Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  Bruce Cawell

  I did not believe that the Pakistani was right. It was a simple mistake, born from personal dislike.

  At the time he approached me, Singh had been on board Sirius for just eight station months, an unpleasant replacement for the talented Dr. Ken. This far out into the system, colony stations are not given much choice about who is sent, and in my capacity of commander on this small bastion at the edge of civilization, I have worked with all kinds. The experience had made me more tolerant, though with Singh, it was if I was green all over again.

  He arrived wanting to make a career for himself, a scientist who believed that it would take him a year to find a disease to make his name and gain tenure in a planet lab. He believed that the Ta’La were killers, that they were involved in our slow genocide, and he wanted proof of that to take back home. Within weeks, he was pushing his lab workers, demanding results that could not happen, and asking for tests that were nothing short of invasive in both privacy and decency from those who returned from Solle. I had already been forced to intervene on two separate occasions when the doctor overstepped his mark. With a limited intelligence and an even more limited moral compass, Dr. Singh had rapidly become detestable not just to me, but the entire Sirius crew.

  My mistake was that I could not see beyond that.

  When his staff informed me that the morning after our meeting he had appeared at work in a yellow biohazard suit, having walked the public corridors in it, my first instinct was to lock him up. He was clearly unfit for the duty that had been bestowed to him. When I started receiving calls not just from within the station, but from the planet, demanding to know what ‘outbreak’ had taken place, I took two soldiers and visited Singh’s room after his scheduled hours. When I arrived, he was not there, and I unlocked the door to his unit to wait for him. Inside, I found it in disarray: the tables, chairs, clothes and bed were pushed up against the wall, hastily thrown to make room for a large map that covered the ground. It took me a moment to realize that it was Sirius itself, with five dots on it. The dots represented the paths that the deceased had traveled upon in their last day.

  If it was airborne virus, I thought before stopping myself. With a shake of my head, I removed a chair from the pile against the wall and settled down to wait. Staring at the map for that time did not, I admit, help me believe I had made the right choice the day before, but I have already admitted my flaw and will not dwell on it. Perhaps events would have gone differently if I had remained there and stared at the map, if I had allowed Singh’s paranoia to seep into me, but an alert was sent to me that a new body had been found and that the doctor, in his suit, was standing around unsuited technicians and crew, securing the area.

  Once there, I said coldly, “You are frightening people.”

  We were standing in the bedroom of the deceased, beneath an air duct above the door. Singh, his eyes on it at all times, moved to stand in front of the window, the lower half of which was filled with the dirty shape of Solle.

  “I will not be quiet,” he replied, his voice carrying an echo from the suit. “This body, this new death—this was not a man connected to any of the previous five. He was not even in the same part of the station! This does not affect just us, but those on Solle too!”

  “Keep your voice down, or I will have you locked up to keep calm.”

  “You would not dare!”

  I did.

  After I had placed him in his cell, Dr. Singh refused to remove his suit. This information, however, I used against him. I showed images of him to calm a panic that was emerging in Sirius and to assure those planetside that they could return normally, that supplies were fine. For a week, as normality returned, I was vindicated. But the deaths continued and Singh’s words to me were repeated in whispers by others until they filled the station. When I returned to Singh, he was still in his suit, but he had nothing to say to me. To others, he would speak, but I was given only silence, and as pains began to wrack my body, I was relieved from command and spoken to by no one.

  A week later as I lay shivering in a hot bath that scalded my skin, my last sight was the burst of pressure as escape pods launched.

