by Neil Clarke
Throughout the sky floaters offer their tendrils, and flyers accept the embrace. Jen observes the ballooner-flyer unions. A transparent, sharp-tipped tube slides from the ballooner into the now-open cranial vent above the flyer’s braincase. The flyer’s wings twitch. A milky fluid slides up the tendril. After the fluid is consumed, the ballooner detaches, and the flyer’s corpse falls until it’s lost in the cloud deck below.
A nearby ballooner tenderly wraps filaments around Jen’s body. Its transparent tubule descends. Her companion holds their body rigid in ecstasy. The eyes refuse to close. Helplessly, Jen sees the knife-like tube penetrate her cranial vent.
Ras.
Douglas walked to the tank. Ras followed. The life form was a gutted carcass except for the damaged mass of residual brainstem.
“The drone picked up her auto-retrieve,” Douglas said. “It brought the body home. There wasn’t much left inside the braincase.”
Ras refused to fall apart in front of the man who killed his wife. Douglas should have stopped her.
Jen, that was stupid.
Then: Jen. How could you leave me?
Douglas’s voice broadcast his discomfort. “The so-called ballooners secrete an enzyme solution that dissolves cortical tissue. They digest the semi-fluid mass, assimilate the memories, then distribute them throughout the species. It’s an astonishing method of information exchange.” Emotion surfaced on Douglas’s features. Anger. Grief. “It might succeed with human tissue. The biochemistries match that well.”
Ras stood hugging himself, shaking uncontrollably. He wanted to scream, to hit something, to die. Douglas opened his mouth to speak, and Ras walked away.
He waited by the door. It wouldn’t open without Douglas. From behind him the old man placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come talk to me when you’re ready. I know what it is to lose someone. Not a thing that happens much anymore. Psych ware is at your disposal. Her body is in Main Med.”
He placed something small in Ras’s hand. “This contains the sensemem record of her thoughts and experiences in Jupiter’s atmosphere. She loved you very much. She would want you to have it.”
The door opened. Ras tasted blood where he’d bitten his lip. When Douglas left, he was absolutely, irrevocably alone.
Capping Callisto station’s “north pole,” the EVA bay was loaded with sixteen serviced and readied off-station craft, from tiny scooters to soloships to a deep-space outrider recently returned from the Oort Cloud.
The vessels floated in their bays, tethered by umbilicals to far-away walls. Ras looked “up” at them from the bay’s master control station.
“I wasn’t expecting you, Dr. Bodogom,” the attendant said. “I don’t see your authorization in my log.”
Ras adjusted his grip on a handhold, re-orienting his perspective to the garage bay with just enough clumsiness to appear awkward in the local microgravity. The diversion allowed him time to consider the situation.
He nodded at the fair-haired man. “Just routine.” He pointed toward a craft that looked like an egg stuck to the top of an elaborate candlestick. “Dr. Kangeledes and I never got a chance to test the skyrider. Not before my . . . my accident, and Jen’s—”
He stopped. Pain swelled inside his chest. He pressed it down as he had so often during the past twenty-eight hours. The effort left him gasping for breath.
“Oh. Jeez,” stammered the attendant, whose name patch said, “Bob Ngo.” “Condolences. I’m surprised to see you here. I’m so sorry.”
The look on Ras’s face stopped Bob’s nervous yammer as thoroughly as a slap. Ras worked to relax his clenched fist. He would not strike this man who’d done nothing but offer sympathy. Douglas would be another story.
“I’m sorry,” Bob apologized for the third time.
“It’s all right.” The hell it was.
Bob looked relieved. “I thought you were in psych, you know, after all you’ve gone through, who wouldn’t be?”
He meant well. Ras just couldn’t manage to care. And Bob Ngo was in his way. Ras said, “Dr. Niall advised me that work would help me deal with the grief. Who am I to argue?” He patted Bob’s arm. The young man smiled gratefully.
Ras had ignored Dr. Niall’s attempts to contact him. “So this is just doctor’s orders. I left something inside the skyrider’s pod there the time I used it.”
“I need to see your authorization.”
Shit. “Mr. Ngo. Bob. Just let me pop over there, comb through the pilot pod, then we can both get on with our day.”
