Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 81

by E. Lily Yu

  I briefly told the assassin the story I have already told you. When I was finished, she said, “You’ve really been working here for eight years?”

  “Eight and a half.” I had made a very bad mistake about my captor’s motives, but I must have piqued her curiosity, for otherwise I would already be dead. And even if I couldn’t talk my way out of this and persuade her to spare me, I still had a couple of weapons she hadn’t found. I risked a lie, said that her net had compromised my suit’s thermal integrity. I told her that I was losing heat to the frozen ground, that I would freeze to death if I didn’t get up.

  She told me I could sit up, and to do it slowly.

  As I got my feet under me, squatting on my haunches in front of her, I glanced up at the top of the ridge and made a crucial triangulation.

  She said, “My instructors told me that I would live no more than a year.”

  “Perhaps they told you that you would burn briefly but very brightly—that’s what they told me. But they lied. I expect they lied about a lot of things, but I promise to tell you only the truth. We can leave here, and go anywhere we want to.”

  “I have a job to finish.”

  “People to kill, riots to start.”

  The assassin took a long step sideways to the cart, took something the size of a basketball from the net behind its seat, bowled it towards me. It bounced slowly over the dusty ground and ended up between my legs: the severed head of an old woman, skin burnt black with cold, eyes capped by frost.

  “The former leader of the parliament of Sparta, Tethys,” the assassin said. “I left the body pinned to the ground in one of the fields where her friends work, with an amusing little message.”

  “You are trying to start a war amongst the prisoners. Perhaps the people who sent you here are hoping that the scandal will close the facility. Perhaps they think it is the only chance they’ll have of freeing their comrades. Who are you working for, by the way?”

  “I’ll ask the questions,” the assassin said.

  I asked her how she would escape when she was finished. “There’s a special team on the way. If you’re still here when they arrive, they’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

  “So that’s why you came after me. You were frightened that this team would find you while they were hunting me.”

  She may have been young, but she was smart and quick.

  I said, “I came because I wanted to talk to you. Because you’re like me.”

  “Because after all these years of living amongst humans, you miss your own kind, is that it?”

  Despite the electronic distortion, I could hear the sneer in the assassin’s voice. I said carefully, “The people who sent you here—the people who made you—have no plans to extract you when you are finished here. They do not care if you survive your mission. They only care that it is successful. Why give your loyalty to people who consider you expendable? To people who lied to you? You have many years of life ahead of you, and it isn’t as hard to disobey your orders as you might think. You’ve already disobeyed them, in fact, when you reached out to me. All you have to do is take one more step, and let me help you. If we work together, we’ll survive this. We’ll find a way to escape.”

  “You think you’re human. You’re not. You’re exactly like me. A walking dead man. That’s what our instructors called us, by the way: the dead. Not ‘Dave’. Not anything cute. When we were being moved from one place to another, they’d shout out a warning: ‘Dead men walking.’”

  It is the traditional warning when a condemned person is let out of their cell. Fortunately, I’ve never worked in Block H, where prisoners who have murdered or tried to murder fellow inmates or guards await execution, so I’ve never heard or had to use it.

  The assassin said, “They’re right, aren’t they? We’re made things, so how can we be properly alive?”

  “I’ve lived a more or less ordinary life for ten years. If you give this up and come with me, I’ll show you how.”

  “You stole a life, just as I did. Underneath your disguise, you’re a dead man, just like me.”

  “The life I live now is my own, not anyone else’s,” I said. “Give up what you are doing, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

  “You’re a dead man,” the assassin said. “You’re breathing the last of your air. You have less than an hour left. I’ll leave you to die here, finish my work, and escape in the confusion. After that, I’m supposed to be picked up, but now I think I’ll pass on that. There must be plenty of people out there who need my skills. I’ll work for anyone who wants some killing done, and earn plenty of money.”

  “It’s a nice dream,” I said, “but it will never come true.”

  “Why shouldn’t I profit from what I was made to do?”

  “I’ve lived amongst people for more than a decade. Perhaps I don’t know them as well as I should, but I do know that they are very afraid of us. Not because we’re different, but because we’re so very much like a part of them they don’t want to acknowledge. Because we’re the dark side of their nature. I’ve survived this long only because I have been very careful to hide what I really am. I can teach you how to do that, if you’ll let me.”

  “It doesn’t sound like much of a life to me,” the assassin said.

  “Don’t you like being Debra Thorn?” I said.

  And at the same moment I kicked off the ground, hoping that by revealing that I knew who she was I’d distracted and confused her, and won a moment’s grace.

  In Ariel’s microgravity, my standing jump took me high above the assassin’s head, up and over the edge of the ridge. As I flew up, I discharged the taser dart I’d sewn into the palm of one of my pressure suit’s gloves, and the electrical charge stored in its super-conducting loop shorted out every thread of myoelectric plastic that bound my arms. I shrugged off the net as I came down and kicked off again, bounding along the ridge in headlong flight towards the bulging face of the cliff wall and a narrow chimney pinched between two folds of black, rock-hard ice.

