Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  Monkey stuck his tongue out at me, but then he turned and faced my sister.

  “Sophie,” he said, his voice too deep for his tiny body. “Would you like to be a doctor, like your mother?”

  Sophie’s tough. She didn’t throw Monkey off her, though she snatched her hand away.

  “What?”

  “I can teach you. The way I’m teaching Cesar to work his computer,” Monkey said. “I can teach you to help people, the way your mom used to. You want to learn?”

  Sophie looked at the little animal in her lap, eyes wide, lips starting to move, then the balcony door scraped open. Mom, red eyed and bleary, grimaced out into the bright daylight.

  “Who the hell you talking to out here?”

  “Cesar’s monkey,” Sophie said.

  Mom stared at Monkey. “Rats with thumbs. Carry disease y’know. Should . . . ” Her voice trailed away and she stumbled away from the light, back inside. The sound of plastic bottles rattled through the door, her searching for another swallow.

  Sophie shoved the door shut. “What is he, Cesar?”

  “Magic,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t know. Little bastard won’t tell me.”

  “I’m telling you what you need, Cesar.” Monkey’s tail curled loose around Sophie’s wrist. “So you and yours can leave this place.”

  “So we can be safe?” Sophie asked.

  Monkey stared at me with his dark eyes, not answering, so I did.

  “Not safe, Sophie. Strong.”

  Excerpted from Constellation Prize:

  Bogie 1’s leaving the system today. (Don’t start with the quibbles. She’s in the Kuiper belt, and that’s my finish line. Going as fast as she is, it’s not like she’s going to turn around.)

  She came, popped her baby, slung around the sun, and now she’s off to boldly go wherever the hell she’s going next.

  Which just leaves us with Bogie 2. Which is definitely headed straight at us, after those course corrections we saw it fire off last week.

  So what the hell is it?

  An instrument package? An ambassador? A bomb?

  Maybe it’s a fucking fruit basket.

  The answer is, we don’t know. And since both ships refuse to return our calls, we won’t know until it gets here. Frustrating, init?

  Gosh, if only we could do something, like meet it half way, wouldn’t that’d be great? Oh, but to do that we would need a space program that wasn’t a complete fucking joke.

  I know, we couldn’t afford it. Billionaires needed tax breaks and artists needed grants to paint their asses blue. I get that.

  I’m just saying it might’ve been nice to have the opportunity to be proactive here, instead of just watching as Bogie 2 cruises in.

  Because while it’s probably not a bomb, it’s not like we could do shit about it if it was.

  I guess we’ll have to be content in knowing we spent our money on more important shit. Like winning the war on drugs, amiright?

  Christ, we are such dumbasses. If it is a bomb, we deserve it.

  The girl slammed the man down in our living room, scattering vodka bottles, screaming for the doctor.

  I don’t know how she hauled him up all those stairs, big as he was. She had though, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to listen to me tell her the doctor was too hung over to help.

  She yelled, I yelled, the man bled and groaned, then my sister shoved in.

  “Shut up, Cesar, and hold him,” Sophie snapped at me, wiping blood away from the knife handle that protruded from the man’s belly.

  Too confused to argue, I did what she said. The girl shut up too, staring at Sophie. I wondered why she didn’t protest about a kid taking charge, but shit, Sophie was doing something.

  Her hands danced across the man, pressing and poking into his neck, armpits, and groin. He groaned once, then passed out. Sophie jumped up, ducked into her room, and bounced back before I could yell at her with a suture kit and drug vials.

  “Thought Mom sold all her shit.”

  “Not what I hid,” Sophie said. “Grab the knife.”

  “Why?”

  “Cause when I tell you, you’re going to pull it out.”

  “What?”

  “Do it, Cesar,” Sophie said, her voice taking that crisp tone our Mom’s used to get before she whupped us. “Do it just how I say, or he’ll bleed out. And if I lose my first patient cause of you, you’ll be my second.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Sophie gathered her supplies, paused to look at Monkey, who nodded at her. Then she started telling me what to do.

