellow colonists on the Cây Cúc. The right to talk to the Earth they’d left behind.
“Let me take a look at the attachment before Da Nang comes up,” Hadil said. On Makemake Station, we lived in epicycles. The station’s magnetic transmission horns tracked Earth in her orbit, waiting every day for the planet to spin Da Nang Mission Control into our line of sight so we could report home. There were a few hours left to go today.
“Do you mind if—” I nodded at the silent ghost. Without his glasses on Hadil couldn’t see the imago, but it hadn’t moved since he paused it.
“Go ahead,” Hadil said, getting up. “It’s your grandpa. He probably spends the next twenty minutes crying about bandwidth and your grandma, anyway.”
I scowled at his back as he walked to the other side of the workroom, walking through all the phantom displays he couldn’t see without his glasses on: bright screens and blinking glyphs, the scale model of Makemake Station in the corner, the wall of clocks hovering in mid-air, my silent flickering grandfather, and my favorite Gauguin, D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous. Hadil had once complained it gave him nightmares, but I found it both soothing and ironically appropriate.
I had pulled rank and kept it at full size, four meters wide in our shared virtual space. Hadil always sat facing away from it.
As the relay station, the only link between Earth and her first colony ship, we could read the Updates from the Cây Cúc but they weren’t meant for us. Once we transmitted it back to Earth, it would be unpacked and pored over by analysts at Da Nang. This Update would have details about the mystery transmission, phrased carefully so that Da Nang wouldn’t think that the crew of the Cây Cúc was having a collective psychotic break. But there wouldn’t be much in the way of analysis from the Cây Cúc, just raw data. The time dilation meant they had no time to sit on information.
And neither did I. Hadil could satisfy his curiosity, but I had laws to break and no time for hypothetical aliens.
It couldn’t possibly be real aliens. They’ve probably discovered a new kind of pulsar.
“You want coffee?” Hadil said.
“No, thanks.”
The slightly acrid smell of instant coffee filled the room. You couldn’t virtualize a kettle, Hadil always said. “Do we have any fresh fruit left?” I asked, not turning around.
The fridge door opened and closed behind me. “Nope. Three days to the next supply drop.”
When he first got here, Hadil had been a little shocked to discover what I was doing. Makemake Station was a two-person miniature civilization at
the outer edge of the solar system. There could be no secrets here, so I had just told him: I was dipping into that precious bandwidth to talk to my grandfather on the Cây Cúc. A strange crime, I’d admitted, but a crime nevertheless. He could have reported me, had me shipped off back home, banned from space.
But Da Nang was very political, even so many years after the troubles. He would be tainted by association, I had told him. I didn’t say that I would make sure of it. He wasn’t stupid. After a few months, he had relaxed. After his first year, we had become friends.
Given enough time, all problems are solvable.
“Oh, crap. Look at this,” Hadil said. He pushed an array of screens across the room in my direction, displacing my own virtual workspace. Process listings and system status monitors, bars in the green flickering up to angry reds.
I rubbed my hands over my close-shaven scalp. “What did you do now?”
“There was an executable binary in the Update,” Hadil moaned. “It was part of the signal they said they picked up.”
“You opened an attachment . . . from space?”
“No! I swear,” Hadil said. He sounded guilty. “Only in a sandbox. I was curious. I’m rebooting.”
I waved at the illegal ghost of my grandfather to continue. Color bled back into the imago’s skin, and light into his eyes.
Dear Dikeledi, Rais said. Granddaughter. He kept looking down at the photo in his hands. I’d walked over and looked at it once, but it cycled through so many pictures of my grandmother and Mom as a baby that it came across blurry and indistinct in the imago. Please let me know about the petition. Has Da Nang given answer? His voice was warm, a little too loud. Little puffs of air from the tiny speakers in my glasses, as if my too-young grandfather had his lips pressed to the soft skin behind my ear.
If things had been different, I would have been one of the twenty thousand colonists. No, that wasn’t right—I wouldn’t even be born yet. If Rais had been allowed to take his wife, Abena, and their infant daughter along with him, my grandmother would be a young woman, my mother still a baby. I wouldn’t be born for another four hundred years.
But he hadn’t been allowed to take them with him. Something happened, eighty years ago, while the family was preparing for departure. My grandmother wouldn’t speak of it except elliptically, to say that Rais made an enemy of someone powerful, someone in the junta, someone with control over the colonization project’s approvals board. I didn’t know exactly what it was that Rais had done to deserve this—Grandma Abena wouldn’t speak of it, and Mom didn’t know. It had been serious enough that after Rais left, Grandma Abena had changed her name and gone into hiding for a while. But by the time Mom was grown up, the urgency and the terror had faded. By the time I was born, it was only history.
I could even appreciate the clever cruelty of it: to give him the choice of being part of the colony, but only if he went alone.
A forced decision, made in haste. I distrusted haste. Decisions needed planning, strategy, not a wild leap into a dilemma constructed by somebody else. And it was still so recent for him, just a year and a half at relativistic speeds. A year and a half of recent memories and regrets, against eighty years of half-forgotten family history for me.
There had been no contact for all of that time, until he got that first message from me. An older woman who called him “grandfather” and told him that his wife and daughter had grown old and died, that I was his only family.
