Imaginarium 3

by Sandra Kasturi, Helen Marshall (ed) (v5. 0) (epub)

  stuttering their names, gather and wait.

  Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary—

  blood pumping, careful, careful,

  do not watch her so closely, do not touch

  the mirror, do not say her name

  too loudly, Bloody Mary, patron saint of fear,

  other Mary, other mother in the mirror—she’ll come

  forward, reach through glass, pull

  you into the mirror beside her, behind her, weeping

  tears of blood, and there will be no man there.

  THE RUNNER OF N-VAMANA

  Indrapramit Das

  Mira lets the wired nanoswarm saturate every muscle, every neuron in her body. She has been running for four days. With sunrise in her eyes she stops, only to remind herself what not running feels like. Her augmented heart is no longer beating—it’s too fast to call it that. It floats like a hummingbird in her chest. The nanoswarm works overtime as she pauses, mending the damage to her muscles and bones, using her skin to synthesize water and energy from the atmosphere and sunlight. Cryofoils embedded in her muscular planes keep her from overheating, sucking at her scorching core temperature. She is alarmed by how inhuman she feels. Four more days, and Mira will be back where she started, back at the huddled settlement of the terraforming station. Looking at the white-hot orb on the horizon, she remembers the adulation of her fellow humans. The settlers, touching her feet and hands, raising their palms to fluorescing clouds pregnant with constant change. Bright array of absorbent prayer flags perched on the settlement’s crete houses, snapping in the charged nanite breeze. Voices lifting in song to the old god in the sky, planted by probes centuries ago and still in the flux of maturation: n-Vamana, nanogod that shares its name with the planetoid it shelters and grows.

  Alone, n-Vamana above and below her, Mira feels artificial, built, a magnificent sculpture created by nanotechnists and surgeons out of an obsolete body. Artificial like the sun in the sky, no sun at all; a hole punctured into spacetime to flood this dim little world with the light of a distant white giant, and pull it gently into a new orbit. Artificial like the atmosphere, churned into fertility by the work of n-Vamana and the zoati, the seven icy comets driven into the planetoid before it was settled. All artifice worthy of gods. Inhuman, magic, impossible. Her heart, trying to fly out of her chest. Her lungs, breathing air that would asphyxiate an Earthling.

  She reminds herself of her brother. The small, human creature that emerged from the same womb she did. Whose augments are still in infancy, growing with him. Her brother, who is an orphan like her. Their mother—dead during the voyage, unable to weather the crushing pressures placed on the human body by the warp-points through which it slipped, by the radiation leaking past shields, by extended zero-g, by the very augments that protect younger bodies from such rigors. Their father—dead on their homeworld while his son was still gestating; crushed by an errant car on the streets of Mumbai’s megapolis, cremated, ashes drifting in that atmosphere. Her brother—alive. Nine-year-old Ela, who smeared her ankles and cheekbones with terastil clay—soil from this world mixed with water from Earth, a planet he has never seen. His eyes vacant with wonder at the expanses of even this small planetoid, dizzying after a life spent on a starship. Ela had carried out the ritual as he’d been told, knowing how precious the old-water was, his small hands carefully daubing the cool mud across his sister’s Earth-born bones. As Mira looked at him kneeling in front of her with his dirty palms and fingers, as if he were just playing out the impulses of childhood instead of the symbolic narrative of an entire posthuman diaspora, she saw a little boy losing his big sister. New worlds need new stories. New legends. She saw Ela witness her ritual transformation into a cybadevi, a breathing mythmeme for this new world. There was no escaping what the whole settlement felt at that moment, as Ela painted Mira’s carbon-reinforced ankles in front of the chanting settlers, the flaring sky. All augmented to some degree, all in the process of cyba-meld to help them stay alive here. But none like her, none trained and modified over nine years to become this new being that might just survive its test. Of all of them, she was the least human.

  She was now the Runner of n-Vamana. She was more than just Mira.

  Knowing this, Mira had run her hand through Ela’s short, damp hair. She had gathered it in her fist and given it a tug.