“I’d like to, Dr. Bodogom. But it’s my ass out an airlock if I don’t confirm.” He reached toward the console. Ras whipped a device from his pocket. The quick movement surprised Bob. He stared right into the pink mist Ras shot at him. Bob’s eyes glazed and he drifted away, loose-limbed in the low G.
Biobrains are easily tampered with, Ras thought with satisfaction. After inserting the coded wafer into the console, he launched himself toward the skyrider with acrobatic precision. Its hull puckered open. He slid into the pilot pod, then harnessed himself into one of the two control seats. Ras enabled the fusion engine. A multitude of thimble-sized thrusters fired and the craft moved into space.
Stars languorously revolved around Ras as if he were the galaxy’s center. Callisto was already diminished by distance. Here, he was shielded from the despair, grief, and anger that threatened to consume him.
Jupiter grew in his view screen, the only hint of momentum. The ship would hit the south temperate zone on the dawn side of the planet’s terminator, near the reproachful eye of the Great Red Spot.
As Ras moved his right forefinger, data displays and instrument screens annotated the view. One hour, sixteen minutes until atmosphere. He fingered the gold medallion attached to the front of his life suit. Within nestled a crystalline mnemochip, its contents uploaded and analyzed and cross-referenced by people who couldn’t look Ras in the eye.
Kami had retracted the top of Jen’s biostasis cell into the Main Med wall. Ras asked for her because she was kind. After Jen’s body emerged, Kami touched his shoulder, then stepped back to give him privacy.
Jen’s body lay on the translucent blue tabletop. Her naked flesh was warm. Ras knew her every curve, from her breasts to the belly she complained bulged. Her open eyes gazed sightlessly at the ceiling. They were left open to accept the gel that kept them moist. A futile care now.
A blue cloth shielded Jen’s open cranium. Ras squeezed her hand, waiting for her to squeeze back. Of course she didn’t. Ras asked, “Why didn’t they use her neural map? She had an update.”
“You know the limitations. We can fix it, we can augment it. We can’t create a working brain from scratch. Not yet.” Kami measured her words carefully. “We’ll keep her until you decide what to do.”
“Do what you like.” Ras dropped Jen’s hand. “There’s nothing here I care about.”
The pod’s comm shattered the hush. Douglas’s voice came through. “Dr. Bodogom. We’re sending a drone to retrieve you.” Pause. “Unless you come back. This won’t help. Nothing helps but time. I know this.” Ras clicked off the commlink. It was a futile gesture since Douglas could reestablish it, but it gave him satisfaction.
Jupiter centered itself in a trajectory display as the skyrider initiated a course adjustment burn. The skyrider’s hull skin hardened, protecting him from the planet’s monstrous radiation belts.
There were three hours till atmosphere. Ras tapped up a screen and enlarged its frame to encompass sixty percent of the forward view. There was only one thing left to do. He inserted the mnemochip from the medallion. Her voice embraced him. Excited, wistful, and a little frightened. He gasped, but kept listening.
At midcourse turnaround, gravity-like pressure returned and the ship decelerated ass-backwards on a spike of fusion fire. Ras opened his bloodshot eyes. Snot and tears slicked his face. His hands were puffy with bruises from pounding the solid arm rest. It was built to withstand forces greater than merely human.
> The instruments could handle descent. Cloud formations lumbered like great armadas across the view screen. The pod’s walls darkened to filter out the sun and illuminate the instruments. Artificial synapses shot preprogrammed instructions fore and aft, and sections of the capsule’s body reconfigured. Soon Ras sat within something part airship, part bathyscaphe, created for this unearthly environment.
The mnemochip was warm against his fingers. With his free hand he tapped controls and adjusted the view projected around him. This is where they’d been seen many times before. Where Jen had been one of them. His fingers squeezed the medallion hard.
Be here.
Douglas looked over Xiao’s shoulder. The fool’s actions weren’t entirely unexpected. He could have had him restrained. He could have required the psych treatment.
Tessa insisted Anton treat people with decency. “It’s not right to play with people’s lives.” That was their forever argument. Forever until Tessa decided he could bend the whole human race to his will, but not her. Douglas sighed.
