Lightspeed Issue 46

by Charlie Jane Anders

  He took his plate back to the table. I waited, thanked the server as she loaded mine, then followed him. “How can you be glad?” I asked him. The gnocchi were heavenly, they always are. I’ve had gnocchi elsewhere and even made them myself, but they’re nothing compared to the way they do them at Teatro del Sale. They taste the way I imagine Ambrosia would taste.

  “I’m glad because I like living on Speranza,” he said. “I think life farming on the New World sounds tedious in the extreme. And I think you’d hate it even worse than I would.”

  “It won’t all be farming,” Genly said, with his mouth full.

  “True. They’ll also need genetic engineers and also plumbers, and possibly massotherapists as well, which is all right for Midge and you and Mei Ju. But they’re unlikely to need artists, which scrapes for me, and as for Fedra, well, Ballette isn’t possible in full gravity. Even if it was, the first generation down will be scraping away at the planet, they’ll have a completely different kind of civilization. Our ancestors who got onto Speranza had the sense to make it a metropolis, and we enjoy a metropolitan style of living, with arts and scientific research and a high culture.”

  “I am not a plumber,” said Genly, getting up and heading back to see if there was any gnocchi left.

  “We get scientific data from Earth,” Midge said.

  “Art too. And we send it back. But as it takes years going to and fro, it’s not part of the conversation.”

  “In science it is,” Midge said. “Really, you know nothing about this, Jay, any more than our ancestors who fretted that they were taking their descendants out of the mainstream of human culture.”

  “They were,” Jay said. “They didn’t realise that we’d like it this way.”

  “I like it,” Midge said. “But I’m working every day for when we get there. When our descendants get there.” Midge had a two-year-old who lived with his father, so she was the most likely of all of us to have literal descendants. I didn’t know whether I did yet. I’d donated a whole ovary with no conditions as my Contribution, because you get a bonus that way and I wanted the money to get out of the Ditch, and also for a breast tuck so I could keep on with Ballette. I had the other left in case I wanted kids when I was too old to dance.

  “Your real work is for the future. Mine is for today. I love Speranza. I love the colours of light on the spurs and the colours of light in the growing tents. I love lunch clubs and art openings and Ballette. I love gnocchi and dim sum and food as art. I love living in a city where there’s always something going on. I love finding things.”

  “There’ll be plenty to find there,” Mei Ju said.

  “And Serendipity Search won’t know about any of it,” Jay said. “It will be a different kind of finding out. You’d like it. I wouldn’t. I love this world, the world we’ve made on this city, this ship. There won’t be much of an audience for poetry on the New World.”

  Mei Ju writes wonderful poetry in English. She only hasn’t opted Anglo because she doesn’t want to upset her parents, which is probably the most Sino thing about her. I asked her once whether they hadn’t guessed, and she said no, they just thought she was very clever. “I don’t see why people colonising a new planet won’t want poetry, or art either,” she said. “I should think it would be an inspiration for all kinds of things to write about. New stories.”

  Genly came back with another plate of gnocchi, and I wished I’d gone back too. There usually isn’t anything left over. “Do you really mean that they won’t have Ballette?” I asked. “I never thought of that before.”

  “Yes, Ballette will die with this voyage,” Jay said. “It was invented on Speranza. Other ships won’t necessarily ever think of it, and certainly they won’t develop our styles and traditions. It’s a very transitory art you practice, two generations old and doomed to die in another two.”

  To Jay this was an interesting idea, slightly sad but perfectly endurable. He was even smiling slightly. I wanted to cry, or scream, or throw something at him. It was a good thing that the saxophonist came out of the kitchen at that moment and started blowing a fanfare as Il Magnifico announced a spaghetti carbonara. All the actors came onto the stage and bowed towards the kitchen. They always make a huge fuss when there’s meat, to make sure we appreciate what we’re getting. Usually I do, but that day I really didn’t care. “I don’t want Ballette to end,” I said, barely in control of my voice.

  Genly, who is genuinely kind and sensitive as well as being a genius, saw that I was really upset. He put his hand on my arm.

  “What are you saying?” Jay asked. Everyone had got to their feet and was drifting towards the back of the room, where we were going to be last in line.

  “I don’t think we should condemn our children to this,” I said, quoting President Murphy’s speech forbidding US embarcation in Speranza, the reason Anglos are still a minority on Speranza today.

  Jay snorted.

  “We can’t lose Ballette,” I said. “It’s too important. We just can’t.”

  “It’s inevitable,” Midge said.

  “We’ll see about that,” I said.