  “Aoh,” he whispered. A single quick syllable, universal. Pain. The pain woke him. It reminded him, perhaps, of his sister. His sister Mira. Mira, the girl who’d once teased him for being afraid of the void outside the chilly starship windows, who told him there were monsters who ate little boys out there in the dark between the stars. Mira, who had long hair then, before she cut it off, whose braids he’d watched float in the starlight of viewing ports, coiling away from her head as she read on her tablet novels written millennia ago. Mira, who held him close when he longed for a parent, helped with his lessons, taught him to grow and prepare gcel rations; who’d tethered and tucked him into his sleeping pod and told him her distant memories of a crowded Earth.

  His hair in her fist. The pain made him look up, look into her eyes so she could smile at him. He smiled back. A weak smile, but a smile all the same. She could ask for no more than that, on the eve of her run.

  “Don’t run away forever. Come back,” Ela said.

  Even with her muscles burning with energy beyond what an unaugmented human being could produce, she pressed her lips to Ela’s sweaty forehead, to let him know that his sister was still there under the glow of this devi’s tattoos, the flicker of glyphs across this devi’s photosynthetic skin.

  “Yashin ti terra, Ela,” she said in the star-tongue of their vessel, now a language of n-Vamana. [I] Swear on Earth, Ela. Blue gem in the sky, fragile, waiting, birthplace, memory. Swear on Earth. Ela had nodded, convinced.

  And then she ran.

  She is not dead, yet. It is working. All of it. She is halfway through the test, halfway across the planetoid. She has run faster than any man or woman since humans walked, faster than machines, faster than Mercury, Hermes, Flash, Maya. This is impossible, it is madness, but she has done it. Four more days. Mira will test the limits of their augmentations, prove how far they can take humans on this little planetoid, just as the warp hole and the atmospheric nanogod sheathing the world has taken n-Vamana beyond its own provenance as a lifeless speck in the universe. In her electric limbs, she holds change itself. She is the messenger, and the message. She will prove how little food or water they will need here, how effectively they can process the changing atmosphere outside the settlement, even while pushing at the limits of the human system.

  Every time she thinks: this is impossible, she thinks of Ela. Child she has raised alone in a vessel that carried them through the howling emptiness of the universe. Who can speak and write, and love, despite not having seen a world to live on till now, despite having only his sister as a guardian. She, grief-struck orphan, has somehow become a mother to her little Ela.

  Impossibilities that bring her back to the ground, even as she shears the very air with her speed, slashing the crust of n-Vamana.

  There is a strange vertigo that accompanies her, running on the back of this celestial dwarf, its gravity low despite a superdense core that keeps her from soaring into flight. It was, after all, chosen by her people because of its small size—easier to terraform. It is the first of its kind, to be wreathed and gifted with life-nurturing power by humans—an experimental home for the first of the cybas. At night, running by the crests of n-Vamana’s low hills, she has seen past the nanogod’s aurora and to the stars, the moon-blue glow of the system’s actual sun, too far away to give this place its own life. To the Jovian giant Shesha, its gaseous curve burning the star-studded dark, distance turning it deceptively small, a delicate red sickle suspended in the black. And she has felt more alone than ever before, dizzy from the sensation that she is running across a tiny rock in space, her legs barely te
thered to the ground. At other times, with the galaxy crowning the night, that same loneliness has nurtured a euphoria so strong that Mira has had to slow down and linger on it, to take in a horizon empty of human life, glimmering with luminescence of burgeoning algal fields, tunnelled sunlight of the warp hole sparking off embryonic microbial oceans pooling out of the sky, to bask in the illusory sensation that she is n-Vamana, that she is beyond humanity, that she is this world incarnate, a deity carving its path through spacetime, aeons from the flocked and boiling Earth and its anxious worshippers who wait for distant strains of information filtering out of the cosmos. The datastreams of humanity’s trembling colonization of deep space, its evolution into space-faring cyba, bolstered against an unfathomable infinity. After nearly a decade of running and training her augmentations in the confines of a starship’s centrifuges, always surrounded by walls to keep the void out, running across n-Vamana feels like no freedom Mira has ever imagined. In these moments, she has become the cybadevi she is meant to be, a legend in the nascent history of this world, embodiment of n-Vamana like the dim, remote gods that gave their ancient names to the solar worlds near Earth. It has taken four sunrises, four times washed by the borrowed light of a star centuries in the past blinding her tear-shot eyes, to wake her from these trances of divinity.

