Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Well, they must be quite stupid.”

  Mei couldn’t help but smile.

  After the eternity of first lunch, the door was closed behind her again. She carefully took up the tablet, and lifted the back cover away. Pursing her lips, she held down the two buttons on the front and pressed the little circular switch.

  The screen went blank. The China Telecom logo came up. And then a dialog for entering an unlock code.

  Holding her breath, Mei touched the “0” key on the onscreen keyboard five times. The screen blanked for a moment, then came back . . . unchanged. The same request for a code. Failure.

  A harsh bark of frustration escaped her throat and she stared unbelievingly at the screen. She had been sure. It had to work. And it had not.

  I can guess it, she thought, it’s only five numbers . . . but she knew she couldn’t. After a few tries, the tablet would lock itself entirely, become useless.

  Mei took a deep breath. There was a number. If it wasn’t random, she had a chance of figuring it out. But she was still clueless when the bell for second lunch rang.

  First dinner. Second dinner. A night of twisting dreams and fragile sleep. She woke once to screams leaking from the delivery room: one of the girls in the chair. She briefly wondered who, then realized she didn’t care and drifted back into nightmares before the sounds stopped.

  First breakfast. Second breakfast. First lunch. The bells, the bowls, newly unendurable.

  I let myself hope, she thought. So much worse than not having hoped at all.

  She was peripherally aware that Jia Li was sitting next to her. Had asked a question. She tapped Mei’s shoulder softly, which stirred memories of tentative taps during other recent meals. As then, Mei fixed her with a flat stare, wanted to say they could talk later, but speaking seemed far too difficult. She turned back to her food, and Jia Li remained silent.

  “ . . . number . . . ”

  The word landed on Mei’s mind like a leaf on water, drifting out of context. She shook herself alert. A conversation down the table. Two girls, part of the clique headed by Ai Bao. Mei’s concentration bored into their words, barely audible above the murmur of conversation in the room.

  “He must have connections,” said the first girl.

  “Or money.”

  “Or both!”

  “How much do you think a car like that costs?”

  It sounded like gossip about the young man with the Changfeng. But could it be linked . . . ? She turned to the girls.

  “Excuse me, what number were you just talking about?”

  The pair turned and glared, and Mei realized that in her excitement she’d stepped out of place.

  Ai Bao noticed.

  “Hey city girl,” she said with quiet venom, “our business isn’t yours.”

  Mei looked down, choking on her frustration, her heart hammering. In her peripheral vision, she saw Jia Li stand with her tray and walk down toward the other girls.

  “Can I sit with you?” Mei heard her say. “I’m from Yangtouqui.” A village tiny enough that Mei had never heard of it.

  “My cousin married a man from Bianshan, not far away,” said one of the girls.

  “I know it, I have an aunt who lives there,” said Jia Li. “Who is he?”

  Mei, now ignored by the other girls, stared at her bowl and struggled to keep back tears. She had been alone before, and now she was again. She should get used to it.

  Meal times flashed by. She’d tried “12345” on the tablet but didn’t dare guess again.

  She was getting green bowls now, meaning she was due within two weeks. She’d known despair when her parents died, but this was different, open-ended, extending to the horizons of her being.

  It had been four days since her failure to guess the code when Jia Li again sat next to her at first breakfast.

  “The number they spoke of is the license plate of the Changfeng that comes here,” she said. “It is a very auspicious number. They think he must have bribed someone, a lot, to have gotten it.”

  The droning static of hopelessness in Mei’s mind was suddenly quiet.

  “Do you know it?”

  “They say it is A99988. Though they also say in a week, he should be back again.” With more eggs.

  Mei looked at Jia Li, her face flushing as she realized how unfairly she had discounted the girl.

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  “It woke you up. I guessed it was important. Why?”

  Mei hesitated, not wanting to give hope and then take it away.

  “It could be useful,” she said quietly. “I’ll tell you more when I can.”

  Jia Li nodded. Mei noticed that her bowl was now blue, no longer white.