That was a hole that nothing could fill. Ras was learning the dimensions of his particular hole, a Jen Kangeledes-sized emptiness. Douglas had his own abyss. Xiao glanced his way, worry creasing his forehead. Douglas put a fatherly hand on the man’s shoulder. At least he could act as if he cared.
Bodogom’s ’rider was at the proper coordinates. Situation normal.
They approached. Slow. Possibly fearful. The ballooners arrived, their skins shifting in patterns of bright colors. Jen thought it was a language. Each living airship possessed a cardiovascular system and a nervous system and digestion and . . . what? A brain? Certainly. Mind? Demonstrably.
Some part of Jen? To be determined.
He recorded, “There’s a herd ahead of me. They’re closer now than they were when I arrived an hour ago. I believe they know I’m here.”
Of course they did. The ballooners’ echolocation pulses ponged out of the computer like the beats of a kettle drum. External mics tracked the high-frequency chatter of the manta ray-like flyers.
“The herd is comprised of fifty-four ballooners ranging in size from ninety meters across down to just under fourteen. I make out three, possibly four, distinct somatic variations. Several varieties of flyers move among them in a roughly spherical halo with defined boundaries.”
They were not a “herd.” It was a tribe with hierarchies and language and history and protocols. They had needs and emotions. Jen had felt those needs, carried by a winged sentience that should never have existed.
Why were they here? Who were they? Ras rolled the questions around his brain, just as he had every day since Douglas first told him why he had brought him and Jen to Jupiter. What did these creatures mean to humanity? What did they mean to Ras?
Fifty-something thousand years ago.
During the Late Pleistocene, humanity hunted, fished, painted their bodies and gathered in caves and around fires. They carved wood and bone and stone. They loved each other and taught their children. They spoke in languages long forgotten. And they killed each other. In love. In anger. Sometimes to appease spirits Ras didn’t believe in.
His ancestors, and the ancestors of these creatures, shared the same long, chaos-twisted bloodline with all the generations that had fucked and bred and died until he was spat out into the world. These beings were lost strands of humanity’s genetic cloth. But fifty thousand years ago, their thread was pulled.
Ras expanded the image projected around him. To his eyes, he sat suspended in the Jovians’ home environment, on a chair with only a paper-thin console in front of him. He rotated the chair 360°, and endless cloudscapes revealed themselves. He could imagine himself as alone in the universe. He was alone.
Except for a faint upright rectangle of green light. It marked the pod’s door. Acid burned the back of his throat. He needed to know if any of Jen’s neural patterns still existed within the Jovian host. Did she live on in this alien community in some biochemical transcendence?
If yes, could Ras forgive her?
Tapping the console, he brought up a three-dee box near his left shoulder. Centered in the box was a realtime exterior view floating at arm’s length. Again he tapped the console. The model’s colors changed. Programmed images formed on the airship’s skin mimicking images recorded by Jen.
“I have initiated contact sequence. The program is based on a sim-version from the retrieved recording. He couldn’t say Jen’s name out loud. “They continue to close. Otherwise, no response.”
His hands shook. Good thing he disabled the psych monitors. For several minutes now Ras had a finger on the firing controls of the onboard laser emitter. Useful for both back-up communications and spectroanalysis, the free-variable laser could also burn through flesh at a hundred kilometers. The finger quivered.
He could destroy them. Watch their fragile bodies scorch and burst. Count the seconds as they fell into the deep atmosphere. They murdered his wife.
Were the ballooners and flyers paying attention to the display? Could they recognize Jen’s final memories playing out on the hovering metal alien?
He unlocked the firing program. The laser was set for a single narrow beam, maximum intensity. At a finger stroke, the image of the emitter gun appeared. A narrow blade would slice through as many targets as he chose. It would be so easy.
There was nothing left of his wife. Jen had never believed it, but deep down, he knew she was wrong. And now, wasn’t he standing, walking proof that when you die, you’re gone? Was he Ras Bodogom anymore? No. He was a neuronet copy of the man Jen had loved, and would never love again.
He eyed the life forms. The ballooner’s skin colorings flowed against each other. Deep sea creatures with no more brains than snails could do that trick. The target display centered on the creature’s vast body.
He pressed the firing pad.
Nothing happened.