  “Rest, clean water, and meat if you can get it. He lost a lot of blood.” Sophie sounded exhausted, but she stood straight as she explained to the girl what her father would need. I listened and spun the knife in my hand, wondering what the hell to make of my little sister.

  “Thank you.” Lisa, the girl, she was about my age. “We owe you.”

  I stilled the knife, looked at the anchor branded into the skin of the girl’s arm. “You’re fisherfolk?”

  “Yes. We’ll get you fish, whatever you want.” For the first time I noticed her long braids, her rich red-brown skin and my tongue went all sideways.

  “Fish. Well—”

  “What the hell’s this?”

  Mom stepped into the room, ragged with involuntary sobriety. She looked at the man stretched across our floor, a row of stitches marking his belly. “Who the hell did that?”

  “I did,” Sophie said, almost a whisper.

  “When’d you decide to play doctor?”

  “When you got too drunk to be one.”

  Mom stared at her, red-rimmed eyes almost focusing for once, then she turned away, stumbling back into her room.

  “Who was—”

  “Nobody,” I told the girl, my tongue free again. “You got a boat?”

  “Course we do.”

  “Good,” I said, “We’re going to need a ride, sometime soon.”

  “That we can trade you, easy.” She smiled at me, and I smiled back, a little dizzy again. I looked away from her to catch my breath and caught sight of Monkey’s tail disappearing into Mom’s room.

  Excerpted from Constellation Prize:

  A year’s passed since Bogie 2 blazed across the sky, broke up and dropped its pieces into the deepest parts of the ocean, and what’s happened?

  Nothing.

  So is that all the show our visitors planned for us?

  Doubtful.

  They’re down there, doing something. Spying? Colonizing?

  Poking Cthulhu with a stick?

  I have no fucking clue. None of us do. Us curious Georges gotta wonder, though. We stare at the waves and try to imagine what’s going on down there. What are they doing, what are the planning?

  When are they coming out?

  Because they will. They didn’t come all this way for nothing. Someday they’re going to surface, and then what?

  In the comments, in my inbox, everyday, that’s the question, over and over. What are they going to do to us?

  Christ, how the hell should I know?

  All we can do is watch the sea and wait, and hope that maybe, if we’re lucky, they won’t fuck us over anymore than we’ve already fucked ourselves.

  “Where you folk going?”

  Samuel had a rough voice to go with his big body, but he treated me nice. He treated Sophie like a saint.

  “New Orleans,” I said.

  “Orleans? Why in hell would you want to go somewhere more messed up than South Padre, boy?”

  Because a man waited there with three new US national ID cards, each of them tied to grey market credit lines flush with the money I’d drained from some private accounts last week. A certain ceegee officer and her boys were going to be wondering where all their money had gone, soon.

  I just smiled. “No worries, Samuel. You get us there, we’ll be fine.”

  The big man grumbled, but went back to his rigging, rubbing his hand over the raw pink scar on his bel
ly. His daughter helped him, and when Lisa caught me staring at her she smiled.

  “We should bring them along.”

  Monkey’s whisper made me jump, but he clung to my shoulder easy enough, lips brushing my ear as he spoke. “We’ll need more people on the mainland.”

  “What for?” I asked, turning to the rail, away from the fisherfolk.

  “Getting stronger. Look.”

  Following his arm, I could see something floating in the water. An old door, and on it—

  “Jesus,” I swore. “One for each of us, right?”

  “You’ll each need one. To learn, to grow.”

  I stared at the little monkeys clustered on the makeshift raft, staring back at me. “Grow into what?”

  “Something better.” Monkey shifted on my shoulder, and I realized how much I’d missed him being there these last few weeks. He’d helped me crack the ceegee’s accounts and arrange our documents, but he spent most of his time now with my mother, whispering in her ear. “We’re going to help you. All of you. There will be those, though, who won’t like that.”

