Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 81

by E. Lily Yu

  “I do not know if I will be alive when you come back. If I am, I will be old. My hair will be gray. I will not be the wife you left behind. I will not be the person you remember.

  “But at this moment I love you. At this moment I say: when I am seventy years old, I will watch the sky for you.

  “If you do not return,” Esther said, “if you choose to fly onward to Ryugu-jo and work there alone—I would understand. We have always both chased the sense of discovery. We have always been driven by the hunger for knowing new things. Your first communications will arrive on Earth fifty years after you’ve left, and your work will be groundbreaking, even if you never see its effects.

  “My other audio logs are intact. I went and dug up all the records of your great-grandparents and your father’s side of the family. If you fly onward, I will tell you, in the rest of the time I have, about how your great-grandfather met your great-grandmother in Heart Mountain during the war. I will tell you about your family and the different places your parents grew up, and where your ancestors came from. I will grow roots for you, so that you are not adrift and alone in the dark. You will know where you came from. You will know where you are going.”

  Her voice clicked off. Leo shut his eyes and saw the green ship and its precious cargo of instruments and electronics smashing into the dusty surface of Ryugu-jo. He thought of the lonely beacon he had been sent to build, which would beam back to Earth the things he had learned that no one else knew. He remembered precisely and vividly what it felt like to kiss Esther on her warm pink mouth.

  He walked over to his sleep spindle, crouched, and ran his fingers along its smooth interior. They stopped on something that protruded from the wall, and he saw it then: a smooth silver bar barely extending into the sleeping space. If he typed in the command, if he climbed in and shut the hatch behind him, if he yanked on the lever—

  The portholes all around him were dark and expressionless. Only the top window, pointing toward Alpha Lyrae, showed him a heap of converging stars.

  They were traveling at .997c. He was thirty-six years old. It was only three years to Ryugu-jo;.

  Leo began another game of chess with the computer, and drew black.

  About the Author

  E. Lily Yu was the recipient of the 2012 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in the Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Apex Magazine, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, and Eclipse Online, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards.

  This is Why We Jump

  Jacob Clifton

  When he will be gentled, I call him little starfish.

  I can curl myself around him like an ammonite, and call him little names, and he will smile. Arms and legs getting bigger every day. A little starfish, crowding me out. It is my name for him, but only when he will be gentled can I say. It happens less and less.

  Humans came here for mining. Oberon, moon of the ice giant Uranus, of the star Sol, the sun we never see. Half ice, half stone: A core 65% of Earth’s moon in size, wrapped in a skin of ice. They built over the ice, chopped out level on level, until it was gone, and they lived upon the surface. And then down again, and again. Now the only bit of moon not cored or carved away sits in a glass case, at the center of our moon. Everything else is steel, and gold, anything too heavy to cart back to Jove Station. A city deep as she is wide.

  My father is a district head of one of the zones running from surface to core, but I haven’t seen him in ten years. My sister leaves me notes to meet, sometimes, in a vent we knew as kids. She buys us dinner, says Father’s getting on. She has a Name, free travel between zones.

  But I have a world, built in the bones of a moon. It belongs to me. My moon, my starfish, and no name at all. We live in the in-between places, the little man and I. In vents and hatches, corridors unmarked by our passing.

  What they don’t understand is that a world like this goes all the way down, spikeshaped, down to core. They live on the surface, like a world is a bubble. Like they’re back home. They call themselves colonists, as though they’re here to save us. We call them refugees, because we know they’re running from something. My sister married one. He has business and travel and friends. One I would like, she says. She says we should meet.

  On third days we wait for a shift-change in a spa about half down coreward, one that doesn’t see much offworld action, and we take our showers. Sweat-stink; that grav-line smell in your hair. He’s been asking to run with big boys, like the gang I first ran with, when I fell through the cracks and into the moon. Scary, violent and wonderful. His smile when he talks about them. I wash and think. He’s seven. I was seventeen when I dropped out, so I think he’s seven.