Ras smiled. He had deactivated the laser before launch. A chill passed over Ras’s body, like a fever breaking, as he “shot” Jovian after Jovian, imagining shrieks and gouts of blood splattering the clouds. It felt good. Panting, he tapped the console. The laser control display vanished.
“Dr. Bodogom, this is Jovias project.” Douglas’s voice. “Our system discerns no intelligible pattern in the native life forms’ dermal colorings. Come back home now.”
Ras floated among the cloud-castles. Jen would love this. She had loved this. The sun tinted the cloudscape peach and pale yellow. The beings out there waited for his next move.
“Jovias, don’t worry about me. I’m going to step outside for a while.”
He stood. The rhythm of his heart beat loud in his ears. Ras walked across the invisible floor to the upright rectangle of green light and stepped through it, vanishing into the Jovian morning.
Found
Alex Dally MacFarlane
Star Anise
Star anise was the contents of one drawer in my spice cabinet: was worth one good energy cell—or three not-so-good ones, or six bad ones, or eight that provided barely any power at all.
I had never traded for just one energy cell. None remained.
At this last asteroid, I had not traded for any. I had found its interior spaces open and airless, blast-marked, most of its equipment broken or gone, debris—shards of metal, rock, old synth materials, blackened bits of bone—still lodged in some deep crannies. In such a small asteroid, a sudden equipment failure could be unsurvivable. I knew this.
It shook me to see it true, after the changes and losses and accidents we had adapted to.
As I confirmed my trajectory and fired my small thrusters two times, once to get clear from the asteroid and once to push me to the next asteroid—just a bright dot in the distance, lost among the stars like another granule of salt—I couldn’t stop myself thinking: What if Aagot had lived there?
Bay
I placed a bay leaf on my tongue.
I maneuvered my craft carefully into the landing crater: a process as natur
al, as easy as an asteroid’s spin. Still, I sighed with relief when my craft hooked into place. It wouldn’t survive a crash.
After triple-checking the integrity of my suit, I drifted out onto the asteroid’s surface with my spice cabinet.
Cut into another part of the asteroid was a landing bay built for spacecraft far bigger than mine: craft that would have arrived to collect platinum and iron and enough liquid hydrogen to fuel their onward journeys. A story. A dream of the past. If I could land in the landing bay, I wouldn’t have to go outside for the meters it took to reach the small airlock—outside, where the stars waited like teeth for my suit to fail—but its use required too much energy.
When the people from Cai Nu arrived, would they be welcomed into the asteroids’ landing bays?
I winced. I wanted to think of something else.
I pressed the bay leaf to the roof of my mouth.
The people of this asteroid had barely opened their mouths before the words “Cai Nu” fell out. They gathered around me in the small communal room, wanting my words even more than my spices. “I have cardamom,” I said. “We managed to get it growing again.” And a few people sighed longingly, before one of them asked what people were saying privately, face-to-face—instead of on the inter-asteroid comms—about the impending arrival of the Cai Nu people. Almost everyone who lived in the asteroid was holding onto the poles running along the room’s rock walls. I counted over twenty people. Though I recognized many of the faces, not one was Aagot’s. “I don’t know much more than what’s on the comms,” I said, reluctant to admit that I rarely listened to the messages my craft picked up between the asteroids. I knew that the Cai Nu people would arrive in less than a year. I knew that our lives in the asteroids would end.
The questions continued to come.
Eventually they realized that I could tell them nothing. Disappointed, a few people drifted away. Others spoke: explaining how many energy cells they could give me, asking what spices that was worth.
“What would you like?” I asked, touching the gray drawers of my cabinet. Etched into the iron were the names of the spices: star anise, cardamom pods, cloves, chilies, cinnamon bark, peppercorns, fennel seeds, coriander seeds, dried coriander leaves, dried sage leaves, juniper berries, lemongrass, dried makrut leaves, cumin seeds, dried mint leaves, dried bay leaves, sprigs of thyme and rosemary, flakes of galangal, flakes of turmeric. Flavor. Some people said that word like a plea at a shrine. Spices made our food—synthetic, completely nourishing, completely tasteless—alive, made it something we wanted to share with each other. Chewing a cardamom pod brought tears to people’s eyes. A sage leaf provoked joyous laughter.