  “The attendant came to you . . . ”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  “I didn’t like it. But there are many things I don’t like,” said Jia Li. “Ai Bao, for example, is cruel. Her friends are frightened. But you are angry. That is better, for being here.”

  “Maybe. But it’s hard.”

  “I know.”

  Back in her room, Mei keyed in 99988. The tablet’s start page flashed up, offering many more options than before. She shook with excitement, and felt an extra thrill as she saw the local and wide area connectivity icons at the top of the screen . . . but it began to waver as they remained transparent. No connection. Jiggering settings didn’t help.

  She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t accept that her progress had been towards a dead end. She tried the browser, the various pre-installed messaging apps, but always ended up at the same error message: “No Internet connection found, please check settings and try again.”

  She felt despair hovering around her, waiting for her to weaken so that it could retake her.

  Almost idly, not allowing herself to consider the death of hope, she browsed through the rest of the newly available apps. Mostly, it was basic stuff—the usual calendar and note-taking kind of thing. But then she found an unusual subfolder.

  Brightleaf Biomanagement.

  She worked straight through the first night. The applications were configuration interfaces for biobots. At first they seemed impossibly complicated, but by poring over the help and scrutinizing the embedded tutorials, she built a rudimentary understanding. She became adept at identifying what she could ignore so she could focus on the relevant elements.

  At first breakfast, Jia Li looked at her with concern.

  “You seem tired . . . is it . . . ?”

  Mei smiled, and Jia Li hesitantly smiled back.

  “I’m tired, but it’s OK. It’s not that that’s keeping me awake. It’s . . . ”

  She wanted to tell her everything, how she’d figured out that the tablets were linking to the biobots in the girls, fine tuning their development. How Mei could now interact with the thing inside her, could control some aspects of it. But with the attendants, the other girls, who knew what ears listening, she couldn’t. She shook her head.

  “Insomnia. It’s just something that happens to me sometimes.”

  The day seemed to move in fast-forward. She buried herself in the programming apps, and during meals her mind churned furiously over the latest setback, often finding a solution by the time she finished eating.

  Jia Li sat next to her at each meal. The two exchanged brief smiles, but her new friend seemed otherwise content to let Mei focus inward, and she was grateful for it.

  At second dinner, Mei noticed that Jia Li was among the last to arrive. She looked pale.

  “Hey, are you OK?” she asked.

  “I don’t feel too good.”

  “If you’re really sick, you can tell the attendant,” said Mei. “But don’t bother her if you don’t need to, you know.”

  Jia Li nodded. “I’ll see. Maybe.”

  Mei turned to her food, let her mind drift back to programming problems.

  That night she fell asleep while working with her tablet, and woke with a start in her chair. She
rubbed her eyes, disoriented, with the vague sense that she’d heard something.

  Then a girl’s scream echoed in the corridor. It froze her, sent her pulse racing. She heard the murmur of voices as well, receding, and sobbing. More screams, now muffled behind the delivery room door. She wondered whose turn it was, and the dinner table with its colored bowls flashed in her mind’s eye. She tried to visualize who had a yellow bowl, the last color. She couldn’t.

  Mei didn’t realize she was looking for Jia Li until the door to the dining room closed. The last girls were getting their trays. Jia Li wasn’t among them. Nor was she further down the table. Mei craned her neck, just to be sure.

  Maybe she overslept, since she had been sick. Maybe they let her stay in her room.

  She looked up from her bowl to see Nuan staring at her from across the table. The shy, slow girl looked down, but Mei kept watching her, and after a few seconds she looked up again.

  “The white truck came last night,” she said softly in her nasal voice.

  “What?” There was a white truck that dropped off supplies sometimes, but Mei had never seen it come at night.

  “At night, it takes girls,” said Nuan.

  Mei felt ice run down her spine.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It hears the screaming, sometimes. It comes.”

  Mei couldn’t speak. A bit farther down the table, Fen Hua had stopped chewing.