  I thought about it while I was eating. It was all tangled up with the fact that I wanted a future. I always had. I wanted children. And I wanted my children, and my grandchildren, and their children, to be able to watch Ballette, to be able to dance if they wanted to. I wasn’t planning to be one of those awful Ballette parents, pushing their kids harder than they wanted to be pushed. Marie, my best friend in Ballette school, had had a father like that, a father who lived for his daughter’s triumphs and wept at her setbacks. Marie gave up Ballette and opted Vietnamese, she went into navigation training and got married and had a baby when she was twenty-four. He’s the cutest thing. She lives up by Nav, which is hell to get to so I don’t see her very often. Her father tried to latch onto me when Marie dropped out, and I had to tell him in no uncertain terms to kagg off. I wouldn’t be like him. I wouldn’t force my children into Ballette, or anything else. It wasn’t that I wanted Ballette for them as much as I wanted it to be there for the kids like me, whoever they were, whoever their parents were. I didn’t want to live in a world without Ballette, and I didn’t want anyone to live in a world where that door was closed to them. I was really sure about that, as sure as I’d been about anything, ever.

  Naturally, I turned to Jay. Two more courses had gone by—the carbonara and a spicy soup. On stage, Pulchinella was singing while some of the men clowned behind her. Teatro del Sale shook slightly as each lift went up the spur, and they were shuddering exaggeratedly every time and making it part of the act. “How could I make it so Ballette went on forever?”

  “Well, Speranza would have to go on forever,” Jay said.

  “Okay, how do I get that?” I asked.

  “No, Fedra, it really is impossible,” Midge said. She had the faintest Chinese accent in English, it only showed when she was stressed. “We’ll reach—all right, our descendants will reach—the New World and that will be the end of the voyage.”

  “What if we kept on going?” Jay asked.

  “That would be crazy!” Mei Ju said. “What would be the point of that? Just going on and on forever?”

  “We’d also run out of trace minerals and chemicals,” Midge said.

  “Oh come on, we could get those from comets the same as we do extra water. We do that already,” Genly said. “Not that I’m necessarily endorsing this idea. But there’s no scientific reason we’d have to stop.”

  “The scientists and the engineers want to get to the New World!” Midge said.

  “They’re not going to,” Jay said. “And to answer Mei Ju’s very pertinent question, what’s the point of anything? We didn’t volunteer to be here, we’re here because our ancestors made certain decisions. We could change those decisions for ourselves, and for our descendants.”

  “We could get to the New World and let some people off and have other people go back to Earth,” Genly said. “Then some people could ge
t off at Earth and others could embark and turn around and go to the New World, and keep doing that. Over and over, like a lift going up a spur. That way Midge and Fedra would both get what they wanted.”

  “Brilliant,” I said, and kissed Genly, who blushed. His skin is quite pale, so it really shows.

  “It won’t work though,” Jay said. “Well, it might once it got going, but it won’t work the first time.”

  “Why not? I see no technical problem.”

  “No, technically it would work. It wouldn’t work for people reasons. All the scientists would get off, right? They’d be mad keen to explore the New World and get data.”

  “Of course they would,” Midge said. “And so would lots of other people.”

  “Exactly,” Jay said. “If it was us, now, getting there next year, you’d get off, and who else?”

  Mei Ju raised her hand, and Genly held his out flat. “I’d have to think about it,” he said.

  “I’d stay on,” I said.

  “I’d stay on too, but just as the planet won’t need Ballette dancers and artists, the ship will need other people too. The engineers would stay on, probably, lots of them—their vocation is making Speranza go. But too many people would get off for us to be able to maintain a high civilization. We wouldn’t have enough audience for Ballette, or enough kids wanting to train for it. We’d be down to one lunch club.”

  “This one,” I said, and simultaneously Genly said “Kam Fung,” which was the dim sum hall where we ate the other half of the time.

  As if on cue, il Magnifico bellowed that there were deep-fried zucchini flowers, and we all rushed to get them.

  “There is another problem,” Genly said, as we were all back in our seats and munching away. “I hadn’t remembered about the fusion drive.”

  “What about it?” Jay asked. “Isn’t it good pretty much forever?”

  “Not forever, but for thousands of years,” Genly said, in his precise way. “But the plan is that when we arrive at the New World it will be disassembled and taken down to provide power for the first years of the colony. If the ship were to return, that couldn’t happen.”

  “Couldn’t we build another one?” I asked.

  “I … don’t know.” Genly said. “It would certainly be a technical challenge. And it would be much easier to go with the plan and take down the one we have—it was designed for disassembly. That’s why I know about this, the design is an engineering classic. Combined with the human issue Jay saw, I think people would have a number of plausible objections.”

  Midge had finished her zucchini blossoms and was looking at me very strangely. “Are you really serious about this?”

  “Yes,” I said, emphatically.

  Mei Ju sketched the sign for calm. “There’s nothing we can do about it. It will be up to our descendants to make up their own minds what to do.”

  “We can make it harder or easier for them,” Genly said. “If we needed to make another fusion drive, for instance, it would be better to think about that in advance.”

  “We can do something,” Jay said. He had his burning look, I don’t know how better to describe it. Jay has been my best friend since I was eleven and sometimes I don’t understand him at all. “Turnover,” he said. “We’re going to do it in a few months, right? The halfway point, the point where we stop accelerating away from Earth and start decelerating towards the New World.” Everyone was nodding, wondering where he was going. “We don’t have to do it. We’re not compelled to. We could just omit Turnover and keep on going.”

  “But that would be—” Midge began.

