by IGMS
Table of Contents - Issue 14 - September 2009
On Horizon's Shores
by Aliette de Bodard
Judgment of Swords and Souls
by Saladin Ahmed
Shadow of Turning
by Joan Savage
For Want of Chocolate
by J. F. Lewis
Hunting Lodge
by Jon Crusoe
The Fringe
by Orson Scott Card
InterGalactic Interview With Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson
by Darrell Schweitzer
On Horizon's Shores
by Aliette de Bodard
Artwork by Dean Spencer
Alex and Thi Loan transferred at Sapalawa Spaceport, from their small shuttle to a military Naga craft -- the only ones still allowed to crawl between the stars with the fuel shortage.
Because the thought of their mission on Horizon weighed on Alex's mind, he said, "You've read the files?"
Thi Loan shrugged. "There isn't much. Professor Kishore died -- and then . . . suddenly there wasn't enough fuel for the spaceships." She smiled, a showing of white teeth against her tanned skin.
"It's a little more complicated than that," Alex said, darkly. "I can't believe they have no idea why it happened." He'd seen the images in the wake of Professor Kishore's death: the automated boats at their anchors, their control panels and quantum brains jammed by the song of the hatirkas. And that was it. That was all it had taken to paralyse the quadrant: no more boats meant no more algae oil, and no more oil meant no fuel.
Thi Loan shook her head. "Horizon's a reservation, not Federation territory. There was just Kishore and the other xeno posted here. Not enough to really investigate. And you know they're not going to pull anyone off of the algae gathering stations."
"You really think our presence will make a difference?" Alex asked, bitterly. He'd read the mission brief; he knew what they wanted of her.
Thi Loan shrugged. "We've had our successes."
"Yes. I wish to God they'd take those and leave us alone."
"They never do," Thi Loan said. "That's the whole point of having xenos." There was reproach in her voice, and he wasn't sure why.
Alex said, "We'll see when we get there. See what we can do to understand why the hatirkas are stopping the ships." But he didn't want to get there.
Again, silence. Thi Loan sat in her chair, as regal as an empress.
"Alex," she said, gently. "We'll board soon. You have to reconfigure now."
He shook his head and didn't move.
Her face was that of a mother reproving a wayward child. "It won't get better if you put it off, you know."
She was right, as usual. But . . .
He'd seen the orders, and he didn't want to get there. He didn't want Thi Loan to get there. He was getting the standard xeno modifications -- enough to ease his way among aliens while he tried to discover the cause of Kishore's death. But she was going all the way from human to tirka to adult hatirka. Her job was to get the hatirkas to stop doing whatever it was they were doing that had shut down the boats. To get production restarted on the Federation's precious spaceship fuel.
And to achieve that aim, they were subjecting her to a barely legal metamorphosis, using brand-new, untested nanos; and more importantly, that metamorphosis would be irreversible past a certain stage. If they didn't succeed quickly, Thi Loan would become so alien that the nanos wouldn't be able to restore her to human form. But they didn't have a choice. Xenos never had a choice, not with the Federation pulling the strings.
Thi Loan was still watching him. With a sigh, he pressed his hand on the terminal by the side of the chair, and felt the familiar tingle as the computer connected with his palm.
"Authentication complete," the computer said. "Alexander Paul Cadogan, xeno number 186554." Then a pause, and another tingle. "Nanos reprogrammed for assignment on planet designated 'Horizon.'"
He didn't feel anything. He ought to have -- he had nanos lodged in every cell, a price to pay for a xeno's education -- but he never did. He watched Thi Loan bend over and touch her own fingers to the pad -- and for a split second, he wanted to wrap his arms around her and take her away, to prevent her assignment from being downloaded. But she was looking straight at him and shaking her head. "It won't change anything, Alex."
The computer said, "Bui Thi Loan," then paused -- for a much longer time than it had done for Alex. "Nanos reprogrammed for assignment on planet designated 'Horizon.'"
Thi Loan withdrew her hand from the pad, very slowly -- stared at it as if unsure of what to do next. That was it -- she had the timebomb now, the insidious nanos within her were starting to rewrite her DNA, and he'd done nothing to stop it.