  I was halfway there when a kinetic round struck my left leg with tremendous force and broke my thigh. I tumbled headlong, caught hold a low pinnacle just before I went over the edge of the ridge. The assassin’s triumphant shout was a blare of electronic noise in my ears; because she was using the line-of-sight walkie-talkie I knew that she was almost on me. I pushed up at once and scuttled towards the chimney like a crippled ape. I had almost reached my goal when a second kinetic round shattered my right knee. My suit was ruptured at the point of impact and I felt a freezing pain as the smart fabric constricted as tightly as a tourniquet, but I was not finished. The impact of the kinetic round had knocked me head over heels into a field of ice-blocks, within striking distance of the chimney. As I half-crawled, half-swam towards it, a third round took off the top of a pitted block that might have fallen from the cliffs a billion years ago, and then I was inside the chimney, and started to climb.

  The assassin had no experience of freestyle climbing. Despite my injuries I soon outdistanced her. The chimney gave out after half a kilometer, and I had no choice but to continue to climb the naked iceface. Less than a minute later, the assassin reached the end of the chimney and fired a kinetic round that smashed into the cliff a little way above me. I flattened against the iceface as a huge chunk dropped past me with dreamy slowness, then powered straight through the expanding cloud of debris, pebbles and ice grains briefly rattling on my helmet, and flopped over the edge of a narrow setback.

  My left leg bent in the middle of my thigh and hurt horribly; my right leg was numb below the knee, and a thick crust of blood had frozen solid at the joint. But I had no time to tend my wounds. I sat up and ripped out the hose of the water recycling system as the assassin shot above the edge of the cliff in a graceful arc, taser in one hand, rail gun in the other. I twisted the valve, hit her with a high-pressure spray of water that struck her visor and instantly froze. I pushed off the ground with both hands (a kinetic round slammed into the dusty ic
e where I’d just been), collided with her in midair, clamped my glove over the diagnostic port of her backpack, and discharged my second taser dart.

  The dart shorted out the electronics in the assassin’s suit, and enough current passed through the port to briefly stun her. I pushed her away as we dropped towards the setback, but she managed to fire a last shot as she spun into the void beyond the edge of the setback. She was either phenomenally lucky or incredibly skillful: it took off my thumb and three fingers of my right hand.

  She fell more than a kilometer. Even in the low gravity, it was more than enough to kill her, but just to make sure I dropped several blocks of ice onto her. The third smashed her visor. You’ll find her body, if you haven’t already, more or less directly below the spot where you found mine.

  The assassin had vented most of my air supply and taken my phone and emergency beacon; the dart I’d used on her had crippled what was left of my pressure suit’s life support system. The suit’s insulation is pretty good, but I’m beginning to feel the bite of the cold now, my hand is growing pretty tired from using the squeeze pump to push air through the rebreather, and I’m getting a bad headache as the carbon dioxide concentration in my air supply inexorably rises. I killed the ecosystem of East of Eden by sabotaging the balance of its atmospheric gases, and now the same imbalance is killing me.

  Just about the only thing still working is the stupid little chip I stuck in my helmet to record my conversation with the assassin. By now, you probably know more about her than I do. Perhaps you even know who sent her here.

  I don’t have much time left. Perhaps it’s because the increasing carbon dioxide level is making me comfortably stupid, but I find that I don’t mind dying. I told you that I confronted the assassin to save myself. I think now that I may have been wrong about that. I may have gone on the run after the Quiet War, but in my own way I have served you right up until the end of my life.

  I’m going to sign off now. I want to spend my last moments remembering my freestyle climb up those twenty kilometers of sheer ice in Prospero Chasma. I want to remember how at the end I stood tired and alone at the top of a world-cleaving fault left over from a shattering collision four billion years ago, with Uranus tilted at the horizon, half-full, serene and remote, and the infinite black, starry sky above. I felt so utterly insignificant then, and yet so happy, too, without a single regret for anything at all in my silly little life.

  First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2006.

  About the Author

  Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of The Fall, Eternal Light, Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence (a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars), Life on Mars, The Secret of Life, Whole Wide World, White Devils, Mind’s Eye, Players, Cowboy Angels, The Quiet War and Gardens of the Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines, and he is the co-editor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent book is a new novel, In the Mouth of the Whale, and a big retrospective collection, A Very British History: The Best of Paul McAuley. Coming up is a new novel, Evening’s Empire.

  Beyond the Tracks:

  The Locomotive in Science Fiction Literature

  Jason Heller

  The capsule of metal begins to hum. Forces accumulate. Seated inside, the passengers feel the propulsion system lurch to life. Their bones thrum in synchronous frequency. Thus harmonized, man and machine move as one. The vehicle is launched along a predestined trajectory, arcing outward, soon to bisect a barren frontier. It accelerates hesitantly at first, negotiating inertia, until at last the optimal velocity is achieved.