  I found him half-hidden behind a fan close to core, just tiny. I felt trapped with my people, sometimes. Running the same gang ,the names they give each other. I thought, “I can retire, climb into the walls and live. Nobody will hate me, nobody will follow. They know I’m fast and I am strong. They respect me. But they won’t be sad either, when I go.” I found him then, that day, and that was proof. And I was right. They don’t bother us and they don’t miss us either.

  This businessman, the refugee. I think about moving back up, up to the surface: Colonial, like her. To sit in Father’s chairs again, and to hear his dreams. Sovereign political power to Oberon herself, control over methane ice and labor and clones; to bring it all together under one flag. I don’t know if I could sit still for all that, but I would like to meet this man, I think. So I wash myself and I look at my shaven head in the mirrors all around and I tell the boy, yes.

  Yes, he can run with the knife boys. He can go and see. For a little bit at first, he can be away from me. And if he is not where I tell him, at the end of an hour, the experiment will have failed, and we will negotiate again in a year.

  My sister says it’s what father should have done. Let me off the leash a little bit. I’d see both things, both worlds, like she does. Even young, she was able. Still in school she’d come away, weekends or longer, running vents and shafts, tops of elevator cars, down the well to core, stolen showers. Sitting in the sounds. Near the bubble you can hear the magnetic field for space junk and solar rays; near the core you get the gravity sounds. Oberon sings to you everywhere.

  His favorite thing this year is to climb past the bubble, right at the obsidian ceiling of their sky’s false night, so his ghostly reflection seems to stand on the surface of our moon. Proud as if he owns it, he stands, feet to secret feet. Little starfish on top of the world. Arms and legs crowding out the night, the stars. Little man bigger every day, little beast, asking for a name I can’t give.

  I call him little brother, he wants to call me Mother. I call him little man, he wants to call me Wife. I call him little starfish, he wrinkles up his nose: When he wants names for things he doesn’t want to play, but to be serious. To name them For All Time. For himself he wants a name like knife boys have, Torc or Jam or Siz. And to shout it, everywhere he goes.

  Sometimes his wildness I think comes from me. Sometimes I think it’s how he was born. But one thing neither I nor my sisters ever was, is a boy. Do all little boys want this? This violence and empire? Father did, but Father’s a special man. He wanted it more than anybody else in 36, wants it more than them still. Perhaps my son is special like that, too.

  I dream he unites the gangs in the walls, each and all. Bends them to his service. When I wake I am not proud, nor really afraid: Just crowded, face pushed gently into the wall, by a starfish.

  Do we need names? I ask. Would we know each other any better? He shakes his head, as if wiser than me. We don’t need them, says the little man. We have them. We must find them!

  My sister calls me Deals, the name they called me in my knife days. I didn’t like it then, nor now when she does it, but she at least must call me something.

  I have a feeling he tests himself with this, in his mind: If one day he’ll be old enough to call me this name,
to shock me with it, to test the lines and limits of our little two-man gang. Biding his time. Just as I did, before I found a crack and dropped straight down.

  But I didn’t fall, I told her, so many times when we were young. Before my boy, and her colonist husband. I didn’t fall, I was not pushed. I jumped. I jump every, every day.

  I leave him, then, in the care of my closest knife: a boy who fell into the same crack I did. We ran together. I suppose we were in charge. I thought he loved me, I didn’t want to know for sure: It would only open up another crack for later. But if we didn’t say it, I’d never have to jump. It comes in handy.

  “As if he were our own,” he swears, and looks at me a second like a broken thing. Like I’m something he was promised, by the ice-skinned goddesses of Oberon, and yet denied.

  Our own, he says. I wonder who is the we.

  They’re only sad as long as they remember to be. And then you go away from them, and the movie goes back to being about somebody else. Whoever is the we today.

  “One hour, brother,” I say to the boy, and he nods, already embarrassed. Already reaching up and back for the hand of this knife boy, without even looking. Hungry, to touch his first man.

  “One hour, or the experiment’s a failure?”