  “Some girls get sick from the egg,” Fen Hua muttered to her bowl. “Makes bad problems. Screaming. They go. Nobody sees.”

  Mei took a shuddering breath, then plunged her spoon back into her bowl. She forced her mind back to the programs, felt like she walked a tightrope over despair.

  When her time came, it was bad. As she was led to the reclined chair with its stirrups, she was seized by an image of Jia Li writhing there in agony, her body rejecting the thing that had successfully taken hold in Mei’s womb.

  Then the pain drove the image away, but it couldn’t dispel the sense of her body out of her control, enslaved to this creature that now wanted out and demanded her participation. And out it eventually came.

  She kept her eyes squeezed shut as the attendant cut the cord. She heard its first mewling squeals, high pitched like a kitten’s. A morbid curiosity opened her eyes and she glimpsed it as the attendant carried it away, much smaller than a human baby, wriggling and pink and red.

  It was bad. But it would have been so much worse without the knowledge that she’d made her mark on the little beast, that it was in a way her servant as well.

  “Would you like to hear a story?” asked Doodles.

  It had been a week since Karin’s mother had bought her the creature, in one of the little shops down on Canal. It was cute, but despite its soft, warm fur and the fact that it could speak, there was something about it that made her uncomfortable. Watching it daintily opening a pack of the dense, hard biscuits that it ate, the fact that they had to leave a bathroom door ajar because it couldn’t reach the knob, the bottle of antibacterial gel it fastidiously used next to the toilet . . . it was like having a pet that was also a house guest. Yet it seemed to have less personality than her cat Sandy—it was too chipper, too much like the annoying guide AIs that popped up alongside new apps to “help” you use them.

  It wasn’t even a real FurryBuddy, though Karin didn’t have the heart to tell her mom that. It was glitchy, sometimes spouting garbled nonsense or freezing in place for a minute or more before popping back to life as if nothing had happened.

  But sometimes the stories were fun. Weird fairy tales, or stuff about monsters and aliens. It was as if someone had just dumped the text of a bunch of old books into the thing’s memory—which was actually pretty likely, given its knock-off status, she thought. As it told the stories, its emphasis and pauses were sometimes off, its body language often out of sync, but not enough to ruin them.

  “OK,” said Karin.

  Doodles nodded, but it seemed to pause longer than usual before saying, “This story is in a Cantonese dialect. Would you like me to translate it into English?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  The creature smiled vacantly and swayed gently back and forth, a sign that Karin knew meant the computer in its head was chewing over something.

  Then it stopped moving and looked at her. Karin had never seen the expression it wore before: flat, no hint of a smile, eyes hooded rather than brightly wide. It began to speak in an affectless voice, arms at its sides, staring straight at her.

  “Hello. My name is Mei Feng. I made this toy. I did not want to. This is my story . . . ”

  Draftyhouse

  Erik Amundsen

  Shenroos is a lucky man. He can relax at a fireplace in green velvet on the moon. He is lucky because he has solitude. Eight days, he has been the sole inhabitant of Draftyhouse. Just him, the Bridgeway, a well-stocked cabinet of floral liquors in every shade between green and purple and all the matching flavors of intoxication and a hundred million places where the air is leaking from the great stone mansion into the void. The man in the moon is having a private party, celebrating his eviction, six days overdue but not yet enforced by the Colonial Army. There is a 300-year-old ghostwood coffee table in front of him, his marching orders open on it, a coaster for his collection of glasses and empty bottles.

  Draftyhouse gets like this. Lonesome but never alone. No one has come to take his place, so Shenroos feels justified in squatting. There must be someone here to mind the spiders and husband the flies.

  The spiders work by instinct trained into their line over many generations. They are sensitive to the places where the air seeps out and driven to spin webs there. Feeding the spiders falls to the flies, and feeding the flies falls to the carcass of an elk brought over the Bridgeway in Shenroos’ wheel-barrow, upended into the crackling room with its slats like the exposed ribs of the carcass, named for the obvious.