  “The people who make me and mine weak,” I whispered.

  “It’ll change, Cesar. Your family will grow, and there are other families, all around the world, growing and learning like you. You’ll come together, someday, and it’ll all change.” Monkey dropped from my shoulder, starting towards the prow where my mother stood, staring out at the waves. Standing straight, clean, sober.

  “What are you teaching her?” I called after him, not caring who heard, knowing it didn’t matter.

  Monkey stopped and looked back at me, eyes shining with sunlight. “I’m teaching her about hope, Cesar. Hope, and God.”

  Something thumped against the hull, and over the rail the new monkeys bounded, eager to teach.

  Sirius

  Ben Peek

  Emily Parker

  At the edge of Deacon College on Tunel Five, the statue of Amadou Qaramanli stands in an empty, sunlit square. A lab technician, he was born in Tripoli, and began working in the expansion of the Earth Empire at the age of sixteen, dying on a planet ninety seven percent water at the age of thirty four, having lived three years longer than myself. Pictures of him reveal an unassuming man, neither tall, nor overweight, nor blessed with a great or distinctive mind. Of his personal life, of his likes and dislikes, and of the small parts that make each of us an individual, history has nothing recorded. By the time I had been born, he had been dead for a century and humanity had been introduced to hundreds of new cultures and was struggling to establish itself. Asking for him to be anything but a cautionary tale amongst lab technicians was too much by then.

  The story I heard was this:

  Amadou and fellow Libyan born researcher, Dr. Waled, were a pair of sweat-stained, badly dieted, over-worked men sharing a run-down house in Saire, the capital city of Tunel Five. Tunel was one of the first gift planets by the Ta’La, a nomadic, pale-skinned, tall race that gifted the conquered planets they had no use for to other cultures. There, both men came into contact with a hemorrhagic virus named after the planet. It was the first incident between the two cultures and apologies were made, later. But, beneath the afternoon sun, far away from the official records, and feverish and with pains throughout their bodies, both men made the diagnosis and discussed the diluted state of the immune serum they had on the plastic table before them. They had enough for one shot each but, in the orange drenched evening, they acknowledged that their chances of survival were slim. As the sun darkened again and blood seeped from Amadou Qaramanli’s eyes, he told Dr. Waled to take both doses.

  The statue on the planet Tunel Five was funded by Dr. Waled after his return to Earth. For decades, the portly scientist told the story of Amadou’s sacrifice, going as far to write about it in his self-published memoirs as a sacrifice for science, a technician’s recognition of the importance of his role. It was a book that sold only to technicians, as Waled, apart from this one event, was an even more unremarkable man than his technician. Having read the book and understanding the tale I, when discovering that the door to the lab containing infected mice had not closed properly after I stepped out of my suit, and fearing Dr. Singh’s response, took two shots of antibiotic cocktails, one for myself and one for the memory of Amadou.

  Two hours later, alone in my room on board Sirius, I sneezed.

  That was all.

  John Gale

  Maria, I am sorry.

  I thought to come home, to hold you, to touch you, to let the sun sink into my skin, turn me brown, but I cannot. You cannot see the destroyed station below me. You cannot know that it began with the body of Emily Parker, a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair. She was delivered to me by her parents, an elderly pair of Ta’La ethnographers who pushed her into my theater on the back of a silver cart. They told me, as we lifted her, that the Ta’La thought us callous because we mutilated our dead to learn how they had passed. They asked if I could be as gentle as possible with their daughter. As they spoke, Sirius orbited the dusty, red planet of Solle, a gift to the Earth Empire from the beings that saw us as cold and cruel; beings that let us rotate our personnel between the planet and the station, let us cut into the planet as we did our dead, examining it as we built atmospheric pressurizers on top of it, as we proved to them we could colonize the stars.