  He nods, he blushes, he races away. Knife trailing behind, laughing with joy at him. The fierceness in his tiny self.

  “But he isn’t ours,” I want to say.

  He isn’t even mine.

  This the first meeting, I said, would be short. Just coffee. I must dress myself like one of them, like a human. We’re a legitimate political bloc, down in moon where they don’t know to go; he’ll know what I am. But I can’t come dressed in a knife’s jumpsuit with gashed knees: Into a dress. Legs pulled tight together, knees knocked. How the boy would laugh.

  “Forty minutes is all I can spare, but I am pleased to meet you. Regine speaks the world of you.”

  He shakes my hand, his face near unreadable. I can see desire.

  I have forgotten why we’re here. Perhaps to make my sister happy; perhaps he is a new crack. A new way to jump: Outward. Away from the core. He would probably call it up.

  “Your sister’s husband has been great. We’re working on a merger, actually. He’s been instrumental.”

  I ask. He wants me to ask.

  “I’m glad you asked. We’re interested in helping transition Oberon to a manufacturing plant. The bottom’s fallen out of mining across the Uranus orbital, it’s all heading inward, to the ice. So we’re looking to build support, here among the people, and your district 36 has been . . . ”

  Not mine, not mine. I am not my father’s, I am not the gate to this. I am mother to a starfish, and even that can be a goad. I think of dragging my sister backwards through a vent. Not a long distance, just enough to make her scream, as when we were girls. Just to show.

  “But of course that’s not why your sister . . . We’re already on quite good terms with 36, and as I understand you’re not a citizen proper now, you’re a . . . I’m afraid of stepping on the . . . terminology? I want to learn.”

  There is no terminology. No words in the in-between. Put names where they don’t belong and suddenly you own that place. I shave my name off every day. Bleed if I had to.

  “Runners, usually. Decentralized anarchist collectives, in the unused spaces. Ask a hundred of us, get a hundred answers. Our fellow Auberans call us runners. I say Nameless.”

  “It’s a very unique economy you’ve built. Working in concert with the . . . ”

  “Everybody chose. You bring with you this idea of somebody being on top and somebody oppressed, but that’s . . . something you bring with you.”

  “Might I ask . . . ?”

  “Ask a hundred runners. Me, I found it too difficult to live only on the surfaces of things. It’s not a planet or a moon anymore, it’s a city. Deep as she is wide. You think in two dimensions—lots of people do, my sister, my father—I just never did. It made me feel . . . Compressed.”

  More words maybe than I’ve said in two weeks. More on this subject, certainly, than in seven years. He stares at me, this man. I still wouldn’t know him in a crowd. That puffiness around their eyes. New gravity.

  “I think that’s beautiful.”

  “I think it’s correct.”

  He doesn’t begrudge me my tone, or smell, my quick turns of the head. Not that turned on, either. They look a way sometimes, as at a thing they never saw before and must own, put a name on. Must crowd into, atop, against. But he’s not one of those either. He’s like Regine’s man, I think: Complacent. Comfortable enough to find other ways fascinating, without wanting to devour them necessarily. To colonize.

  “ . . . Cloning. You’ve done more on your moon in ten years than the rest of the Solar in a hundred, and those tanks sit fallow. Empty. A manufacturing base with self-sustaining crops and a workforce bolstered—a gene pool, randomized to order—by your dad’s clone facilities. A new world.”

  “We don’t turn in upon ourselves, like an ingrown hair. It’s sustainable already.”

  “Not if those jobs convert to manufacturing, it’s not. They’re on the other moons. Looking into adaptations for the ice giant himself next. A net of satellites, supplying everything a world would need. The next Earth down there, and Oberon the jewel in the sky. You have the greatest engineers coming in on every shuttle . . . Do you follow the news at all?”

