by Lavie Tidhar
Copyright
This anthology is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
The Apex Book of World SF: Volume 3
ISBN: 978–1–937009–24–3
Cover Art © 2014 by Sophia Tuska
Title Design © 2014 by Justin Stewart
Typography © 2014 by Maggie Slater
Published by Apex Publications, LLC
PO Box 24323
Lexington, K.Y. 40524
www.apexbookcompany.com
Courtship in the Country of Machine–Gods (c) Benjanun Sriduangkaew 2012. First published in The Future Fire.
A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight (c) Xia Jia 2010, 2012. Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu. First published in Chinese as bai gui ye xing jie in Science Fiction World. First published in English in Clarkesworld.
Act of Faith (c) Fadzlishah Johanabas 2010. First published in Cosmos.
The Foreigner (c) Uko Bendi Udo 2012. First published in Afro SF.
The City of Silence (c) Ma Boyong 2005, 2011. Translated from the Chinese by Ken Liu. First published in Chinese as ji jing zhi cheng in Science Fiction World. First published in English in Clarkesworld.
Planetfall (c) Athena Andreadis 2009. First published in Crossed Genres.
Jungle Fever (c) Zulaikha Nurain Mudzar 2014. Original to this collection.
To Follow the Waves (c) Amal El–Mohtar 2011. First published in Steam Powered II.
Ahuizotl (c) Nelly Geraldine García–Rosas 2011. Translated from the Spanish by Silvia Moreno–Garcia. First published in Historical Lovecraft.
The Rare Earth (c) Biram Mboob 2012. First published in Afro SF.
Spider’s Nest (c) Myra Çakan 2002. Translated from the German by Jim Young. First published in English, in The Infinite Matrix, from the German Im Netz der Silberspinne.
Waiting with Mortals (c) Crystal Koo 2012. First published in The World SF Blog.
Three Little Children (c) Ange 1998, 2010. Translated from the French by Tom Clegg. First published in French as Il était trois petits enfants in Fantasy. First published in English in Crossing the Boundaries.
Brita’s Holiday Village (c) Karin Tidbeck 2010, 2012. First published in Swedish as Tant Britas stugby in Vem är Arvid Pekon. First published in English in Jagannath.
Regressions (c) Swapna Kishore 2012. First published in Breaking the Bow.
Dancing on the Red Planet (c) Berit Ellingsen 2012. First published in Rocket Science.
—TABLE OF CONTENTS—
Introduction
Lavie Tidhar
“Courtship in the Country of Machine–Gods”
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
“A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight”
Xia Jia
“Act of Faith”
Fadzlishah Johanabas
“The Foreigner”
Uko Bendi Udo
“The City of Silence”
Ma Boyong
“Planetfall”
Athena Andreadis
“Jungle Fever”
Zulaikha Nurain Mudzar
“To Follow the Waves”
Amal El–Mohtar
“Ahuizotl”
Nelly Geraldine García–Rosas
“The Rare Earth”
Biram Mboob
“Spider’s Nest”
Myra Çakan
“Waiting with Mortals”
Crystal Koo
“Three Little Children”
Ange
“Brita’s Holiday Village”
Karin Tidbeck
“Regressions”
Swapna Kishore
“Dancing on the Red Planet”
Berit Ellingsen
About the Artist
About the Editor
Introduction
It seems, to use the old cliché, only yesterday — and yet so long ago! — that the first Apex Book of World SF anthology came out and, alongside it, the first post on the accompanying World SF Blog appeared.
I am writing this introduction some time before the actual book comes out, as is always the case. The World SF Blog, started in February 2009, has recently celebrated four years online, and has just, as I write this, won the BSFA Award for Best Non–Fiction. Only some weeks back, it was given a special Kitschies (the “Black Tentacle”) Award, for “an outstanding contribution to the conversation surrounding genre literature”. This seems as unlikely as doing an anthology of international SF/F short stories had seemed to us back in 2008 or so, when Jason Sizemore of Apex and I first began to kick the idea around. Neither of us, I think, imagined those awards, nor the changes in the landscape and discourse around speculative fiction that has emerged, nor that we would be publishing a third volume — the one which you are now holding.
I am, naturally, excited about this anthology. I got to include more longer stories this time, and it is a thicker volume than its predecessors. Women dominate — twelve to five (one story is a collaboration). I was able to draw on a wide range of sources, many more than I had access to in 2009, amongst them the excellent Afro SF anthology (edited by Apex Book of World SF 2 contributor Ivor Hartmann), anthology Breaking the Bow, edited by Vandana Singh and Apex Book of World SF contributor Anil Menon, and even the World SF Blog itself! In that I am indebted to my two excellent fiction editors for the site, first Debbie Moorhouse and later Sarah Newton.
As before, these stories run the gamut from science fiction, to fantasy, to horror. Some are translations (from German, Chinese, French, Spanish and Swedish), and some were written in English. My thanks in particular go to the indefatigable Ken Liu, who continues to translate Chinese SF stories into English, two of which are reprinted here. The authors herein come from Asia and Europe, Africa and Latin America. To me, their stories are all wondrous and wonderful, and showcase the vitality and diversity that can be found in the field. They are a conversation, by voices that should be heard, and I am, once again, tremendously grateful for the opportunity to publish them.