  The passengers settle into their seats. It’s going to be a long ride. Each knock and kick is a tick of the clock as they hurtle aboard this newfangled conveyance—into the future.

  Locomotives are the original spaceships. True, the same could be said of naval vessels, and in particular the steamship. The first practical application of steam technology in a boat predates the steam train by a handful of years. But only a handful. And even then, rail travel is an equally apt metaphor for spaceflight. When British inventor Richard Trevithick pioneered the steam locomotive with a historic tramway run in Wales in 1804, it was as profound an achievement for its time as Yuri Gagarin’s Vostock mission a century and a half later. With the advent of this new technology, frontiers opened. Barriers fell. And the future was altered forever.

  Trevithick’s locomotive—and subsequent improvements by the likes of George Stephenson—ran like wildfire throughout the world. A lynchpin of the nascent Industrial Age, the steam train was a quantum leap in how humans could harness the forces of the physical world. And abuse those forces.

  Unsurprisingly, the locomotive helped fuel a parallel development in literature: science fiction. One of the first true science fiction novels, Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy!: Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, appeared in 1836, and it posits a future where entire houses migrate about the land via railway. Emile Souvestre’s 1846 novel Le Monde Tel Qu’il Sera [The World As It Will Be], whisks its protagonists to the dystopian world of the year 3000, and his vehicle for this voyage is a steam locomotive that flies through space and time. And that giant of 19th century science fiction, Jules Verne, offered his own take on the locomotive in his 1863 book Paris au XXe Siècle—this time with the addition of speculative technology in the form of pneumatics.

  As the locomotive became less of a smoke-breathing novelty and more of a staple of Industrial Age life, science fiction authors were forced to stretch their imaginations further in regard to the train. “The Tachypomp” was written by American newspaperman Edward Page Mitchell in 1874, five years after the final spike was driven into the Pacific Railroad, later to be known as the First Transcontinental Railroad. The short story doesn’t marvel at the locomotive as it existed at the time, but wonders about its potential as a means of infinite speed, a concept that foreshadows Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, still 21 years away. Most intriguingly, though, the titular Tachypomp comprises a series of vertically-stack trains resulting in exponential increases in velocity—a staggering symbol of imminent modernity that remains poetic in its conception.

  The locomotive takes a turn for the horrific in A Mexican Mystery and The Wreck of the World, published in 1888 and ’89, respectively. Written by William Grove, the duology posits a train that is able to fuel itself—and then spins that perpetual source of sustenance into a prototypal form of artificial intelligence. One that embodies the “revolt of the machines” trope that came to typify science fiction as the dark side of industrial progress—pollution, exploitation, and dehumanization—began to become fixed in the collective consciousness. A more standard work of predictive fiction, John Jacob Astor IV’s A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future followed in 1894. Among its many wild guesses about the world of the year 2000 is the spot-on prophecy of magnetic levitation (or maglev) trains.

  The use of the locomotive in fantasy is another fertile topic unto itself, but its seeds can be seen in Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 short story “.007.” Rather than attaining self-awareness via some technological phenomena (as in Grove’s books), the trains in “.007” possess consciousness as a simple matter of course. That aura of magic realism excludes the story from the science fiction canon, but it is noteworthy in this sense: In a sense, “.007” is the first work of science-fantasy. While 19th-century fantasy pioneers such as George MacDonald and William Morris were rejecting industrialization in favor of a rarified pastoralism, Kipling imbued locomotives with mythopoeic so
uls—to the point where, for all intents and purposes, the trains of “.007” function as ironclad faerie-folk.

  The advent of the 20th century brought with it a new view of futurism—and of locomotives. The Victorian Era’s romanticism gave way to sharper aesthetic of the Edwardian, and the conquering of one scientific mystery after another rendered the locomotive not only commonplace, but quaint. Inventors and explorers—some, like Robert Goddard, inspired by science fiction writers like H.G. Wells—began setting their sights in earnest on the stars.

  In a feedback loop of fact and fiction that continued through much of the century, SF writers followed suit. The first major work of the genre to feature trains is Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 novel Ralph 124C 41+. Serialized in Modern Electrics magazine and steeped in the scintillation that would soon inform pulp SF, the book is a grab-bag of futuristic marvels. One of them is a subterranean magnetic train that runs from Europe to North America—but measured against Gernsback’s mad salvo of way-out (and at times eerily prescient) gadgetry, his vision of the locomotive’s future is far from compelling.

  Then came World War I. The first major military conflagration to make extensive use of innovations such airplanes, submarines, and chemical warfare, it reduced the once-noble soldier to mere fodder for death machines. It also indelibly altered human culture—science fiction included. The notion that technology could bring about the extinction of homo sapiens resulted in a strain of dystopianism; SF writers used the genre as a battlefield for opposing ideas about science’s moral value.