  Amanda Neal

  I was forced to quarantine the men and women who fell from Sirius not because of their infected state, but because I needed to ration our food and water and control access to the dig sites. Solle City, the only city on Solle, was a sprawling, skeletal creature filled with the remains of a conquering nomadic race and a second, extinct race that the Ta’La did not acknowledge in their histories. If not for the bones, you would believe the Ta’La had found the planet empty. The threat posed by the angry escapees, then, to this knowledge was unacceptable. In my arrogance, I believed that there was much to be learned about the Ta’La through those remains, much that would make our dealings with them easier. Five years ago, I stood before a Ta’La and watched the slow blink of its eyes, its naked, genderless body offering a cold indifference to all conversation made to it and I knew that if we wished to survive in a universe that was not just us, we had to know everything we could of those around us. We could not afford to view these creatures as ancient killers turned galactic shepherds.

  After overseeing the quarantine, I stepped into my office and called Sirius privately. As the call was put through, I laid the blame for the situation squarely at the feet of Dr. Singh, a detestable and incompetent man who, for a brief moment, I had thought would be an ally against Commander Cawell. Oh, how I would be eating my words again as I banded with the British soldier against the doctor.

  To my surprise, however, the call connected me immediately with the image of Singh, sitting in a dirty yellow contamination suit.

  “What is going on, doctor?”

  “Neal.” He smiled, but it was a sickly. “How good it is to see you.”

  “I don’t have time for this. I want to be briefed on what has happened and what is being done to ensure we can feed the people here.”

  “You’ve met the Ta’La.” Singh’s eyes closed, and he swayed; when he lifted his lids, the lack of balance in his physical form was present there, too. “Tell me, are they really like birds? People compare them to birds in the literature, and always favorably. They compare them to hawks and eagles, but they’re wrong. I see that now. They should be compared to myna. That’s a bird that drives off native birds with its violence, drives them off so that when it leaves an area—if it leaves an area—there is nothing but emptiness left behind.”

  “What has happened on Sirius, doctor?”

  “Emily.” A faint smile crossed his face. “That is what I call it. It is airborne. That is the most logical conclusion. There are no survivors and no serum and it manifests differently in everyone and leaves a complete genome in its victim, complete where it had before been incomplete in us since the dawn of time. It’s not the same genome, either. That is what made it difficult for me to understand. It finds different strands in every single person.”

  I frowned, but said nothing.

  “It is a swarm,” he continued, his voice given rhythm by the drugs he had taken. “A swarm of virions that completes what is inside us.”

  I was thirty seven when I met my first Ta’La, when I stood before it and watched as a man I admired tried to convey to it the importance of research, the responsibility we all had—all creatures had—to understand themselves and those around them. Afterward, he said that the being did not understand the double meaning of his words, the veiled threat that was implied in that small office, in that pale, peach-lit room where we were gifted Solle.

  “Doctor, doctor,” Singh whispered, pressing the glass of his contamination helmet to the screen. “You are alone, now.”

  And then the screen went black.

  Reverend Packer

  The Lord will have to forgive my cowardice.

  I have prided myself on honesty, of not flinching away from difficult situations, of being true to the Lord and the tenants He has left us, especially here on the edges
of civilization amongst the Godless. Yet, when Dr. Neal approached me and asked—through her growing fever—if I would return to Sirius, I agreed only because I thought it would save me. I could think of nothing else. I rejoiced when I was told that I would be given one of the few contamination suits we owned, that I would be taking a quarter of our remaining food and water, that I would be allowed to read the notes left by Dr. Singh and have access to the research done in the station. If a cross were but real upon me now, I would feel its weight, and be chastised by my thoughts.

  I shared the shuttle with Richard, a young blond man who had arrived with the colony on a scholarship from the military. He was the only ’scientist’ capable of making the journey and it was to him that the deciphering of the notes and saving us would fall. I was but a pilot with a desire to learn. With notes from Dr. Neal strewn around us, we spoke little as we approached the orbiting mass of Sirius, until it was time to voice our fears at the sight the large, circular station adrift brokenly, as if a careless child had dropped it from a great height.