Lavie Tidhar
London
April 2013
Courtship in the Country
of Machine–Gods
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
One of the most exciting young writers of speculative fiction working today, Thai author Benjanun Sriduangkaew exploded onto the scene in 2012 with a string of high–profile novelettes, of which this lyrical tale is one.
In the shadow of machine–gods I tell wayfarers of a time when my people were a nightmare the color of hemorrhage and glinting teeth.
There are other narratives, but this is the one they want to hear most, the one they pay with their adoration and bright–eyed want, for they’ve never known us for anything but peace. Conflict juts out from the skein of Pojama’s history, broken glass–shard, rupturing and ruptured.
I smile; I oblige. Though the story is for me, there are parts that I share simply for the reality of speaking it out loud, for the virtue of being heard.
My mouth moves, output for one of my cranial chips. My fingers sketch, autopilot, the forms of our heroes and enemies from a continent whose name and life has now been lost. My voice murmurs the tragedies and sings the heroics of Kanrisa and Surada, rising for climax, falling soft for denouement. The visitors’ district is machine–dead. What a thrill it must be to hear the thunderclap notes of my gloves, behold the psychedelic fires that pour from my nails.
Once, they interrupt. The figures of our enemies do not seem real. They are right: with sagging eyes the hues of cheap jades and faces like skulls, even for villains they are too fantastical, too unhuman.
“My great–grandmother told of them so,”
I say and shrug. “Perhaps she was senile.” With a motion, I turn the figures into shapes more familiar, shapes more like ours.
Inside the vessel of my thought — a garden of sliding intelligences who whisper to me, childhood mates grown to adults next to my ventricles and lungs — a different story unfolds.
§
I met my betrothed Kanrisa in our second cycle.
A garden festooned with lights, on a day of the scythe. I was in academy uniform, narrow skirt and sigil–carved sleeves, surrounded by girl age–mates. I tried to look severe, and mature, and to be taken seriously. I can no longer remember what the gathering was about, albeit I recall that someone was terra–sculpting on the fly. The earth twitched and jolted, forcing us to hover. For an hour or so, I tolerated this, making stiff comments to my age–mates. The ground eventually stilled — I thought the mischief–maker had simply had enough; the hush that fell on everyone told me otherwise.
A garden patch smoothed into an impromptu landing pad. The craft touched the grass quietly, which was not extraordinary until I realized that the engine had been off long before it touched the ground. It had shed altitude with nothing save clever maneuvering and air resistance. Brave. Reckless.
Its hatch lifted, and out came echoes in training, each fitted in muted flexskin, their throats metallic with Bodhva implants that’d let them synchronize with machine–gods. The last of them, pilot, stepped out. She stood taller than most.
My age–mates rippled, whispering. “Oh her—” “The prodigy, my sister said.” Breathlessly. “Graduating soon, at our age.” “No she’s a little more senior… look how she moves.”
I looked, compulsively. Kanrisa was dressed no differently from the rest, but she set herself apart in the sinuous fluidity of her steps. Where other echoes were soft and pared, she was hard and full–figured.
Now I remember why I was there, that day.
I moved through the wave of giddy students on tiptoes at the sight of rarely–seen echoes, basking in reflected prestige and exotique. Most of us had been taught the theories of Bodhva training; few saw it in person, and even close observation told little. How did one stretch a mind to accommodate the multi–threading of machines?
“She’s lovely, birthed to echo, I think.” “Oh no you don’t, that’s not legal anymore — the molding matrices, surely not!” Someone sighed. “It was legal when she was made. Is she even entered into the Abacus? I’d guess not, a shame…”
One last line of young ambigendered and I was through. From her angle I must have looked as though I’d materialized out of nowhere, scandalized susurrus given flesh. Kanrisa glanced at me, over her shoulder, over a tight little smile: she wasn’t pleased to be here, preferred to be back in meditative spheres or else out flying. For that was the privilege of Bodhva.
We surprised each other. I didn’t expect to catch her; she didn’t anticipate anyone to touch her at all, let alone to clasp her hand and say, “I’m Jidri. You are to be my wife.”
A few heard, her fellow echoes mostly. One or two behind me, part of the academy crowd.
Kanrisa’s smile didn’t change, though she didn’t dislodge me or pull away. “You must be mistaken, student. The Abacus doesn’t rattle my name.”
“It will.” Courage or unreason moved me to draw closer. “Put your name in. It’ll match us.”
Until that day, I had never met her: had no personal knowledge of her, let alone desired her. All she’d been to me was a name, output to me by a modified copy of the predictive algorithm that gave the Abacus its sapience.
Kanrisa submitted her name, out of either curiosity or an angry impulse to be proven right that the exercise was pointless, and within the week we were declared matrimonial potentiates. We would make a union of two, against the average match of four point five.
§
The land of our enemies had a name. But we called it Intharachit.