He watched her, already wondering where the changes were going to show, which parts of her anatomy would be modified first -- and he knew he'd ask himself the same questions over and over on the three-week journey to Horizon. They'd lead nowhere; but he couldn't help it.
The first thing you saw on Horizon was the sea.
It stretched, endless, around the small landing pad and the even smaller research centre: a heaving mass of iridescent water, exhaling brine and the acrid smell of oil -- all meeting the grey-green hues of the sky in a haze of foam. In the distance, swimming beyond the algae-covered waters, were the elusive, serpentine shapes of the hatirkas, their song mingling with the roar of the waves. Between the research centre and the hatirkas were the darker, bulkier shapes of the forage boats, anchored to their platforms. They weren't moving.
Still no answer, then.
Of course there would be no answer, not from hatirkas. What did the Federation hope for? That Thi Loan could somehow mediate between mankind and a wholly incomprehensible species?
What a joke.
On the sands, Thi Loan had stopped. She took one, two halting steps towards the waiting waves, her fingers clenched into fists. Her face was tense -- filled with a longing Alex knew all too well: that bitter need for the beaches of her childhood.
And he knew, too, that there was no going back to that time, that Earth's rising sea had drowned every inch of the Mekong Delta she'd grown up in. "Thi Loan," he called.
She didn't turn. The wind ruffled her hair; her arms stretched, like sails to catch the brine. In the background, a tirka triad was swimming out of the water, pushing themselves up with their stubby hands. They didn't look at the humans. They never did.
"Thi Loan."
At length, her arms fell; but she still didn't move. Alex walked to her in silence.
"It's so big," Thi Loan said. Her voice was already taking on the singsong accents of the tirkas: an inescapable reminder of why they'd come here.
"I know." He squeezed her shoulder, briefly -- aching to take her in his arms, to tell her that it was going to be all right, even though it was a lie. But she'd never been that demonstrative; not in public. Alex added, "But it's not our sea."
Thi Loan didn't speak for a while. "No. It's not the same smell, is it?" Her hands unclenched. She stared as the foam exhaled over the horizon line, just long enough to open a hollow of fear in Alex's stomach. "Let's get to work. The nanos won't wait for us."
Meghan, the senior xeno on Horizon, welcomed them into the research centre. She took them to her own rooms on the side of the building and made some tea -- artificial, of course, nothing Earth-like grew on Horizon. Alex sat down by Thi Loan's side, swallowing the stretched-out taste of dehydrated drinks.
"I'll show you to your rooms later," Meghan said. Her blue tirka ruff kept opening and closing -- like gills -- as she spoke. Alex couldn't help but stare. Damn it, why? He'd seen many xenos over the years, so many variations on nano-modifications -- heard so many voices, some even weirder than Meghan's warbling, staccato tones. It
was the same transformation that was going on inside him.
But he knew he was lying to himself.
How do I live, if I know you won't be here by year's end? he'd asked Mother a lifetime ago. He had been devastated by her decision to refuse further medical treatment. She'd turned her face away from him, hiding a grimace of pain. "You can't change what's already happened. You can't heal me. And you certainly shouldn't try to follow me," she'd said, as if sensing the horrible thought that that was already coalescing in Alex's mind. "All you can do is live hour by hour, and day by day."
That had been impossible for Alex to hear. If he had to let go, he at least needed to know more. To understand her decision.
Meghan drank her tea and waited for Thi Loan to do the same. Thi Loan wasn't really drinking -- her gaze was distant, even though her own ruff was barely visible.
"All right," Meghan said. "This is the point where I usually give xenos enough pointers to make sense of the planet." She set her cup down on a woven-fibre mat. "Unfortunately, in the case of Horizon, I believe you already know all you need to."
"We've read the files," Alex said. "On the out journey."
"Yep," Meghan said. "And the files are all you get. As they said: we can talk to the tirkas. Or rather, we have a fragmentary understanding of their language, and some of their customs. And that's it. They're not interested in us: they might understand what we're saying -- but they rarely talk to us."