I look forward very much. Your next message, Rais said. Your last before you leave Makemake. Perhaps petition will move faster when you are back in Da Nang.
Rais kept pausing, as if expecting an answer. He wasn’t used to one-way messages yet, having only been doing them for a few weeks. His messages were full of awkward pauses and non sequiturs. Or perhaps the error correction at this range was poorer than I’d accounted for and parts were being lost. There was no way to tell.
Family, under time dilation: he’d append a personal message to the Cây Cúc’s daily update; I’d get it every two months. I’d add a small personal message to the annual update from Makemake; he’d get one of those every week.
When it ended, he would have spent a month talking to me. I would have spent five years, the full term of my contract on Makemake Station. It was almost done.
I nudged Hadil. “Your spikes are on the host network now,” I’d just noticed the angry red spikes indicating increased activity on Makemake Station’s computers both physical and virtual.
“Everything’s showing spikes,” Hadil said. “Except ops and life support.”
“Those are physically separate networks,” I said, absently. The CPU temperature graph was climbing steadily. I’d missed something Rais said. I’d have to rewind him later.
“Will you please switch off your grandpa and check the logs?” I could hear the glare in Hadil’s voice. He was right, but I was reluctant to stop listening.
I’d been ten years younger than Rais was now, when the plan occurred to me. I was still at Nha Trang University, working through the qualifying courses to apply for extraplanetary duty. Plan—more of an intention, then, an understanding that I wanted to do this, that maybe I could, that maybe I should. I’d grown up hearing about Rais from Grandma and dreaming of space, which may have had something to do with my choice of career. But that was the year I put the plan together. The time dilation, Makemake Station, my career, the time and training I’d need to get there. I could talk to Rais himself; I could close the loop, answer the nagging little questions.
Now at forty-two I was as old as Mom when she had me. Ten years older than Rais, who had aged less than a year in my two decades of putting all the pieces together. I’d thought I knew him from Grandma Abena’s stories, from the things Mom didn’t say. Rais had grown bigger in the tellings, his absence having density and mass.
In person, he was too small, too young.
My grandfather’s ghost was flickering again, almost strobing.
Hadil and I both looked at it.
“Did your grandpa break the imago?” Hadil said.
“Shut up,” I said. “I’m pretty sure this is all your fault.” I grinned at him to take the sting out of it a little, while swiping rapidly through the last hour of logs. Makemake generated a lot of logs even when not doing anything in particular. Anything of note should have been flagged. There was nothing.
I really miss Abena, Rais said. He said this every time. He had never known her as a grandmother, with the wrinkles and the white hair that I kept expecting him to have. He wouldn’t talk about Mom at all.
I’d told him in my second message that Mom had lived into her eighties and taught art history. She specialized in Lý dynasty ceramics. But he didn’t acknowledge what I said—or he did and it was lost in the sea, neutrinos that didn’t ping. To him she was still a baby, or should have been.
When I made my plans I had intended to ask him questions. Why leave? Why not stay? Did they force you? Did you choose?
But well-made plans adapt to changing circumstances. I realized when I first saw his imago that closing the loop wasn’t about getting answers to those questions. It was about resetting our time-twisted family’s history back into a single story. It was the open-endedness that nagged at me, the sense that Rais had vanished into some other world—the future, perhaps, or the past—which was forever cut off.
I hope you plan to have kids, Rais whispered.
Rais believed that the petition would allow him to talk to any descendants I left behind, after I died. He didn’t put it like that, but we were all mayflies to him now. Four centuries would elapse on Earth by the time he sent foot on his colony world in a few years. At least a dozen generations. Would my descendants even want to talk to him? I didn’t know, but it felt distant and irrelevant to me.
I didn’t know if I wanted children. I’d had my eggs stored before I left Earth, left myself options. But I didn’t want to pass Rais down like a demented heirloom. I’d made up the story about the peti
tion to get him to stop talking like I was a candle about to be blown out, and now he was obsessed with it.
There was no petition, of course. I wasn’t stupid. That would just attract the wrong sort of attention in Da Nang. People would figure out that what I’d been doing here. At the very least, I’d never work in space again.
“Hey, Dike,” Hadil said. “Is everything flickering for you?” He had taken his glasses off and was rubbing his eyes. “It’s giving me a migraine.”
“Mine seems fine, except for Grandpa,” I said, looking around. “Here, use these. I need a break anyway.” I walked over to him and handed him my glasses.
With my eyes bared, the room was empty and silent. The walls were a neutral gray, designed to be unseen to operators who would cover them with virtual displays. I looked for the spot where the imago had stood, but of course there was nothing there.
I stretched, relaxing my eyes, rolling my neck. On Earth, at least there was a world for the glasses to augment. The sky might be covered in advertising, but you could take the glasses off to see it be blue. Here, it felt like being in an abandoned house. Everything gone but for these ratty old chairs, a couple of desks, the kettle and the fridge in the corner. No color to any of it. I already missed the bright yellows and haunted blues of the Gauguin.
Hadil was waving his arms in the air as if conducting an invisible orchestra.
When they built this habitat and set it spinning eighty years ago, they had ensured that operators would experience standard Earth gravity, for health and sanity. So just sitting, standing, drinking water from a cup, they were all reminders that we lived in a tin can on a string.