  I don’t giggle, but I chuckle. Of course I do, I’m my father’s daughter. Before I jumped I was one of them, one great scientific mind in a long line of them, all pressing down. He says this as if I am lucky. I am not lucky, nor am I unlucky: It’s not relevant anymore. Her gravity is my blood, her ice is my skin. I am a native. But he does not begrudge, and this shines in him. His eyes wonder, shine, and we are equals; neither colonist nor colonized, neither refugee nor refuge.

  I could love him, I think gingerly. I need more information but I could love him.

  With five minutes left—who could say what the starfish would do, if I came late—I’m unexcited to leave. His color rises when I ask to see him again; desire hardens into diamond. Whatever it is they want, I’ve done it. At least enough for more.

  Across the zocalo of the third, down to the vent at the arena, quick loop up over the skyway and again, to a cleaner chute. Cozy old jumpsuit from a stash locker, and the long drop down, coreward, to the hollow place where we meet. Phyto paint on the walls, neoprimitive signs, in a hoax language. He’s filthy, but all his limbs are there. All the arms and legs of him.

  Did he have fun, with the big boys? Oh my, indeed. Cheeks ruddy, eyes glossy; we’ll sleep like ammonites, curled into infinity. Did he run, and fight with gravity? He shows me a tiny scab that won’t even scar. Were the knife boys nice to him? Ever so.

  They gave him a book of funny animals and a tiny blunted knife of bone, and fed him on sugar and—I was hoping, I knew he’d adore it—racked his arms and legs in grav boots, tossed him in the well. He floated up, and up, he says. Core a million billion feet up, starfished, looking down on the one piece of real moon: He says it glimmered, like a star. He means its plastic show box.

  “I’ve only ever done that once. The grav.” Was I too afraid? I can’t say yes, but I can’t say no either.

  “I like to be in control of myself,” I say. “My parts.”

  He says the gravity, through the rig, was like waves in port station. The pool’s free for them, my sister used to take us there. “You could feel it passing up, lifting,” he says. “You could ride it. It was my beast.”

  He shows me a horse in his picture book: “Me and the wind. Gravity. Looking down on a star, like it was mine.” Not controlling him, he means. I’m too weak for being afraid, he means, when for him it was his beast.

  He points to the letters, “H-O-R-S-E,” and looks proudly up. I smile, but he’s known how to read since he was four. They set him down with this book and they thought, “That hermit girl won’t care for letters and words
and names. This little man, oh, without even those.” Imagine how pleased they were with themselves, when he read it back to them. Like they’d done it! And so quick, too. This is why I left the knives. This is why I cut my hair, move fast. If they want to be like them, just surfaces, why jump at all?

  We do wake curled. He will be gentled. I run my fingers through his curls, and he recounts his adventures. In just an hour, the world and stars opened to him. Some of the stories are like dreams, others are parables. Some of them, I think, even actually happened.

  He tests the skin around a bruise: This idea of Names, of legitimizing. The knives wanted to give him a nickname, something unlike little starfish, little man, but my friend their leader knew better than to let them. He said one day my boy would pick his own, and oh, the romance of that!

  He spends the better part of ten minutes just saying words. Some real, some real enough that you could see how he found his way to them. Testing them out upon his tongue. Against my ears.

  “ . . . Your friend says you have no love for Names. You run from them like a breach.”

  He’s right, I say. He said that just right. I miss him. If I had no little man, I would miss him more. Still, I do.

  “When you think of the best name, little starfish, you will know it. Everywhere in you. Until then, you needn’t hurry or feel pressured. It’s not because I hate Names, or knives, or anything in our whole entire world. It loves us, as I love you. Oberon. She wraps herself, curls herself around us.”

  He nods, distracted. “STARFISH,” he pronounces, flipping through his book. Gleaming up at me: It is him.

  “Cut off an arm, another one grows. Forever and ever. Cut ’em all off, what have you got?”

  A moon, cored and mined until it’s a satellite of steel and heavy metals. A solid city, in the skeleton of a moon that was. A skin of ice. But the same name, always: Home.

  “Once the arms grow back, he’s new,” I say. “Something new and wonderful. He remembers what he was, but he grows and grows again.”