For centrids untold, it was an enigma, first the preoccupation of dreamers then that of physicists: a spatial distortion cordoned Intharachit, locking it from sight and opening it to imagination. And then the Intharachit turned up, leaving us speechless, which said much — as a tribe we were tremendously difficult to shock.
It was a vast continent with a long history. Not a gentle one, for in their memory–paper I read the eradication of another indigenous group followed by a theological scourge — born of some snake–woman–fruit myth — that swept through their states, incinerating reason as it went. Eventually, recovery happened, but they’d spent so long in that quagmire it was a wonder to me, to us, that they overcame the barrier that kept them from the rest of the world.
I imagined myself in that first voyage with its crackling heat, the air just breathable, oxygen supply kept low against spontaneous combustions. And then, emergence into the unknown. A horizon stretching without end.
To this day, historians debate the why. Why it is that they were drawn to our shore; why they made first contact with us, and not with any of the other city–states or sovereignties… there are entire disciplines dedicated to this question. Some are determined in their belief that, had they met Tisapk first, or Mahuya perhaps, conflict could have been elided. (Elision, not avoidance, a distinction of some importance.)
All moot. The foreign ship landed on our shore, and there we were under the shadow of our machine–gods. We offered them hospitality, seeing no threat in them beyond their extreme alienness, and my elders took a portion of them into our home. We were curious.
One day I came home — back from a week in Umadu where I learned matrix–splicing — and found two Intharachit navigators housed with us. Like empty canvases their skin stretched, open to sun–stains that reddened their cadaverous cheeks and pointed snouts. Hair in thin yellow and dried–offal red clung lank to their skin, which poured salt and sick–smells. They did not look human.
Among the children of the house, I reacted least badly to them: our elders, then, tasked me with the aliens’ care. “Aren’t they grown?” I asked sharply. “They aren’t children. I am.”
“The female has seen less than a cycle, and the male under half that. With great care do treat them,” one of my ungendered parents told me. “For they are infants who think themselves complete.”
I didn’t hide my aversion, but the aliens didn’t remark on it, having opted to take our hospitality at surface. They were eager to believe us welcoming, eager to explore any corner large enough to admit their ungainliness. We didn’t consider it necessary to inform them that we restricted them to the visitors’ quarter.
“I’ve never seen anything like your city,” the female said as we went through the artisans’ street. She spoke her own tongue, which our software had been compiling into a lexicon through analysis of physiological cues. “Most — unique.”
Her fellow navigator said something in another language, one dialectically related to hers. My chip picked that up. Most primitive, more like, he corrected her.
“Speak your home to me.” I enunciated the syllables carefully: it wasn’t pleasant, this barbaric syntax. They mistook my formulation of it, in as near a form as I could draw to Pojami, for inarticulate stupidity.
Regardless this request launched them into a double–voiced monologue. “We have such machines—” “To warm us in winter, and cool us in summer.” “Our records are carried in contraptions the size of your finger.” “And in one of them alone, we can store an entire library ten times the size of your home.”
By their gesticulations, I understood that I was to be impressed. I didn’t oblige, but I did have the courtesy not to inform them that what they had listed was nothing to be proud of. It didn’t do to tell a toddler that perambulating on two legs was no accomplishment to adults.
The Bodhva compound was visible in the distance; having decided I wasn’t fit for language, the aliens flapped their hands to indicate interest. I consulted my linguistics. Nothing in their languages answered the connotations of Bodhva, machine–gods or echo. “A temple
to mathematical faith, where acolytes train to be god–speakers mediating between us and our deities.”
They looked at each other. “This institution is important to you?”
“The very most. For the gods make our skies what they are.”
It was not my intent to deceive; again the matter was one of linguistic disparities. In retrospect perhaps I should have communicated in kennings.
“May we see this temple?”
“No,” I said. “I haven’t the authority with which to permit you. Even if I had, I would not. You are not to go there. This is definite.”
Again they shared that glance, but did not press the issue.
That night they tried to breach the Bodhva compound; summarily drones executed them. I’d warned them — the entire expedition was cautioned against certain entries, certain acts. Still it could have been written off, if we cared to, the deaths smoothed over in the diplomats’ laps. We did not try: we reported the pair’s demise to them, stating that they’d violated one of our few rules. The expedition anticipated apologies, some efforts to compensate and reconcile.
By this point it was evident we would gain nothing from them, and our engineers had collected what they needed from the Intharachit ship, to replicate and refine the spatial compensation.
Other indiscretions happened. We hadn’t yet perfected hematocyte synthesis, and a number of outsiders had come to Pojama for education, paying for tuition with their blood. One such student — to whom I’d taught a class in haptics — told the expedition what she did, as amicably as she discussed her studies.
But more than that discovery, it was the hairline crack in their story that they couldn’t bear. Their records were littered with moments of first contact that’d proceeded predictably: trade, abjection, conquest. We did not desire the first, had no interest in pretending the second, so what was there for the aliens to do but seek the third? They had to refit us into a narrative they could understand; we must be made to exist in relation to them, ciphered in their language.
The expedition went home carrying what they believed were our secrets, and what they thought was a schema of our architecture and small limited sciences.