  In awkward, slow movements, we drifted in bulky space suits from the shuttle to the exposed entrance of Sirius. Debris floated inside: frozen chairs, brittle boxes, cracked glasses. They broke beneath my hands as I pushed them aside to make our way to the command deck. It was there that we found, lodged against the ceiling in a tattered contamination suit, the remains of Dr. Singh. With a clumsy sign of the cross, I turned away from the terrible visage that he was, and tried to bring power back to the remains of the station.

  I could only find a small amount, enough to bring up the design map of Sirius. Disappointed, I made my way to Singh’s laboratory, located in a fragment that curved above the command center. It took an hour to navigate to it, a journey that saw me ticking off the hopes and dreams I had. No wife, no children. I could hear Richard’s voice through the suit, murmuring, and as we made our way through the quiet corridors, his words a repetition of knowledge he dare not forget, a sign of faith I no longer had. Finally, we reached a large white room adorned by floating beakers and frozen fluids. There was no power here, either, and my hope that I would be able to bring up a very basic amount to read what Singh had kept on file was not one that the Lord granted. Instead, there were only papers that crumbled beneath my every touch.

  I became sick when we returned to the shuttle. I took only one kindness, words from a young man who tried to treat me even as he became sick, that all signs of the infection pointed to a virus of such a virulent nature that, by killing us so quickly, it was also killing itself.

  Bakana Mer

  I am the first and the last. The last of the first people that watched the huge, shuddering bulk of the Ta’La cruisers press through the atmosphere of our home. The first people who experienced cruelty deliberate in the diseases sown into their gifts, the first who watched a people and culture destroyed so another could take it. Irony, oh irony, I am told by those new spirits, those who arrived here to take the Ta’La gift, that their ancestors did the same, years ago. Then, they gave blankets riddled with diseases and, like the Ta’La, took another’s home to expand their own culture. As I listen to their words, I am unable to offer sympathy. They have died, yes, died from a stain rooted deep into my world, a world that is no longer filled with water, that no longer shimmers, and they are the victims to the thoughts of domination that motivate the Ta’La; but they, in coming to my home, in accepting my world as their gift, have shown that they are nothing but a different shade of the people who killed me.

  History, I murmured to my child, does not chart a course in singular events, never to be repeated again.

  Her answer, I knew, was no longer one she could grow into.

  Synch Me, Kiss Me, Drop

  Suzanne Church

  When my nose stopped aching, I smiled at Rain. She had snorted a song ten minutes before me, and I couldn’t quite figure why she waited here in the dark confines of the sample booth.

  “Rain?” I said. “You okay?”

  “Do you hear it, Alex?” she said, not really looking at me. More like staring off in two directions at once, as though her eyes had decided to break off their working relationship and wander aimlessly on their own missions. “It’s so amaaazing.”

  She held that “a” a long time. I should’ve remembered how gripping every sample was for her, as though her neurons were built like radio antennae, attuned to whatever channel carried the best track ever recorded. I needed to get her ass on the dance floor before I got so angry that I ended up with another Jessica situation. I still had eight months left on my parole.

  “Do you hear it?” Rain nudged me, hard on the shoulder. “Alex!” Her eyes had made up and decided to work together, locking on me like I was the only male in a sea of estrogen.

  “Yeah, it’s awesome,” I lied. For the third time this week, I’d snorted a dud sample. My brain hadn’t connected with a single, damned note.

  Beyond the booth, the thump, thump of dance beats pulsed in my chest. Not much of a melody, but since they’d insisted I check my headset with my coat, I couldn’t exactly self-audio-tain.

  I grabbed her arm, feeling the soft flesh and liking it. Loving it. Maybe the sample was working on some visceral level beyond my ear-brain-mix. “Let’s hit the dance floor.”

  “In a minute. Pleeease.”

  Over-vowels were definitely part of her gig tonight.

  “Wait for the drop,” she said, stomping her foot.

  “Right.” I watched her sway back and forth, in perfect rhythm with the dance music coming from the main floor. The better clubs brought all the vibes together, so that every song you sampled was in perfect synch with the club mix on the speakers. When the drop hit, everyone jumped and screamed in coordinated rapture.