  E-la. Two syllables, named on Earth, spoken by a mother and father long gone. Ela. Ela. Ela. She whispers, veils of steam rising off her superheated body.

  Mira is cyba, but human still.

  She sees into the future, when her likeness will grace the domed ceiling of the port, immortalized in a mosaic of stone chips, their colours unlike anything Earthlings ever saw, mined from the crust her feet cling to right now. New arrivals will look up at her for generations to come, glittering above them, a new myth born on this place. Earthlings will look at their textbooks and read about her centuries from this moment, and light incense in front of shrines in her honour, smoke lilting through glowing 3D portraits of her carried in the pulsing hot dataservs of starships; they will look through their telescopes to the constellation where her memory dwells, the runner in the night sky, herald of the long awaited galactic age. The pioneer of the cybas, the runner of n-Vamana. She doesn’t care that these things will happen. Rather, she actually does care about these things, but is just too wired to realize this. Right now, all Mira can see is forward motion. She wants to run, to live, to survive. She can feel the union between her body and the nanoswarm, between her colony and n-Vamana, its atmosphere seeded and transforming even as she breathes and sweats. At this moment, what she cares about is the finish, a hemisphere away, drawing a human line across the planetoid to her little brother Ela, her fallible flesh and blood, waiting, waiting for his sister to run around the world and return to him.

  IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND ELEVEN

  Jan Conn

  Scent of black cherry kindling lingers in the patchwork

  building, cast-iron stove still ticking over, warm to the

  gloved touch. We have skidded to a halt, breathless, nervy,

  guided here by a finger gliding across a small screen.

  The dock has been jimmied from its pilings, quagmired on shore,

  woodgrain magnified beneath a slick of ice. Positioned to catch

  roof run-off, a wooden barrel slips its hoops. We posit

  a sculpture of dock, metal and nearby rock, execution

  iffy (acetylene torch, glue gun), but plausible.

  Drawn to the edges of hemlock light,

  we cantilever ourselves upward for the singular view

  of the creature—upright, teetering

  on a snowbank. Its arms are old propellers with crusty,

  frostbitten tips. Metal birdcage for a head.

  Below it are silvered fish houses, nominally

  unremarkable, voltaic in this swarming light. One of us has traced

  on the windcombed snow the blurred outline

  of our former home. There is no explanation

  for the fanatic promiscuity of white, or the bird skulls dangling

  at the creature’s side. Now we are prone, on the edge

  of the coast, the horizon punctuated by a black twig.

  The green metallic hysteria we thought of as extreme sky

  is an ice cliff, looming, fresh from the ruins of Antarctica.

  Cracking, shearing. Eviscerating daylight.

  LESSER CREEK:

  A LOVE STORY, A GHOST STORY

  A.C. Wise

  Standing on the trestle bridge, a boy and girl stand side by side. They can just see the water through the trees. Directly below the bridge, abandoned rails curve gentle to their vanishing point. Weeds grow between the cracked ties, and two children walk, kicking stones along the track.

  On the bridge, the girl looks at the water. Lesser Creek. It seems familiar somehow. The greenery does its best to swallow the sparkle and shine, keeping the light at bay. But all along the bank, running parallel to the tracks, muddy paths cut through the growth, and run down to the water’s edge. Hoof-paths, paw-paths, and foot-paths, carve gaps in the green. They are made for stolen sips and stolen kisses, midnight swims, and midnight drownings.

  She remembers fireflies.

  Maybe it wasn’t this bend of the creek, but some other. She wants to remember blue shadows between the trees, and the secret-wet smell of earth, bare feet trailed in cool water, and luminescent bugs flashing Morse-code transmissions from another world. And so she does. Who’s to say her truth is wrong?