  Hauling the carcass of an elk must fall to an astronaut, therefore a gentleman. Common folk aren’t fit for outer space and so, in leathers and a helmet and bearing a cart full of ripe elk, comes Shenroos: twenty-eight years of life and twenty-one spent in the walls of this house with the Bridgeway supplying food and water and air. He owns seven rooms of Draftyhouse. Lord of the manor by three rooms and by noble obligation, the only one who sticks around.

  Draftyhouse is larger than some sublunary villages, encased in tall blocks of angled stone. There are a scattering of luxurious, dangerous windows, like arrow-slits from the ancient castles, poured thick with distorting glass. The house breathes a long sigh, exhaling the air that flows across the Bridgeway into space. Every change in that stirring of air registers in the hairs on Shenroos’ neck. A breach would slam the great door shut, sever the Bridgeway and abandon Draftyhouse to Mother Moon. Drink does nothing to dull that sense of doom, nor sleep, nor any task.

  Shenroos is a lucky man because he is aware of death in every twitch of his every nerve, every division of every cell. The surface of the moon is littered with many other places so abandoned and walkers who go outside sometimes come back from those places with the remains of foreign outposts and foreign dead to decorate the house. Shenroos’ ancient wheelbarrow has brought more bones than just elk into Draftyhouse.

  Shenroos, when he stirs, presses his hand or his ear to the walls, places carved with mottos and poems, bas-relief and pattern. There are no walls in Draftyhouse not in the work of astronaut hands or old hunting tapestries for the privacy of the spiders beneath, weaving, listening. They all listen to the slow language of the walls, the drone of earthy consciousness, telluric current pulsing in the stone like sap through a slow, ancient tree. It is that current which keeps Shenroos close to the floor and his limbs the proper weight. The attraction weighing him and anything it touches down, the shared circulatory system of a composite entity.

  Shenroos studied the principles and equations behind it, not for scholarship but self-discovery. You do not jump in Draftyhouse, unless you like a close view of
the vaulted ceilings. When you sleep, you sleep on the floor, like a monk.

  Shenroos reels through the chambers of Draftyhouse when he is not reading ghost stories. He’s drunk and uninspired. Shenroos has composed stillborn, premature poems, bitten off at their cords and his mouth is rusty at the corners from the birthing. Epics in old traditional styles about hunters tracked by ghosts across snowy hills, priests giving prophecy, their sleeves and pockets stiff with gore. Then he finds the ghost. He has been looking for words worth carving into these walls and a place to carve them. There are places, spaces, nooks and crannies accreted over the place like luster on a pearl, some well hidden. None untouched. Shenroos is looking over those overlooked corners when the ghost rides through, slouched on the spectral body of an elk in the leathers and helmet of an astronaut.

  Shenroos mistakes its scratching for the sound of a rat. Wise rats do not come to the moon; foolish ones get hunted by all present in grand affairs that go on from the first sighting of the little animal until its death. The thought of a rat of his own to hunt and stalk is enough to perk his sodden sensibilities. His eyes seek out movement in the dim of the house, the pale glow of the cold-lighting, but what they see isn’t movement, just an image that Shenroos’ brain wants to make into a shadow of a curtain and the silhouette of a hunting trophy. This is not what his brain wants there to be. The ghost becomes clear.

  The ghost does not look at him; the elk does. Not one of the slate-furred animals of Shenroos’ native forests. This one is the color of an old scab, the color of a priest’s trailing sleeves. Shenroos knows better than to trust his eyes, the hour, or anything else but his feet. They are bare against the cold stone of the floor, and through them, he feels a thing, light, but present in the telluric current, in front of him, a thing moving, a thing with mass.

  The ghost’s arms are tangled in the beast’s antlers, the head, a half-grinning, jawless skull nods in the helmet, the lines and ink of the astronaut’s facial marks transferred from the flesh to the bone. The flesh resolves between those markings, an astronaut family that Shenroos does not know, and the skull beneath.