"Surely observation --" Alex started.
"It's been tried. We've learned a few things, as I said. But only scraps. I have thousands of hours of video," she smiled bitterly, "but no framework in which to interpret them. I see them gather around a bit of driftwood, but how do I know whether it's a religious ceremony, or just curiosity?"
"I'll see those videos," Thi Loan said, speaking up for the first time.
Meghan shrugged. "If you like." She shook her head. "We've been on Horizon for a century, and we still live separately."
"Tell us about Kishore," Thi Loan said. She'd brought the palms of both hands together, in what Alex called her Buddha pose, and her face was creased in thought.
Meghan shrugged. "He'd been here five years. He was one of the older crop of xenos, with the second generation of nanos. But they were good enough for him to try to establish contact. You'll have to read some of his findings."
"About the triad matings?" Alex said, carefully skirting Kishore's real accomplishment: the discovery that tirkas and hatirkas were the same species, a transformation from larva into sterile adults. The same discovery which had allowed the scientists of the Federation to reprogram Thi Loan's nanos, to allow her to change from tirka to hatirka -- from the slightly alien to the completely incomprehensible.
Meghan nodded. Her smile was ironic. Likely she knew what Alex wasn't telling her about Kishore and nano research. "You already know all there is to know about him, don't you?"
Thi Loan shrugged. "You might have seen something that wasn't in the reports."
"I wish," Meghan said. "I just found his body in the boat. That's all."
Thi Loan was staring in the distance again; after a moment of silence, she spoke up. "The hatirkas . . . Their song has changed."
Meghan looked at her for a while. "Maybe," she said. "How long have they given you?"
Alex knew the true meaning of the question -- how long until the nanos finished their work within Thi Loan -- but he chose to be vague. "We have to find a solution as soon as we can."
"Yes," Meghan said. "The entire quadrant depends on the spaceship-fuel Horizon produces. I imagine they'd want those boats to start again, and fast." She looked again at Thi Loan. "I'm just not sure what they think you can do."
Alex bristled at the implied criticism, though it wasn't unexpected. "Thi Loan's the best xeno the Federation has."
Meghan waved a hand. "I know. Spare me the praise. I've read her file. If you want to work a miracle . . ."
The miracle Alex wanted had nothing to do with the ships or with the tirkas, but he didn't say it. It was a foolish idea: what xeno could go against the programming of their nanos, against their masters of the Federation?
He wished Thi Loan could.
There was a bubble in their room: a smooth, huge vat of nano-grown fibreglass which took up half the space available. It rocked back and forth, driven by the mechanism on its pedestal -- and the liquid inside sloshed to a rhythm almost identical to that of the waves outside.
Alex and Thi Loan took one look at it, and then at each other. Thi Loan raised a hand to her blue-veined lips. Alex suspected that she was imagining the same thing he was: a being with the stubby arms and sinuous, serpentine shape of hatirkas -- and the eyes of a human -- crawling into the safety of the bubble to complete its metamorphosis away from prying gazes.
"Let's --"
"Yes," Alex said, and together they moved the bed to the other side of the room -- just under the window, as far away from the bubble as possible.
But the bubble was still there during dinner, wedged into his thoughts. Thi Loan was even quieter than usual: the only noise that punctuated the meal was the silvery sound of her chopsticks against the metal bowl. Alex's throat itched, and no amount of honeyed tea could wash down the bitter taste. Of course, it wasn't in his oesophagus that the problem was, but in his wind-pipe, which was rearranging itself on a molecular level.
"You want to see the videos tomorrow?" Alex said.
"Might as well start with something. I'll go out afterwards." Thi Loan's face was set.
Alex said, "You don't have to."
Thi Loan smiled without joy. "You think I can't handle this planet?"
She was bristling easily tonight -- the long journey, perhaps, had made her more sensitive than usual.
Alex had no wish for a quarrel, but he could not bring himself to lie. "You saw what the beach did to you. How it affected you."