  Only you are in my thoughts as I look upon the wreckage that my body now lies in. I wish we had done things differently. Parker followed her parents, or her parents followed her, I do not know which, but I felt your loss in their presence, so much so that while I noted the slight discoloration around the body’s fingers and the gentle swelling in the stomach, I did not fully comprehend it. I would have cut if the head of the Science and Research Department, Dr. Anu Singh, had not strode in. He wore a yellow bio-hazard suit and his breath echoed with every step.

  In quarantine, the parents apologized.

  “We just didn’t think,” the father, Edward, said. His lined face sagged, as if the skin would drop away. “This is our first planet. Our—”

  “We were just—” Trish, the mother, paused. “She was our only daughter,” she finished quietly.

  Maria, I miss you.

  Anu Singh

  The problem was simple: to that tall, skeleton race of nomads who wandered across the universe, we were biologically and culturally inferior. Their opinion was clear in the discoloration on Emily and Edward Parker’s fingers, but you could also see how they underestimated us, did not fully understand us, yet. Trish Parker and John Gale did not have the same discoloration and the slight bloating in Emily was singular. As were John Gale’s tumors, which were found inside the heart and argued a rapid onset with no pre-existing condition. Nothing suggested an epidemic yet, but after the death of a young boy who had no connection to Emily Parker, her parents, or John Gale, I took my concerns to the Station Commander, Bruce Cawell.

  “You can’t quarantine the entire Sirius, doctor,” he said, snappish in the way that elderly white Londoners are. A career soldier, his hair close cut and white, he sat before me in his sparse office and sipped water while the rim of Solle, a dirty, red-brown smear, grew outside. “It would panic people and only stop the planetside rotation from returning in nineteen days, days before, I might add, their food and water needs to be resupplied.”

  I tried to impress upon him the fact that we had no idea what had caused it.

  “We have five deaths,” he said, punctuating his diminishing patience by placing his glass down loudly. “It is tragic, but by your own admittance the boy’s death may not even be connected to the first four.”

  Beneath us is a planet with untold secrets, I told him. We bring into our quarantine labs rocks, soil, and the remains of anything we find that is interesting, but we do so like a child slapping blindly at blocks that need to go into a hole. The Ta’La tell us that once, they conquered thousands of planets in a history that they wish to step away from. That they instead, now, wish to help the universe, to grow it
, but to do so with a vision we cannot understand.

  “I am aware that the Ta’La are not always thoughtful with their gifts, doctor, but Sirius is fitted with very expensive and very state-of-the-art filters and monitoring systems. With none of those tripped, you are jumping to conclusions.”

  I pressed him to acknowledge the possibility that a secondary infection, one that was droplet-based, could be carried through the system after being spread by sneezing or dust or mice.

  “Are you missing any mice?” he asked.

  No, I told him.

  He smiled faintly. “Perhaps we can cross that one out, then.”

  My response, I admit, was not the most calculated. I have never dealt well with those who cannot see clearly. To my outburst, Commander Cawell straightened and his pale, cold eyes held mine. “Five people have died, doctor. I am not making jokes. Nor am I humoring you anymore. New diseases on our own planet are found all the time, but we do not panic then, nor now. Your belief that the Ta’La are responsible is misplaced.”

  When I began to argue, he said, “I suggest you return to your lab.”

  My hands curled around the plastic handles, furious.

  “You are dismissed,” he said.

  Outside, I let out a frustrated breath. How could he be so blind? Already, I could feel a heaviness in the air, as if there was something new to it, something that we had not seen. Ahead of me in the hallway ran small air ducts, just as there were hundreds throughout Sirius, each of them linking back to a central system that was shared by everyone in the station. To me, it was already a beating, diseased heart, spreading the virus across the ship and my breath was a series of shallow, nervous gasps through my teeth as I made my way to my lab and the contamination suit within.

  I would live in it for six weeks, the longest of anyone on board Sirius, the longest of anyone who stands around me wordlessly now. Such was my prize for being right.