  I would miss the group-joy here in this tiny booth, with this date who was more into her own head than she would ever be into me. If I could get Rain out on the floor, I could at least feel the bliss, whiff all the pheromones, feel all those sweaty bodies pressed against mine, soft tissues rubbing together.

  “Yeaaaah!” She shouted and grabbed my hand, squeezing it. Harder. Her eyes pressed shut, her mouth wide open, she leaned her head way back.

  The drum beats surged, and then, for a fraction of a second they paused. Everyone in the club inhaled, as though this might be the last lungful of air left in the world and then . . .

  Drop.

  But drop doesn’t say it all. Not even close. Because when it happens, it’s like the most epic orgasm of all time and pinching the world’s biggest crap-log at the same moment.

  Rain opened her eyes and pressed her hand against the side of my cheek. Lunging with remarkable speed for a woman who over-voweled, she kissed me. Her tongue pressed against my lips.

  I tasted her. Wanted her. An image of Jessica popped into my head: the look of terror on her face when I accidentally yanked her under.

  The euphoria gone, I closed my mouth and turned away from Rain.

  “Whaaat?” she said.

  For a second, I thought about explaining what I had done to Jessica. Spewed on about how the drop isn’t always built of joy. Instead, I went with the short, obscure answer. “Probation.”

  Rain looked at me funny, like she couldn’t quite figure out how the judicial dudes could mess with our kiss-to-drop ratio. Finally, she smiled, and said, “Riiight.”

  Desperate to avoid another over-vowel, I shouted, “Let’s dance!” This time, when I grabbed her arm, she followed along like a puppy.

  Scents smacked at us as we pushed our way through the seething mass on the floor. This week’s freebie at the door was Octavia, some new perfume marketed at the twenty-something set. It was heavy on Nasonov pheromones, some bee-juice used to draw worker-buzzers to the hive. When the drug companies cloned it, the result was as addictive as crack and as satisfying as hitting a home run on a club hook-up.

  My nostrils still ached from snorting a wallop of nanites, but scent doesn’t only swim in the nose. The rest is all n
eurons, baby, and I had plenty to spare. Apparently so did Rain, because she was waving her nose in the air like a dog catching the whiff of a bitch in heat. The sight of her made me want to take her and do her right there on the floor.

  But Conduct was a high-end club. The bouncers would toss us both if they caught us in the act anywhere on the premises, so I kept it in my pants. I still had another two hundred in my pocket. Enough for three more samples. Maybe I’d pick up a track from an indie-band this time. Top forty drivel never seized my brainstem.

  Unlike Rain.

  The beats were building again. This time, with a third-beat thump, like reggae on heroin. I could feel the intensity from my fingertips to my teeth to my dick. Even if I couldn’t hear more than the background beats, I anticipated the drop. Rain opened her mouth again, raised both her hands in the air with everyone else, like a crowd of locusts all swarming together.

  Pause.

  Drop.

  My date kept her eyes closed, her hands on her own breasts as she milked the release for all it was worth. Any decent guy should’ve watched her, should’ve wanted to, but I caught sight of a luscious creature, near the high-end sample booth, in the far right corner of the club. The chick was about to slip between the curtains, but she caught me staring.

  Her eyes glowed the purple of iStim addiction, reminding me of Jessica.

  She had grown up in the suburbs, her allowance measured in thousands not single dollars. The pack of girls she hung with had all bought iSynchs when they first hit the market. The music sounded better when they could all hear the same song at the same time. For the first time in more than a hundred years, getting high was not only legal, but ten times more amazing than it had ever been before. We all lived in our collective heads, the perfect synch of sound and sex.

  I should’ve turned away from the sight of the purple-chick, should’ve reached out to Rain and kissed her again. Close tonight’s deal. Instead, I approached her swaying body, and next to her ear shouted, “Back in five.”