  “It wasn’t always like this, was it?” Memory nags, and she asks the question, wishing she didn’t have to break the silence that has stretched between them for so long.

  The boy beside her watches the children’s dwindling figures, following the rails.

  “Do you think we could catch them all?” he asks.

  For a moment she thinks he must be talking about the fireflies she wants to badly to remember. But his past isn’t her past; his memory is otherwise, and as inconsistent as hers. Who knows what meaning the creek and the rails hold for him?

  Side by side on the bridge, the boy and girl are roughly the same age: fifteen, sliding backward to ten and upward to twenty, depending on who is looking. It is the age they’ve always been, for as long as they can remember. Which isn’t very long.

  She remembers fireflies, and sometimes, she remembers drowning.

  She looks at the boy side-wise, wondering how he died. If he died. Have they had this conversation before? She picks up a stone, weighing it a moment in her palm before letting it fly. It pings the steel, reverberating like the memory of trains.

  Maybe one of the children looks back at the sound, and maybe they don’t. Everyone knows these woods, that bridge, these rails, that water, are haunted.

  The girl picks up another stone, frowns, and closes it in her hand.

  “Will we bet, then?” she says. This seems familiar, too.

  “Yes, A bet,” the boy agrees. “And a tally, on that big rock in the water.”

  He points through the trees; she knows the stone—a big boulder planted firm in the creek’s middle, dividing the current.

  “At the end of the summer, we’ll count up the marks, and see who wins,” the boy says.

  A cicada drones. The sound means heat to her, summer-sweat and irritation so sharp she can taste it. She shivers all the same. It won’t take much for the boy to win, between the airless nights and the far worse days, the sun beating down on everything and pushing people to the edge. She bites her lip, but she’s already nodding.

  The rails, stretching one way lead to the horizon, and in the other, they lead to a town. It nestles around a vast crossroad, and maybe, for that alone, it’s cursed.

  Could it be the town that calls them, again and again, this boy, and this girl, in their myriad forms? Or does the town exist because they come here again and again to stand on this bridge, over th
ese rails, beside that water, to bet on the town’s souls?

  The town has never borne her any love, the girl thinks. Not for the boy at her side, either. She should take joy in the reaping, but she never does. There is a hunger in her, a hole deep at her core; it is in her nature to wish that hole full.

  She isn’t greedy. One soul, just one soul, ripe and sweet as the last summer peach, might last her all winter long. She looks sidelong at the boy beside her, and breathes out slow.

  “Deal,” she says.

  “Deal.” The boy spits in his hand.

  The devil’s own twinkle shines in his eye. They shake on it, and go their separate ways.

  And so the summer begins.

  The first time you see her, you think: She isn’t real. Because you’ve lived in Lesser Creek your whole life, and you’ve never seen her—never even seen a girl like her—before.

  Your second thought is: She’s a ghost. Because everyone knows these woods are haunted, and didn’t a girl drown here years ago? All the stories say so.

  She’s sitting on a wooden bridge over the narrowest part of the creek. Her legs dangle over the water; one hand touches the topmost rail, fingers curled as if to haul up and flee at any moment. Her hair screens her face, but you know she’s chewing her lip in concentration. Just like you know exactly what colour her eyes are, even though you haven’t seen them yet. They are every colour you can imagine, and so is her hair. Because even looking at her full-on in the sunlight, you can’t tell anything about her for sure.

  She is definitely a ghost.

  You sit next to her, legs dangling beside hers, close, but not touching. Your mismatched laces trail from scuffed shoes. She doesn’t flee, and so you say, “Hey.”

  You say it carefully, not looking her way. You think of a deer, ready to be startled, though she’s nothing like that at all. She could swallow you whole.

  Where she sits, the air is cooler, like the deepest part of the creek, where the sunlight doesn’t touch. Viewed side-wise, you can see right through her. Her skin is blue, her hair moonlight, and you just know, when she finally turns your way, her eyes will be stones, and her will lips stitched closed. And you decide that’s okay.