  “Condemning our children to this?” Jay asked. “We already did that one.”

  Up to that moment I had mostly thought about Turnover in terms of the great arts festival that was being planned to celebrate it. I was playing the lead in Jin Cullian and the teacher in Flowers for Algernon, which has two wonderful but terribly difficult pas des deuxs. We were already in rehearsal.

  “You mean we could persuade people to just keep going?” I asked.

  “It would mean politics,” Genly said.

  Despite what the idiotic American refusniks had thought, we had everything on Speranza, including politics. My Auntie Vashti had started off as a community organizer in the Ditch and was now one of the assistant mayors. She’d help me. And I had Jay, my secret weapon. Jay could find anything.

  “You’re not serious?” Midge said. “This is ridiculous. We have to make Turnover.”

  “I don’t think there’s time before Turnover to decide properly,” Mei Ju said. “We’d be deciding for our descendants.”

  “We are anyway,” Jay said.

  “But there are more choices when we get to the New World,” Mei Ju said. “Not turning over, just going on, would be closing off choices for them. They’d never be able to stop.”

  Genly was sketching on his phone and ignoring us. After a moment he looked at Jay. “Can you find me the rejected designs for the fusion plant?”

  Jay turned his wrist and typed for a moment, then Genly nodded and sank back into ignoring us. He even ignored dessert being announced. The rest of us went up to get it. My brother Luke deigned to introduce me to his date as we were in line, so we made small talk for a few minutes, which Jay hates, of course. Dessert was chocolate and hard sweet hollow cookies. I brought back extra chocolate for Genly, and a jug of water for all of us.

  Genly glanced up from his phone when I put the chocolate and water down next to him. “I think I have it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If we could replicate the fusion plant, which is a challenge some of my colleagues would be delighted to have, then our descendants would have three choices. They could go down to the New World, as planned. They could stay on Speranza and turn it around to go back to Earth, which would have the problems Jay pointed out. Or they could keep Speranza in orbit as a city. They could use the rockets to go up and down. Those who want to colonize can colonize, they can come up every few months to see Ballette. They would be farmers, but they’d still have a metropolis to visit, and those who wanted metropolitan life could stay. And of course there are scientific uses to having a manned space station.”

  “That’s amazing,” I said, seeing it at once. “That’ll actually work.”

  “It might be easier to make the new fusion plant on the planet rather than copy the exact design.” He took some of the chocolate and smiled amiably.

  “That’s just a plumbing detail,” Midge said.

  “Plumbing beats politics every time,” Jay said.

  “And of course, we can’t say what our descendants will want, any more than our ancestors knew what we want,” Mei Ju said. “They might all want to go down. Or they might all decide to turn back. Or somebody might invent something that changes everything.”

  “That could always happen, at any moment,” Genly said. “What I want is to keep everyone’s options as open as possible, so that people can make their own choices when it’s the right time.”

  “We’re okay here,” I said, thinking of the crow. “We’re okay here—and did I tell you that I’m dancing the lead in Jin Cullian in the Turnover Festival?”

  © 2013 by Jo Walton.

  Originally published in a chapbook published by the 2013 Novacon convention.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Jo Walton is the author of nine science fiction and fantasy novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others; a tenth, My Real Children is coming out in May. She has recently published a collection of her Tor.com blog pieces, entitled What Makes This Book So Great. She also writes poetry and very occasional short stories. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal, where she writes, reads, and eats great food. It worries her slightly that this is so exactly what she always wanted to do when she grew up.

  FANTASY

  A Different Fate

  Kat Howard

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Tri
une. Trinity.

  Separate and inseparable.

  We are one. We are three. We are sisters, together and individual. Past, present, future. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. One of us must have been born first, but the stories say there were always three, and so there were. Fate is too weighty a thing to be dealt by only one. And certainly then we must also be eternal, always and neverending, untouched by time or death. Certainly. If you tell a story enough times, it will have weight of its own. It will reshape fate.

  We are governed by fate, as well. Spin, measure, cut.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  • • •

  As the story is told, Penelope’s husband was away for quite some time. Ten years of war, and then ten years more of wandering before he returned to her. An entire generation passed in his absence. A woman who had just become a mother when Odysseus had left might see her own daughter do the same before he returned.

  Through all those years, Penelope wove.

  There were men who thought it was wrong, to see the lands and wealth of Penelope’s husband with no man to manage them. There were men who looked upon Penelope with lust, and felt it was wrong that there was no man to manage her, as well.

  And as they looked, and as they lusted, Penelope wove.

  The men told Penelope that she must accept her fate. That Odysseus was not coming back, that her lands needed someone to plow them, and frankly, she needed the same. They told her this again and again, until her ears rang with the telling. And so Penelope agreed. She would choose a man from among her suitors, but not until she finished weaving a great tapestry.

  The men agreed to Penelope’s condition. A woman with skill was a prize.

  Every day she wove. Every night, she picked the threads apart, undoing the day’s work. She did this for years, before the men, blind with impatience, noticed.

  Some will not see their fate, even as it is woven in front of them.