"Yes." Thi Loan was silent for a moment. "Yes. There is that." She sighed, and then raised her bowl of tea to her lips. Her eyes were as bright as the stars in the void. "But I'll still do this. I have to."
When the sea had finally engulfed her village after its long, protracted agony, Thi Loan hadn't been there: the Federation had kept her away, as it had done during her whole studies -- afraid she'd abandon everything and go home.
She'd been incommunicado on Lixacan, on a diplomatic mission to establish a joint city with the Yoalli. She'd said nothing when Alex had brought her the news; nothing when the first mails had come from her family, showing her the deserted streets where the water lapped at the houses. But the holos of her childhood, which she'd always kept on her personal reader, had vanished overnight -- replaced by pictures of Alex and her mountaining in the Andes, in the Himalayas, climbing the summits of the Alps with a broad smile on their faces, and no sea to be seen for hundreds of kilometres.
"The sea --" Alex said.
Thi Loan shook her head. " -- is my own affair, Alex. Please. You worry about me too much."
Alex could have brought up any number of points. But he was wise enough to say nothing.
"You're right," he said. "Let's take things as they come."
Hour by hour and day by day, Mother whispered in his mind, You don't have to understand why. If you love me, just accept it. But he'd learnt to ignore her by now, to relegate her to the back of his thoughts with his other fears -- and he took Thi Loan's hand and brought her into the bed, and they made love slowly, fiercely, as in the first days of their marriage, a bulwark against the storm.
The bubble, all the while, never stopped rocking.
Afterwards, Thi Loan slept curled on the bed, her throat a slightly darker blue where her ruff was developing.
There had been a legend, once, about blue throats and a god who had swallowed poison to save the world. Alex couldn't help but wonder what the god had felt, sacrificing himself for the sake of mankind.
Of course, no one had asked Alex or Thi Loan how they'd felt either. It was how the game was played: ten y
ears of xeno courses at uni, full medical benefits and a salary big enough to own acres of land on Old Earth -- but there was a catch. There was always a catch. Where their masters bid them go, they had to go -- and they had to go with a smile on their lips.
Alex thought of drunken parties in Mumbai, of sunsets by the shivering sea; of all that would be gone when the nanos irrevocably changed Thi Loan; and he found that his hands were shaking.
To calm himself, he walked to the computer terminal, turned it on, and began typing the usual messages: "Dear Aunt Linda, Dear Father, we have safely arrived on Horizon . . ."
His com chimed, "Alex! Didn't expect to see you around!" Pablo. Of course. Who else would be online so late -- and who else would pepper his speech with exclamation marks and 3D-emos?
Alex forced a smile he didn't feel; he turned on his internal head speakers and diverted the audio to them. Then, with a flick of his hand, he activated holo-visuals. Pablo's tanned face appeared on-screen, with the prominent fangs and fan-like ears of his hanjiu flock.
"Hombre," Pablo said, crushing Alex in a hug. Even in virtual space, it was as disturbing as in real life to see two ghostly arms folding around him. They hadn't nicknamed Pablo "the Bear" at uni for nothing. "It's good to see you."
"Good to see you too," Alex said. "How are you doing?"
Pablo grinned. "Trying to explain Christian religion to the hanjiu. So far, so good."
Alex couldn't help it. "You do know --"
"That's it's on the list of untranslatable topics? Yeah," Pablo said. "They asked, Alex. What was I supposed to do?"
Alex shrugged. "I don't know. I guess I'd have done the same." He'd never been one for rules, and neither had Pablo.
"Anyway . . ." Pablo shook his head, as if trying to dislodge a persistent insect. "How's Horizon?"
Alex had expected the first thing that would come to mind to be Thi Loan, but instead he found himself saying, "Big. Ocean as far as you can see."
"Scary," Pablo said. Pablo, like Alex, was from a race of mountain-dwellers, without Thi Loan's hate-love relationship with the sea: to him, the ocean wasn't a source of subsistence or of pride, but simply the invisible killer, the encroacher irretrievably drowning the lowlands of Earth. "And the tirkas?"